Keith Pavlischek has written a fascinating essay which appears in Books & Culture and is entitled “Human Rights and Justice in an Age of Terror.” It is a response to “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror,” which came out earlier this year. Pavlischek is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. D.C. (and incidentally a big fan of Bob Dylan and a reader of RWB — hooray!). From his essay’s intro:

In March 2007 a small group of evangelical academic theologians and activists released An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror, a document that was subsequently published in The Review of Faith and International Affairs, along with a commentary by David Gushee, the lead drafter. What follows is my own effort — as an evangelical, a political philosopher, and a recently retired intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps with a long history of both scholarly and personal interest in these matters — to engage the issues they have raised. I hope that this response will give rise to further discussion and clarification of these vitally important matters, and help provide guidance for evangelicals who wish to speak coherently and responsibly on these and similar issues of public concern.

Click here to read it all. It is a relatively long piece — if you don’t feel up to reading the whole thing, I recommend at least scrolling down about halfway, to this sub-heading: Legal and Illegal Combatants: The Substantive Deal Breaker, and reading what is a very valuable reflection on the great importance of continuing to distinguish between lawful and unlawful combatants, and why this is very much of a piece with Christian just war tradition.

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