Christian Ethics

This week the editors discuss a book review of Melissa Florer-Bixler’s How to Have an Enemy, a review of James Bond films, an interview with Karen Tumulty about Nancy Reagan, and Marc Livecche’s article about Gen. Mark Milley.

Like so many of our national security institutions, James Bond is an asset that the West hasn’t quite known what to make of since the end of the Cold War.

Melissa Florer-Bixler is angry, and she wants her fellow Mennonites to get angry, too. At least, that is the professed premise of her book, “How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace.”

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

Justice and forgiveness, rightly understood, are not opposites. They are mutually reinforcing goods. We divorce them at our own peril–and our enemy’s.

This week the editors discuss Debra Erickson’s article about the just war tradition after 9/11.

These accounts from the Japanese-run internment camp in China during World War II can still prompt readers to contemplate several questions.

In her 2003 book Just War Against Terror, Jean Bethke Elshtain argued for a new paradigm for a just war: the fight against global terrorism, particularly terrorism perpetrated by followers of militant Islam. Twenty years after 9/11, this claim is due for revisiting.

This week the editors cover Marc LiVecche’s article about retribution, Colin Dueck’s article about Reinhold Niebuhr, and Christian Forstner’s comments on the German election.