There is a growing discussion of the idea of jus post bellum (jpb) and what it means as an addition to just war thinking. This essay connects jpb to the thought of Augustine and Aquinas, so that jpb appears as integral in that tradition. To make this case, I argue that achieving jpb is key to building a just peace, of which the fundamental characteristic must be human security, and thus defines two approaches to the study of human security that emerges from the theological development of jpb ethics: Michael Schuck’s Augustinian and Kenneth Himes’s Thomistic jpb conceptions. I argue that they both emphasize the importance of human security, as shown by their arguments for building humanitarian norms post bellum, but have different aims and jpb moral implications.

The Yazidis, surely one of the most unknown communities in the Middle East, made it to the front page of international media in 2014 when the Dáesh added them to their long list of victims. However, it was not the first time in history that this community suffered direct attacks and discrimination for their religion. On October 5, Iraq celebrated the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to one of its citizens, Nadia Murad, awarded for her fight against the use of sexual violence as a weapon in armed conflict. With this, Murad placed her people, the Yazidis, a religious minority in northern Iraq, in the center of hundreds of articles in the international press. Murad was also the first Kurd to win the award, which made her, as stated by the leader of the Kurdistan National Party, a symbol of firmness for Kurdish women and youth.

The admissions cheating scandal illustrated how colleges and universities in the US depend upon and reinforce socio-economic privilege. The first part of this paper uses a Reformed Christian approach to moral virtue to analyze privilege in higher education as an ethical problem. Understanding privilege as moral vice clarifies the relationships between practices, attitudes, and intentions we associate with privilege. The second part of this paper contrasts ethical frameworks prominent in the discourse on higher education with a commitment to the common good. Within an ethics of the common good, privilege’s function as vice becomes clear, as does its deleterious effect on US higher education’s “original intent.” Ultimately, cultivation of a “character of inclusion” is the necessary antidote to the vice of privilege, to realign higher education with its historic responsibility to the common good of a just society.

Two qualitative data sets from 2010 and 2016 are compared to explore the respondents’ perceptions of peacebuilding in the wake of the 1998 Belfast Agreement (BA) and the ensuing peace process. Fifty-two Civil Society Organization (CSO) leaders from Londonderry/Derry were interviewed during the summer of 2010 to delve into their perceptions of the BA, and building cross community contact through peacebuilding and reconciliation processes. The International Fund for Ireland and the European Union Peace Fund funded these respondents CSO peacebuilding projects. They held many viewpoints on peacebuilding. Seven grassroots peacebuilders from Derry/Londonderry were interviewed in 2016. These peacebuilders revealed that Northern Ireland has a long way to go to build an authentic and genuine peace. A key stumbling block to the Northern Ireland peace process is heightened societal segregation that results from the BA institutionalizing sectarianism, and the recent fallout from Brexit. Politicians continue to refuse addressing the past that has long-term implications for peace.

The work of liberation theologians, notably Jon Sobrino, has sought to give expression to Christian hope and the eschatological promise of the Kingdom from the context of the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed of history. From these contexts develops an understanding of Christian hope as a distinctly ‘crucified hope,’ emerging from both the sacrificial gift and the scandal of the cross. Building on Sobrino, this article develops an understanding of ‘crucified hope’ from the context of the current migration crisis, arguing that this hope begins where human optimism ends. Trust in the promise of the resurrection to which the Christian community witnesses empowers the crucified to respond to radical injustice and suffering. ‘Crucified hope’ thus shifts the focus of hope from the larger Christian community, participating in taking the crucified down from their crosses, to the crucified themselves and their actions of self-liberation.