War
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Why the Iran war is immoral
A hospital is not a fortress. A school is not an armory. A child eating breakfast is not collateral damage waiting to happen. The just war tradition draws these lines in indelible ink, yet the fog of war keeps producing erasers — and generals willing to use them.
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The peace of the Resurrection and the call to end war
The argument that enemies hide among civilians does not grant unlimited permission to inflict mass casualties on noncombatants. Civilian infrastructure like power grids and food supply chains cannot be obliterated simply because soldiers also depend on electricity and sustenance to carry out their operations.
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Banksy captures our moment
A Banksy statue appeared overnight on a London street — a man in a suit, stepping into thin air. Banal at first glance, the figure crystallises something all the year’s op-eds have failed to: the breathtaking gap between political confidence and political vision in our time.
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How Iran broke Trump’s alliance with Catholic America
At an Easter vigil for peace, Cardinal McElroy preached that the United States entered the Iran war by choice, not necessity, and failed to exhaust negotiation. He called both its initiation and continuation morally illegitimate.
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A passive voice is how we hide from the wars we choose
We have constructed an entire vocabulary of evasion around war. Violence “erupts,” conflicts “spiral,” casualties get “reported” — all passive, all subjectless. Leo XIV punctures that fog by insisting someone chose this, restoring human agency and accountability to every act of destruction.
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The dire straits of Anzac Day
Every year Australia and New Zealand remember soldiers who died on a Turkish beach. In 2026 that remembrance collides with a new war over a strategic strait, raising urgent questions about whether nations ever learn from past losses.
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Doing theology in times of political crisis
The collision of political sovereignty and ecclesial authority exposes fundamental questions of legitimacy within a fragmented normative landscape. Appeals to tradition obscure irreducible complexity, crisis functions as rhetorical apparatus, and the inexorable dynamics of imperial decline reconfigure authority itself—compelling discernment between authentic moral critique and instrumentalised religion.
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The boy in the basement
War does not only flatten buildings. It dismantles the invisible architecture of childhood — the assumption that the ground is solid, the belief that adults have things under control. When fear becomes normal, children stop imagining that anything better exists.
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God is not a weapon
Pope Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily quoted Isaiah directly at those prosecuting the Iran offensive, saying God does not hear the prayers of those whose hands are full of blood. It was among the sharpest papal condemnations of an active military campaign in recent memory.
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Interpreting Pope Leo on the Middle East
Pope Leo has returned regularly to the Israel-US-Iran War in the Middle East in his public statements. He commented almost immediately after both Israel and the USA began their strikes on Iran and has maintained his focus on the topic. The Pope clearly prefers peace and diplomacy to war and aggression — his language about…
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