J. Daryl Charles, Affiliated Scholar in Theology and Ethics, Acton Institute and Mark David Hall, Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics, George Fox University

Commentary by Allen C. Guelzo, Director, Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, James Madison Program and Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University and William Anthony Hay, 2019-2020 Garwood Visiting Fellow, James Madison Program, Princeton University; Professor of History, Mississippi State University

J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology and Ethics. He also is a contributing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy and the journal Touchstone and is an affiliated scholar of the John Jay Institute. The focus of his research and writing is religion and society, the just war tradition, and the natural law. Dr. Charles is author or editor of nineteen books, including Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), The Just War Tradition (2012), Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), and most recently, (with Mark David Hall) America and the Just War Tradition (2019). Dr. Charles has taught at Taylor University, Union University, and Berry College. He served as director of the Bryan Institute for Critical Thought & Practice, as a 2007-08 William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and as the 2003-04 Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University. Prior to entering the university classroom, Dr. Charles did public policy work in criminal justice in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. from Westminster Theological Seminary. 

Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. He is also Associated Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and a Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books, including Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth (2019); Great Christian Jurists in American History (2019); America and the Just War Tradition: A History of U.S. Conflicts (with J. Daryl Charles, 2019); Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (2014); Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (2013); America’s Forgotten Founders (2011); The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (2009); The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (2009); The Founders on God and Government (2004); and The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742-1798 (1997). He received his B.A. in Political Science from Wheaton College (IL) and his Ph.D. in Government from the University of Virginia. 

Allen C. Guelzo is Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and the Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Dr. Guelzo is an acclaimed scholar of American history whose writings have been recognized as among the most important contributions to scholarly and public understanding of 19^th century America. He was previously the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. His book Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) received the 2000 Lincoln Prize, as well as the 2000 Book Prize of the Abraham Lincoln Institute of the Mid-Atlantic. His Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004) and his Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013) received the Lincoln Prize in 2005 and 2013, respectively. He is one of Power Line’s 100 “Top Professors” in America. Among many other honors, he has been awarded the Bradley Prize, the Lincoln Medal of the Union League Club of New York City, and the James Q. Wilson Award for Distinguished Scholarship on the Nature of a Free Society. He has been a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and currently serves as a Trustee of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s American History series, and as well as courses on Abraham Lincoln (Mr. Lincoln, 2005) on American intellectual history (The American Mind, 2006), the American Revolution (2007), and the Founders (America’s Founding Fathers, 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

William Anthony Hay, 2019-2020 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow, is Professor of History at Mississippi State University where he specializes in British History, International Relations, and the Atlantic World over the long eighteenth century. His books include Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (2018) and The Whig Revival, 1808-1830 (2005), and he writes frequently for publications including the Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, and Modern Age. Elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2009, he is a past president of the Southern Conference on British Studies. Along with research grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Earhart Foundation, he has held fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. He directed a program on European politics and U.S. foreign policy at the Foreign Policy Research Institute before joining the faculty at Mississippi State; he served as book review editor and associate editor for its quarterly Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs. He previously worked with the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. Professor Hay holds a Ph.D. in Modern European and International History and an M.A. in European History from the University of Virginia.

From the University of Notre Dame Press:
America and the Just War Tradition examines and evaluates each of America’s major wars from a just war perspective. Using moral analysis that is anchored in the just war tradition, the contributors provide careful historical analysis evaluating individual conflicts.

Each chapter explores the causes of a particular war, the degree to which the justice of the conflict was a subject of debate at the time, and the extent to which the war measured up to traditional ad bellum and in bello criteria. Where appropriate, contributors offer post bellum considerations, insofar as justice is concerned with helping to offer a better peace and end result than what had existed prior to the conflict.

This fascinating exploration offers policy guidance for the use of force in the world today, and will be of keen interest to historians, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians, as well as policy makers and the general reading public.

Part of the Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship