Kelly, J. Landrum Jr.

Dr. J. Landrum Kelly, Jr. was former Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at Livingstone College. He recieved his Ph.D. from the University of Florida.

Conscientious Objections Toward a Reconstruction of the Social and Political Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth

1994 0-7734-1935-7
The author argues that Jesus' views were based on belief in a non-retributive, omnibenevolent God, challenging not only the Mosaic Law but assumptions about eternal punishment and the divine sanction of the state and its retributive institutions of war and punishment. It also interprets Paul as being the first Christian revisionist. As a result, orthodox Christianity, through the influence of Paul (and thus Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin), has mistakenly promoted the 'just war' and 'divinely-ordained state' doctrines in the name of a thinker whose conclusions were in the opposite direction.

Militerrorism on the Morality of Combating Terror with Terror

1995 0-7734-8909-6
This reprint of "Militerrorism", a chapter from Kelly's recently published Conscientious Objections (Mellen, 1994) seeks to show that, among all of the trendy empirical studies of terrorism, there are enduring questions of an ethical and theological nature that bear upon the question of how best to proceed in the fight against the use of terror. It points to the ethical contradiction of using state-sponsored violence and terror to fight violence and terror. It aims to make people more willing to take seriously an ethical framework which defends a morality of "perfect means", an ethic that requires, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that "the means must be as pure as the ends." Critical Questions Series