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Ramón Luzárraga

Dr. Ramón Luzárraga is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Martin’s University. He holds a B.A. from Fordham University, where he double-majored in political science and theology, an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School, and a Ph.D. with a focus on systematic theology and ethics from Marquette University. His research interests deal with general questions on Catholic faith, doctrine, and questions surrounding the inculturation of Catholic religious practice in culture, political theology in all its varieties and the inevitable ethical questions which arise from that, as well as Hispanic and Caribbean theology. He has presented and published in refereed journals across the country and internationally, most recently in the journal Politics and Religion, published in Belgrade, Serbia. Recently he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Society of Christian Ethics, was awarded Benedictine University’s Kevin Doyle Award for Mission and Identity, and he has participated in the international conference Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, which convened in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2018.

Essays

The Ethics of a Just, Protracted War

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become a protracted war between Ukraine and Russia, with elements of a new Cold War where Ukraine’s western Allies are fighting Russia by proxy through the supply of weapons and other aid through the NATO alliance. The just war standard of “reasonable chance of success” is not part of the original theory devised by Saint Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, but a later innovation made by Francisco Suárez to prevent wars from deteriorating into a long cycle of revenge by parties at war.

The Social Mortgage on National Sovereignty in the Immigration Debate

The prophetic role of the Church here is to crack open and break up this renewed parochial nationalism, and remind all of the words of Paul in Galatians 3:28, that regardless of background, we are all one in Jesus Christ.