Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

The full essay is at "Valkyrie." 

Pope Leo Denounces Warmongers

With Easter, 2026, taking place amid the holocaustic genocide in Gaza, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and the U.S./Israel attacks against Israel, Pope Leo used the occasion to speak out against war, and those who benefit politically and by profiting from war. The pope’s absolute rejection of war included excoriating Christians who had been using theological rationales to justify war. Although not in the pope’s field of vision at the time, such Christians have included the popes who had perpetuated four crusades—the last of which was waged against Constantinople (i.e., eastern Christians)—in Medieval European Christendom. The implication is that Jesus did not hear the prayers of those militarized Christians who thought they were defending Jesus and his Church.

The pope’s Easter message against war was unequivocal: “This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”[1] Compassion towards detractors and even enemies is antipodal to war, and thus the pope’s condemnation was indeed on solid ground. What are we to make, therefore, of the Catholic just war rationales? If Jesus rejects war, then even a war that is just is included in the rejection. Besides being a problem for Catholic social-ethics theory, should Jesus’s preachment of compassion for the Nazis as they committed genocide against Slavs, Jews, Communists, and other societal undesirables stand up against the just-war rationale to invade Germany to stop the wholesale slaughter? Asked about how India should have reacted to a Nazi invasion, Gandhi answered in line with the pope’s condemnation by saying that people should stand in non-violent resistance on India’s borders. Would Jesus agree? His distancing of himself from the Zealots in the Gospels may suggest that he would not join the armed resistance to the Nazis. His kindness to the Roman soldiers suggests that he would have compassion for individual Nazis in spite of their atrocities.

So in the wake of the pope’s condemnation of war, Catholic just-war theory may need to be revised. The pope also claimed that Jesus ignores the prayers of Christians who support or wage war. This would include even the prayers of Christians who were supporting Israel because of its role as a precondition for Jesus’s Second Coming even as Israel was committing crimes against humanity against the people of Gaza with impunity. Whether taking back Jerusalem for Jesus in the Middle Ages or enabling a genocidal government in the twenty-first century so Jesus could return, such rationales are ignored by the Christian deity.

The presumption that even positions that are antithetical to Jesus’s preachments in the Gospels are in some way Christian nonetheless reveals the susceptibility of the human mind to going too far without any self-check mechanism in the domain of religion. Faced with Christians who were looking the other way as Israel was committing a genocide, Jesus would probably retort that his second coming is in the righteous suffering of the Gazan people who were not guilty of having attacked Israel in 2023. He would no doubt apply his condemnation of the Jewish religious leaders in the Gospels to Netanyahu and his government, with something like, They still don’t get it, but even such a guttural condemnation does not go far enough, for the principle of selfless love even and especially against people we don’t like (and even hate) is in need of loudspeakers in being pronounced to be the way into the Kingdom of God in this life. Defending Jesus and protecting the way for the Second Coming, especially if by violence, pale in comparison to that principle, which can stand on its own without any anthropomorphism.

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[1] Joshua McElwee, “Pope Leo Says God Rejects Prayers of Leaders Who Wage Wars,” Reuters.com, March 29, 2026.

The Scarlet and the Black

In the film, The Scarlet and the Black (1983), Gregory Peck and Christopher Plummer face off as Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and Col. Herbert Kapper at the end of the film when the Nazi head of police in Rome abruptly changes his tune in challenging the Catholic priest no longer by threats, but by appealing to the priest’s faith of humble compassion applied even to one’s enemies so O’Flaherty will extend mercy to Kapper’s wife and children, who would otherwise fall into the hands of the Allied troops advancing into Rome. Before that dialogue, O’Flaherty and Pope Pius XII subtly debate whether the pope had been right in compromising with Hitler in order to keep the Catholic Church intact in Nazi Germany. The film can thus be viewed in light of the potential of the medium of film to convey and even thrash out contending theological ideas.

The full essay is at "The Scarlet and the Black."

Pope Leo’s First Christmas Message: On International Relations

That severe, systematic inflictions of suffering on whole peoples were going on in the world even on Christmas Day in 2025 did not require a papal announcement for people the world over to be informed of those atrocities. Russia’s military incursion in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza had been going on with international impunity for years. The suffering in Yemen and Sudan was less well-known, but substantial nonetheless. Speaking out against the sordid state-aggressors on the first Christmas of his pontificate, the pope provided an alternative basis for international relations that is so antithetical to military invasion and genocide that the message could seem utopian and thus practically of no use whatsoever. Because “might makes right” had made such unimpeded “progress” even in becoming the default and status-quo, the principle of humble compassion to the humanity to one’s detractors and even outright enemies could seem like a fairy tale. 

Nevertheless, even though the principle was so utterly eclipsed in practice on the world’s stage at the time, a person can have faith that even enunciating the alternative has value. At the very least, making it explicit shows powerful people such as Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu in an especially dark light. Ironically, were either of those men to come to terms with themselves and change their ways, the principle would call the rest of us to forgive them. Even absent such a change-of-heart, or a dawning of heart in those two men, the principle mandates that the rest of us respond in humane compassion even to those two men on an interpersonal level should either of them need help. Such is the depth of power of the principle that it can be reckoned as inculcating what can be called divine nature even if the principle is not anthropomorphized in human form; the principle has validity, and thus value, in itself. So even if it seems utterly unrealistic for it to become the default in international relations (and even interpersonal relations), there is value in the pope’s inclusion of the principle in his first Christmas message.

In his Christmas Day homily, Pope Leo “remembered the people of Gaza, ‘exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold’ and the fragility of ‘defenseless populations, tried by so many wars,’ and of ‘young people forced to take up arms, who on the front lines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them, and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths.’”[1] The infliction of genocide, and even such suffering as to qualify as a holocaust, on a defenseless civilian population that had been subjugated for many decades, render Israel’s Netanyahu government and its supports equivalent to the Nazis in Europe almost a century earlier. The very language used by the pope, as in “the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths” could definitely be applied to Hitler and Netanyahu.

The sheer depravity of such powerful men who have allowed their respective hatreds to manifest in atrocities without any internal restraint is antipodal to a person who “would truly enter into the suffering of others and stand in solidarity with the weak and the oppressed.”[2] It is paradoxical that such outwardly powerful, militaristic government officials are actually so weak internally, whereas people who are willing to defer “before the humanity of others”—even and especially detractors and even enemies—may have no worldly force yet are very strong internally.[3] 

Therefore, it is of value for anyone, especially a pope with a microphone, to set the stubborn savagery of men like Putin and Netanyahu relative to a principle that, if internalized and acted on by enough people, would change the world even though the likelihood of such a drastic, fundamental change is only possible rather than probable. Being possible is itself astonishing, given the fixity of human nature. Worldwide, peoples and their respective government officials in 2023 failed to retain the lesson that had presumably been learned when the Nazi holocaust was exposed in 1945. Standing by rather than going in to rid Gaza of the Israelis and even Ukraine of the Russian army can be reckoned as instantiating the banality of evil, which is two degrees of separation from the principle of humble compassion for the humanity of others, especially one’s enemies. The world, and humanity itself—our species—can thus be condemned for standing by instead of stopping at least the holocaustic genocide that had been going on for years as of Christmas, 2025.

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1. Silvia Stellacci and Colleen Barry, “Pope Leo XIV Urges the Faithful on Christmas to Shed Indifference in the Face of Suffering,” APnews.com, December 25, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Secularized Religion in Nazi Ideology

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

The full essay is at "The Devil's Arithmetic."

The Gospel According to Dr. Goebbels

“What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon, National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.”  From his diary on Oct 16, 1928.[1]

Goebbels first asks about Christianity in his day. The main problem is its outmoded rituals, so a religious reformer is needed to put new ones in their place. National Socialism, Goebbels’ “church,” has the potential to become the latest incarnation or reform of Christianity in his day if traditions and rituals could only be added by a “religious genius,” or reformer.
In referring to “the Lord,” Goebbels reveals himself as a theist and willing to do God’s will. Although Goebbels does not mention Jesus explicitly, liberation theology is clearly evinced in Goebbels’ interpretation of God’s will as liberating the oppressed (German) people from slavery. The sort he had in mind is most likely economic, for the World War I reparations being paid at the time by Germany were causing unemployment there. Like liberation theology, the economic structure itself wherein Germany was being made to pay reparations, is not only unfair, but also against God’s will. If only God’s will could be known so concretely as to be evinced in certain socio-economic structures that are presumably “sacred.” Goebbels was assuming he knew about God than he could as a finite being. This criticism applies to believers in liberation theology more generally too.
In Goebbels’ case, the assumption of God’s will being to liberate Germans from their economic poverty strangely co-existed with the assumption—presumably also part of God’s will—that Slavs, Jews, and homosexuals should be exterminated as if from natural laws that God had established. Some Christians in the last quarter of the twentieth century had no problem believing infallibly in sacred economic (e.g., the rich and poor being less unequal) and social (e.g., anti-prejudicial) structures, just as Goebbels’ had had his beliefs in God’s will being just as concrete. In both cases, the Kingdom of God was confined to earthly terms, whereas Jesus of the canonical gospels preaches of a kingdom within and giving to Caesar what is his. In other words, liberation theology errs in neglecting Jesus’s point that the Kingdom of God is not of this earth. Ignoring this point allows ideological agendas to gain more authority and force than is deserved and merited. The notion that some ideologies are better than others morally speaking is doubtlessly true, but even the best can easily become encased in self-idolatry. When such idolatry hits the sordid ideologies, the result can literally be quite dangerous.
In short, applying religious belief to economics, politics, and social structures give certain of the latter too much certainty and force at the expense of self-critique. The want of a check on the ego and its designs amplified to divine plans renders partisan platforms as sacred, and thus others as evil. The resulting imbalance is itself unstable, and yet it is entombed in ideology-made-sacred (and evil). Dr. Goebel could have been a lot less certain of the religious sanctioning of his economic and social ideologies—which would have required humility. Similarly, resisting the temptation to put God’s stamp on liberation theology by rendering certain political, social, and economic structures as inherently sacred requires a good dose of humility as well as a recognition of the sheer distance between God’s kingdom and even human finite creatures. We should not presume too much about ourselves in relation to God, including revelation.  

For quite another version of Christian leadership than that of Dr. Goebbels, see "Christianized Leadership in Business," available at Amazon. On the distinction between religion and ethics applied to leadership, see "Spiritual Leadership in Business."

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1. “The Goebbels Experiment” (2005). Film.

Schindler's List: A Christian Notion of Power Based on Compassion

In German-occupied Poland during World War I, Oskar Schindler spent millions to save 600 Jews from the death camps. In the 1993 film, Schindler’s List, the gradual transformation of the luxuriant capitalist is evident as the film unfolds. At the end,  he comes to an emotional realization as to the worth of money as compared with human lives. He realizes that had he not spent so lavishly, he could have saved even more lives. He realizes, in effect, his selfishness that had blinded him even to the obvious severe suffering of the Jews around him. The story is thus not simply that of greed giving way to compassion. 

The full essay is at "Schindler's List."