Speaking of The Bomb, former Secretary of State (under Reagan) George Shultz has penned an important moral plea for nuclear abolition in Yale Divinity School’s Reflections.

Noting that the policy of containing bomb technology was always a security delusion, and that the day of widespread access to the Bomb is careening toward us, Shultz outlines real and pragmatic steps toward abolition.

It's really possible, but it will be in the first instance a diplomatic feat, not a military one. It only seems impossible because of a failure to imagine reciprocity possible, he says:

The world is trending toward an increase in danger from nuclear weapons. That trend must and can be turned around. Support is building. Doable steps toward the goal of a world without nuclear weapons have been identified. Attainment of the goal is a real possibility.

It’s 64 years this Thursday since Hiroshima was destroyed with a nuclear bomb.

Historians and Military thinkers have debated ever since the strategic value of the bomb. It is possible to argue that lives were saved on balance by the bomb’s eliminating an Allied need for a land invasion of Japan, and so on.

But today I wonder a smaller question: not about those who made the decision to do it, but about those who chose the city of Hiroshima. Any of several cities could have been chosen, but what did it feel like around the conference table to choose this city over others?

As peacekeeping—ever a slippery concept, involving a volatile mix of force, human rights, rule of law, reconciliation and restoration—plays an increasing role in military operations around the world, the role of the chaplain is taking on an external mission.

Chaplains have long had a support role, tending to the spiritual needs of soldiers, but war itself is growing more complicated. As compared with, say, World War 2, today’s soldiers come into much more intimate contact with locals and enemies than in the recent past.

Last month the South African Navy hosted the International Military Chief of Chaplains Conference, with the theme of "The Role of the Chaplain in Reconciliation and Healing in Post-Conflict Reconstruction".

Yale Theology Professor Miroslav Volf gave the keynote address, Agents of Peace in Theaters of War (pdf). The problem is fairly easy to state:

Given the classical account of the purpose of armies, then, it seems that military chaplains, in their official role, cannot be agents of peace. If they have a ministry of reconciliation, it will be an internal one of helping to ease the tensions and conflicts that undoubtedly rage among soldiers in stressful situations, as well as within their individual souls. But externally, military chaplains would either serve the cause of violent injustice or of justice violently enforced.

How, then, can military chaplains have an external operational ministry of reconciliation?

Drawing heavily on a recent doctoral dissertation by Canadian Forces chaplain Major S. K. Moore titled Military Chaplains as Agents of Peace, Volf proceeds to examine why Chaplains are finding themselves thrust forward: they are the military’s top experts at peace and human flourishing.

To the extent that force is insufficient to keep peace in a world in which human rights and democratic ideals matter, and to the extent that religion plays a role in defining peoples’ communal identities and in fomenting conflict, chaplains’ external ministry of reconciliation may be an essential component of the success of an army’s peacekeeping mission.

Acknowledging the potential for contradiction here, as chaplains are by definition close to power, and in particular the power of force, Volf, who has served in the Yugoslavian army (and was subjected to a military trial for espousing faith in an officially atheist force, a story recounted in his newest book, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World), then suggests some parameters:

There seems to be a tension, possibly even a contradiction, between the mission of an army and its chaplains to defend a sovereign state and their mission to keep and make peace. The first is guided by justice, and the second by love. Can we bring these two missions under the same moral umbrella? I think that we can. Here is roughly how.

…

If this relation between defense and reconciliation as well as between justice and love is correct, then it may be possible for an army and its chaplains to maintain a single overarching goal in their dual missions of defending sovereign states and of peacekeeping. That overarching goal is the goal of establishing peace. Is it possible for soldiers and military chaplains to engage all their missions as peacemakers? From the perspective of the Christian faith, this question is the most important one for soldiers and military chaplains to answer.

[photo credit: navy.mil. caption: Religious Program Specialist 3rd Class Thia Pham of Minneapolis, Minn., lights candles prior to the beginning of Catholic Mass aboard USS John F Kennedy]

It’s been a bad week for the world’s youth, what with the mass murder in Germany and the publication of reports on Somali teens in Minnesota being recruited as cannon fodder for endless wars in the lawless country of their parents.

Or single parent, as it seems. USA Today reports that all of these two dozen missing Somali youth come from single mother households, and were seduced by attention from soldiers looking for recruits.

The children of immigrants face particular challenges, as do the children of single mothers, and these kids had both obstacles to deal with.

That doesn't excuse them, of course, but it clarifies the recruiter(s?) crime a bit: these terrorists were like gang leaders, looking for weak kids.

I picked up on this angle because I’m currently assisting a D.Min. candidate at Bakke Graduate University with his dissertation on ministry among young fatherless black men. I’ve been reading a number of books and papers on the issue, both as it relates to America’s inner cities, and some of the wars in Africa. The Somali youth in Minnesota, of course, fit in both categories.

Alas, along with the ever increasing interconnectedness of the global economy comes the parallel globalization of underground crime. When you live in a moderately troubled neighborhood, full of immigrants, as I do, and you become acclimated to gang graffiti (such as, near my home, the South Side Locos), whose main presence seems to be racially tinged fights at local high schools, it's easy to overlook the fact that these kids are hierarchically connected to multinational drug economies. You know, the ones intimidating the Mexican Army.