On April 2 at Providence’s “Islam, the Middle East, and Christian Engagement with the Middle East” event in Middleburg, Virginia, Chris Seiple spoke about how Americans and Christians could use soft power to engage with various communities.

If America wants to constrain tyranny and prevent anarchy in ways that are both just and sustainable, it must resist the temptation of empire and embrace again a vision of international collaborative peacekeeping.

More than a third of self-identified evangelicals support Donald Trump, who touts a false story about an American general executing Muslim terrorists with bullets dipped in pig blood. These numbers suggest that American evangelicalism has a serious discipleship problem when it comes to the ethics of war and peace, and the name of that problem is not pacifism.

A Wilderness of Mirrors: Trusting Again in a Cynical World is by no means a defense of Christian realism, nor an appeal for a bold and strong America in the world, but it does offer a positive contribution to those ends by making a number of crucial observations about broken trust and its effects on society.

At the Church of England’s General Synod last November, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby delivered one of the most rousing calls to a truly Christian realistic approach to the civil war in Syria and the rise of Islamic radicalism in recent memory.

On the complex moral issue of war, one might expect to find a diversity of views in the history of Christian thought. Ron Sider disagrees. He’s wrong.

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.

From the Print Edition

Historically, Christians have talked about the fall of Adam in conjunction with the origins of government.