Edinburgh theologian Michael Northcott has been reading John Howard Yoder for many years and taking his dialogue with Yoder in some directions that Yoder himself never went, at least in print. In his work on environmental ethics he has shown how the “politics of Jesus” requires Christians to resist not only the violence of war but also the violence of an industrial food system which cruelly imprisons animals and wrests cheap food from the earth in a war-like fashion.

In his latest book, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, Northcott is, however, on more classic Yoderian territory. He provides a deep and scholarly analysis of the theology of empire which underwrites the neoconservative tendency in the current Bush administration in the United States, and its imperial foreign policy in Iraq, Central Asia and Central and South America.