War and the Christian Conscience: Where Do You Stand?
By Joseph J. Fahey. Orbis Books (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2005) 205 pp. $15.

Peacework: Prayer, Resistance, Community
By Father Henri Nouwen with foreword by Father John Dear, SJ. Orbis Books (Maryknoll, N.Y., 2005) 127 pp. $16.










Just War?
By Charles Reed with foreword by Jean Bethke Elshtain. Church Publishing (New York, 2005) 181 pp. $14.

Some of us likely have had the strange experience of spotting, in the course of our daily business, one of the yellow-and-black fallout shelter signs that popped up during the Cold War and still linger. The black circle with the three inverted yellow triangles seemed to burn itself into the national consciousness, both capturing and evoking the nation's dread of a massive nuclear war.

This is the specter that haunts Father Henri Nouwen's "Peacework: Prayer, Resistance, Community," a collection of some of the Dutch spiritual writer's work from the 1980s compiled by Jesuit priest and anti-war activist Father John Dear (who also wrote the book's foreword).

"Peacework" represents Father Nouwen's vision of a spirituality of peace, which is based on the premise that being a peacemaker is a fundamental part of the Christian vocation. This obligation is not lessened, in his view, by the lamentable fact that the person who advocates peace is inevitably labeled a naive dreamer.

With its focus on the would-be peacemaker's need for inner conversion, however, the book is as much about Father Nouwen's spiritual wrestling match with himself as it is about his opposition to nuclear weapons. One also detects a certain existential angst in lines like "Men and women work in offices under neon lights, sitting behind metal desks, drinking instant coffee from paper cups, eating their lunch out of a paper bag, and often wondering if they make any contribution at all."

Thus, despite Father Nouwen's often beautiful writing, "Peacework" seems at times in danger of collapsing under its own ominous weight. That aside, the book serves as a reminder that though the arms race may be over the world now faces the daunting challenge of reducing nuclear stockpiles --- something that continues to prove remarkably difficult.

Joseph Fahey's "War and the Christian Conscience: Where Do You Stand?" is a lucid and readable overview of a number of approaches to the question of war found in Christian thought. Clearly written for use in the classroom (likely at the undergraduate level), the book begins by introducing the reader to a confused student who must clarify her own views on war in light of a fictional president's decision to request that Congress reinstate military conscription.

Using this device, the book sets out four Christian views on war: pacifism, just war, total war and (the relatively novel) world community.

The author leaves little question as to which approaches he favors, and there are the obvious limitations of covering in less than 200 pages so much intellectual and historical terrain, such as the simplification of complex historical movements. One also wonders how many Christians actually adhere to a "total war" approach. Still, if the idea is to get students and general readers thinking, "War and the Christian Conscience" hits the mark.

Finally, those with more scholarly tastes could do much worse than Charles Reed's spectacularly researched "Just War?" As opposed to Fahey's flyover approach, "Just War?" --- as the title suggests --- focuses specifically on just-war theory.

Reed, the international policy adviser to the Church of England, rigorously applies just-war criteria to a blow-by-blow account of the political processes and decision-making that led to the two most recent Iraq wars. In the course of the analysis, Reed wonders whether the response of some British church leaders to the two conflicts (and preceding crises) inadvertently jettisoned their ability to influence British foreign policy.

Although it is brief, academics, policy wonks and armchair theorists alike will find "Just War?" substantial food for thought and discussion.

Brent Kallmer is a former research fellow with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Department of Social Development and World Peace and a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.