Colleges and universities have largely abandoned their traditional stance in loco parentis, as moral guardians over student life, and instead seek to promote toleration while preventing conflict. In this volume David A Hoekema argues that in doing so, they fail to provide an atmosphere conducive to the attainment of the kind of responsible independence that such goals presuppose.

Igor Primoratz, Justifying Legal Punishment Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and London: Humanities Press, 1989, x + 196 pp.; bibliography.

Kent Greenawalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choice New York Oxford University Press, 1988. Michael J. Perry, Morality, Politics and Law New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Two recent monographs re-examine the central elements of the just war tradition and its contemporary applications. David Rodin’s War and Self-Defense analyzes, and rejects, the common doctrine that just war is an instance of national self-defense, in parallel with the right of individuals to protect themselves against violent attack. This derivation fails, and it cannot justify resort to war. In contrast, Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited dismisses the notion that there are rules for just war and calls instead for (...) careful and deliberate practical reasoning in particular contexts. Indeed, there can be no just wars, only specific acts that pass the tests of theological, historical, and practical scrutiny. (shrink)

Ethical reflection on the practice of war stands in a long tradition in Western philosophy and theology, a tradition which begins with the writings of Plato and Augustine and encompasses accounts of justified warfare offered by writers from the Medieval period to the present. Ethical reflection on nuclear war is of necessity a more recent theme. The past few years have seen an enormous increase in popular as well as scholarly concern with nuclear issues, and philosophers have joined theologians in (...) exploring the moral issues surrounding the harnessing of atomic forces in the service of war. (shrink)

Franklin Zahn, born in 1908 to a German family that had settled in California a generation before, was trained as a mechanical engineer. He might have spent a lifetime designing diesel engines had certain meetings and conversations not awakened in him a passion for nonviolence and social reform. Deeply influenced by the activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and several Quaker groups, he set a new course which led him to spend several weeks in a camp for conscientious objectors and (...) some weeks in jail, to work as an independent builder and a free-lance religious psychotherapist, to sail a small boat into a nuclear test zone in protest, and to assist in a housing project for the poor in India. (shrink)