Earlier this month, over at Religion Dispatches, Kim Bobo, the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice – a great organization that I visited with earlier this summer – had a nice article about why and how the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) have stepped up as leaders in the campaign against SB 1070 in Arizona. She boils down seven lessons that the faith community can learn from the Unitarian experience about how to mobilize people around immigration reform or any other social justice issue:

1) Engage leadership.

The UUA president made a personal commitment on the issue. He offered to go to Arizona. He issued an invitation to others. He agreed to get arrested. Denominational leaders are often overwhelmed with their responsibilities and commitments. And yet, their personal involvement in economic and social justice issues, on the ground, particularly in the midst of tough situations, can support and embolden local leadership and draw others into the work. Leading through action is always stronger than through words.

Equally important was the leadership of the local pastors in Phoenix, especially the terrific work of Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray and of the UUA’s moderator, Gini Courter, who came to Phoenix with members of the UUA Board.

2) Link to principles and history.

The UUs consistently linked the struggle in Arizona to their longstanding commitment to civil rights and their core principles. The UUs also linked the campaign to the denomination’s anti-racism initiative.

3) Assign staff and resources for planning.

The UU committed money and staff to the planning and preparation in Arizona. Presumably, the UUs are as cash-strapped as other denominations, and yet they committed resources to action and witness. As a result of the denomination’s commitment, contributions flowed to help with bail, legal defense, and additional outreach work.

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“In other countries, the country has a military. In Pakistan, the military has a country.”

I arrived in Pakistan on May 4^th, traveling with Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier from Voices for Creative Nonviolence, based in Chicago. After traveling through Pakistan for about two weeks, I surely can’t claim to fully understand the country, but these words from I.A Rehman, Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, seemed to summarize what I learned.

I learned that most of the combat troops in the pre-1948 Indian Army were Muslims. So the army “got a country” when East and West Pakistan were formed in 1947 from the former British colony of India.

One difficulty is that democracy and the military don’t mix well: the military is not a democratic institution. When it comes to running a country, this mis-fit becomes even more problematic. Kathy and Josh had been to Pakistan last year, and this year, as we went from place to place and interviewed person after person, we kept hearing about how the government was not representative of the people. Instead, we learned that a small ruling elite runs the country for its own benefit.

Here in the US, corporations are increasingly influencing US warmaking policy to fuel their consumption of resources. In Pakistan, however, the military actually owns profit-making corporations. As Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa, writes in her book Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy: “The military’s two business groups – the Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust – are the largest business conglomerates in the country.” And the military’s investment in their own corporations leads them to use more and more government influence so as to stifle, or even take over, rival corporations.  That, in turn, entails an increasingly militarized and hence an increasingly undemocratic state.

Modeled by the federal government, this non-representation of the people’s interests extends down even to local police and courts, creating an “enfranchisement gap” between the people and their “leaders,” with the people of Afghanistan feeling more like subjects than citizens, as one professor told us.

When the people realize that the government is not guaranteeing their civil rights, sooner or later they will begin to act to secure those rights.

In Pakistan, that action by the people takes several forms. The first is in the growing number of civil rights demonstrations scattered across the country. Dr. Mubashar Hassan, a long-time and astute political activist and observer told us he believed that a some point, those isolated demonstrations will coalesce and form a national movement that will compel the ruling elite to change.

We can get glimpses of that movement toward unity among the demonstrators from the social media. For example, check out the newly formed Amn Tehrik (Peace Movement) out of Peshawar, or Voice for Peace out of Khar.

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Though the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder died in 1997, new writings of his continue to appear in print. Just released (hat tip to Danny Postel) is a new collection of his work on the connections between pacifism and epistemology—the study of knowledge, of how we know, believe, and understand.

The two subjects might appear to have only a tendentious tie. What does nonviolence have to do with knowledge? For the beginning of an answer, one need go no farther than Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, truth-force. Truth, he taught, is the method and medium of nonviolent force. But then further questions arise. What do we mean by truth, and where does it come from? How do we recognize it?

For the rest of an answer, this book seems like an excellent place to start:

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

Learn more and order the book at Wipf and Stock Publishers. Also check out another Yoder publication from Baylor University Press this year, Nonviolence: A Brief History.

• A Saudi man walked on an electric wire to protest frequent power cuts in his community. The man said that he wanted to prove that the wires often did not carry electricity.

• Women and children in Nepal stage a demonstration to protest against human trafficking.

• In Copenhagen, tens of thousands of people demonstrated outside Parliament to protest the Danish government’s three-year austerity package.

• An Irish nurse sat atop a ladder for seven hours to protest her family’s eviction from their home for back-rent.

• Thousands of priests from around the world rally in Rome in support of the Pope.

• More than 5,000 Guatemalan peasants blocked a border crossing with Mexico in protest against constant power outages in parts of the western province of San Marcos.

• Hundreds of people gathered in Moscow yesterday to protest the reopening of a factory environmentalists say will lead to waste being dumped into the world’s oldest lake.

• Hundreds of protesters, many in kayaks, took to the water off Horseshoe Beach in Newcastle, Australia yesterday morning to prevent shipping movements at the world’s top coal port. Rising Tide Newcastle said the protest stopped ships from entering and leaving the port between 10am and 5pm, but the Newcastle Port Corporation denies these claims.

• Landmarks around the world—including Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Sydney Opera House—went dark Saturday evening to observe Earth Hour, a global effort to raise awareness of climate change. 126 countries and more than 4000 cities and towns took part worldwide.

• Greenpeace activists unfurled banners of every size today outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, just as Dell executives meet to discuss a roadmap to finally remove the worst toxic chemicals from their electronics. The message around the world to Dell’s founder and CEO: “Michael Dell: Drop the Toxics!”

• Covered head-to-toe in black, a Saudi woman lashed out at hard-line Muslim clerics’ harsh religious edicts in verse on live TV last week at a popular Arabic version of “American Idol.”

• Students at two New Jersey high schools cut class yesterday morning to protest Governor Chris Christie’s State school-aid cuts.

• More than 7,000 people gathered in the main park of the northern Mexico city of Monterrey yesterday to protest a wave of violence that has affected the country’s third largest city in recent weeks. Most of the protesters wore white and some released white balloons and a white dove as signs of peace.

Among Catholics eager to stop and prevent war, matters can quickly become theoretical. The church, after all, generally teaches some form of just war theory, which allows for the possibility that war might be necessary and even right under certain circumstances. But in my interview with Andrea Bartoli of the Catholic lay organization Sant’Egidio, published today at The Immanent Frame, he suggests that the theoretical question has gotten more attention than it deserves. The gospel preaches peacemaking, and Christians should be hearing—and acting on—that call first and foremost. Practice matters more than theories.

NS: Since Augustine, Catholic tradition has upheld just war theory. Does Sant’Egidio see itself, like the Catholic Worker movement in the United States, as a challenge to that tradition? Or does its approach to peacebuilding fit within the just war framework?

AB: Augustine discusses peace about 2,500 times and war a couple of dozen. Everybody discusses what Augustine said about just war, but they usually fail to recognize that he speaks about just peace much more. Sant’Egidio focuses on the parts of Augustine that focus on peace. War is a possibility. War is a human choice. But from our perspective, the Christian position cannot be but a peaceful one, both in terms of being peaceful ourselves and in terms of being peacemakers. We don’t begin with theories. We work for peace because, to the poor, war is the worst of all conditions—Andrea Riccardi called it “the mother of all poverty.” Rather than holding a theoretical argument in favor of, or against, war, we need to be bound to practice. We’re more concerned with orthopraxis than orthodoxy. We want to be orthodox, but we have an even greater desire to actually practice the gospel.

Read more about Sant’Egidio’s remarkable work in our  full interview at The Immanent Frame.

On the first day of Lent last week, I started my day with mass. I sat with my fellow students. I sat with Jesuits and sisters. I sat and waited to receive ashes. I waited and listened, searching for the meaning of the day. Hoping the priest would remind me why I was there; remind me what Ash Wednesday represented. If only after two decades of attending Ash Wednesday services I could be more grounded in the meaning behind the tradition.

But in my mind and in my heart, I was carrying my agenda for the day. I would not be returning to class after mass. I would be catching the el to head south. I would be a part of the dialogue at the Union League Club. I would be part of the presence outside of its doors. I would be sitting at a table and fasting through lunch. I would wait, and listen actively in order to assess the words of Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway as he gave his lecture, “Closing Guantánamo: Policy, Legal and National Security Concerns”.

As we traveled south, we read the cases of men imprisoned at Guantánamo. We read their names, their trials and the details of their continued detention.

When we reached the Union League Club, we opened our banners and we put on orange jumpsuits. We pulled hoods over our heads and processed to the front entrance.

There we stood. Masked. Solemn. Strong.

Our message read, “We are all human beings. End indefinite detention.”

Underneath the hood, I felt people stare at me. I felt their curiosity. I felt their indifference. I began to think of the men I represented. I began to imagine them standing in my place, on the streets of Chicago, as people walked by and nodded, as people walked by and gawked. I wondered at the shame one feels as a prisoner, made to wear a hood, made to wear a costume, made to feel inhuman. I wondered at the powerlessness of standing erect in the face of indifference, imprisoned.

I had the choice to walk away. I had the choice to drop the banner. I had the choice to go to class. I had the choice to fast. The men at Guantánamo do not have these choices. Their protest is met by force-feeding.

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Today at The Immanent Frame, I’ve got a report on last night’s event at Fordham University on St. Francis’ mysterious encounter with the sultan of Egypt. More and more, it is being remembered as an antidote to the “clash of civilizations” and a model for Christian-Muslim peacebuilding. But is the history really what we want it to be? And what do we need from history to take on the work of making peace today?

It’s tough to imagine a better run-up for today’s interfaith—or inter-civilizational, or whatever you want to call it—dialogue: at the height of the Fifth Crusade in the summer of 1219, St. Francis of Assisi traveled to the battlefield at Damietta, Egypt, went behind enemy lines, met with Sultan Malik al-Kamil, and then returned to Europe to continue his career as one of the greatest of medieval saints. There may even have been a miraculous gauntlet of fire involved, depending on which of the various contrasting reports from the period you read. Really, beside a few basic facts, the reports agree on very little, least of all what we might now want from the story most.

When I first learned about the story—it was the subject of a college paper I wrote in 2005—I could find few modern sources to draw from. As I gathered every early account I could, it amazed me that, in the proverbially post-9/11 world, a bigger deal wasn’t being made of Francis’ adventure. Now that has changed. On February 17th, with half the foreheads in the packed room marked by Ash Wednesday smears, Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture sponsored a forum with four authors who have recently written about it: two historians, a Franciscan sister, and a journalist.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

Last weekend I had an opinion piece published in the Melbourne Age, a major Australian daily newspaper.  It was responding to the recent scandal of gunsights used by Australian, New Zealand and U.S. soldiers having been inscribed with Biblical references.  This story gave me the opportunity to clarify both the fact that Christianity is intended to be nonviolent, and that nonviolence is never passive in the face of injustice or oppression.

There were a number of comments after the original article, and the discussion has continued in the letters to the editor.  Two objections were raised in Monday’s newspaper, and two responses to the objections appeared in Tuesday’s paper.

It’s a rare event when nonviolence (let alone Christianity!) gets a run in the mainstream media in Australia.  This was a source of great encouragement.

It also made clear just how far we have to go in explaining and communicating nonviolence.  Two things in particular frustrated me.

1. It doesn’t seem to matter how often you say that nonviolence is not passivity, people will continually object on the assumption that nonviolence is passive.

2. It might seem pedantic, but the pervasive editing of the correct ‘nonviolence’ to the incorrect ‘non-violence’ is a demonstration of the kind of misunderstanding nonviolence receives in mainstream culture.

Have a look and see what you think.

An Australian peace activist named Sheik Haron (pictured to the right) was recently charged with writing hateful letters to families of fallen soldiers. Jarrod McKenna reflects on this incident as a reminder to activists to “love the enemy”:

The world is ready for an activism which loves its enemies. As A.J. Muste put it, “There is no way to peace — peace is the way.” The early Christians were called “people of the Way” because they lived the way of Jesus. If the sharing of our faith is to have any integrity, Christians who say “Jesus is the Way” must embody “the Way of Jesus.” The same is true of peace activists (Christian or otherwise). As Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would often say, “Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

As a human being living in a time of tremendous challenge to the earth’s resources, I am quick to apply this message to the issue of sustainability. According to nonviolent principles, just as we love the soldiers and their families, we must also love those who pollute and degrade the earth. When we stand up for the earth, we might remember that most of us have polluted, and still pollute, in some ways, such as fossil fuel transport, using plastics, and heating our homes.

At this time, quickly and urgently, we are needed to build systems in which we can coexist with each other and with the earth. Sustainability is a form of peace–peace for our biosphere. Along the way to that lofty goal, when we refuse the pollution, still we may love the polluter. That love may be motivated by the vision of the reconciliation when we all will live together in peace on a healthy earth.

Buddhism is often thought of as the exception. It’s a religion without gods (at least in some forms), to the chagrin of those who want to define religion as something along the lines of “belief in gods.” By the same token, as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism take the blame for some of history’s most savage violence, we tend to think of Buddhism as the sole nonviolent world religion.

A new book by Mark Juergensmeyer and Michael Jerryson (both of UC Santa Barbara’s religious studies department), Buddhist Warfare, reveals a Buddhism that is more complex than that and, the authors claim, more human. Jerryson writes, over at Religion Dispatches today:

Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence.

Before his fieldwork between 2006 and 2008 in Thailand, Jerryson thought of Buddhism as basically peaceful too. He actually went there to study Buddhist peacemaking. But what he found were militarized monks carrying guns and stockpiling weapons. It caused him to question the sources of his knowledge about the religion back home:

It was then that I realized that I was a consumer of a very successful form of propaganda. Since the early 1900s, Buddhist monastic intellectuals such as Walpola Rahula, D. T. Suzuki and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist traditions as primitive, but as mystical.

Yet these mystical depictions did not remove the two-dimensional nature of Western understanding. And while it contributed to the history of Buddhism, this presentation of an otherworldly Buddhism ultimately robbed Buddhists of their humanity.

Buddhist violence is certainly not limited to Jerryson’s experiences of it. For decades, Sri Lankan Buddhists have been carrying on a brutal civil war against a Tamil insurgency. For thousands of years, Buddhists have led and fought in armies, just as adherents of other religions have.

Does, Jerryson’s phrasing forces me to ask, violence equal humanity? Do we only know that our image of someone is human if it includes the specter of cruelty? I suspect that there is some truth to this. Just as Augustine of Hippo believed that faith begins with the recognition of one’s own sinfulness, Gandhi’s form of nonviolence was built on an intensive awareness of the temptation to violence within oneself. The power of his example suggests that even radical nonviolence depends on the recognition that violence is integral to human nature.

In the hands of Jerryson and Juergensmeyer, this book is not meant to be a glorification of violence, or an excuse for it. (Earlier in his career, it should be noted, Juergensmeyer wrote a fine little book called Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution, and he has since written important works on religious violence around the world.) Instead, they insist that we focus on Buddhist violence partly in order to fully appreciate the challenge of the alternative. Buddhist Warfare is likely to hit home most of all among American-born Buddhists, who have enjoyed the selective vision of a religion in which violence seems happily absent.

It was 3am when they came barreling into town – Israeli jeeps and tanks preempting the dawn and hollering menacing messages over their loudspeakers. ‘Wake up you Arab dogs’ they would exclaim as our team gathered to prepare our nonviolent direct response to the impending threat of violence.  What do we do?  Planning a course of action as a member of the International Solidarity Movement entails its own process, one that not always dovetails with the ethos of being a member of the body of Christ.  For those of us who have been led to Palestine by our love for Jesus, for God and for humanity, we inexorably find ourselves asking, like Christoper Dickey in his article in Newsweek, what would Jesus do in Palestine?  As followers of Jesus, our answer is crafted from the loving words and actions of the Good Shepherd who is both Jewish and Palestinian.

Side by side with self-proclaimed atheist anarchists, I found myself at times unnerved by the cavalier attitude of tank-chasers and the hostility of those who sought to provoke violence for the sake of their own aggrandizement.  This is not to devalue or dismiss the legitimacy of others’ motivations for being there but to honestly convey my own perception of existing ranks within the organization.  In fact, it was on this day that despite the disparity in our spiritual and political motivations we were able to act in concert for the betterment of the Palestinian people.  Why? Because we let love be our guide.  We assessed the situation and determined that our highest priority were the humanitarian concerns of those Palestinians who were unable to access food and essential provisions because of the curfew.  The team member in charge of facilitating communication was an Israeli-Jew fluent in Hebrew and English.  In all humility, he put himself in harm’s way on behalf of people he never met because he believed that those who shared his religion and ethnicity were perpetuating a grave injustice.  To me, this is what Jesus did during His time, and this is what Jesus would do today.

A nonviolent revolution is well underway in Palestine, one in which native Palestinians protest,  boycott and divest alongside Israeli and international partners.  We strive for the end of military occupation, to end the appropriation and destruction of Palestinian land, an end to the bloodshed and adherence to international law.  Yet for all this to happen one very important thing must happen.  Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians must come to love and respect each other.  I heard Palestinians tell me that the conflict will only end when the Jews were pushed into the sea and obliterated.  I saw first hand how ruthless Israeli Jews and settlers could be towards Palestinians.  This is why I believe that recent efforts like those of B’Tselem are on target to address the conflict at its roots and are aimed at creating understanding, respect and tolerance amongst those at war with each other.  The conflict must be transformed by building bridges that showcase culture, through dialogue, by sharing hopes, dreams, tears and aspirations.

In short, Jews and Arabs must fall in love with each other.  Barriers and walls, rockets and arbitrary detentions only dash the hopes of a lasting peace built on a foundation of respect for mutual sanctity.  Palestinians must continue to tell their stories, for the very right to tell their own history is under threat.  In the midst of such an asymmetrical conflict, we must stand in solidarity with those who are in jeopardy of losing it all.  And, like Jesus, one who perfectly embodies a Jewish-Palestinian identity, we must call into unity and awareness all who are blinded by hate, power and greed.  We can and will do this with the simplicity of our impartial loving concern.

At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Mark Johnson, executive director of the pioneering Christian pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. (I wrote about the Fellowship in a recent book review for Commonweal.) We discuss the FOR’s current work, its legacy, and how it is adapting to the the challenges of religious (and non-religious) diversity in its ranks.

NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today?

MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world. There’s quite a bit of anxiety among many people, who are asking, if the community consciously opens itself more broadly to humanists and avowed atheists, what confidence do we have that we will share basic values in common? But you can argue, I think, that atheism or agnosticism or humanism are as much religions as any denomination or sect in terms of having an identifiable set of values and, eventually, sets of rituals that shape how people think about and act in the world. A lot of what we struggle with is simply a matter of words. I love Charles Taylor’s arguments about the emergence of the secular age. We’re also reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s very nice new book, In Praise of Doubt. Doubt lies at the heart of the practice of pacifism. You can never know, ultimately, how you’re going to respond when confronted by violence. Absent a total conviction or confidence that you’ll act nonviolently, can you characterize yourself as a pacifist? Part of the conversation that we’re having, also, is about how doubt can create the space for being more accepting of more people.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

Dr. Timothy George, one of the document's authors, at the National Press Club.

We’ve been following here with interest the growth of protest activism on the part of the American Right since Obama came into office. They’ve been adapting the methods and language that have traditionally been the purview of the Left and, in the process, getting far more mainstream media attention.

The latest example of this trend comes in a statement released on November 20th, the “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.” Chuck Colson was one of the drafters, and signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America. Thus begins Laurie Goodstein’s report in the New York Times:

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

The document’s preamble goes further, citing past Christian opposition to slavery, Roman infanticide, women’s suffrage, human trafficking, and sexual slavery. At the conclusion, after rehearsing their convictions about abortion, euthanasia, and marriage, the authors and signers commit themselves to act:

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.  We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.  But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

For many people, this promise of nonviolent resistance really amounts to violence: restricting women’s access to abortions, barring same-sex couples from marriage (or even blessing), and threatening the progress of medical research. But one might say the same thing about a boycott that threatens workers’ jobs. Yes, active nonviolence is a weapon, and it forcibly shapes society. (Be sure to catch Sarah Posner’s excellent analysis, for instance, of the political machinations at work in this declaration.) If these people are truly intending to take the suffering that they see in the world onto themselves as a statement against it, I cannot but accept the testimony of their consciences. I’m certainly far more willing to listen to an action like this than to the murder of an abortion provider.

Active, creative democracy is messy, and it forces us to listen to and hear out the voices of those we might deeply disagree with. Those of us who don’t like it are perfectly welcome to take up acts of conscience of our own.

At Religion Dispatches today, there’s an interview with Sharon Nepstad, a sociologist of religion with a worthwhile-looking new book: Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement. There’s lots of interest in it, but an especially useful part of the discussion takes on questions of protest method in a nonviolent paradigm:

To what extent are certain strategies used in protest violent?

The question of the line between violence and nonviolence is an ongoing debate within peace movements. My own research on the Catholic Left-inspired Plowshares movement is an example of a group that really pushes the boundaries by destroying and damaging military equipment. The debate over property destruction has not been settled within the peace movement.

But what I respect about the Catholic Left is that in the 1960s they were ones who began to say that sometimes protest is not enough. There had been hundreds of protests against the Vietnam War but the government didn’t change its policy or position. So the Catholic Left started to call on people to interfere with the government’s capacity to wage war. These activists asked: “Would it be violent if people dismantled the gas chambers in Auschwitz?” Some activists were still opposed to property destruction as a resistance tactic, but the Catholic Left activists argued that they were saving lives by destroying draft cards or by attempting to disarm weapons of mass destruction.

Even traditional Gandhian tactics can be violent if they are used in a coercive manner. The Gandhian concept of satyagraha emphasizes that we ought to search for the good in our opponents; we ought to persuade them as we implement nonviolent acts of noncooperation. But if a nonviolent tactic is carried out in a coercive way, or if it is done with the view that the opponent should be humiliated or degraded, then it becomes a violent form of resistance. It is something that I think activists have to be constantly reflecting upon. The division between violent and nonviolent tactics isn’t always as clear-cut as we think. In my opinion, it has a lot to do with the spirit in which a campaign is conducted.

It’s definitely worth reading more at Religion Dispatches. And don’t miss a review of the book at Times Higher Education.