The Horrors We Bless: Rethinking the Just War Legacy
By Daniel C. Maguire. Augsburg Fortress (Minneapolis, 2007). 103 pp., $8.50.

Faith and Force
By David L. Clough and Brian Stiltner. Georgetown University Press (Washington, 2007). 286 pp., $26.95.

Passion for Peace: Reflections on War and Nonviolence
By Thomas Merton, edited by William H. Shannon. Crossroad (New York, 2006). 174 pp., $14.95.

As the United States enters the fifth year of war in Iraq, many Americans are more focused on how our country can end our participation in it than on the question of whether the war is justified. But these three books remind us that we are doomed to repeat this kind of futility if we don't look hard at the moral and ethical issues of war and peacemaking. Christians in particular are obliged to re-examine its traditional responses to war: pacifism and just-war theories.

Daniel C. Maguire, the author of "The Horrors We Bless," is professor of ethics at Marquette University in Milwaukee whose views on contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage have been criticized by the U.S. bishops. This book offers a brief and blistering review of the just-war theory, its history and development, and the need to rethink it in the light of nuclear weapons and terrorism.

The war in Iraq reminds Maguire of the three major battles the French fought with the English in the 14th and 15th centuries. Three times the French rode into battle with knights clad in armor on horseback and three times the English slaughtered them with arrows shot from longbows. The French, with superior numbers and equipment, could not seem to understand that the methods of warmaking had changed and paid a high cost for their refusal to face facts.

In a similar way, Maguire argues, Americans don't seem to grasp that wars are not fought as they were in the Second World War. He contends that the Iraq War does not meet in any respect the criteria of just war: a just cause, a declaration of war by a legitimate authority, war fought with the right intention, war fought with the principles of proportionality and discrimination, and war used only as a last resort.

Rejecting the idea of pre-emptive strike as legitimate policy, the author does offer just peacemaking as a sane response to modern threats to security. Maguire acknowledges that peacemaking is difficult, and often dangerous, but he contends the alternatives are much worse.

Meanwhile, the book "Faith and Force" is the result of a debate argued across the Atlantic between David L. Clough, director of studies and teacher of ethics and systematic theology at St. John's College in Durham, England, and Brian Stiltner, an associate professor and chair of the department of philosophy and religious studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

Clough is a Methodist lay preacher and an advocate of pacifism; Stiltner is a Catholic theologian and a just-war adherent. They review issues of humanitarian intervention, the proliferation of weapons and the increasing threats made by rogue nations. Each chapter ends with a debate by the two authors on the given topic.

While "Faith and Focus" covers a broader range of topics, it reads like a textbook. Clough and Stiltner are skillful advocates of their positions, but their book lacks the passion of "The Horrors We Bless." We forget it is real human beings who are fighting and dying over the policies these men debate.

The book "Passion for Peace" is an abridgement of "Passion for Peace: The Social Essays" by Thomas Merton, originally published in 1995. Most of the essays were written by Merton in the early 1960s. It was in those years that Merton realized the contemplative life of a Christian monk is not meant to center on an individual's spiritual state, but, instead, is meant to be focused on the larger, contemporary concerns of the world.

Merton writes on people as diverse as Adolf Eichmann, Mohandas Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh and places as far-flung as Auschwitz and Vietnam. We hear the more mature voice of Merton, who had by this time rejected the religious romanticism of his younger years, but his eloquence and faith remain undiminished.

---CNS Graham Yearley is earning a certificate of advanced study in theology at the Ecumenical Institute at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore.