H. David Baer

I am a professor of theology and philosophy at Texas Lutheran University. My research focuses largely on religion in Eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary, where I lived between 1995 and 1998. My book The Struggle of Hungarian Lutherans under Communism examines the different strategies employed by Hungarian Lutherans to cope with political oppression. Recently I have been studying the state of religious freedom in Hungary. Some of the unsettling results of my research were published in a bilingual English-Hungarian book titled Essays in Defense of Religious Freedom / A vallásszabadság védelmében. Because I care about religious freedom, I joined the executive board of Forum for Religious Freedom Europe and the advisory board of the Central-European Religious Freedom Institute. In 2014, I founded my own nonprofit, Christians Associated for Democracy, which is dedicated to enhancing awareness of the role religion can play in enriching and strengthening democracy. Christians Associated for Democracy also publishes an English-Hungarian journal dedicated to issues of public life, called Principium. In addition to religious freedom, I often write on just war theory and the ethics of peace. I believe deeply in the importance of peacemaking, but that doesn't mean I'm a pacifist! I believe in this imperfect world the work of peacemaking depends upon the responsible exercise of power. I have written about my views in a book titled Recovering Christian Realism: Just War Theory as a Political Ethic.