Bob

“The answer to evil is not revenge but redemption.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

“we wish to prosecute the thesis that in a world with a human propensity for evil, greed and injustice, liberal democracy stands as the least worst option for human governance. Liberal democracy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a just society, but it can be an enabling condition for a just society.”
― N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

“Before the United States entered World War I, forty-six million Protestants and sixty-two million Catholics were trying to kill forty-five million Protestants and sixty-three million Catholics on the other side. In that war, Christians succeeded in killing millions of other Christians. Reflecting back on the war in 1925, one Christian said, “Christian nations engaged in the most frightful carnage of history. No human device of cruelty and murder was too terrible to use. No human ingenuity was inappropriate for the purpose of destroying life. Nominal and real Christians fought other nominal and real Christians. Pulpits behind both trenches preached the crusade, held the cross before armed regiments and called down upon the carnage the blessing of God.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“has often been suggested that moral (or practical) reason is distinguished by the fact that it is prescriptive, while theoretical (or speculative) reason is descriptive. That is certainly not right. Moral reason has a vast stake in description. It describes particular things, describes their relations and purposes, describes the way the world as a whole fits together. Without this descriptive exercise practical reason would not be reason at all. It cannot be that “reason is the slave of the passions.”5 That is to say, it cannot be that practical reason begins with a simple impulse, an undetermined will, which then calls on knowledge of what is true and false, independently arrived at, to shape the execution of its project. For the impulse on its own, apart from any rational description, can have no clear project. It cannot be the impulse it is — fear, desire, sympathy, or anything else — unless it knows something about the world from the start: there are things that pose a danger to existence, there is good that offers it fulfillment, there are fellow-beings whose case is like mine. World-description belongs, as they say, “on the ground-floor” of practical reason. There can be no prescription without it; neither can there be description which is neutral in its prescriptive implications. Only because this is so, can we think our way through the world practically.”
― Oliver O'Donovan, Self, World, and Time: