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Voices
Drew Christiansen, S.J., served as the editor in chief of America from 2005 to 2012. He was a Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development at Georgetown University and a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. He was co-editor with Carole Sargent of A World Free from Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament (Georgetown, 2020).
Drew Christiansen
For me, growing up in the years after World War II, Memorial Day meant a civic service of remembrance at a neighborhood monument with a heart-stopping rifle salute to the dead; followed by a parade down Staten Island’s Victory Boulevard, where columns of veterans, active military units and martial bands passed in review; and finally a family visit to St. Peter’s Cemetery to lay a wreath on my Uncle Joe’s grave, where the American Legion had already stopped to plant an American flag.

Today my rituals are more private, pensive and mournful: a small Mass in community where, as we do on most days, we pray for all today’s war dead; a mournful remembrance of the service personnel killed in Iraq, whose photos I survey each month in The New York Times, and the scores of faceless Iraqi civilians daily slaughtered by terrorist insurgents; and finally reading war poetry, for a poem captures better than news reports the ambiguity, the pain and, most of all, the evil of war.

This year I settled on W. H. Auden’s Shield of Achilles, a favorite I read often in times like these, of low-intensity, low-profile warfare. Published in 1955, the poem draws on a passage of Homer’s Iliad, where the lame blacksmith god Hephaestus, at the request of Thetis, Achilles’ mother, fashions a magnificent shield for the hero celebrating scenes of Greek pastoral and civic life. As if to contrast the heroic ideal with the modern reality, Auden alternates short, lyric depictions of the Homeric shield with elegiac descriptions of modern war.

The second modern stanza is typical:

Out of the air a voice without a face

Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
C. S. Lewis wrote of “Hamlet” that it was best to read the play like a small child. Children never tire of hearing stories over and over again. They relish atmosphere, and they never forget details that seem insignificant to adults. One of the joys of growing older, I find, is hearing an
Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
When the Franciscans of the Holy Land elected their new superior last spring, they opted for renewal. The custos or guardian, so called because of the Franciscans’ traditional role in protecting the holy places, is a 39-year-old Italian priest, Pierbattista Pizzaballa. With just 14 years in th
Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
Sports physiologists talk of slow-twitch and quick-twitch muscles. Slow-twitch muscles are fit for events like weightlifting, quick-twitch muscles for sprinting. The world seems increasingly built for quick-twitchers. Video games raise the reaction times of young people to levels that even Tom Cruis
Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
Critics have often asked, “When has the just-war theory ever led to the condemnation of a war?” Seldom, if ever, it would seem. As the Rev. J. Bryan Hehir has written, the Just War Theory provides reason “to pause analytically” before going to war, but an outright condemnatio
FaithFaith in Focus
Drew Christiansen
The days were lengthening. Daylight itself seemed brighter. The sap was rising in the trees, and with it I felt the wanderlust rising in me.
Drew Christiansen
Two prominent rabbis have denounced the failure of Catholics publicly to brand the recent film “The Passion of the Christ” as anti-Semitic. They spoke at the joint meeting on April 20 of the Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Affairs and the Rabbinical Council of Ameri
Drew Christiansen
In These Pages: From July 5, 2004
Drew Christiansen
In response to criticisms of the mistreatment of Palestinian Christians in Israel and the Israeli-controlled Palestinian Territories, I am often asked, “Don’t Christians also suffer persecution at the hands of Muslims in the Arab Middle East?” There is no simple answer.Yes, the Uni
Of Many Things
Drew Christiansen
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. "It is a beautiful honor to die for one’s country.” In this famous line, the Roman poet Horace gave lasting expression to an ideal of republican virtue inherited from an age when citizen soldiers defended their homeland against its enemies. Even