THINKING COMPARATIVELY ABOUT

RELIGION AND WAR

James Turner Johnson

ABSTRACT
In contrast to the period when the Journal of Religious Ethics began pub-
lishing, the study of religion in relation to war and connected issues has
prospered in recent years. This article examines three collections of essays
providing comparative perspectives on these topics, two recently authored
studies of Buddhism and Islam in relation to war, and a compendious collec-
tion of texts on Western moral tradition concerning war, peace, and related
issues from classical Greece and Rome to the present.
KEY WORDS: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, jihad, Judaism,
just war, peace, Western moral tradition

1. Context and Scope

THIS ARTICLE FOCUSES on several recent books examining, in different
ways, the relationship between religion and war. Although this has be-
come an important theme for scholarly effort, it will help to provide some
perspective on this subject to realize that when this Journal first came
on the scene, such an article could not have been written. If one had
been tried, its focus would have been on a limited number of books, all
treating in one way or another the relationship between one kind of
religion—mainstream American Protestant Christianity—and war. For
the general picture of the subject, Roland Bainton’s Christian Attitudes
Toward War and Peace (1960) still reigned supreme, with the problems in
its typology and the influence of Bainton’s own commitment to pacifism
on its analysis yet unchallenged (if even noted). The legacy of Reinhold
Niebuhr’s Christian realism continued through Niebuhr’s own work and
the writing of John C. Bennett. Paul Ramsey’s contribution to the re-
covery of just war thinking as a Christian paradigm had produced two
thoughtful and influential books (1961, 1968), although as I have noted
elsewhere, when Ramsey spoke to fellow Christians he used the language
of Christian neighbor-love, but when he wrote for the public policy com-
munity, he avoided religious language and shifted to arguments based
on the nature of right politics. In American churches, as Ramsey had ob-
served early in his 1961 book, religious discourse on war was increasingly
taking form as pacifism of various sorts. However, an article examining

JRE 36.1:157–179.

C 2008 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.
158 Journal of Religious Ethics

the literature on religion and war of this period from Bainton’s Christian
Attitudes and Ramsey’s War and the Christian Conscience to the advent
of the Journal of Religious Ethics would have been about various un-
derstandings of Christianity and warfare, seen from the perspective of
mainline American Protestantism, a literature whose purpose was often
more apologetic than historical or analytical.
To continue these reflections on perspective a bit further, we may note
that apart from whatever might have been going on in the field of reli-
gious ethics, dominant elements in American intellectual and political
life in this period rejected out of hand the possibility that examination of
the relationship between religion and war might have any contemporary
relevance. For them, it simply was not an interesting topic. This was
particularly so in the schools of public affairs and among policy intellec-
tuals in and out of government, whose paradigm for understanding and
seeking to shape political behavior within and between states was that
of political realism, which emphasizes interests and discounts ideals of
any sort, including those based in religion. The intellectual and policy
debates today are significantly more diverse.
Finally, when the Journal of Religious Ethics began publication, there
were simply no serious comparative studies of the relationship between
religion and war—that is, studies that treated the views found in differ-
ent religious traditions. The first efforts came later. When I first became
interested in the comparative study of religions and war—an interest
motivated in my case, as in the case of many others, by the rise of mil-
itant Islam in the form of the Iranian Revolution—what I found were
all of two books: John Ferguson’s War and Peace in the World’s Religions
(1977) and James A. Aho’s Religious Mythology and the Art of War (1981).
Ferguson’s slim volume (166 pages) had chapters on each of the major
world religions and, in a way typical of the time, developed his treatment
through looking at the core scriptures of each one. Any idea that these
religions might have developed their understanding of war—their judg-
ments on war as a phenomenon or right and wrong ways of engaging
in war—over time and in relation to developing historical and political
contexts did not appear in Ferguson’s analysis. Nor did he show any
recognition that each of the religions treated has, and has had, a differ-
ent relationship with its scriptural writings. The approach used in this
book was perhaps an important place to begin to do a comparative study
of the world’s religions in their various ways of thinking about war, but it
was not the only such place, nor even the best place for some of the reli-
gious traditions treated. Aho’s book was considerably more detailed, and
his view of each religion took account of not only its scriptures, but also
its use of those scriptures in its historical development over time. How-
ever, Aho’s organizing framework was a rather rigid typology of possible
attitudes, a matrix of conceptual boxes into which he fitted the various
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 159

religiously rooted positions he identified. It is a mark of the worth of his

typology that in several instances he located the views of one religion
in different places within his matrix, demonstrating thereby how com-
plicated the religion–war relationship tends to be and showing also how
different religions may seem to converge in their attitudes at times but
may sharply diverge at others. I find Aho’s work still a somewhat useful
reference point as a systematic effort to map the various kinds of un-
derstanding of the relationship between religion and war that one finds
when taking major religious traditions in their historical development
and diversity. However, his typology limits even as it reveals, and a more
nuanced examination of particular religious traditions quickly takes one
beyond his conceptual matrix.
Apart from explicitly comparative studies, books treating specific non-
Christian traditions on war were extremely rare. Two books by Majid
Khadduri discussing Islam on war (1940, 1966) stand out as the excep-
tions to the general rule that scholars were uninterested in probing how
religious traditions dealt with warfare.
All this began to change as the 1970s progressed and especially during
the decade of the 1980s. Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977),
although not dealing with just war thinking as a product of religious
influence, helped to open up the recovery of just war thinking launched
by Ramsey’s books. The debate that was launched by the efforts of the
U.S. Catholic bishops to write a pastoral letter on war and peace, and the
publication of The Challenge of Peace (National Conference of Catholic
Bishops 1983) itself, provided the third major pillar (with Ramsey’s and
Walzer’s works) in this recovery of the idea of just war as a tool for moral
reflection about war, in this case attaching such moral reflection to the
religious authority of the Catholic bishops. It was also in this period that
I did my three historical works on just war tradition and its place in
Western moral tradition on war and wrote my first book applying just
war reasoning to contemporary issues (Johnson 1975, 1981, 1984, 1987).
William V. O’Brien also contributed various books dealing with the just
war idea during this period, including The Conduct of Just and Limited
War (1981), which moves from a discussion of the Christian tradition to
examining how the influence of this tradition still exists in contemporary
ideas of limited war, arguing a point similar to my own about the idea of
just war as a diversely rooted cultural moral concept in the West.
However, scholarship on war as treated in other religious and cul-
tural traditions than that of Western Christianity and Western culture
still languished. That state of affairs began to change for the case of
Islam with the Iranian Revolution, which presented the policy arena and
scholars alike (to the confusion of the realists) with the phenomenon of
a political movement explicitly defining itself in terms of religious ideas
and ideals, including the justification of warfare in terms of the idea of
160 Journal of Religious Ethics

jihad—struggle or striving in the way of God. Still, in the West, the

first reaction to this was not from scholars but from journalists: Robin
Wright’s Sacred Rage: The Crusade of Modern Islam (1985) provided
an early and influential look into this phenomenon, and well-informed
journalists have continued to treat this topic in various ways. At the
time John Kelsay and I conceived and conducted the series of sem-
inars that led to our two edited books comparing the just war and
jihad ideas and their supporting traditions (Johnson and Kelsay 1990;
Kelsay and Johnson 1991), there was still no significant scholarly liter-
ature (Khadduri’s works excepted) that examined the place of the idea
of jihad as warfare in the framework of Islamic thought and practice.
The situation was even worse for other major religious traditions. While
these edited books were in press, I approached a prominent academic
friend whose specialty was Buddhism, telling him about the project that
had produced these books and suggesting that I would like to put to-
gether something similar on warfare in Buddhist religious thought and
Buddhist cultures. His response was, “Oh, but Buddhism is pacifist. You
won’t find anything about war there. You should look at Hinduism.” I
mention this because it seems to me typical of the attitudes of scholars
in religion at that time. That there were actually forms of Buddhism in
which war was accepted as a practice and in which there was also se-
rious moral reflection on war—the case of the Sri Lankan Buddhism of
the Mahavamsa and also that of the Vajrayana Buddhism adopted by
the Mongols during their prime—was just not on the radar.
In terms of the volume of work, the situation is certainly different
today. The question is how much more broadly gauged and probing con-
temporary scholarship is than that of the earlier period I have sketched.
The books discussed below provide a kind of answer to this question,
and that answer, I suggest, is mixed. Three of the books to be discussed
are collections of essays. This format, by its nature, precludes extended,
in-depth treatments. However, where general knowledge of a subject is
already established, individual collections of essays can serve to develop
particular themes in some detail and thereby expand the general base of
knowledge. The three collections reviewed here provide examples of two
kinds of essays: some that attempt to encapsulate the whole outlook of a
religious tradition in a general form and others that examine particular
issues—for example, the question of justice—as they appear within the
frame of one or another religion.
That collections like these can prosper, as they do in today’s climate,
unfortunately also signals the continuing overall lack of book-length
studies examining the approach of particular religious traditions to war
longitudinally over time as these approaches have developed and in an-
alytic depth as regards their content. The two book-length studies ex-
amined here (Bartholomeusz 2002; Kelsay 2007) respond admirably to
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 161

this continuing need. The former shows that Buddhism is not, in fact, all
about pacifism but that there is an important tradition on war within
Buddhism that can usefully be brought into conversation with such moral
traditions from other spheres as those of just war and jihad.
Finally, this essay looks at a book treating Western moral tradition
on war, peace, and related issues, including statecraft and international
order. This book (Reichberg, Syse, and Begby 2006) is an edited collec-
tion of texts which, taken together, represent the editors’ assessment
of essential contributions to the historical and thematic development of
Western moral thought on these related issues from the era of classi-
cal Greece to the present. Although there can be argument about the
range of texts chosen and thus about the nature of the development of
such moral thought, this collection makes the case powerfully that the
meaning of such thinking is best understood in its implications when it
is approached historically and not as some sort of product of abstract
thought.
With these general comments as a reference point, we may now turn
to a closer look at each book. I will discuss them in three groupings:
the three collections of essays offering different sorts of comparative
overviews of major religions and war, the books on Buddhism and Is-
lam by Bartholomeusz and Kelsay, and the collection of texts discussing
Western moral thought on war and related issues.

2. Recent Comparative Collections on War

in the Major World Religions
Comparative cross-cultural study of ideas and traditions can be car-
ried on in a variety of ways. The first book to be examined in this section,
The Ethics of War in Asian Civilizations, edited by the Norwegian scholar
of Hinduism Torkel Brekke (2006), is different from the others in not de-
voting a chapter to Christian ideas on war, although it could arguably
have done so because it includes chapters on Judaism and Islam under
the rubric “West Asia.” Surely the Byzantines could have been included
using the same artifice. However, I find the idea of including these tra-
ditions, however they are made to fit under the category of “Asian reli-
gions,” puzzling in a book with this title. Although the old categories of
“Eastern” and “Western” religions no longer fit particularly well in face
of the global reach of all the major religious traditions of the world, surely
there are internal characteristics in these groups of traditions that still
tend to mark them off from each other as significantly different forms
of religious conceptualization and expression. There are also important
historical links: those between Hinduism and Buddhism, between Ma-
hayana Buddhism in China and traditional Chinese forms of religion,
and between Japanese forms of Mahayana Buddhism and traditional
162 Journal of Religious Ethics

Japanese religious understandings. All argue for a kind of commonality

that is not shared with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These latter,
likewise, are similar in ways that are not shared by the religious tradi-
tions indigenous to South and East Asia.
In including chapters on Judaism and Islam but not Christianity,
Brekke leaves room for the methodology he describes in the Preface:
to apply “the conceptual framework of Christian just war thinking to
non-Christian cultures” (ix). But of course that opens the question of
what understanding of that “conceptual framework” to use (for there are
important differences on this matter between contemporary writers on
just war and also between some of these contemporary writers and the
classic conception of just war as developed and employed from the high
Middle Ages to the early modern period). This book’s effort to resolve
this issue is the Introduction, subtitled “Comparative ethics and the cru-
cible of war,” by G. Scott Davis (1–36), which smuggles into the book a
sophisticated and broadly gauged analysis of just war tradition, its his-
torical development and substantive thematic content, and some of its
contemporary expression, without it being called a chapter. (Therefore,
Christianity and the Western tradition of just war do in fact get treated
in this book on “Asian civilizations” after all!)
This would be a useful place for the chapter authors to begin, if the
methodology Brekke describes in his Preface were actually the one used
throughout the book. Doing so would produce one kind of comparison,
which would move from a careful definition of the conceptual frame-
work to an exploration for each of the traditions treated of the meaning
and content of the categories that define the idea of just war. In fact,
though, the actual chapters, although several of them use the term “just
war” in their titles, pay closer attention to the religious tradition on
warfare being discussed than to the “conceptual framework of Christian
just war thinking.” Even in Brekke’s own chapter, “Between prudence
and heroism: ethics of war in the Hindu tradition” (113–44), the link
to the professed conceptual apparatus seems tenuous at best. This is
perhaps a good thing, as another way of comparing is to develop the
ideas of a particular culture on their own terms and then look to see
whether there are possible points of conceptual connection—whether
similarities or differences—with ideas from other cultures. Take for ex-
ample the chapters by John Kelsay, “Islamic tradition and the justice of
war” (81–110), and by Tessa Bartholomeusz, “In defense of Dharma: just
war ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka” (145–58); both chapters proceed by
closely examing texts and concepts particular to the religious tradition
in question (shari‘a reasoning for Kelsay; the Mahavamsa, some other
traditional texts, and statements by contemporary Sri Lankan figures
for Bartholomeusz) and then turn to how this relates to ideas found in
just war tradition—justice for Kelsay and a broader range of just war
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 163

categories for Bartholomeusz. The advantage of this approach is that it

allows the tradition being examined first to be laid out on its own terms;
the other approach mentioned above tends to define and categorize the
tradition being examined in ways that may not fit well with its own
self-understanding.
By attending to the religious traditions themselves and their situa-
tion within particular civilizational contexts, the chapters in this book
are able to offer relatively dense and analytically instructive snapshots
of how religion and war are related in these various traditions. I tend to
cringe these days whenever I see a chapter whose title is “the ethics of war
in” one or another religious tradition; often the result is the kind of gen-
erality and oversimplification—and misdirection—found in Ferguson’s
book mentioned above. However, Norman Solomon’s chapter, “The ethics
of war in Judaism” (39–80) actually takes its readers through how to con-
ceptualize Judaism, what its various normative sources are, how these
relate, and how they have been and are used for normative guidance be-
fore turning to a close examination of a number of illustrative medieval
figures and contemporary debates on Judaism and war in the context
of the existence of the State of Israel. Similarly Brekke’s chapter, by fo-
cusing on specific historical texts representing Hindu tradition from dif-
ferent perspectives and from different historical periods, takes readers
into Indian religious and civilizational approaches to war in a detailed,
suggestive way that avoids misleading generalities about “Hinduism” as
a kind of monadic thing. This is also the approach found in the other
two chapters of this collection, Karl Friday’s “Might makes right: just
warfare in early medieval Japan” (159–85) and Mark E. Lewis’s “The
just war in early China” (185–200). What these chapters and the others
already mentioned do, and do well, is to immerse their readers in the
civilization being examined in a particular historical context, developing
the religious and moral concerns found there on their own terms. The
result is a comparatively conceived collection of essays, each of which
exemplifies meaty scholarship on the subject it treats, so that the reader
of the collection as a whole may come away not with vague generalities
about each of the religious traditions but with compact snapshots of how
they have functioned in actual historical contexts.
However, there are certain common themes that are worth identifying.
Doing so is the contribution of Henrik Syse’s “Afterword: ethics across
borders” (201–5). Syse, like Brekke a Norwegian scholar, the author of
some thoughtful work on just war, and the co-editor of the collection that
will be discussed later in this review, identifies some important common
themes, but the thrust of his essay as a whole is to argue the importance
of seeking to find what he calls “a cross-cultural consensus on rules of
war” (202). Noting that elements in international law “have achieved
part” of this task, Syse argues that the religious traditions examined
164 Journal of Religious Ethics

in this volume, reflecting the civilizations out of which they have come,
need closer sympathetic examination as a way to a more deeply rooted
awareness of shared need to avoid wars based in cross-cultural con-
flicts and identifying shared values in conceiving the justification of
war and the proper limits of war. This brief essay is useful in its own
right, although it is of a rather different nature from the chapter-length
studies of the particular traditions that provide the main weight of this
collection.
The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions, edited
by Richard Sorabji and David Rodin (2006) is really two rather distinct
groups of essays under a single cover. The first of these, “Traditions”
(11–150), is similar in conception and execution to the Brekke
collection—including essays by two of the same authors, Norman
Solomon on Judaism and John Kelsay on Islam—but also includes chap-
ters on the roots and early development of the just war tradition, the
Byzantine understanding of just war (which needs to be distinguished
from the just war of Western tradition), and the development of just war
thought in the modern era, beginning with Grotius; it does not include
a chapter on Buddhism. (Is it perhaps because Buddhism is assumed to
be universally pacifist?)
Of the chapters in the first section of the book, those that treat the re-
ligious traditions themselves, Sorabji’s chapter, “Just War from Ancient
Origins to the Conquistadors Debate and Its Modern Relevance” (13–29),
seems to me to strain to bring major figures from Sorabji’s own scholarly
field, ancient philosophy, into the frame of a concept of war that was not
consolidated until the Middle Ages. There is a familiar type of discussion
in his chapter when early Christianity is characterized as pacifist—an
overstated and problematic characterization that might best be left to
the Mennonite historians—followed by brief looks at Augustine, Gratian,
and Aquinas (grouped together) and three early modern Spanish theolo-
gians of rather different stripes: Vitoria, Las Casas, and Suarez. These
discussions are too brief and sketchy to be more than reference points
for future study for readers so inclined. Unfortunately, although Sorabji’s
notes refer usefully to original sources from these writers, Sorabji leaves
readers in ignorance of existing interpretive scholarship seeking to pro-
vide depth and context to these historical figures and their contributions
to the idea of just war and the development of just war tradition. The
concluding section of this chapter moves somewhat abruptly to several
“Ideas Relevant to Modern Issues” in some of these historical figures (are
the ideas not treated in this section irrelevant?), treating them without
depth and, again, without references in the notes to other authors who
have engaged these very ideas (and more) at greater length, in substan-
tial detail, and all in all more seriously. It is important to flag major fig-
ures and indicate the relevance of their ideas, but Sorabji’s failure to draw
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 165

attention to the existing interpretive literature is neither responsible nor

useful for readers.
A great deal remains to be learned about normative Byzantine at-
titudes toward war and their conceptual and political expression, and
Angeliki Laiou’s chapter, “The Just War of Eastern Christians and the
Holy War of the Crusaders” (30–43), represents a substantive move in
this direction. Laiou explicitly rejects the idea that the Byzantine concept
of war was a form of holy war thought, arguing that it was a conception of
just war. In support of her position, she observes that “in the tenth cen-
tury, as in the eleventh or the twelfth, the concept of just war is rather
more indebted to Aristotelian and Roman ideas about war than to reli-
gious ones” (33). Now, perhaps this was so in the Byzantine world, but
I really do not understand how such a claim can be made for the Chris-
tian West, where there was no coherent idea of just war—Aristotelian,
Roman, or religious—before the mid-twelfth century (that is, Gratian’s
Decretum) at the earliest, and when one did come into being, its clas-
sical heritage was well filtered through Augustine’s Christian theology.
Still, Laiou’s claim is an interesting and suggestive one for the Byzantine
context. On the one hand, it reminds readers not to make overmuch of
the religious role of the Byzantine emperor, part of a conception of the
interrelation of political and religious life within the community that
contrasts sharply with the separation of religious and secular authority
that developed in the West. The latter is expressed in the classic just
war conception of right authority and deeply symbolized by the use of
Romans 13:4 (“For the prince is the minister of God . . . . ”) as a kind of
proof-text by medieval and early modern Western writers on just war.
Laiou’s conception also invites reconsideration of the implications of the
clear similarity between the Byzantine conception and execution of the
political–religious relationship and those found in classical Islamic ju-
risprudence on the caliphate, siyar, and jihad. In the context of this
chapter, insisting that the Byzantine conception of war took just war form
allows Laiou to contrast it with the “holy war” conception that she identi-
fies with the Crusaders. Now, it is clearly true that the Crusaders did not
carry a concept of just war with them when they went to Byzantium or
the Middle East; partly this was because such a concept had not yet been
developed (early on), partly it was because just war tradition developed
as an effort aimed at defining the justification and proper conduct of
warfare within western Europe but not extending outside it, and partly
it was because of dynamics within the developing debate on the relative
places of church and secular authority relative to war. In reference to the
last reason, the Crusades have been characterized in various contexts
as “the just wars of the church,” in which church authority replaced that
of the prince, defense of religion replaced defense of the common good
as just cause, and the intention of establishing right religion replaced
166 Journal of Religious Ethics

restoration of a more limited tranquillitas ordinis. However, I suggest

that much the same thing can be said about the conceptualization of
warfare found in Byzantine history and in classical Islamic jurispru-
dence. If it is “holy war” when applied to the Crusaders, I wonder why it
is not when applied to the Byzantines or the Islamic jurists’ conception
of jihad. In short, Laiou’s claims about the Byzantine embrace of “just
war” and the Crusaders’ embrace of “holy war” need careful evaluation
by readers.
The development of just war thinking beginning with Grotius and its
evolution toward an international law of war is an important issue, one
that is documented extensively in the Carnegie Institution series Clas-
sics of International Law, one treated in close detail in an excellent book
by Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (1980), and one I have written
about at length in various contexts. In the present collection, it is the
focus of Karma Nabulsi’s chapter, “Conceptions of Justice in War from
Grotius to Modern Times” (44–60). I am not at all convinced his dis-
cussion of Rousseau belongs in this story, and I think he moves rather
too quickly to and through the coming together of the modern laws of
war between 1874 and 1949. Best (whom Nabulsi does not cite) is far
superior on this. However, Nabulsi’s intention is to get to the develop-
ment of the conception of justice in the emergence of the law of war, and
his treatment of this question in the final section of the chapter is well
targeted and tightly focused. In the chapter as a whole, Nabulsi’s posi-
tivistic treatment tends to leave the moral tradition rather in the dust of
history—there in Grotius but not in the actual development of treaties
and conventions—although a close look at the language used right up
through the nineteenth century shows the continuing close presence of
the underlying moral ideas. Nabulsi’s is a useful essay, and he flags many
good sources from the original and the secondary literature, yet he and
I—and for that matter he and the Carnegie Institution series, and he
and Best—are on quite different pages when it comes to interpreting the
relationship between the moral tradition of just war and developments
in international law.
The chapter by Kelsay in this collection is structured in fundamen-
tally the same way and shows the same scholarly virtues as his essay in
the Brekke collection. Kelsay’s focus here, “Arguments Concerning Re-
sistance in Contemporary Islam” (61–91), is arguably on a less central
issue, group of texts, and set of arguments than represented by his fo-
cus on justice in the Brekke volume, but like the focus on justice, it is a
topic with relevance in historical Islamic tradition and in contemporary
discussions of shari‘a. As for Solomon’s chapter (108–37), it is not only
similar to the one by him in the Brekke volume, it is actually a shorter
version of the same essay (as is noted in a heading at the beginning of
the chapter).
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 167

Alongside Kelsay’s and Solomon’s chapters, there is another one deal-

ing with Judaism and Islam in the present collection: Noah Feldman’s
“War and Reason in Maimonides and Averroes” (82–107). His subjects
here are well known and much studied, but there is something to be
said for giving a new look at such figures, both for their importance in
their own religious traditions and for the ability to perform comparative
analysis in a case like this when the subjects are from the same cultural
context but from differing religious traditions. Feldman’s focus for both
these figures is their use of philosophical reasoning based on Aristotle
within the frame of religious law to lead the law to new conclusions
“through an abstract understanding of how the law ought to develop”
(93). Yet of course, in a religious tradition defined in terms of law, the
question that needs always to be addressed is the degree to which the
law develops the way the philosophers think it should. In the case of
Judaism, the answer for Maimonides is that his thought has been incor-
porated into the overall frame of rabbinic argument, in which opinions
pointing in different directions are all held within the tradition. For the
case of Islam, though, the answer is different, because juristic decision
making gave the development of shari‘a its own dynamic and its own
path, one that largely left the philosophers aside. Although Feldman’s
analysis of these two contemporaneous figures from medieval Muslim
Spain is crisp and insightful, he would have done well to offer an assess-
ment of how and how much their thought on war matters for subsequent
reasoning in the developing traditions of their two religions.
The final chapter in the section on “Traditions” is Nick Allen’s “Just
War in the Mahābhārata” (138–49). His treatment is brief and program-
matic, tracing the conditions for just war as given under the heading
“war, just” in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy to particular texts
within the Mahābhārata; as to the latter, Allen writes, “Most of the ref-
erences are given by Brockington in his standard work on the Sanskrit
epics” (139).
The essays that are included in the second part of this book, “Con-
temporary Problems,” are mostly by philosophers and, as I noted earlier,
do not engage the religious traditions examined in the first part. This is
true even of the chapter by Richard Harries, Anglican Bishop of Oxford.
Although they demonstrate how far just war discourse has entered the
field of contemporary debate over public policy, they do not represent the
effect of religious thinking about just war as it has formed a part of this
debate. Their nature puts them outside the field of the present review.
The final collection of essays I was given for this review is War
and Peace in World Religions, edited by Perry Schmidt-Leukel (2004).
The book is divided into three main sections: “War and Peace in the
Eastern Religions” (including Hinduism, Buddhism, and classical Chi-
nese religion), “War and Peace in the Abrahamic Religions” (including,
168 Journal of Religious Ethics

predictably, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and a section entitled

“Inter-religious Foundations for Peace” (including chapters on the de-
velopment of a “global ethic” and on the World Conference of Religions
for Peace). The chapters on the various religious traditions are all en-
titled “War and Peace in . . . . ” As these titles suggest, the chapters are
all quite general and introductory in tone and scope. They are as much
introductions to each of these traditions as to their treatment of war
and peace. Perhaps they might have value for a not very knowledgeable
general readership or for a beginning-level college class, but the Brekke
collection reviewed above would be a better choice in either case.

3. Two Books on Specific Religious Traditions on War

In this section, I treat Tessa J. Bartholomeusz’s In Defense of Dharma:
Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka (2002) and John Kelsay’s Argu-
ing the Just War in Islam (2007). Both offer a close, extensive, and highly
developed analysis of the religious traditions treated as they have en-
gaged the subject of war, its justifications, and the limits that should be
observed in it. As book-length studies, they examine their subjects in far
greater depth, with more attention to the influence of context and with
much greater nuance than is possible in even the best chapter-length
discussions of a religious tradition on war.
Bartholomeusz’s book is the oldest one treated in the present review.
It was published posthumously after her death from cancer, largely in
the form in which she presented it for publication but with some final
minor revisions by the editors of the series in which it appeared and with
some editorial help from colleagues of hers in the Department of Reli-
gion at Florida State University. I have already suggested one reason
for its importance at the time of publication and its continuing impor-
tance for those interested in religious traditions and warfare; it shows
how mistaken the impression is that Buddhism is universally pacifist.
What it does for the case of Sri Lanka remains to be done for other cul-
tures and for other forms of Buddhism than Sri Lankan Theravada: the
role of the Mahayana tradition in China, the adoption of Vajrayana Bud-
dhism as court religion by Mongol rulers in the period of their dominion
not only in China but also to the south and west, the implications to be
drawn from the sectarian fighting between Buddhist sects in Japanese
history, the links between Zen and bushido, and the attitudes toward
violence and war found in some new Japanese religious movements de-
veloped out of Buddhist bases. For the Mongols, this may mean a long
wait, because most of the evidence there seems to be in forms that art
historians study, not scholars of religion with their preference for texts.
However, for the rest, there are plenty of texts waiting to be studied
with an eye to the question of Buddhism and war. In the meantime, we
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 169

have Bartholomeusz’s book, which although it treats only one limited

segment of Buddhism as a whole, nonetheless examines how Buddhist
religion can be understood to provide for an acceptance of war even while
setting limits on that warfare.
The context of Bartholomeusz’s study is the ongoing strife in contem-
porary Sri Lanka, which is fueled by religious and cultural differences
between the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE—culturally
Tamil and religiously Hindu) and the Sri Lankan government (cultur-
ally Sinhalese and religiously Buddhist). One way Bartholomeusz might
have organized her book is to give a close analysis of the Mahavamsa and
other texts relevant to Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition on war and then
turn to how Sinhalese partisans have employed or applied these to make
the case for Sinhalese domination of the island and use of force against
the LTTE. However, she follows a different path, developing the analy-
sis of the historical texts in dialogue with the ongoing use of those texts
by important contemporary figures and movements. The result is more
complicated, but more nuanced; the texts are not presented as something
separate, which can be tapped into or left aside as wished in a given case;
rather, they are treated as living sources whose life is found in the use
given them by the contemporary figures and movements treated.
Bartholomeusz argues that there is a kind of just war reasoning at
work in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhism, read out of the traditional
texts and Sri Lankan history. Tellingly, she cites an interview with the
Venerable Athuraliya Rathana, coordinating secretary of the National
Sangha Council, in 1998, in which the monk argued, “there are many
stories in the canon that depict the Buddha as an advocate of force and
violence if there is just cause” (40). The authority to do so on behalf of
the good of the society as a whole rests on the ruler, along with the obli-
gation to serve that good. A similar point is made in Bartholomeusz’s
discussion of the argument to this effect by Chandrika Bandaranaike
Kumaratunga, elected president of Sri Lanka in 1994, who appealed to
Buddhist tradition for justification of waging war against the LTTE, as
well as by her opponent in the presidential race, Ranasinghe Premadasa,
who cited the precedent of the legendary King Asoka as holding to the
right to punish and kill “when considered necessary” even while advocat-
ing non-violence as the ideal (37). Kumaratunga, Bartholomeusz argues,
like other modern presidents of Sri Lanka, explicitly identified with the
“wheel-turning monarch” of the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, interpret-
ing the role of that monarch as including the right and duty to use force
when necessary for the good of the community and of the Buddhist faith.
The idea and explicit language of “just war” itself is, of course, for-
eign to the Buddhist texts; what Bartholomeusz does is to show how the
contemporary interpreters and apologists she examines use the Bud-
dhist texts to produce language that corresponds to the categories of
170 Journal of Religious Ethics

just war tradition: right authority, just cause, the end of peace, last re-
sort, and so on. In so doing, she may implicitly be making the claim that
these categories have a kind of universal presence; when thinking about
the obligations of government and the question of war, one necessarily
thinks in those terms. Whether this is true or not, each tradition uses
its own particular language and categories, and rather than imposing
the just war categories from the top of her analysis down, her method
is to examine the citations and use of texts by the figures she discusses
and then show how the examples and arguments they offer—and the
language they use—may usefully be placed within one or another just
war category. This is a useful and informative method of comparison that
preserves the character of the tradition being studied and its contempo-
rary expression even while connecting it to a larger discourse about the
justification and the limits of war.
A chapter in this book is given to the idea of dharma yuddhaya (which
Bartholomeusz translates as “religious, or righteous, war” [68]) and to
the associated idea of those who fight in such a war as “dharma warriors.”
The question is what this concept means, whether figurative, referring to
devoted self-abnegation in the service of the dharma, or literal, referring
to actual war for the sake of the dharma. Bartholomeusz’s answer is that
it includes both: the former following the example of the Buddha’s self-
abnegation and the latter following the example of King Dutugemunu
in the Mahavamsa (70). In that Dutugemunu’s military success was to
protect the land of the dharma (Sri Lanka) from invasion by the demalas
(Tamils), contemporary Sinhala apologists have had little trouble draw-
ing the connection between the historical referent of the Mahavamsa’s
king and the contemporary obligation of faithful Buddhists, including
the Sangha itself.
In her final chapter, Bartholomeusz returns to the concept of dharma
yuddhaya, observing that some scholarship on the Sri Lankan conflict
represents it as holy war. “[C]ommon wisdom about Sri Lanka and war
is polarized,” she writes; “some characterize Sri Lankan Buddhism as
being the paradigmatic ultra-pacific religion, while others talk of Sri
Lankan Buddhism and its holy war ideology” (158). Her own view, which
she again argues for in this chapter, is that the position of contempo-
rary Sri Lankans using Buddhism to justify warfare in response to the
threat posed by the LTTE is better understood as a form of just war
thinking, a position which like Bainton, she places on a spectrum be-
tween pacifism and holy war. “[T]he evidence presented in this book
suggests that Sinhala-Buddhist culture authorizes efflorescences of just-
war thinking, based on Buddhist narratives, despite doctrines that urge
pacifism” (167). This language, almost the last words in the book, offers
an interesting way of understanding the matter, distinguishing between
“Buddhist narratives” and “doctrines.” Even if the latter are pacifist, the
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 171

former are not; a form of just war thinking may be drawn from them.
In the case of Sri Lankan Buddhism and other forms of Theravada, the
narratives include texts that other forms of Buddhism do not share, and
one may wonder whether the same distinction can be found there and,
if so, with what results. The case of Sri Lanka is special because of the
power of the narrative texts held sacred in its form of Buddhism; yet
there may be other cases that are also special, though in their own ways,
so that the “doctrine” of Buddhist pacifism is by no means as universal
in its implications and scope as is often claimed.
Although interpretive literature on Buddhism and war is still rel-
atively scarce, that on Islam and war has grown vigorously over the
last twenty years. Some of this latter literature is quite good on its
own terms, but it reflects contemporary policy debates and is intended
to bear on these. For the scholar of religious ethics interested in how
Islamic religious tradition has treated war and how that tradition re-
lates to present-day conceptions of jihad, this policy-oriented literature
leaves many questions unanswered. However, answering these questions
is precisely the focus of Kelsay’s book, and it succeeds admirably at doing
so. Khadduri’s treatment of Shaybani’s Siyar set the gold standard for
work on Islamic tradition on politics, international relations, and war
for decades; although it still stands out as a focal source for studies of
the early development of Islamic jurisprudential thought on these topics,
Kelsay’s book broadens the focus to look at shari‘a reasoning as a whole
in the context of its origins, its historical development and use, and its
contemporary appropriation. In doing so, it sets its own gold standard;
outdoing Kelsay’s work on this subject will be unlikely for the foresee-
able future. Although it is to be hoped that this study will lead to others,
they will necessarily need to keep Kelsay’s book in focus as a point of
reference.
Kelsay’s original title included the subtitle, “The ‘New Jihad’ and the
Crisis of Sharià Reasoning.” As is often the case, the subtitle conveys
the focus of the book far better than the main title. In any case, the
Press’s choice of title was different from either, and I think something
has been lost in the process. Although Kelsay knows just war tradition
and just war reasoning well, “just war” is not a term used in Islamic
tradition, and it is only by extension that it can be applied here. The book
is not—in a way similar to Bartholomeusz’s—developed to show how the
categories or conclusions of shari‘a reasoning fit into the frame of just war
thought, although people knowledgeable in just war thinking may make
their own connections. Although Kelsay occasionally makes comments
as to similarities between the traditions (for example, 109), this book
is focused on the Islamic tradition itself, on shari‘a reasoning at the
core of that tradition, and on the circumstances that constitute a crisis
in that form of reasoning as exemplified in contemporary arguments
172 Journal of Religious Ethics

about how to employ shari‘a reasoning when thinking about jihad and its
extent.
The book begins with a chapter, “Sources,” that provides a summary
introduction to the origins and core ideas of Islam. Kelsay develops this
early history as a way of situating the development of shari‘a reason-
ing as the characteristic form of Islamic thinking about religious mat-
ters. The nature of shari‘a reasoning itself is the subject of the following
chapter. Thus, when he turns to the subjects of the next two chapters after
this—“Politics, Ethics, and War in Premodern Islam” and “Armed Resis-
tance and Islamic Tradition”—he is able to do so in a way that situates
the developments he treats there in this earlier time so that they do not
appear as later accretions that might be in tension with early Islam but
as organically connected to it. Similarly, his final two chapters treating
the appeal to and use of shari‘a reasoning to address important contem-
porary issues—“Military Action and Political Authority” and “Muslim
Argument and the War on Terror”—depend on showing the continuity of
thinking and methodology that traces back to early Islam through these
premodern developments.
For readers who know Kelsay’s earlier work and, equally, Khadduri’s
on al-Shaybani, the chapter on “Politics, Ethics, and War in Premodern
Islam” begins on familiar territory, but after a close, if necessarily sum-
mary, look at Shaybani, Kelsay takes his readers into the thought of
other figures, perhaps less familiar outside the Muslim context but of
importance within it, particularly for contemporary argumentation: al-
Mawardi (d. 1058), al-Sulami (d. 1106), and Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). The
last of these is a figure frequently used as a leading authority by radi-
cal Islamists—including Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al
Qaeda—who read Ibn Taymiyya a particular way. However, Kelsay’s use
of Mawardi and Sulami shows how the tradition develops as a form of
extended dialogue, not necessarily ending up where contemporary rad-
icals would have it but including other options as well. This nuanced
examination of the development of the tradition of shari‘a reasoning by
examination of specific figures within it shows the poverty of interpre-
tations of Islamic thinking on jihad that present it as monolithic.
Similarly, Kelsay has also already written on armed resistance in
Islamic tradition (including the essay on that subject discussed above),
and anyone who knows the work of Khaled Abou El Fadl will recognize
the close connections in Kelsay’s chapter on this subject. Again, though,
he uses the examination of selected figures from the developing tradition
(including Ibn Taymiyya, among others) to show the ongoing debate, not
simply the conclusions about that debate that contemporary radicals and
their opponents draw about its outcome.
The “crisis in shari‘a reasoning” mentioned earlier is central to
Kelsay’s analysis in the chapter on “Military Action and Political
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 173

Authority,” which examines the ongoing debate within Islam—one that

often takes the form of sharp disagreements even between Islamic
radicals—over the concept of the caliphate and the use of jihad for
its restoration. There is “the program of the militants” (Kelsay’s term),
which is essentially the justification for jihad including terrorist methods
against America and Western culture as a whole. But as Kelsay shows,
the state of contemporary opinion of Muslims is far more varied, more
complicated, and even more confused than arguments for this program
taken alone suggest. The “crisis,” as described by Kelsay, is that the old
assumptions about the parameters of shari‘a reasoning no longer hold—
assumptions about who may properly engage in such reasoning, about
the population addressed and in some sense bound by it, about the in-
evitability of Islamic triumph in the world, about the relative equality of
the various schools of interpretation, and so on.
The picture that results from a close look is one of flux and even con-
tention, in which “the program of the militants” is but one of the contend-
ing positions and is moreover a position characterized by a particular
weakness. As Kelsay puts it at the beginning of his final chapter, “The
most important weakness in the militant claim to represent true Islam is
the contradiction between the end professed and the means employed.”
“This weakness,” he goes on, “provides an opening for those who would
present an alternative,” specifically, those whom Kelsay calls “Muslim
democrats” (198). The chapter on political authority examines several
of these—three American Muslim scholars from different backgrounds
(Abdullahi an-Na‘im, Abdulaziz Sachedina, and Khaled Abou El Fadl)
who have advanced particular arguments to the effect that the proper
political meaning of Islam in the contemporary world is democracy. In the
final chapter, Kelsay takes up the arguments of the Muslim democrats
again, showing the sharp contrast with the kinds of arguments put for-
ward by the current President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For
Kelsay, the critical issue in the war on terror, viewed from the perspective
of the ongoing struggle over the contemporary meaning of Islam carried
out in the context of the crisis in shari‘a reasoning, is the outcome of this
conceptual battle over what Islam means for the shape of political order
and community. Thus, the outcome of the crisis in shari‘a reasoning has
implications that reach far beyond the boundaries of the Islamic world,
for the positions argued from within the context of that crisis have to do
with the shape of political order and community in the entire world.
This book, unlike the others treated above, is not an effort at com-
parison of religious traditions on war but a robust study of develop-
ments and debates within a single religious tradition as those have
taken form over time and in the contemporary world, but such serious,
thorough, in-depth study arguably provides the best basis for identify-
ing and building on possibilities for communication across religious and
174 Journal of Religious Ethics

cultural lines. The worth of this approach stands out most sharply when
set against rationalistic analyses—including some contemporary con-
ceptions of just war—that intentionally ignore the influence of religious
traditions within cultures or analyses that, although appearing sympa-
thetic to religion, seek to define right religion in such an abstract way
that particular religious traditions are filtered into unimportance. How-
ever, the meatiness of this approach also stands out in contrast to even
the best chapter-length discussions of particular religious traditions on
war, necessarily circumscribed in scope or forced into generalities that
obscure the dynamic character of the tradition in question. It is tempt-
ing to imagine how a collection such as Brekke, for example, has assem-
bled would look if each chapter were a book of such robust character as
Kelsay’s or even a more limited study such as Bartholomeusz’s. That, in
principle, is a goal worth striving for.

4. Revisiting Western Moral Tradition on War

and Related Issues
The final book that I will examine here is The Ethics of War: Classic
and Contemporary Readings (Reichberg, Syse, and Begby 2006). George
Lucas, professor of philosophy at the U.S. Naval Academy, in a comment
on the cover characterizes this collection as “bring[ing] together all of
the essential texts of the just war tradition in one single volume.” This
is both an understatement and an overstatement.
First, this collection of texts reaches beyond just war tradition. In my
Quest for Peace (1987), I identified and discussed three moral traditions
in Western cultural history, with just war tradition being one of them;
the other two are sectarian pacifism, exemplified most centrally by the
pacifism of the first-century Christian church, the pacifists of the Rad-
ical Reformation, and contemporary groups coming out of the Radical
Reformation heritage, and what I called “world-order pacifism,” a way of
thinking found in the “perpetual peace” writings of the Enlightenment
era, in international law, and in modern groups that see the creation
of world order as a way to the abolition of war. All three of these tra-
ditions are represented in texts found in this collection. Furthermore,
unless Angeliki Laiou’s conception of what counts as just war think-
ing (discussed above) is accepted, this collection includes materials from
classical Greece and Rome that I think of as belonging to the roots of
just war thinking proper but distant from the formed just war tradition.
Therefore, to characterize this collection in a way that suggests that it
only includes texts relating to just war is an understatement; its reach
is deeper and broader. It would be better to think of this as a collection of
texts expressing the historical development of Western moral thinking
on war and related issues, not of just war thinking alone.
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 175

At the same time, Lucas’s characterization is an overstatement; any

collection necessarily picks and chooses, and this one is no exception.
The literature is rich, and although the texts that the editors have cho-
sen mark out most of the major lines of development of just war tradition
(and the other traditions they also treat), their choices of which authors
to include and which texts from those authors to use are ultimately their
own choice, and others might choose differently. I know this from ex-
perience, because I have chosen differently in my own historical work
on just war, sectarian pacifism, and world-order pacifism. To take some
examples: missing in the current collection is any text from the prolific
English literature from the period of the post-Reformation religious wars
and the rise of Puritanism; the perpetual peace examples provided in-
clude texts from Rousseau and Kant only; Clausewitz is included, but
nothing from Jomini, who was far more influential in his own time; and
from the twentieth century, there is nothing at all from the writings of
Reinhold Niebuhr.
There is also the matter of the specific texts chosen and how they
cast the issues being treated. Two examples will suggest how this might
matter. First, the Thomistic tradition gets comparatively extensive at-
tention, with thirty pages of texts from Aquinas himself that cover the
gamut of his discussions of anything relative to the question of war and
with some ninety pages from the later scholastics Vitoria, Molina, and
Suarez. This is an important part of the developing just war tradition,
but I wonder whether the total of some 120 pages on it is not a bit ex-
cessive in the context of such a collection, especially given the ready
availability in various languages of the texts excerpted. My second ex-
ample is the treatment of twentieth-century American thought on just
war. Paul Ramsey is represented, as is the U.S. Catholic bishops’ The
Challenge of Peace, and (full disclosure) so is a selection from my work.
The texts chosen in all these cases bear on nuclear weapons and nu-
clear war. That is perhaps defensible in a certain way, but this focus on
the topic of the texts cited obscures the important methodological differ-
ences between these three examples of just war reasoning, differences
that have a longer reach than historically situated debates over nuclear
weapons. To take a small slice of this difference to which I refer, al-
though The Challenge of Peace stresses the importance of what William
V. O’Brien used to call the “war decision,” adding to the traditional jus
ad bellum categories new ones aimed at making the resort to war more
difficult to justify, Ramsey stressed jus in bello reasoning, and neither
Ramsey nor I accept the bishops’ characterization of just war thought as
beginning with a “presumption against war,” with the various just war
criteria functioning to determine whether and when this general pre-
sumption can be overridden. The “dirty hands” model of justified use of
force that results from the bishops’ conception of just war has much more
176 Journal of Religious Ethics

to do with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism than with traditional

just war thinking (which I insist needs to be favored) or Ramsey’s concept
of the positive obligation to use force that sometimes arises as a result
of the moral requirement to love one’s neighbor.
Then, too, there is the matter of the philosophical contributions to
recent just war thinking—represented here by excerpts from Anscombe,
Rawls, Walzer, and Nagel—and how these connect to the religious debate
over just war or if they do at all. The philosophical texts cited in this col-
lection deal with different subjects, not a single one, yet although there
is a bit more focused attention to method here, how these contemporary
philosophers conceive just war and how it might relate to the histori-
cal just war tradition or to theological conceptions of just war are not
developed.
These are important concerns, I think, but no one book should be
expected to do everything. The virtue I suspect most will find in this col-
lection is its compendiousness: seven hundred-plus pages of texts from
major authors who have contributed to the development of Western moral
thought on war and peace. Although I have many of the works from which
excerpts have been taken in this collection, I will keep a copy of this book
in my study at home and in my office, and I expect it to be a useful re-
search tool and a focal collection for teaching. Others interested in this
subject, whether for research or teaching, should find it similarly valu-
able. There is nothing else like it. However, it supplements, rather than
replaces, longer historical studies of Western moral tradition on war or
more tightly focused essays on particular figures or elements from that
tradition. In this regard, it also offers a second virtue; the selection of
authors and texts, their organization, and the brief but suggestive edito-
rial introductions to each figure excerpted describe a particular way of
reading the development of Western moral thought on the topics treated.
First, there is a tradition, one that reaches back into classical antiquity
and builds on ideas first framed there. Second, the developing tradition
is one that includes a variety of types of inputs: philosophical, religious,
legal, military, reflections on the practice of government and statecraft.
Third, understanding that tradition is essential to situating and criti-
cally understanding twentieth-century thought on the subjects treated.
So persuasively crafted is this book as a whole that if anyone reads it
straight through from beginning to end, he or she may be forgiven for
adopting this particular way of understanding the development of West-
ern moral thought related to war as canonical, but anyone tempted to
do so should recall the understatements and overstatements I discussed
above. I agree with all three postulates about the existence of a moral
tradition on war and related issues, the multiple sources that have fed
into that tradition over time—that is, it is not simply a religious or philo-
sophical or legal or military tradition; people who see it as idealistic and
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 177

unconnected to reality need to come to terms with the fact that the tra-
dition includes idealistic and practical elements—and the need to assess
contemporary reasoning on war and related issues by reference to the
broad wisdom found in the tradition. However, in my own historical work
on Western moral thought on war and related issues, I examine some-
what different figures and movements, prioritize the contributions of
each somewhat differently, and rather than tracing a common line back
to classical Greece and Rome—for me, these provide the deep roots of
a tradition not yet formed; I also add the influence of the Hebraic cul-
ture mediated through the Old Testament—have argued that the best
place to begin is with the coalescence of a coherent conception of just war
in the high Middle Ages. Two forthcoming books by young scholars, the
American Mark Totten and Cian O’Driscoll of the University of Glasgow,
provide other close analytical looks into this moral tradition of the West
that also agree on these three postulates but focus on different figures,
movements, and relationships between elements of the larger tradition.
Anyone interested in dealing seriously with the topic of Western moral
thinking about war and related issues should relish this rich diversity, to
which the present collection of texts testifies, and to the understanding
of which it contributes uniquely and importantly.
Readers of this assessment should reflect for a moment on the state of
scholarship on moral thinking about war and related issues in other
religions and cultures, the subject of earlier parts of the present es-
say. Even for the case of such scholarship on Islamic tradition, which is
the most developed of the major religio-cultural traditions from beyond
the Christian-influenced West, there is nothing like the same richness
of resources. One can imagine a bookshelf on the Islamic tradition on
governance and war that includes Khadduri, Kelsay, some particular
studies of specific ideas or figures, a limited number of translations of
historical and contemporary works from within Islamic tradition, and
some selection from recent journalistic and policy-oriented books deal-
ing with Islam, politics, and war. However, Kelsay’s would be the only
volume offering a longitudinal interpretation of the development and
implications of that tradition, and there would be nothing compara-
ble to the Reichberg-Syse-Begby collection on the Western tradition.
The case for the other major religious and cultural traditions would
be much worse. Reflecting in this way underscores the richness of the
resources on moral thinking about war and related issues in Western
culture and the importance of understanding this thinking in terms of
the historical tradition it forms. It also serves as a reminder of how
much work needs to be done to produce a similarly deep and intellec-
tually varied understanding of how other cultures have dealt with these
topics, not only religiously, but also politically, legally, militarily, and
otherwise.
178 Journal of Religious Ethics

REFERENCES
Aho, James A.
1981 Religious Mythology and the Art of War. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press.
Bainton, Roland
1960 Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace. New York: Abingdon
Press.
Bartholomeusz, Tessa J.
2002 In Defense of Dharma. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
Best, Geoffrey
1980 Humanity in Warfare. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brekke, Torkel, ed.
2006 The Ethics of War in Asian Civilizations. London and New York:
Routledge.
Ferguson, John
1977 War and Peace in the World’s Religions. London: Sheldon Press.
Johnson, James Turner
1975 Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War. Princeton, N.J. and
London: Princeton University Press.
1981 Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War. Princeton, N.J. and
Guildford: Princeton University Press.
1984 Can Modern War Be Just? New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale
University Press.
1987 The Quest for Peace. Princeton, N.J. and Guildford: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Johnson, James Turner, and John Kelsay, eds.
1990 Cross, Crescent, and Sword. Westport, Conn. and London: Green-
wood Press.
Kelsay, John
2007 Arguing the Just War in Islam. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Har-
vard University Press.
Kelsay, John, and James Turner Johnson, eds.
1991 Just War and Jihad. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood
Press.
Khadduri, Majid
1940 The Law of War and Peace in Islam. London: Luzac & Co.
1966 The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybani’s Siyar. Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins Press.
National Conference of Catholic Bishops
1983 The Challenge of Peace. Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic
Conference.
O’Brien, William V.
1981 The Conduct of Just and Limited War. New York: Praeger.
Ramsey, Paul
1961 War and the Christian Conscience. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press.
 Thinking Comparatively about Religion and War 179

1968 The Just War. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Reichberg, Gregory M., Henrik Syse, and Endre Begby, eds.
2006 The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford and
Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, ed.
2004 War and Peace in World Religions. London: SCM Press.
Sorabji, Richard, and David Rodin, eds.
2006 The Ethics of War. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate
Publishing.
Walzer, Michael
1977 Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books.
Wright, Robin B.
1985 Sacred Rage: The Crusade of Modern Islam. New York: Linden
Press/Simon & Schuster.