America and the Just War Tradition

A History of U.S. Conflicts

By: Mark David Hall, J. Daryl Charles

Narrated by: Kevin Moriarty

Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

America and the Just War Tradition examines and evaluates each of America’s major wars from a just war perspective. Using moral analysis that is anchored in the just war tradition, the contributors provide careful historical analysis evaluating individual conflicts.

Each chapter explores the causes of a particular war, the degree to which the justice of the conflict was a subject of debate at the time, and the extent to which the war measured up to traditional ad bellum and in bello criteria. Where appropriate, contributors offer post bellum considerations, insofar as justice is concerned with helping to offer a better peace and end result than what had existed prior to the conflict.

This fascinating exploration offers policy guidance for the use of force in the world today, and will be of keen interest to historians, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians, as well as policy makers and the general reading public.

The book is published by University of Notre Dame Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"This book is an important contribution to the applied ethics of just war reasoning." (Mark R. Amstutz, emeritus, Wheaton College)

"The book is very readable for anyone in academic humanities and even for non-academics." (James L. Cook, United States Air Force Academy)

“This collection has the capacity to be the reference point for just war theory in relation to American wars from colonial origins to today. It deserves a wide readership.” (Harry Stout, Yale University)

©2019 University of Notre Dame (P)2020 Redwood Audiobooks

Narrow Focus As a Good Introduction

I had some high hopes for this book: some were not, but my higher expectations were not met.

The narration could've been less dull, but it was a effective and professional delivery. This book focuses *strictly* on the "Just War" philosophical tradition (a lot of it in the vein of Christian ethics) of large scale American conflicts.

For those looking for a more academic discussion of these conflicts in terms of ethics, each chapter provides a great introduction to the major inflection points. The Chapter on the Mexican American War was very interesting on it's discussion of the Polk administration.

Each chapter had the potential to be a book in its own right; condensing large amounts of information into short chapters is bound to create this problem. All in all, I enjoyed this book and it was not difficult to follow it's argument (although the first chapter is far more academic than the others, and I had to relisten to some parts to catch a few key points).

Too biased towards America and Christianity.

The author doesn't even mention America bombing Cambodia and Laos while justifying America's involvement in Vietnam!

Excellent Analysis of American Military Action Through a Christian Realist Lens

The negative reviews are totally unjustified, seeming to have totally missed that the analytical lens applied to past American military action is just war theory—which draws almost exclusively from Catholic and post-Reformation Christian philosophy. Excellent analysis, very well read.