This remembrance helps develop a confident, enduring Christian hope that is more than wishful thinking and leads to real-world action.

It is childish to demand the real world conform to one’s fancy; it is childlike to learn about the real world by playing in an imaginary one. Both the idealist and the cynical realist are childish. The Christian realist, by contrast, should be childlike.

Pat Buchanan derides internationalists as dreamers disregarding his supposedly sensible neo-isolationist realism but advocates a nearly Utopian perspective.

Mark Lilla’s new book, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, examines the power of nostalgia in its political manifestation.

This article about the morality and justification of World War II and the Church was originally published in Christianity & Crisis in 1942.