How to summarize a towering academic like Jean Bethke Elshtain? Like many, I had the privilege of learning from Elshtain at the University of Chicago. She was the quintessential Chicago educator: erudite, intellectually nimble, committed to open and rigorous argument, bored with ideologies of all stripes, and possessing an effortless charisma—part gracious charm, part biting wit—that justified her status as an international public scholar. Many have celebrated her character and intellect since she died in 2013. I can only contribute to the chorus, praising a prolific career and a life well lived.

Yet Elshtain's legacy lives on and is more vibrant and pertinent than ever. For the ethical, political, and cultural shifts that have taken place both inside and outside the academy since her passing not only validate her prophetic warnings about the disintegration of democratic society and the civil debate that sustains it, but also, and consequently, invite us to consider anew how she can continue to guide us forward. Two recently released books—Jean Bethke Elshtain: Politics, Ethics, and Society, an expansive edited volume, and Augustine and the Limits of Politics, a republication of Elshtain's 1995 book with a new foreword—provide rich resources for answering that question.

But first, more about that state of disintegration. Elshtain writes in Augustine and the Limits of Politics, “People roam [the political and ethical wilderness] fixing on objects or policies or persons to excoriate or celebrate, at least for a time, until some other enthusiasm or scandal sweeps over them. If we have lost the sturdiness and patience to sustain our society over the long haul, then our democracy, as a social world and culture, is in trouble” (2). That was 1995. Twenty-four-hour cable news was still in its adolescence (though it acted more maturely back then), the internet squeaked and squealed upon connection, and Twitter and Facebook were the feverish dreams of a precocious nineteen- and eleven-year-old respectively. Technology has progressed, no doubt, but is Elshtain's assessment any less accurate today? Indeed, has the state of civic debate not descended into heretofore unseen depths of irrationality, absurd rhetorical territory where a presidential administration can shamelessly appeal to “alternative facts” while the opposing party, and much of the media, fetes a young congresswoman who frowningly observes, without a whiff of irony or self-awareness, “There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right”?

And what of the institutions of higher learning, our civic strongholds of nuanced critical thinking? As I write this review, a jury has ordered Oberlin College to pay $44 million in compensatory and punitive damages to a bakery that college administrators falsely accused of racism. Meanwhile, professors and speakers who find themselves out of step with the fluid demands of self-professed “social justice” advocates are resigning (Yale), losing their jobs (Harvard), being held hostage by frenzied student demonstrators (Evergreen College), being escorted out of events with police protection (Claremont McKenna College), and even getting physically assaulted (Middlebury College). Unapologetic and often oblivious emotivism frequently supplants argument both inside and outside the classroom; words and suffixes like “hate,” “phobia,” and a panoply of “ists” and “isms” “and archys” have acquired a mystical, spell-like quality whose sheer utterance has the power to silence dissent and extract castigatory public apologies, usually accompanied by pecuniary atonement. Off campus, far left and far right groups openly battle in the streets, as police watch and do nothing—particularly in the face of violence from the left—afraid, their leaders say, to “escalate” the situation. If the diagnosis of the institutions that make democracy possible was bleak in 1995, in other words, it is even darker today. Democracy as a social world and culture remains in trouble and on trial.

The release of these two books could thus not be timelier. Both highlight Elshtain's enduring methodological and substantive contribution to politics and ethics. Let me address each in turn. Two fundamental characteristics define Elshtain's methodology: (1) a refusal to segregate political analysis from theological analysis, and (2) a deep sensitivity to the impact political theories have on human individuals and communities, which, in turn, leads to what Elshtain called an “untidiness” in her scholarship, something that was both unavoidable and desirable, she believed, because it resists totalizing (and totalitarian) political systems.

Her book on Augustine, one of many in which she engages with a theologian (Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and St. John Paul II were some of her most cherished interlocutors), crystallizes what the classical Western theological tradition gets so right about political theory and what modern and postmodern theories get so wrong: contrary to contemporary thinking, politics not only necessarily involves asking and answering questions about ultimate meaning, it also entails engaging the anthropological question of what comprehensively defines the human being and human nature. Rather than jettisoning teleology, for Elshtain political theory done right must ask what politics is for; it must ask questions about ends, not only about means, about how to reason, not only how to strategize.

From this authentically inclusive perspective, one sees, consequently, that the reduction of politics to prudential considerations of how to attain quantifiable, politically desirable outcomes is not only foolish because it begs the most important questions (e.g., How do we normatively define what we should quantify? And how do we know what outcomes we should desire in the first place?), it is also dangerous. The overlapping error of otherwise ideologically opposed radical individualism and identitarian communitarianism is, for Elshtain, an anthropological one: systems built on the false belief that humans are either absolutely self-creating or absolutely created by some feature of group identity have led to horrific forms of suffering, as, for example, Hannah Arendt, another of Elshtain's heroes, so trenchantly chronicles in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In short, to get the human right, we need to get the totality of the human right; and to get the totality of the human right, we need to engage with thinkers who address that which transcends humanity. From this standpoint, resources like “the fall,” “sin,” “grace,” “redemption,” “eschatology,” “ultimate responsibility,” and “forgiveness,” to name a few, offer powerful explanatory and constructive possibilities that are otherwise invisible from within the constricted horizon of a purely secularized politics. Elshtain teaches that we reject these resources, distinctively religious resources, at our own peril.

Yet these transcendent themes must always remain firmly grounded in experience if they are to improve the human lot. One of Elshtain's favorite metaphors for describing the ideal ethical polity was the “village” or “small town,” a trope she also uses in Augustine and the Limits of Politics:

Elshtain's admits that this village exists only in an idealized form, and that, as a human village, it also has its share of “malicious gossip and backbiting and pettiness.” But it nevertheless remains the ideal polity because, as she puts it, it exists on a human scale and, as such, resists the reduction of individuals and communities into grist for ideological mills. Elshtain respected systematic thinkers, but she was not one of them. It is not that she could not spin a grand theory, but that she did not want to. And she did not want to precisely because she recognized that grand theories, no matter how well intentioned, often end up swallowing their subjects. Elshtain also recognized that this resistance to systems and systematizing could give her arguments uneven edges and the occasional misfitted joint. But so be it, she maintained. She would rather write about a messy but real life than a pristine fiction.

It was also for this reason that Elshtain was so drawn to St. Augustine, a theologian who was acutely aware of the human propensity to overstep boundaries, both in thought and action. Indeed, Elshtain's recognition of, and advocacy for, boundaries runs through most of her work, including her final book, Sovereignty: God, State, Self. The primordial human sin, as Augustine helps teach Elshtain, is pride—but not “pride” only in the thin sense of arrogance or undue self-regard. Rather, pride, theologically construed, is the false belief, the delusionally false belief, that we can create ourselves and our political arrangements in our own image, according to our own will, alone. This is the lesson at the heart of Augustinianism that, for Elshtain, we repeatedly choose to forget: we are not God, nor is anything else in time and space. Freedom, authentic freedom, is thus the freedom to respond to that which normatively is, not to create it—to discover, not to invent.

Although admirers and critics alike often tagged Elshtain as a “conservative” thinker for holding this view, this theological, ontological, and anthropological insight on the normativity of fixed boundaries cuts against both communitarianism and classical individual liberalism, including their “progressive” and “libertarian” manifestations today. If, as Augustine argues, God is, in fact, sovereign over all creation, including human beings, then we must exclude two ideological options as pretenders to the throne at the outset: both the belief that individuals can define their own natures and goals qua individuals independent of any external normative reality (libertarianism), and the belief that individuals can have their goals and natures defined for them by some larger, but still human, entity like an identity group (progressivism). To be sure, Elshtain agrees with Augustine that the recognition of divine sovereignty does not translate into a justification for any form of theocracy or direct religious authority over the secular. Augustine's God, the same as Elshtain's God, is a Judeo-Christian God, a God who not only is accessible to all, in a limited but real form, through reason and the natural law, but also a God who clearly establishes the political realm as different (which is not to say independent) from the kingdom of God in the New Testament. However, it remains true—true epistemologically because true ontologically—that humanity must work out its political arrangements within the horizon of divinely instituted, fixed limits.

One of the most important limits takes the form of recognizing that humans are not only finite; we are fallen—another foundational anthropological insight that is deeply politically relevant for Augustine and Elshtain. With a nod to Reinhold Niebuhr, as well, this means that even moral political systems will inevitably remain tainted by sin, which, in turn, justifies the need both for ongoing vigilance of the political order and the abandoning of every form of political utopianism, including Christian utopianism. To be sure, Elshtain believes that the kingdom of God exists as a fixed standard for grounding the principles that make peace and prosperity possible in the temporal realm. However, the approach to the kingdom, from a political perspective, must always be understood asymptotically: humans can, with care, get closer to the absolute form of the good, but they can never achieve it. Indeed, paradoxically, it is only by recognizing the impossibility of the perfect that we have any hope of approximating it at all in this life. It is within this Augustinian tension between the possible and the impossible—and the commitment to do everything possible not to confuse the two—that Elshtain constructs her own political vision.

As Jean Bethke Elshtain: Politics, Ethics, and Society reveals, this theologically informed foundation has been, and remains, fertile intellectual ground for scholars from a variety of disciplines to engage. Indeed, the disciplinary diversity of the contributors is an impressive as their credentials: names include Lisa Sowle Cahill, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Walzer, Robin Lovin, and Gilbert Meilaender, among others. Divided into four parts—“The Political Question,” “Cities of God and Man,” “Nations and Citizens at Peace and War,” and “The End(s) of Political Life,” each with its own introduction in addition to the general introduction by coeditors Debra Erickson and Michael Le Chevallier—the collection analyzes Elshtain's body of work from contemporary theoretical and applied perspectives. Like this review, most of the assessment is positive, although, as was the case while she was still writing, some authors criticize dimensions of Elshtain's interpretation of Christian realism, especially her book Just War on Terror, which was published in the wake of the attacks of September 11, her support of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, and her justification of “enhanced interrogation” in extreme circumstances.

These are, indeed, controversial areas of Elshtain's thought. Yet they should be read against the Augustinian backdrop of the brokenness of temporal existence and, indeed, the intractable complexity of discerning and articulating an authentically “Christian” political ethic—one that champions the injunction to “turn the other cheek” as much as the command to love one's neighbor (which presumably requires protecting the neighbor's life); one that abhors violence, while recognizing that St. Peter himself carried a sword (which a hypostatic Jesus surely would have known about!); one that knows the difference between lions and lambs and wolves in sheep's clothing as it works towards temporal reconciliation of all to all, to the degree it is possible.

This work can be, in the end, untidy, even dirty, work. But Elshtain, for one, was willing to sacrifice a bit of moral purity for the sake of temporal peace; she also knew that temporal peace should never be confused with eternal peace, and that all individuals are ultimately judged not only for what they do, but also for what they do not. In short, while there remains ambiguity in Elshtain's thought on just how dirty a Christian's hands can become before transforming their owner into a pagan, she was clear that, wherever the exact line lay, it was somewhere this side of heaven and, therefore, unavoidably ambiguous. Pretending otherwise, for her, was itself an act of pride.

But ambiguity does not mean we cannot know anything for sure. It just means we cannot know everything for sure. And one thing Elshtain knew, for sure, is that society only has a shot at attaining and keeping authentic peace and prosperity when it stubbornly reserves a seat for theology in civic debates. The alternative? We are living it right now.