The doctrine of ‘just war’ was developed in order to emphasize that, though war is always an evil, sometimes it is the lesser of two evils.

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I'm afraid we in the UK have only heard distantly of Jerry Falwell. Most churchgoers in England won't have heard of him at all; nonchurchgoers will only have heard of him as a strange character who pops up from time to time when people are writing 'how weird can they get' articles in our newspapers shaking their heads over American strangenesses.

My own sense, having spent a lot of time in the States over the years, is that he was a classic of his type and with a lot more integrity than some of the shady characters in the religious penumbra. But, insofar as I know what he taught -- which I freely admit would be second or third hand -- he was saying some things which I strongly say myself but I think in a different framework, and some things which I strongly argue against (e.g. on the present state of Israel and prophecy).

Within the strange, large economy of God's grace, which filters the truth of scripture through all of us imperfect interpreters, it may be that I make just as many mistakes as I think he did, but we are each called to be true to what we find in scripture and I have no reason to suppose he was not as obedient to that imperative as I struggle to be.

May he rest in peace and, with the rest of us, rise in glory where we shall look back on present disagreements like an adult looks back on childhood squabbles in the playground.

The answer is that it gets murkier and murkier by the day.

Only the diehard commentators are still maintaining that it was absolutely the right thing for us to go in when we did. (Remember the war has now been going on longer than the First World War did.)

I opposed it from the start, to the fury of my right-wing friends, and now I find a lot of them saying 'You told us so'. But granted we have made a huge mess, a quite new argument can be made for saying that we have to stay and see it through.

At this point it becomes a nice political judgment as to whether the region is likely to return to stability with us or without us. On that, granted the continuing horrible chaos, opinions will differ, but it is vital that our leaders get as broad and impartial wisdom as possible in assessing the possibilities.

There are still, alas, those on the one hand who insist that because we westerners know what's what we must of course stay and impose our way of life (dream on!). And there are still, alas, those on the other hand who insist that it's the Iraqis' mess and we have no business there -- though the present mess is at least as much of our making.

For the Christian the main obligation must be to pray; and then, to try to help at whatever point in the forming of that wise public opinion which will inform the decision-makers. And to help that same public opinion to learn from its mistakes.

The Pope's reaffirmation is simply another statement of what has always been the RC position -- at least for the last century or more.

(In what follows, I speak, naturally, from the Anglican position.)

On the one hand, there have been striking ecumenical advances -- Pope John's giving of his ring to Archbishop Michael Ramsey being a highlight of deep symbolic import. But these haven't been matched, on the other hand, by any real advance in terms of official recognition of Anglican orders and hence of Anglican Eucharists. There is an inconsistency here in that RCs do recognize Anglican (and indeed Methodist, Baptist etc.) baptisms as valid providing they are trinitarian; so if our baptisms are valid, why not our Eucharists? Is that an Achilles heel in Rome's 'fixed' position?

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Sergei Torop is no more crazy than several people who write to me on and off . . . but nor has he really anything much to do with the Jesus of the gospels, the first-century man from Nazareth. He sounds very much like a low-grade version of the sort of self-help religion you get in popular bookshops: bits and pieces of this and that.

Put it another way: if this man is the real Jesus, then not only the one we have in the gospels, but most of the others whom scholars have tried to 'reconstruct' from time to time, were barking up the wrong tree. If God had really wanted to give us late 20th Century religious gobbledygook, why would he have bothered to send Jesus to tell us about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven?

I don't think you are crazy for asking the question, but you'd have to be crazy to see this man as anything other than either seriously deluded or a muddled hoaxer.

This is of course an impossible question, like 'If the sun were to rise in the west, would it be green or blue?' In other words, by agreeing to the terms of the question you make it impossible to give an answer based on anything other than highly distorted speculation.

Jesus didn't run for anything. He acted as if he were a different kind of ruler altogether, with a 'kingdom' that didn't originate from the present world (otherwise, he said, his servants would fight to rescue him) but instead was meant FOR this present world, to transform and heal it. The present way we do politics and government is, alas, part of the problem, and he would have challenged it (its huge cost, its pretense of participation which is shamelessly manipulated by the media, its cult of personality, its ignoring, all too often, of the actual needs of the poor, etc. etc.) just as he challenged the power structures of his day.

The real question is, what sort of a cross would today's system be intent on using to kill him?

The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?

I was working in the downtown freight shed for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in Toronto when the news came in. (I was in what we call a 'gap year' between high school and starting as an undergraduate at Oxford.)

I have a vivid memory of that day in Toronto: an enormous crowd gathered spontaneously in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, where the (then) new City Hall is, with tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands all singing "We shall overcome", and people leaning out of office windows and the like all round. It was the first time I'd ever been part of that kind of event, and granted that it was 1968 with people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in their heyday there was a sense which I suppose was a kind of secular analogue to what the early church felt about martyrdom -- the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church, so the blood of MLK was the seed for an 'overcoming' -- though we were perhaps a little hazy as to what that might involve -- which would radically change the society we were in.

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As a Brit I am of course deeply interested in the U.S. elections because (as I think I've said before) they are really more important for my future than any UK elections. Shame I don't get to vote, though, when it will affect me as much as it will.

Having said that, from where I sit it's hard to choose between Hillary and Obama. Both have big plus points and big minus points. I don't set much store beside charges of dishonesty during an election campaign -- these things are always overheated and anyone can be taken out of context and probably usually are. However the larger issue is important: as I've certainly said before, if people are dishonest in some ways they'll likely be dishonest with voters and parties and who knows what else. But . . . politics is about reality, not ideals . . . and I worry about the state of democracy worldwide (e.g. in the election for London Mayor the electorate was faced with a tricky, certainly dishonest radical left-winger who'd been in power for 8 years and done all sorts of crazy things, and a solidly right-wing super-rich playboy, very smart and totally untrustworthy. Does that sort of choice add up to 'democracy'?