City of God

Cultivating the garden of world order includes tending to the tasks that uphold public safety, execute justice and promote human flourishing.

Instead of debating President Trump’s character, we should ask which is more Christian: the experiment with globalism that seems now to have faltered, or the somber return to nations that seeks, modestly yet earnestly, to fortify transnational alliances where they are possible, but reject them where they are not.

St. Thomas Aquinas’ ideas about just war still affect how Americans feel about wars, including World War II and the Persian Gulf War.

Most Christians, including most evangelicals, have been falling over themselves to denounce Jeff Sessions. But the way this immigration debate is carried out too often mirrors the political debate.

Christians should remember this: any political theology that treats its own people as a divinely chosen political community treads on heretical soil.

Force is always only the form love takes against terrible evil in the last resort when nothing else will protect the innocent, restore justice, and bring about the conditions for peace. The old Chestertonian nugget remains: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

This essay examines the perspectives of three eminent Christian leaders—Ambassador Charles Malik, Father Richard John Neuhaus, and Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They were shaped by different theological traditions (Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran, respectively), but each wrestled with the political, cultural, and moral crises of their times according to their Christian convictions.

Augustine’s influence runs deep and broad through Western Christian doctrine and ethics. This paper focuses on two particular examples of this influence: his thinking on political order and on just war.