Adult Education: The Bible and Just War Thinking

Fr Austin returns to this perennially important topic, with the hope that our thinking about it can be aided with some tools drawn from the thinking of Augustine and other greats, who were themselves thinking about war in terms shaped by the Bible. A good but challenging book on the subject is Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited.

Topic for Sunday, July 10: “Authority in Just War Thinking.” If you come to this class, you’ll find we keep circling back to some very basic principles, one of which is the discomfort felt in this line of thinking with wars of self-defence. By contrast, a more secular line of thinking about war (represented, say, by Kant) is that self-defence is the only just grounds for taking it up.

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