After ruminating earlier this week about foreign policy and just war, I asked a series of interrelated questions yesterday about just war. Prof. Bainbridge was kind enough to respond, and offered the critically important distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, that is, justness up to war and justness in war. This gets at the difference between justification for the cause or occasion for war, causus belli, and the way in which that war is conducted. Bainbridge concludes,...

My piece on the debate over chimera research and the relevance of your worldview to the debate appears today at BreakPoint, “A Monster Created in Man’s Image.” Drawing on the work of C.S. Lewis, and among the questions and conclusions included, I write, “Chimera research may indeed have some potential benefits, but we cannot ignore the question of potential costs. What toll does such research take on the dignity of human beings? Must we destroy the human person in order...

A very, very interesting piece in WSJ this week detailing a study by the Business and Media Institute that looks at how businesspeople are portrayed on television: The study, titled “Bad Company,” looked at the top 12 TV dramas during May and November in 2005, ranging from crime shows like “CSI” to the goofy “Desperate Housewives.” Out of 39 episodes that featured business-related plots, the study found, 77% advanced a negative view of the world merce and its practitioners. On...

“…can one build something lasting if the goal is not truth, but power? The few, most penetrating minds of that time understood that what constitutes the sickness of contemporary culture is the repudiation of truth for the sake of action…” Czeslaw Milosz, 1942 ...

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about just war, I’m passing along this TCS Daily piece by Prof. Bainbridge, “Just War for the Sake of Argument” (it’s also discussed at The Remedy and Bainbridge’s own blog). Bainbridge’s piece measures the current Lebanon/Israel conflict by the standards of just war, and finds it wanting. He makes the following important point: “Although Catholic scholars and theologians have thus made valuable contributions to the just war tradition down through the centuries, the principles...

There’s some discussion at Mirror of Justice (here and here) of Martin Marty’s recent piece in The Christian Century, “Snookered,” which raises the issue of the validity of politicians invoking Scripture, using the example of Tom DeLay. The new progressive Christian approach seems to be to assert, rightly of course, that “God is not a Republican. Or a Democrat,” and is rather more nuanced and convincing than, say, “Jesus is a Liberal.” And since so much politics, aside from a...

These kinds of stories make me sick, and they are all mon. In today’s Washington Post, a lengthy article examines the Livestock Compensation Program, which ran from 2002-2003, and cost over $1.2 billion. In “No Drought Required For Federal Drought Aid,” Gilbert M. Gaul, Dan Morgan and Sarah Cohen report that over half of that money, “$635 million went to ranchers and dairy farmers in areas where there was moderate drought or none at all, according to an analysis of...

One of the more lively and illuminating discussions at last week’s Advanced Studies in Freedom seminar revolved around the question whether and how classical liberalism is applicable to foreign policy, specifically with regard to questions of war. In the New York Times earlier this week, Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, wrote a lengthy op-ed that bears on the relevant questions, “An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With.” Wright...

Notre Dame law professor Richard Garnett wrote an outstanding piece for USA Today. He argues convincingly that the large-scale and widespread withdrawal of Catholic institutions from many of the nation’s cities has ramifications that extend beyond the interests of Catholics alone. He notes, too, that government has a role to play in facilitating the flourishing of religious institutions such as Catholic churches and hospitals—mainly by honoring a properly understood separation of church and state: Is there anything the government and...

In this mentary, “Transcendence and Obsolescence: The Responsible Stewardship of Oil,” I ask the question: “Why did God create oil?” I raise the question within the context of debates about global warming and the burning of fossil fuels, including Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and the work of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. I argue that nonrenewable resources, especially fossil fuels, “have the created purpose of providing relatively cheap and pervasive sources of energy. These limited and finite resources help...