Just War Tradition

The notion of retribution or punishment has long been the scourge of social science. Christian thinkers should develop the distinction between retribution and revenge or retaliation.

As a broad set of ethical principles, the just war outlook is vital to civilized society. However, errors come—and they can be dangerous ones—when proponents of just war take their categories too narrowly and apply their axioms without historical context.

The United States must pursue policies that ensure the U.S. nuclear deterrent is safe, reliable, and credible. Reserving the right to resume nuclear testing is one such means to maintain such a credible deterrent.

Christianity can provide us with a clear lens with which to scrutinize the Paris terror attacks. They were deliberate, unrestrained, unprovoked, and unlawful (extra-judicial) mass murder perpetrated by sadistic criminals on unsuspecting, legally innocent civilian victims.

Christian ethicists should read less moral theology and political philosophy and more history.

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.