Journal of Moral Theology 7.2 (June 2018) Click here for entire issue. Click here for Schlabach article. This paper was first presented as part of a panel on “just peace” at the Society of Christian Ethics annual meeting in Portland, OR, in January 2018. Other panelists were Lisa Sowle Cahill and Eli McCarthy. Their presentations…
Tag: just peacemaking
What is “just peace”?
What is “just peace?” In recent decades, representatives of various church traditions have called on their churches to move away from, replace, or transcend the “just-war” framework for discerning responses to war and violence in some way, in favor of a “just peace” framework. Recently and prominently, such a call came from Catholics gathered in…
Pacifism in action [an interview with Gerald Schlabach]
U.S. CatholicFebruary 2017 Gerald Schlabach first started thinking about peace and violence in the mid-1980s. He and his wife worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua during a time of ongoing civil revolution. A member of the Mennonite church at the time, he was tasked with figuring out how the historically pacifist church should…
Evangelizing as a people of peace:
Paul’s clue, John Paul’s globalism, Francis’s principles
To judge from some of its wildest critics and enthusiasts alike, Gaudium et spes and its friendly engagement with the modern world would almost seem to have made the Church as a body superfluous. The Council fathers certainly called for partnership with all people of good will and gave fresh recognition to the vocations of the laity in secular spheres. But the English title for the document has always been “The Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World,” not merely “people of good will” in the modern world or even “Catholics” in the modern world. Still, the challenge is to envision the Church acting as a body at work for the common good without evoking either a pre-conciliar confusion of “the Church” with the hierarchy alone, or a contemporary specter of faithful Catholics as triumphalistic culture warriors. In this paper I will argue that together Popes Paul, John Paul, and Francis have projected a more winsome though perhaps more difficult vision of the Church moving together as a global people of peace in the modern world. Buried in Pope Paul’s Evangelii nuntiandi is a critical clue to the social posture of churches as communities of witness. Central to John Paul’s vision of a civilization of love is a communitarian political theory that coordinates respect for local identities with networks of global solidarity. Francis’s Evangeli gaudium pulls these threads together with four key principles for peacemaking, which make clear: Not only are evangelization and social engagement integral to one another, they find their unity in the tasks of building up a people whose very presence in the world is a peacemaking witness among the nations. After all, for Francis, peace-building is people-building, and vice versa.
Just Policing, Not War:
An Alternative Response to World Violence
For decades, the Catholic Church and historical peace churches such as the Mennonites have come together in ecumenical discussions about war and peace. The dividing point has always been between pacifism, the view held by Mennonites and other peace churches, and the just war theory that dominates Catholic thinking on the issue. Given the transformation…
Just policing:
how war could cease to be a church-dividing issue
Abstract: Might Christians who have long been divided along just-war and pacifist lines agree some day that just policing—and only just policing—is legitimate? In an essay first written as a resource for the first international dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics, the author offers a thought experiment on what would be necessary for war eventually to cease to be…