Last September, Providence hosted an event where Paul Miller, Jonathan Leeman, and Jennifer Marshall spoke about whether or not Christianity is compatible with liberal democracy.

Recently, Providence editor Robert Nicholson sat down with Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In a wide-ranging conversation, Hamid addressed the lack of cross-cultural understanding in the West, the value of pluralism, the possibilities of democratic reform, and the potential for increased Christian engagement with Muslim neighbors.

Today we see forces against liberalism at home and abroad. We need statesmen who understand liberalism and who can make the case for limited, representative, and accountable government.

On January 8, 1918—one hundred years ago—President Woodrow Wilson mounted the rostrum of the House of Representatives, America’s inner sanctum of democracy, to deliver one of the most consequential speeches in history.

From the ashes of both Bryan’s ignoble isolationism and Wilson’s utopian universalism rose the school of Christian realism advocated by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Born a hundred years ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would write The Gulag Archipelago, a blistering account of the Gulag system under Stalin. George Kennan called this novel “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.”

In this article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on April 19, 1943, F. Ernest Johnson illuminates the twin wartime concerns of brutality and cynicism. Johnson illustrates the importance of maintaining public morality; losing compassion for the enemy will scuttle the peace and instigate the next war, while ignoring social influence in determining personal ethics invariably corrodes society on a more insidious level. To paraphrase John 17: 14-19, we must be in the world, but not of it.

Are we, in fact, seeking through foreign policy to protect ourselves from a pre-millennial apocalypse—or, perhaps, to bring about a post-millennial one? The intellectual and spiritual resources of Protestant Christianity have a great deal to add to this debate. But up until now, I haven’t seen much evidence that these resources have yet been brought to bear on these questions.

Foretelling a time of cultivation, Isaiah prophesies, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” One cannot plow a field with a sword, nor prune a tree with a spear. In this article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on March 8, 1943, John Knox contrasts the promotion of good with the destruction of evil, particularly in conflict. Promoting good is insufficient; the conduct of war and the creation of peace are distinct phenomena to be pursued with discrete tools.