Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War and Peacebuilding, by Lisa Sowle Cahill (Book Review)

Lisa Sowle Cahill, a professor at Boston College, is one of the academy’s leading theological ethicists. Among her abiding interests has been the ethics of war and peace. In 1994, she authored Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (Fortress Press). That book served an influential role for a generation of students and scholars. It provided a substantive survey of the history of Christian thought on justifying war and promoting peace. It served as a textbook for undergraduate and graduate students, charting the development of Christian thought from Jesus’ teaching to twentieth-century theologians. Blessed Are the Peacemakers takes the earlier book as its “point of departure,” substantially expanding and revising it (ix). Of the ten chapters, three are entirely new, four are “so extensively rewritten as to constitute a new argument,” and the remaining three are significantly updated (ix). Cahill says this book has a dual aim: “to offer a critical historical understanding of the Christian traditions of pacifism and just war and to illustrate the promise of a newer approach sometimes called ‘peacebuilding’” (1).