Christian Ethics

This Veterans Day, growing disrespect for the war-dead seems a sad symptom of our ever-widening distance from the ways of our ancestors.

Wishful Thinking Idealism, unlike Christian Realism, believes that everyone, even competition, is fundamentally reasonable.

Patriotism is part of our repertoire of civic ideals and identities, as Jean Bethke Elshtain reminded us. While its excesses and perversions are to be lamented, Patriotism rightly perceived yields a concern for the moral tenor of one’s culture.

American audiences are still hungry for cinematic portrayals of the old virtues: patriotism, heroism, courage, and self-sacrifice

Niebuhr realized that an overweening faith in the powers of human rationality was a severely misplaced and perpetual threat which has reemerged in 2022 America. 

Political action, in the form of running for a school-board seat, is not the abdication of discipleship or a self-serving act to win the culture war.

From Christianity and Crisis, July 1947: “The beginning of wisdom is to know that God’s will rules His world.” But discerning the end of wisdom is more complicated.

“The people of Munich were informed by proclamation of the city administration that the requisition of private homes for army housing was to be carried through, and to a greater extent than had been hitherto feared.”

From 1945 to 1947 as the United States and Soviet Union moved toward the Cold War, Christian realists writing for Reinhold Niebuhr’s journal, Christianity and Crisis, responded to global dilemmas. Here are five impressions of those articles, along with lessons for today.