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Rethinking the Crusades

The language that demands that our ancestors be posthumously anathematized is not too distant from that of the men who wanted the corpse of Pope Boniface VIII to be exhumed and burnt. We may be entering a period of conceptual uncertainty about the most difficult of all society’s dilemmas — when or when not to use force — and we need not emotion, but cool heads and an objective analysis of the past.