WWII

Beginning in 1940, Reinhold Niebuhr made the case for a sober, realistic, and morally grounded US involvement overseas, out of the central admission that whatever America’s own faults, a punctilious detachment from world affairs might very well result in the triumph of greater imbalances and injustices

Formal religious adherence is declining, but America’s longtime religious self-identity as a lodestar of democratic responsibility in the world continues unabashed.

Tim Bouverie’s history of British pre-WWII appeasement—Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War—compellingly recounts how the democracies, chiefly Britain, deferred confrontation with Hitler for much of a decade, only barely recovering in time to avert complete calamity.

Pope Francis visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki this weekend. In both locations, he lamented the horrors and immorality of nuclear weapons. He got the horror right, not much else.

Midway is a magnificent movie about the 1942 naval and aerial battle that blocked further Japanese aggression in the Pacific….

Alan Jacobs’ book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in the Age of Crisis investigates the hopes and fears of major Christian intellectuals who struggled to process the total devastation WWII wrought.

I was honored to offer the invocation at Colleville-sur-Mer, France, for the seventy-fifth D-Day anniversary memorial ceremony on June 6, 2019. This, of course, is the town name of the place that many Americans know simply by the more infamous moniker of Omaha Beach.

I am not, here, interested in debating the specific conditions on our southern border. This is its own crisis. What I am interested in is commenting on why comparing what’s going on down there to the Holocaust is foolish both historically and strategically. For what it’s worth, my objections apply to nearly any comparison made between the Holocaust and a current atrocity—real or perceived.

Nigel Hamilton’s third and final volume on FDR’s war leadership, War and Peace: FDR’s Final Odyssey D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945,…