Author: <span>William Cavanaugh</span>
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Terrorist Enemies and Just War (Cavanaugh, 2004)

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Terrorists don’t fight fair. To Christians who are accustomed to approaching matters of organized violence through the just war tradition, terrorist tactics are a source of frustration. Within the tradition are criteria for deciding when and how violence can be used legitimately in a limited fashion for the correction of injustice, but for the last few centuries at least, the tradition primarily has been applied to conflicts between states. What happens when major acts of violence are perpetrated by nonstate actors who don’t even pretend to play by the rules?

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When Enough is Enough: Why God’s abundant life won’t fit in a shopping cart, and other mysteries of consumerism (Cavanaugh, 2005)

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Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else. It is not buying but shopping that captures the spirit of consumerism. Buying is certainly an important part of consumerism, but buying brings a temporary halt to the restlessness that typifies it. It is this restlessness—the moving on to shopping for something else no matter what one has just purchased—that sets the spiritual tone for consumerism.

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Sins of Omission: What “Religion and Violence” Arguments Ignore (Cavanaugh, 2004)

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My hypothesis is that “religion and violence” arguments serve a particular need for their consumers in the West. These arguments are part of a broader Enlightenment narrative that invents a dichotomy between the religious and the secular and constructs the former as an irrational and dangerous impulse that must give way in public to rational, secular forms of power.

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Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good (Cavanaugh, 2004)

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In Christian social ethics the assumption is often made, with a minimum of examination, that the responsibility for promoting and protecting the common good falls to the state. In this essay I want to examine that assumption. All too often Christian social ethics begins from ahistorical and idealized assumptions about the state as protector and benefactor.

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Consumption, The Market and the Eucharist (Cavanaugh, 2005)

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Economics, we are told, is the science which studies the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. The very basis of the market, trade – giving up something to get something else – assumes scarcity. Resources are scarce wherever the desires of all persons for goods or services cannot be met….Consumerism is the death of Christian eschatology. There can be no rupture with the status quo, no inbreaking Kingdom of God, but only endless superficial novelty….The Eucharist tells another story about hunger and consumption. It does not begin with scarcity, but with the one who came that we might have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10).

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At Odds With the Pope: Legitimate Authority and Just Wars (Cavanaugh, 2003)

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At a recent campus discussion about the bishops’ authority to speak on matters of war, much airtime was given to whether the bishops had overstepped their competence in judging such matters. Near the end of the session, a genuinely perplexed student stood and echoed the disciples’ question to Jesus: “To whom should we go? If we can’t rely on the church’s judgment in these matters, where should we form our opinions?” It is one thing to argue, on just-war grounds, against the overwhelming judgment of the pope and worldwide bishops, that the recent campaign in Iraq was morally justifiable. It is another thing to argue that the pope and bishops are not qualified to make such judgments.

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Pledging Allegiance: A Theological Reflection on the Kobasa Case (Cavanaugh, 2006)

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Christians have a word for putting earthly things in the place of God: idolatry. Furthermore, the Church has not hesitated to identify the danger of idolatry attendant to the modern state. Pope Pius XI said that nationalism is “an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, real pagan worship of the state—a Statolatry which is not less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction to the supernatural rights of the Church.” In its section on idolatry (2113), the Catechism makes clear that “idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith.” The Catechism continues, “Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God,” and includes “the state” in a list of examples. Elsewhere, the Catechism warns against the “idolatry of the nation” (57).

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Stan the Man: A Thoroughly Biased Account of a Completely UnObjective Person (excerpts) (Cavanaugh, 2001)

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William Cavanaugh has penned a thoroughly entertaining introduction to the (in)famous Methodist theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwaus in “Stan the Man: A Thoroughly Biased Account of a Completely UnObjective Person” (The Stanley Hauerwas Reader, Duke UP, 2001). Hauerwas, for those who aren’t aware, is a Texan with a mouth of a sailor, a low tolerance for bullshit, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and a taste for Mexican food. Here are some choice excerpts from Cavanaugh’s introduction.

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Threat of Torture Plays with More Minds than You Might Have Imagined (Cavanaugh)

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What is torture for? Torture has a formative effect on the collective imagination of a society. It is, in the strict sense, a taboo. Its name must not be spoken, but its presence must be widely known, because it generates a special kind of collective imagination about us and about our enemies. Torture does not merely respond to enemies; it helps make them.

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Does Religion Cause Violence (Cavanaugh, 2006)

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What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge tonight. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful. The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state.