Courage and cruelty, honor and horror, miraculous escapes and damning coincidences are the stuff of film and novel, but also — at singular moments of history, for some few people — the stuff of life. In the wild days of World War II, a mild-mannered young German pastor, a theologian of some note and a
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For too long, people have interpreted Jesus’ teachings of peacemaking practices as Platonic ideals, high and beautiful, but not practical in real life. But when Jesus taught the leaders in Jerusalem that they needed to practice peacemaking or the temple would be destroyed, he was talking realistically about a real threat and about the practical
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We shouldn’t be surprised that the early church struggled with the morality of war. Protestants, like myself, too often assume that the return to the sources demanded by Renaissance humanists and the European reformers necessarily renders earlier better, or at least simpler. It is my contention that while we should recognize the important insights of
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You see a known murderer break into your neighbor’s house. Your neighbor and his entire family are sound asleep; the only people awake are you and the murderer. You grab your handgun from its hiding place and quietly follow him into the house. You enter to find the murderer poised over your neighbor’s children’s beds.
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When we’re trying to decide how to live our lives, our starting point really does matter. During one of my sections this week, we had a conversation about the stance of French intellectuals toward the mid-twentieth-century struggle for independence in Algeria. Algeria had been a French colony for over a hundred years, with the inevitable
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Our most recent issue contains at least three arguments for pacifism from Christian premises. After reading all three, I remain unconvinced of the truth of the pacifist thesis.[1] Perhaps this fact reflects callousness on my part; I am more inclined to think it reflects some deficiency in the arguments presented. In fact, I can put
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And when the servant of the man of God arose early and went out, there was an army, surrounding the city with horses and chariots. And his servant said to him, “Alas, my master What shall we do?” So he answered, “Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who
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