Search results for: religious freedom

Debates over the appropriate American response to the Syrian refugee crisis reflect division and uncertainty about a deeper question: What is America’s national purpose?

Just war aims at peace. As Augustine argued, “Every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace.” We do not fight war for its own sake, or for revenge, profit, or prestige. The only conceivable rationale for waging war is to create a world of better, deeper, more lasting peace than the one that led to war in the first place.

Alarmingly, today there are militant Islamists who are using “Strategic jihad” to threaten our fundamental freedoms and rights.

In his State of the Union address, the leader of the free world promises America will remain on the sidelines as a totalitarian juggernaut advances against the West. Sound familiar?

In what follows I will first lay out some of the most important obstacles, the challenges they pose, their respective weaknesses, and some thoughts on opportunities they offer; then I will offer some thoughts on how best to bring Christianity into engagement with American foreign policy.

Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the assumptions of progressive Christianity and helped create the political theology of “Christian realism”, which sought a more biblical view of how the Christian citizen can live responsibly within a civilization in crisis.

It’s Christmastime in the People’s Republic of China, and Beijing continues its crackdown on people of faith, especially Christians.

Since my commissioning in 1988 as a United States Army Chaplain Candidate, the fundamental purpose of war has changed relatively little: war generally remains a contest of wills to achieve political ends between nation-states employing military force. However, war inherently seems different today, does it not? How so?

African public theologians have, as their vocation, the study of the relation between religion and public life in Africa… so I presume their work will cast light on what Africans in general (or at the very least Africans actively participating in Christian churches) feel and think.

Christians have been targeted for death, sexual slavery, displacement, cultural eradication and forced conversion by ISIS. The U.S. government’s response has been woefully inadequate — neither helping them defend themselves and stay, nor providing them asylum to leave. And now, to add insult to injury, they are casualties of the agencies contracted to resettle refugees in America.