ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the empirical, historical relationship between the realms of religion and war—recognizing that in rhetoric and practice, the history of war and the history of religion are often linked, but not deterministically so. Having acknowledged these assertions and assumptions, we can identify four major lines of inquiry about the relationship between war, religion, and ethics. The Christian tradition provides much of the vocabulary used in analyzing just war theory. Saint Augustine is credited with the first commentary on the ethics of war, but Thomas Aquinas developed the most systematic articulation of a Catholic just war doctrine in the thirteenth century. The interactions of religion and religious people with political institutions has been a persistent theme across time and space, in part because organizing and deploying military forces require significant bureaucratic and organizational power. On a global stage, the field remains quite open for scholars to tackle many of the questions outlined earlier, particularly in contemporary, non-Western contexts.
