Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Evangelical Moment in American Public Life

This essay was delivered during a panel discussion entitled "'Costly Discipleship and Contemporary Culture: Bonhoeffer as a Model for Religious Activism" during the conference Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Our Times: Jewish and Christian Perspectives, cosponsored by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hebrew College, and Andover-Newton Theological School, September 18, 2006. The author argues that conservative American evangelicals "often conflate loyalty to Jesus Christ with loyalty to the United States of America. They weave together loyalty to Jesus Christ with loyalty to the president, the party, the troops, the flag, or the nation." For the author, the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer encourages a strong resistance to such a confusion of loyalties

Religious Reason-Giving in the Torture Debate: A Response to Jeremy Waldron

I am grateful to the Mercer Law Review for including a Christian ethics professor in this colloquy and, wearing my other hat as a cosponsor of this symposium, grateful to our distinguished guests for being here! I am also grateful to my friend Jeremy Waldron for his very kind words about me and about our Evangelical Declaration Against Torture,\u27 and for his excellent paper presented at this symposium, to which it is my honor to offer a brief response. It seems to me that a paper focusing as it does on my own work on the Evangelical Declaration rightly evokes a somewhat autobiographical response. I want to deal with the important theoretical issues raised by Professor Waldron in light of my own involvement in the torture debate from 2005 until today. This will take you behind the scenes to some extent and, I hope, will reveal the cogency of Dr. Waldron\u27s claims about the constructive value of religious contributions to public deliberation