Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War

About the Author, Back Cover

Caron E. Gentry is lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. She is coauthor with Laura Sjoberg of Mothers, Monsters, and Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. “This is a bold and brave book that tackles weighty matters pertaining to vio-lence and community with a deft touch. Caron Gentry’s perspective, which marries contemporary feminist and critical thought to Christian realist, just war, and pacifist concerns, is fresh and insightful. She succeeds wonderfully in carving out a space that relates the literature on hospitality to the contemporary ethics of war. This book will be of major interest to scholars working in theology, international relations, political theory, and religious ethics.” — C I A N O ’ D R I S C O L L, University of Glasgow “Caron Gentry offers a daring constructive moral proposal here calling for a reconstruction of the just war ethic’s criterion of last resort as a platform for embodying a deep form of Christian hospitality in international affairs. Along the way she analyzes the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. A must read for students of political theology, international relations, and feminist theory.” — S H A U N C A S E Y, Wesley Theological Seminary To understand the problems of violence in today’s world, including genocide, terrorism, and failed states to name just a few, requires choices about the use of force and a rethinking of the conventional arguments about just war and peacekeeping. In Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War, Caron E. Gentry reevaluates the predominant strands of American political theology—Christian realism, pacifism, and the just war tradition—to ask if these are the capstones to each strand’s conversation or if they are now a point of departure for a new way of Christian thinking about war. She draws out the connection between hospitality in postmodern literature and hospitality as derived from the Christian conception of agape, and relates the literature on hospitality to the Christian ethics of war. She contends that the practice of hospitality , incorporated into the jus ad bellum criterion of last resort, would lead to a “better peace.” C A R O N E . G E N T R Y is lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. She is coauthor with Laura Sjoberg of Mothers, Monsters, and Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 • undpress.nd.edu ...