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In 2009 the president of the United States, Barack Obama, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. No one, it should be said, was more conscious of his anomalous position than the president himself. The prize seemed, he acknowledged, to be more anticipatory than laudatory. Most uncomfortably, he was receiving an award for peace while presiding over war in two discrete world theaters. His discomfort prompted Obama to invoke a secularized version of "just war" theory: "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." 1 As my colleague Matthew Gabriele has pointed out, Pope Francis made a very similar statement more recently in South Korea: "Where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor." Gabriele suggests that, in both cases, the speakers were rejecting a medieval understanding of holy war and turning to an older doctrine, as articulated by Saint Augustine. 2 This Augustinian understanding of justified conflict is written into several of the most cherished irenic documents of our time, including Nuremberg Principle

This article explores the range of cultural scripts made available to medieval hagiographers when they depicted anger in accounts of mission and conversion. The focus is communities with prominent “lapsed” Christians, who then become targets of re‐conversion. By reconstructing templates of emotional change and redemption associated with anger in these narratives, we are better able to see how mission hagiographers reconciled extended, politicized and violent Christianization processes with sudden, dramatic conversions. The use of these emotional templates can also be located in the immediate circumstances and longstanding communal pressures of the monastic communities that produced these conversion narratives.

“Only connect …,” the epigraph of Forster's Howards End, offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection—whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations—in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel's conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.