Description:

The Graduate Group will be hosting Cecelia Lynch in a panel discussion of her new book Wrestling With God. 

Wrestling with God is the new work by leading International Relations and Religion scholar Cecelia Lynch. Utilizing what she terms a neo-Weberian genealogical method, Professor Lynch examines the history of Christian ethical debates surrounding colonialism, war, and humanitarian intervention, delving into the tensions in Christian political theology and practice about conceptions of alterity and the ethical goals of justice and peace, and analyzing them vis-a-vis the legitimation of violence and/or injustice. Her work opens a bold analytical space for revealing Christianity in modern international relations, not to counter its absence by promoting it as the be-all and end-all of modern ethics, but to understand it as formative and yet fluid; influential and yet frequently beset by contradictions, and most of all, reflective of ethical debates in international politics and the field of IR itself.