In her 1994 book, Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory, Lisa Sowle Cahill opened with the question: “What do social responsibility and love of neighbor mean for the committed Christian individual or community, especially if direction is taken from the New Testament?” (7). After a run through the history of Christian thinking on war and peace from the time of Jesus through the present, Cahill ended in a kind of eschatological (“already, but not yet”) tension without finding a satisfying answer in either the Christian pacifist or just war traditions.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding is essentially a revised edition of Love Your Enemies that largely repeats the latter's historical presentation while adding two new chapters at the end on “Christian peacebuilding.” Indeed, the order of the book and many of the chapter titles remains the same, with some chapters drawing (very) heavily from Love Your Enemies. Unfortunately, as in the previous book, Blessed Are the Peacemakers does not offer an account of the historical rise of the modern nation-state and its eventual coopting of the church's authority on matters of war—what historians refer to as the “migration of the holy” from the church to the state—and the nationalism that has remained ever since.

What is new in this present volume is Cahill's argument that Christian peacebuilding should be seen as the “rightful heir” of both the Christian pacifist and just war traditions, offering a kind of third way. It is worth pointing out that Cahill participated in the 2016 Nonviolence and Just Peace conference that called for the church to cease teaching the just war theory. Cahill describes this kind of peacebuilding as working across cultural and religious lines to facilitate a process that seeks long-term and sustainable peace that addresses the root causes of conflict. She does note that Christian peacebuilding is “internally diverse” on the issue of cooperation with national and international military forces and that it does not rule out the use of violence to bring about peace. Although it is not for Christians to justify violence, if and when violence is justified, Cahill explained, “others will ably furnish the reasons—and, one hopes, the ‘just war’ limits” (324).

For Cahill, this sort of peacebuilding goes beyond Christian pacifism, whose advocates she describes as seeing “their vocation to be a church against the world” and who regard “nonviolence as possible within the church but not as a realistic social goal” (92). Likewise, peacebuilding goes beyond the just war theory, which takes for granted that “force must be countered by force,” and whose supporters, Cahill contends, justify violence as “the only way to achieve incremental justice in an unjust world” (92). In short, for Cahill, pacifism is too sectarian to be a responsible Christian position, and the just war theory is too at odds with gospel nonviolence. In contrast, she declares that Christian peacebuilding can be “public, political, and pluralistic without losing its religious character”—though it does exclude any “explicit theological validation” (23).

One problem here is Cahill's dismissal of Christian pacifists for embracing a nonviolence that is not a “realistic social goal.” This seems to ignore figures such as Kathy Kelly and groups like the Christian Peacemaker Teams who have traveled to war-torn nations across the globe “getting in the way” as a response to war. Problematic as well is Cahill's depiction of the just war theory as justifying force as the “only way” to achieve peace. Franz Jägerstätter, for example, who Gordon Zahn once suggested was the “patron saint of the just war theory, ” willingly accepted death rather than participate in a war he determined to be unjust—a “solitary” witness to the power and possibility of the church's just war teaching to resist the state.

All in all, Blessed Are the Peacemakers is certainly a noteworthy contribution made by a significant theologian to the ongoing—but today, sadly often overlooked—discussion on war and peace in Catholic moral theology. And with drones, cyberwar, and the always present shadow of nuclear weapons, such discussions are as needed as ever.