Between pacifism and Jihad : just war and Christian tradition / J. Daryl Charles. [print]

Wrestling with a perennial issue -- Contemporary geopolitics -- Presumption against war or against injustice? -- Making moral judgments -- Religious attitudes toward war -- Just-war thinking and the terrorist threat -- Just-war thinking in ancient and medieval thought -- Pre-Christian just-war thinking -- Early Christian attitudes toward war and soldiering -- Early Christian development of just-war thinking : Ambrose and Augustine -- The medieval development of just-war thinking in Thomas Aquinas -- Just-war thinking in the late medieval and early modern period -- The Protestant Reformers on church and state and war -- Early modern thinking about international law : Vitoria, Suarez and Grotius -- Just-war thinking in the modern period to the present -- Reinhold Niebuhr -- John Courtney Murray -- Paul Ramsey -- William V. O'Brien -- Michael Walzer -- James Turner Johnson -- Jean Bethke Elshtain -- Roman Catholic social teaching -- Christian ethics and the use of force -- The personal and the political (Romans 12-13) -- Rethinking the "politics of Jesus" -- Rethinking the ethics of the New Testament -- Rethinking pacifism and the nonviolent imperative -- Rethinking neighbor love -- The morality of preemptive force -- Just-war theory : its character, constitution, and context -- Rethinking justice -- Just war's debt to natural-law thinking -- The spectrum of force : just war as a mediating position -- The moral criteria of the just-war position -- The justice of deterrence -- Retribution or revenge? -- Just-war theory and the problem of terrorism -- The nature of the terrorist threat -- Terror in the name of God -- Just war's response to terrorism -- Extending just-war thinking beyond war and terrorism : postbello considerations -- The church's worldly mission -- Christ and culture revisited -- Adjusting our eschatology and ethics -- Incarnational witness and civic duty -- The moral necessity of politics : rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's -- Taking theology seriously.

"Daryl Charles reconsiders the use of force to maintain or reestablish justice, showing how love for a neighbor can warrant the just use of force. Reviewing and updating the just-war teaching of the church, he shows how it captures many of the concerns of the pacifist position while deliberately avoiding the excesses of jihad and militarism."--Jacket.

COPYRIGHT NOT covered - Click this link to request copyright permission: