Christian Ethics

The following is based on remarks delivered at the Providence launch party, Friday, November 6th. The recorded event is available on our Facebook page. For those who prefer to read, in the days ahead, we will post additional transcriptions. Watch for them!

Providence aims to rediscover Protestant tradition and to unearth some of those resources as they relate to international affairs and the vocation of the state and how we would counsel America as a great power to perform on the world stage.

For soldiers, the burden of having to do that which they believe to be morally evil is devastating. And according to the classic Just War tradition, it needn’t be.

My hope is that this new journal would help Christians who are in government, interested in government, or who just vote for government to better understand how government can use its power wisely and responsibly.

This new journal, Providence, seeks to foster Christian and specifically Evangelical conversation about our moral duties as Americans in this place and time to seek, promote, and preserve an approximate justice with liberty for as many as possible.

Pope Francis surely is a shepherd with the responsibility to guide his flock through history. He has the world’s ear – many are straining to hear him clearly…

It was a terrible anniversary. Seventy years ago this past week, at zero eight fifteen hours, August 6th, 1945, the Enola Gay, a U.S. Army Air Force B-29, dropped an 8,900-pound bomb, dubbed “Little Boy”, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later a second bomb, Fat Man, fell upon Nagasaki.

God can be loved and worshipped on the battlefield, and pacifism as opposed to soldiering stands as an exception to the Christian norm.

In the just war tradition, war (and therefore torture) are not only sometimes morally permissible but obligatory in order to restrain the enemy from sin.