Iraq

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.

Obama and Bush demonstrate the dangers of overly aggressive and overly passive foreign policies, but they share something in common: a deeply moral vision of America’s role in the world.

President Obama lectured, “‘Never again’ is a challenge to defend the fundamental right of free people and free nations to exist in peace and security.” Perhaps “never mind” is more apt.

Terry Ascott’s solution for the Middle East tramples over one of the region’s most sacred cows: Redraw the map.

The Marrakesh Declaration is a good—albeit late—start. Political and religious leaders in the Middle East’s Muslim-majority nations have much ground to cover to protect religious minorities. Shiites are targeted in Sunni-majority nations, Sunnis in Shiite-majority nations, and Christians virtually everywhere in the Middle East.

Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church clearly have a close relationship, but their foreign policy in Syria is flawed.

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.

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.

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.