This essay explores the political and legal problem of legitimate wars in relation to the theological question of justice and peace. It begins by charting a brief genealogical account of how in the modern era the Christian ‘just war’ tradition was formalised and thus drained of much of its substantive and practical context.

The essay also examines and rejects a number of contemporary attempts to use ‘just war’ theory in order to legitimate modern warfare. The argument is that both neoconservative realism and political liberalism instrumentalise the ‘just war’ tradition to defend and extend central state power. Christian pacifism has a compelling critique of realism and liberalism, but it fails to offer a genuinely transformative ontology and politics.

The essay concludes by calling for a metaphysics of peace that can resist the modern primacy of violence and make real the divine promise of a harmoniously ordered cosmos.

This article engages David Bentley Hart's critique of coercive “demonstration” in apologetics in favor of Gospel proclamation in the mode of “persuasion.” More specifically, I evaluate Hart's articulation of persuasion as a discourse that is primarily aesthetic and traffics primarily in beauty. After expressing an appreciation for Hart's critique of the traditional apologetics of demonstration, I suggest that Hart's own proposal still has elements of an “apologetic”—a kind of natural “aesthetic” theology, but a natural theology nonetheless. I conclude by extrapolating the Reformed critique of natural theology (based on the “noetic effects of sin”) to include a critique of Hart's aesthetic quasi‐natural theology by providing an account of the “affective” effects of sin.

“Hispanic” is a term from the United States (USA) census bureau later adopted by the United States Catholic Council of Bishops (USCCB) that refers to USA residents who trace part of their ancestry to Spanish-speakers. Usually they also have ancestors from among either American indigenous communities or Africans imported as slaves, or both. For the purpose of this article, it presumes that whatever their level of acculturation to USA society, their preferred language of worship is still Spanish.

A new way of being Catholic is necessarily forged by those Hispanics. They are not assimilating into the USA church as did former immigrants from Europe, but they are also unable to simply reproduce the Catholicism of their twenty plus countries of origin.

New church structures must therefore address this novel phenomenon, especially in areas where those immigrants are recent or geographically dispersed.

Rather than only continuing the mostly futile attempt to integrate immigrants into existing parishes, local ordinaries should consider other options including parishes without boundaries or buildings. Such personal parishes constituted of a community of small communities are not only possible under current Church law and doctrine, but often best fulfills the intent of those same documents.

There are a number of places in his works where Thomas Aquinas writes about teaching and learning. Following a summary account of his understanding of education, this paper presents and discusses a neglected source on these matters. The sermon Puer Iesus, probably preached in January 1271, contains thoughts on pedagogy that are, in the words of its Leonine editor, ‘original and of great interest’. The sermon offers a broad sketch of human development in which the adolescence of Christ, the ‘most excellent of teachers’, is appealed to as an inspiration and an example. It raises Christological and pedagogical questions and it is the latter that are considered here. Encouraging his student congregation to listen generously, enquire diligently, respond prudently and meditate attentively, Aquinas outlines for them a practical method of learning that is at once critical and contemplative.

In “The Beauty of the Infinite,” David Hart offers a persuasive case for why the beauty of God's infinity is at the heart of the Christian evangel of peace, a peace funded by our analogical participation in God's Trinitarian life. At the heart of his argument is an appropriation of Gregory of Nyssa's concept of infinity, which presupposes a “non‐dialectical creation of out of nothing.” He then links this understanding of infinity with what he calls the “Christian evangel of peace”, which he contrasts with what he calls a “genealogy of violence” (identified with Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger). His main contribution lies in his use of this understanding of God's infinity to rethink important issues in Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. Nonetheless, the question can be raised about whether his argument does justice to classically Christian understandings of the following: the presupposition, rooted in creation, of a shared human rationality, the importance of law, the centrality of the prophetic critique of idolatry and individual and corporate sin, and the place for lament in biblical depictions of Christ's death and the Christian life.

I offer a brief outline of The Beauty of the Infinite, pointing up its similarities with and differences from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990), and the violence of its rhetoric. I then take issue with Hart's reading of Nicholas Lash on the death and resurrection of Christ. I argue that not only is Lash closer to Hart than Hart allows, but that Lash recognizes the necessarily unfinished nature of Christian story telling. Hart is led by his rhetoric of out‐narration to affirm an unsustainable completeness that elides the terrors of suffering and death, the very fault for which Hart chides Lash. Having noted Hart's misdirection I conclude with an appreciation of his aesthetics.

It is a pity that The Price of Peace, resulting from a prolonged transatlantic dialogue between theologians and academics, should begin with a flawed section on modern ‘just war’ thinking which fails to recognise the difference between: 1. war between states, in which, international law having failed, the objective is to render the enemy powerless so that the victor can dictate what happens next; and 2. global criminality, as in the terrorism of gangs like al-Qaeda, which requires to be dealt with by a global police force designed precisely to restore the rule of law for the sake of the common good of all humanity. Pace authors like George Weigel, thinking about the justice of armed force cannot remain what it was: it needs to develop, as the papacy has long taught, to take full account of the fact that crime is today replacing war as the prevailing international evil.