Radical Civility

When I was a teenager I fell away from Christianity. What brought me back was an interest in the ethics of war, which I developed as a college sophomore. Curious about how a faith system founded by the “Prince of Peace” changed over the course of a thousand years into what military historian Sir Michael Howard called “one of the great warrior religions of mankind,” in the summer of 1980 I decided to write a paper about it. I did it on my own: it wasn’t part of any class asignment.

I began with the four canonical gospels, worked through the rest of the New Testament, then explored such early church fathers as Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine of Hippo. Eventually I wound up with the address by Pope Urban II in 1095 that inaugurated the First Crusade. But it was the initial readings that most impressed me, because through them I discovered that Christianity, which I had come to regard as a vapid fairy tale, actually had a lot of intellectual meat on its bones. That realization led me to read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and after that I was convinced.

But my interest in the ethics of war remained. I went on to study St. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Vitoria, and other Catholic thinkers who developed just war doctrine, then began to going through the modern literature by such scholars as Paul Ramsey, James Turner Johnson, and Michael Walzer. When I went to Kings College London to get an MA in War Studies, my special subject — that is, area of concentration — was the ethical aspects of war. And at least two of my books, The Hard Hand of War and Civilians in the Path of War, are chiefly concerned with the problem of moral judgment in war.

Consequently the on-going conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has riveted my attention, principally because its hallmark is the killing of civilians. Combatant losses have been fairly modest — a couple dozen Israeli soldiers and, if the estimates of the Israeli Defense Forces are reliable, a maximum of 450 Hezbollah militiamen. Compare that with over thirty Israeli civilians and upward of a thousand Lebanese.

Anyway, on my professional blog I’ve been wrestling with these matters and batting perspectives back and forth with the people who comment on my blog. A three-part post on the July 30 air strike at Qana begins here; most of the discussion occurs at the end of Part 3.