• President Emeritus of Notre Dame University Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame

To help you think through those questions, renowned Catholic educator Edward Malloy, C.S.C., has created this series. In it, he plumbs the resources of Christian thought and history. He explores traditions of pacifism and just-war theory and explores lessons learned from the Crusades and Inquisition. Exploring these darker aspects of our history can shed helpful light on our current events.

How can we fight terrorists without killing "the quality of mercy" in our own souls? What is torture? What ethical considerations should govern the use of force even in a good cause? Has there ever been—can there ever be—such a thing as a "just" war?

These are just some of the questions that you can reflect upon with invaluable help from Father Malloy. He brings a lifetime of research, reflection, and writing on Christian ethics to his presentations, and it shows. Father Malloy weighs the oldest Christian tradition—pacifism—sympathetically and credits its prophetic value while finding it less than adequate as a guide to the relationship between force and justice. To fill that role, he turns to the tradition of just war.

The idea of "just" war is not without its own problems, of course. Yet just war appears as the best-available option when contrasted not only with pacifism, but also with the misbegotten attitudes that led to the Crusades and thence to the Inquisition in medieval and early-modern Christendom.