Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013) was an American political theorist, ethicist, and public intellectual who made scholarly contributions to various debates, and especially on the just war tradition.

Mark Lilla’s new book, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, examines the power of nostalgia in its political manifestation.

For young American Christians aspiring to a vocation intersecting faith and public life, a career in peacemaking and statecraft can afford the opportunity to positively influence US national attitudes in this area, if such aspirations are paired with proper training and certain cardinal virtues.

Against pacifist sentiment and calls for isolationism, Reinhold Niebuhr insisted on a realistic Christian response to political crises, one willing to dirty its hands to avoid catastrophic evil. However, his dialectic between love and justice produces a catastrophic paradox.

In a world where might makes right, it is the U.S. military—not international treaties, presidential speeches, UN resolutions, protest marches, Wall Street, or Wal-Mart—that protects us from enemies who would either stamp out all faiths or force submission to one faith.

Nations are inclined to raise their moral voices, even if the impact on other nations is limited. They should use their moral voices much more sparingly. In short, moral triage is called for.

It is imperative that we understand that a Middle East devoid of Christians and other religious minorities would be a tragedy—a tragedy not only for Christians and others who have lived in the Middle East for centuries, but a tragedy for an outward-looking and tolerant Islam.

With his novel concept of sovereign obligation in A World in Disarray, Richard Haass makes an important advance in the search for peace in a disoriented world. But its advances fall short, unable to grasp the essential moral quality of world order.

Preoccupation with “empire” by some American Christian elites may be back now that Donald Trump is president.