Read a 2004 report that includes religious preferences in the military (see Page 25). The report found that service personnel were less likely than the general population to have a religious affiliation.

Read the U.S. Department of Defense Directive 1300.17, which governs the accommodation of religious practices in the military services.

Daniel Smith-Christopher is professor of theological studies and director of peace studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He served for two years in volunteer peace research in Israel/Palestine in the late 1980s. His publications include Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions and Jonah, Jesus and Other Good Coyotes: Speaking Peace […]

Joseph Prabhu is a philosophy professor at California State University, Los Angeles. His interests include comparative religion and social and political theory. He is the author of Liberating Gandhi: Community, Empire and a Culture of Peace.

Michael J. Nojeim is an associate professor of political science at Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas. His publications include Gandhi and King: The Power of Nonviolent Resistance.

Ira R. Chernus is a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is interested in religion, war and peace and the connection between politics and faith. Among his publications are “Religion, War and Peace” in the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History; American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea; and Monsters […]

Tobias Lee Winright is an assistant professor of theology at St. Louis University. His interests include just war, just peacemaking, just policing and the responsibility to protect (R2P), and he has written extensively about the topics.

Richard B. Miller is a professor of religious studies and director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has written extensively about the ethics of war and peace, and his publications include 9/11, Radical Islam and the Disquiet of Equal Liberty.

Patrick G. Coy is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Applied Conflict Management at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. His specialties include religion and politics. Among his research projects are the philosophy of nonviolence of the Catholic monk Thomas Merton and a comparative analysis of the religious rhetoric used […]