The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been rife with war and threats of war. Jihadist-related deaths have increased from an average of roughly 2,500 innocents per year from 2001 to 2006 to a peak of 44,000 in 2014. ISIS waged deadly attacks and genocidal missions across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The Syrian civil [ Read More ]
I am often asked—by skeptics, by agnostics, by atheists—how I could possibly believe Jesus rose from the dead. My answer? “There’s plenty of evidence that, yes, he did. He really did, literally and physically, walk out of his tomb.” In the past few weeks, though, people might be ask a different question about the resurrection: [ Read More ]
Friends, I participated in a ZOOM conference this week, in which I spoke for 45 minutes on the topic of “Politics and Christian Witness in a Secular Age.” Following the talk, I fielded questions for another 45 minutes. If you’re interested, the talk has been posted at my new YouTube channel. To access the video, [ Read More ]
In recent posts, we described the essence of the just war tradition, contrasted it with pacifism and jihadism, and described its foundations in ancient thought and its development through the medieval and early modern eras. In this post, we will explore the work of selected twentieth-century just war thinkers, each of whom made a signal [ Read More ]
As COVID-19 continues to disrupt and distress people around the world, it has been necessary for many churches to cease gathering on Sunday mornings. For all churches, this transition has been difficult. But pastors of smaller churches, which usually do not regularly livestream services and do not have a professional audio-visual team, the transition has [ Read More ]
As COVID-19 continues to disrupt and distress people around the world, many colleges, universities, and seminaries have switched on-campus classes to online media such as video conferencing or recorded lectures. For students who are unfamiliar with online learning, the abrupt switch will be difficult. For professors who are unfamiliar with online instruction and facilitation, the [ Read More ]
Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to permanently close places of worship that resist the city’s order to pause services during the coronavirus outbreak. De Blasio mentioned that a “small number” of religious communities had ignored his order to pause services and that such defiance of the law could lead [ Read More ]
As we noted in a recent article, the roots of the just war tradition are found both in the Graeco-Roman tradition and in the biblical witness. Even so, many modern histories of the early church assert that the early church was universally pacifist. In fact, if you mentioned the word “pacifist,” for many today the [ Read More ]
The United States has suddenly come face-to-face with a feeling most humans in history have experienced: the dread and fear of a sudden and unavoidable death. No vaccine is available to save us. No amount of caution is certain to spare us. But unlike many people in past history, we are, for the most part, [ Read More ]
What is the genealogy of the just war tradition? If we trace its roots, will we find them planted in religious or secular soil? The answer is “both.” The just war tradition emerges primarily from two streams of thought: the ancient Graeco-Roman world and the biblical writers of the Old and New Testaments. This is [ Read More ]