Michael Cromartie

The environmental movement both echoes and challenges traditional Judeo-Christian views about humankind’s proper relationship to the natural world. Ten scholars and activists here explore–and clash over–some of the scientific, religious, moral, philosophical, economic, and political claims advanced by contemporary environmentalists.

Does our world now have more people than it can reasonably sustain? If current growth rates continue, will overpopulation be the cause of ever-increasing hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation? Will we run out of resources? And if the world is becoming overpopulated, what is the most wise, humane, and effective response by concerned governments and organizations? These are some of the questions that engaged twenty-six scholars and practitioners at a conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in October 1993. The four papers and two related responses from that conference form the nucleus of this book.

The religious right, currently the subject of intense press attention, is here scrutinized by both insiders and outside observers. Journalists Fred Barnes (The New Republic), Michael Barone (U.S. News & World Report), and E. J. Dionne (The Washington Post), activists Ralph Reed (Christian Coalition) and Michael Farris, and scholarly analysts John Green, Allen Hertzke, Michael Horowitz, Richard Land, and George Weigel examine the agenda of religious conservatives, their influence upon the 1992 election, and whether and how they can increase their political influence in the next four years. In a foreword, Irving Kristol calls religious conservatives "the very core of an emerging American conservatism." The volume, published jointly by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Eerdmans, includes brief comments by eighteen other informed observers as well.

“The discussion of ethics or morality in our relations with other states is a prolific cause of confusion,” former Secretary of State Dean Acheson once asserted. The distinguished contributors to this volume—Alberto R. Coll, James Finn, Richard D. Land, Luis E. Lugo, George Weigel, and Nicholas Wolterstorff—do not deny such confusion. But they argue that moral issues are simply unavoidable in the making of foreign-policy choices. The often-heated “morality and foreign policy” debate can best illuminate the quandaries faced by policy-makers through a recovery of the classic tradition of “prudence.” This tradition encourages statecraft that is, in Coll’s words, neither “politically impractical nor morally bankrupt.”

In this provocative collection nine distinguished observers give their assessments of what the Religious New Right has achieved and what its potential is for the rest of this decade. Historian George Marsden of Notre Dame, sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton, and political scientists Robert Booth Fowler of the University of Wisconsin and Corwin Smidt of Calvin College ponder its past and future from their varying perspectives. Five other scholars—James L. Guth, Carl F. H. Henry, James Davison Hunter, Grant Wacker, and George Weigel—offer challenging responses, and nine prominent activists and experts add insightful comments.

In his highly controversial 1988 book Peace and Revolution, political scientist Guenter Lewy charged that since the Vietnam era the four major American pacifist organizations—American Friends Service Committee, Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters League, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—have moved from singleminded devotion to the principles of non-violence and reconciliation to a defense of “the moral legitimacy of armed struggle and guerrilla warfare.” This provocative collection begins with a summary of Lewy’s argument. Then fifteen respondents—pacifists and non-pacifists—join the discussion. Some decry Lewy’s account as prejudiced and incomplete; others applaud it as a long overdue exposure of the subversion of a noble purpose. In a final chapter, Lewy replies to his critics.