Continued amazement at the utter capitulation on of this
“theologian”  to secular bastardizations of just war theory. 

The secular just-war theorist Michael Walzer has been proposing for some years that there is another leg, so to speak, on the just-war stool: a ius post bellum (as Walzer styles it), a set of moral criteria for defining the peace to be sought as the moral goal of the use of armed force.

He readily admits the “secular” notion as having reinterpretive power and authority in this matter.  Not that this is REALLY “secular”;  indeed,  as Cavanaugh’s article on the “empty shrine” asserts,  these “shrines” are quite “theological” in their claims, albeit cast in “secular” terms.  They promise a soteriological end to this “keeping of the peace” if only we place our trust in their ability and willingness to “keep us safe”.  Lost is the call to an ultimate allegiance to the Kingdom which calls us to a life of ultimate love which refuses the justifications for abandoning this love to a an ultimately failed hodge-podge of “this we must do because that’s the way it is”.  The language of Empire, through and through.

Source: FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life