Senior Fellow
Walsh School of Foreign Service
August 6, 2020
In "Faith Alive!," a weekly catechetical series from Catholic News Service, Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J., describes how the condemnation of deterrence is the clear teaching of Pope Francis and concludes that the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the right time for American Catholics to adopt the same posture.
Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J., is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His current areas of research include nuclear disarmament, nonviolence and just peacemaking, Catholic social teaching, and ecumenical public advocacy. He is a frequent consultant to the Holy See and a member of the steering committee of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. He also served on the Atlantic Council's Middle East Task Force and on the Holy See delegation that participated in the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons during summer 2017.
Rev. Christiansen is the co-author of Forgiveness in International Politics: A New Road to Peace (2004, with William Bole and Robert Hennemeyer) and co-editor of Peacemaking: Moral and Policy Issues for a New World (1994, with Robert Hennemeyer and Gerard F. Powers), “And God Said It Was Good”: Catholic Theology and the Environment (1996, with Walter Grazer), and Michel Sabbah: Faithful Witness: On Reconciliation and Peace in the Holy Land (2009, with Michel Sabbah). He has published more than 200 articles in five languages.
His recent articles include “Liberty’s Rise and Fall: A Modern History of Religious Freedom” and “The Future of Public Theology” (America); “The Jesuit Pope, Judaism and the Jews” and “Making the Parish a Place of Encounter and Dialogue” (Origins); “The Church of the Poor: Papal Responses to the Financial Crisis” (Journal of Catholic Social Teaching); and “Von Beruf: Weltretter” (Die Zeit) and “Just Peacemaking and Hybrid Wars (e-journal Ethik und Militar}. He is also a contributing editor for the Review of Faith in International Affairs and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought.
Rev. Christiansen has served as director of the Office of International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Catholic Conference (now the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) and editor-in-chief of the Jesuit weekly America. He has taught at the Jesuit School of Theology/Graduate Theological Union-Berkeley and the University of Notre Dame, where he was a member of the founding team of the Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies. He holds his Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Yale University; an S.T.M. and M.Div. from Woodstock College; and an A. B. from Fordham University. For his service to the Holy Land Christiansen was named a Canon of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.
