Lectures to Consider Sacrifices of Soldiers and a Society at War

WORCESTER, Mass. – The College of the Holy Cross’ Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture will present two lectures in November addressing the moral legacies of war. On Monday, Nov. 8, renowned theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas will give a lecture titled “Sacrifice and the Sacrifices of War.” Nancy Sherman, author of The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers, will speak about her book in a lecture on Thursday, Nov. 18. Both lectures will be held at 4:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College. They are free and open to the public.

Hauerwas, a pacificist, suggests that war requires humans not only to sacrifice human life, but also to sacrifice their unwillingness to kill. “Killing shatters speech, ends communication, isolating us into different worlds whose difference we cannot even acknowledge,” Hauerwas wrote in a 2007 article for the Journal of Religion, Conflict Peace. “No sacrifice is more dramatic than the sacrifice asked of those sent to war, that is, the sacrifice of their unwillingness to kill. Even more cruelly, we expect those who have killed to return to ‘normality.’”

Named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001, Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University Divinity School. Hauerwas recently authored Matthew: Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Brazos Press, 2006) and The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

Hauerwas’ talk is supported by the Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity.

Sherman is University Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown and an affiliate at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Previously, she held the first Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Her book The Untold War (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) explores the psychological and moral burdens borne by soldiers preparing for, experiencing, and returning home from war. At the heart of the book are interviews with soldiers, from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from Vietnam and World Wars I and II.

“What it feels like to put on a military uniform, deploy and come home is still not really a part of the public conversation about war,” Sherman wrote in The Chronicle Review in April. “Even in philosophy or ethics classes, in which war is the topic and some of our students are themselves about to go to war or have just come home, the inward war soldiers wage is often kept outside the classroom.”

A scholar focused on ethics and the emotions, in ancient and modern philosophy, Sherman has also written Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

To learn more about these program and other events in the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture and to listen to lectures online, visit www.holycross.edu/crec.

About The Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture:

Established in 2001 and housed in Smith Hall, the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture provides resources for faculty and course development, sponsors conferences and college-wide teaching events, hosts visiting fellows, and coordinates a number of campus lecture series. Rooted in the College's commitment to invite conversation about basic human questions, the Center welcomes persons of all faiths and seeks to foster dialogue that acknowledges and respects differences, providing a forum for intellectual exchange that is interreligious, interdisciplinary, intercultural, and international in scope.  The Center also brings members of the Holy Cross community into conversation with the Greater Worcester community, the academic community, and the wider world to examine the role of faith and inquiry in higher education and in the larger culture.