Did our modern understanding of just war originate with Augustine? In this sweeping reevaluation of the evidence, Phillip Wynn uncovers a nuanced story of Augustine's thoughts on war and military service, and gives us a more complete and complex picture of this important topic. Deeply rooted in the development of Christian thought this reengagement with Augustine is essential reading.

Did our modern understanding of just war originate with Augustine? In this sweeping reevaluation of the evidence, Phillip Wynn uncovers a nuanced story of Augustines thoughts on war and military service, and gives us a more complete and complex picture of this important topic. Deeply rooted in the development of Christian thought this reengagement with Augustine is essential reading.

John Mark Mattox's work is the first book-length study of St Augustine's 'just war' theory and is now available in paperback for the first time.

Explores the role of the nobility and analogous traditional elites in contemporary society.

When is war just? What does justice require? If we lack a commonly-accepted understanding of justice – and thus of just war – what answers can we find in the intellectual history of just war? Miller argues that just war thinking should be understood as unfolding in three traditions: the Augustinian, the Westphalian, and the Liberal, each resting on distinct understandings of natural law, justice, and sovereignty. The central ideas of the Augustinian tradition (sovereignty as responsibility for the common good) can and should be recovered and worked into the Liberal tradition, for which human rights serves the same function. In this reconstructed Augustinian Liberal vision, the violent disruption of ordered liberty is the injury in response to which force may be used and war may be justly waged. Justice requires the vindication and restoration of ordered liberty in, through, and after warfare.

Armies know all about killing. It is what they do, and ours does it more effectively than most. We are painfully coming to realize, however, that we are also especially good at killing our own "from the inside out," silently, invisibly. In every major war since Korea, more of our veterans have taken their lives than have lost them in combat. The latest research, rooted in veteran testimony, reveals that the most severe and intractable PTSD--fraught with shame, despair, and suicide--stems from "moral injury." But how can there be rampant moral injury in what our military, our government, our churches, and most everyone else call just wars? At the root of our incomprehension lies just war theory--developed, expanded, and updated across the centuries to accommodate the evolution of warfare, its weaponry, its scale, and its victims. Any serious critique of war, as well any true attempt to understand the profound, invisible wounds it inflicts, will be undermined from the outset by the unthinking and all-but-universal acceptance of just war doctrine. Killing from the Inside Out radically questions that theory, examines its legacy, and challenges us to look beyond it, beyond just war.

This provocative and timely primer on the just war tradition connects just war to the concrete practices and challenges of the Christian life. Daniel Bell explains that the point is not simply to know the just war tradition but to live it even in the face of the tremendous difficulties associated with war. He shows how just war practice, if it is to be understood as a faithful form of Christian discipleship, must be rooted in and shaped by the fundamental convictions and confessions of the faith. The book includes a foreword by an Army chaplain who has served in Iraq and study questions for group use.

Plague, a devastating and recurring affliction throughout the Renaissance, had a major impact on European life. Not only was pestilence a biological problem, but it was also read as a symptom of spiritual degeneracy and it caused widespread social disorder. Assembling a picture of the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to plague from medical, spiritual and civic perspectives, this book uncovers the place of music - whether regarded as an indispensable medicine or a moral poison that exacerbated outbreaks - in the management of the disease. This original musicological approach further reveals how composers responded, in their works, to the discourses and practices surrounding one of the greatest medical crises in the pre-modern age. Addressing topics such as music as therapy, public rituals and performance and music in religion, the volume also provides detailed musical analysis throughout to illustrate how pestilence affected societal attitudes toward music.

Vietnam Beyond By: Gerald E. Augustine “Vietnam Beyond” is not only a photographic accounting of a soldier’s time while serving in a front-line unit in the infantry; it is a study of human nature. When rank has its’ privileges, not only in the military, but in civilian life as well, you will learn how a person with “power’ will use this power to his advantage over someone at his most vulnerable time in their life. You will read how officers and sergeants use their rank to their benefit. You will also learn how attorneys and even a senator used the legal system to their advantage when having control over someone when he is most vulnerable. “Vietnam Beyond” is also a study of the criminal act of the spraying of herbicides by our government not only on the jungles of Vietnam, but on the civilians and our servicemen as well. The result tells of the after effects on the author and his family to this day. And most of all, “Vietnam Beyond” tells how a combat soldier endured traumatizing events that he brought home with him. Those events drive him to be the best that he can be at whatever he encounters and to continuously defeat those demons.

This book is an Augustinian interrogation of contemporary Christian accounts of empire, just war, and terrorism. Though Augustine’s voice has guided much of the Christian discourse in these conjoined arenas, it has not shielded his work from being misappropriated to serve ends that are inimical to his own. The US “war on terror” is the most recent and egregious example of violence that many theologians have unjustly baptized as “Augustinian.” By reading Augustine pastorally rather than merely polemically, this work offers a counter-narrative and an alternative praxis for the American Christian trying to reconcile her baptism with her citizenship.