[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”0836196309″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gctDc%2BY3L._SL160_.jpg” width=”107″]Page 2: Logan Mehl-Laituri – For God And Country
In writing about Cornelius, the military commander from Acts who plays an indispensible part in Peter’s realization that Christianity was to be open to everyone – even gentiles, Mehl-Laituri writes that the church “…must stop valorizing our warriors, but we must also stop vilifying them; we must let them be the human beings they are; capable of good and evil alike.” And herein lies the crux of his writing (for even a hagiographic almanac has an end, of course): an invitation to enter into the contradictory mess of human allegiances. It is an invitation to take seriously the stories of soldiers, to “come to terms with this terrible wisdom our military members have acquired through the fires of hell, the bloody battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, the European and Pacific theaters of World War II, and many more.” This book is an invitation to practice faithful integrity. If the church has something to say about violence, war, and military service, the only way it can speak with integrity is to engage deeply with the lives and the stories of those immersed in the systems of war we wish to critique.
Of course, this book has faults, too. Some of the portraits are a bit unwieldy in their narrative, unavoidable when attempting to squeeze entire lives into three pages of re-telling. As hard as he tries to be open and honest about his motivations, there are underlying assumptions about valor, honor, humility and systemic violence that Mehl-Laituri leaves untouched. To be fair, he has said that this book operates in a way as a companion to his first book, Reborn on the Fourth of July, a memoir of his own service and conscience.
Still, the book fills an empty corner of the church’s conversations on war and peace. There are plenty of peace-church and pacifist-theory correctives to the prevailing American theologies of valorizing war, but there are very few engaging correctives to thoughtless theologies of pacifism for he sake of pacifism. This book’s greatest strength is that it counters and corrects the blind spots of peace churches and pacifist-theories, forcing us to take seriously the wounds and wisdom of our sisters and brothers who have suffered through the very horrors that we attempt to preach against.
And, in the end, isn’t this actually the invitation of the gospel itself? Isn’t the life of Christ one lived in and amongst the beautiful and horrible realities of human existence? Mehl-Laituri insists that the church learn to know and to love our soldier-saints, know both their bravery and their brokenness. In the end, isn’t that also the invitation of Jesus: to love one another with all humility and gentleness, to witness to the radical grace of God within the context of honest, mutual relationship? Would that the church could engage all hard questions of allegiance and discernment in the graceful ways that Logan Mehl-Laituri embodies in his writing.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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