Jonathan Schell has a lengthy piece in the Nation arguing that the U.S. can’t be an empire even if it wants to. He attributes this to the fact that recent history has imposed limits on the use of force which prevent any country from being the new Rome or British Empire. The two most important…

Interesting NY Times article about a megachurch pastor in St. Paul who preached a series of sermons against the identification of Christianity with American nationalism and how it cost him a fifth of his congregation. The Times article sort of tries to spin it as a conservative vs. liberal thing, but the pastor, Gregory A.…

Exhibit A Exhibit B Granted that neither of these authors is a Christian, they are both writers well within the mainstream of American conservative politics. And both essentially advocate an “anything goes” approach to waging war. Again, I’m not interested in arguing whether the Israeli response in the current situation is “proportionate,” or meets other…

I’ve noticed in recent days, mostly in various blog comment threads about the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, that whenever anyone brings up traditional just war notions like proportionality or non-combatant immunity, almost inevitably someone will say, with an air of triumph as if delivering an unassailable argument-stopper, something like “So, you’re saying the Allies were…