Violence

Jeremiah Webster charts a via negativa in verse.

Sexual violence doesn't always allow its survivors to claim redemption.

Jewish history tells me to be both compassionate and alert. When it comes to the Palestinian conflict, I don't know how to do both at once.

Catherine Nixey is right: the early Christians were violently destructive. So were the Romans, the Persians, and the plagues that swept across the ancient world.

Michael J. Sharp had been investigating violence in the Congo when he was killed one year ago.

Mai-Anh Le Tran bravely jumps into the space where theory meets practice.

If O'Connor's stories are shocking, that's only because the gospel is, too.

Han Kang’s main theme is the dignity and the cowardice that atrocity brings forth from people—often the same person.

Westworld’s claim is that memory leads to consciousness, which leads to violence.

Pope Francis’s response to the killing of a French priest puzzled some. But it pointed to the true nature of Christian witness.

Why does the church participate in modern-day lynching, or at most turn a blind eye, rather than protesting as our faith would dictate?

The media have been ablaze with stories of police brutality, campus rape, military conflict, and mass murder. Stan Goff insists on a single thread: masculinity.

Are the rest of us so different from our brothers and sisters in Libya or in Charleston? Are they heroes with whom we can never identify?

People appeal to Bonhoeffer to justify a range of moral choices. They tend to ignore his emphasis on context and the need for constant discernment.

The current issue of the Century features a remembrance by my mother of my grandfather’s terrifying war experience and its unfolding consequences. Tomorrow the world marks the 70th anniversary of V-E Day, when the world-shaping trauma of the war halted in Europe. My grandfather’s story is only a tiny fragment of the war, his decades of agony only a ripple in its billowing aftershocks. But it is the kind of story that is easily lost as the war recedes from living memory.

In 1998, I drove my parents from Wisconsin to Georgia to visit the new National POW Museum. My siblings couldn't believe I'd agreed to this.

May we not domesticate the Jesus story for our own religious comfort, but in telling the story, and doing so truthfully, may we worship our crucified Christ and encounter his delivering presence, and therefore be transformed after the image of God.

Throughout history, people loyal to a higher law have been responsible for much violence. Should we reject appeals to a higher law?

Some people see violence as an absolute wrong. Others see it as a sometimes necessary evil, with considerable variation as to just how often these times come up. I’m at the dovish end of the latter group: I believe that there are times—not many, not remotely as many as American foreign policy consensus or law enforcement norms would have it, but some times—when a violent action might be the least-bad available option.

But a necessary evil isn’t a virtue; “least bad” doesn’t mean “good.”

At the vigil for Ferguson, I stumbled over singing "We Shall Overcome." I have remarkably little, personally, to overcome in my life.