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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It all depends what your ‘faith’ is. If you believe that the present world of space, time and matter is basically trash, from which we are supposed to be rescued, then who cares?

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Quite simply: all the great prophets were critical of their contemporaries and were not for that reason anti-Jewish.

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I can't speak for the United States. But discrimination against Roman Catholics is sometimes alleged in the UK -- for instance, in the present Blair government's decision to go ahead and insist that all adoption agencies, including not least the Roman Catholic ones, will be forced to place children with gay couples.

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Jesus was a social revolutionary in the same way that Mozart was brilliant at counterpoint.

That is, it was a key element in a much larger package, but to imagine that it was the main or the only thing is to ignore all the other things that were going on.

Of course, it needs saying because for years the church has screened out that element of 'kingdom of God' teaching, but once the message has been heard -- which I would have thought it has been in many quarters though not all -- it needs to be re-integrated into the larger agenda which Jesus embraced.

About that, of course, I like many others have written quite a lot elsewhere!

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 really interesting thing is, what might the Hindu have meant by 'god'? To whom did this person think (s)he was praying? As long as Americans concentrate on the 'church and state' questions on the one hand or on the 'one nation' issues they will ignore these real questions.

That, I guess, comes from the Deistic background in which it is assumed that 'god' is univocal, whereas precisely in Hinduism that is far from being the case. I have a sense -- which I see in spades on this side of the Atlantic as well! -- of people taking great care not to ask the 'god' question, perhaps in case the cat gets let out of the bag, i.e. that people might start realizing that the Christian claim is that we only really discover who the true God is when we look long and hard at Jesus himself.

The whole 'Jesus Seminar' movement was an exercise in making it harder to do that, making it less likely that people would glimpse the shocking and deeply challenging true Jesus and true God (while, of course, claiming all the while that theirs was the truly radical Jesus and God...).

A genuine conversation about what 'god' means, between a well thought out Christian and a well thought out Hindu, would be a great start. And we might discover that the word 'prayer' actually changed its meaning, too, according to what sort of god you think you're praying to.

As often with U.S.-specific questions, I have a kind of 'curious trans-Atlantic onlooker' view of this one.

Huckabee's comment raises -- and of course begs -- all sorts of questions: how do we know what God's standards are, who says when a dispute arises, and can you implant Christianity (or any other theistic religion) in the constitution of a state just like that? God's standards, for most religions, would include regular and faithful prayer and worship: is He proposing to make churchgoing (or synagogue-going or mosque-going) and private prayer compulsory? Is adultery going to be punished by law? What about the prohibition of images? And so on, and so on. Actually it's amusing to have an American say this because I thought part of the reason that the U.S. became the U.S. in the late 18th Century was because the nascent States didn't want governmental interference in matters of religion.

My own reflection on this -- typed on the way back from spending the morning in the House of Lords, which begins with prayer for God's wisdom in our national life, and happened to continue today with a debate on whether we should have a national inquiry as to why on earth we went to war in Iraq -- is that Huckabee's raising of the question, and the way in which these things are now debated in the U.S. (and, in a much lesser degree, in the UK) is an indication that the Enlightenment 'settlement' whereby secular governments run the country and religion is a private affair, is rapidly being seen as threadbare.

We urgently need new public debate on both sides of the Atlantic as to how to (in the ugly phrase) 'do God in public'. It won't do to scream on the one hand that that's the way to a theocratic totalitarianism, or on the other hand that 'we know' for whatever reason (the excesses of religious fundamentalism, for instance) that God doesn't, can't and shouldn't belong in public. We need serious, grown-up, informed debate...

The stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism is getting bigger across the western world -- and the churches are of course caught up in it, on both sides. I'm intrigued, as a British onlooker on the US scene, to observe just how much weight is given to 'religion' in one way or another whereas in my country, despite (or perhaps because of?) or official 'establishment', we more or less don't do it like that...

Both fundamentalism and secularism are of course high modernist features, and both are well capable of being deconstructed within postmodernity (thank goodness). The question is, what will replace them? And when will our politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, notice that postmodern irony has eaten away at the core of their shrill vote-for-me-and-it'll-all-come-right certainties?