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.

Guernica magazine has a new interview with Robert Thurman, once a Tibetan Buddhist monk and now professor of Buddhism at Columbia. He’s also co-founder of Tibet House and the father of actress Uma Thurman. Here, he discusses the prospects of a new world order based on nonviolence and the realistic—and perhaps even violent—steps it may take to get there. Guernica asks him a lot of the questions that are so often asked of folks advocating violence. His answers might surprise some; take, for example, how he replies to the familiar question of what to do when an invader comes into the house:

You have to oppose whoever it is. You have a right to defend yourself and you should try. But you should try to do it with minimal violence. For example, if you’re in a place where the breaking in is very, very likely, I guess you should be well trained in martial arts. You should be well armed and well trained about the arm, then hopefully not use it. Or if you have to use it, shoot for the legs. Be like Grasshopper, if you remember the old Carradine show Kung Fu. You should be forceful in opposing and defending, but without hatred.

It’s far from a pacifist position. The Tibetans didn’t violently resist the Chinese, he explains, not out of principle, but because they weren’t strong enough to be successful. If they had been strong enough, they would have practiced a restrained and defensive military campaign. “Buddhism is pragmatic; it’s not fanatic,” he says. “We have surgical violence within nonviolence.”

Despite the advice to keep a gun in the house, he’s a staunch advocate of demilitarization and imagines a global order based in detente toward nonviolence.

It would not be a Buddhist strategy, however, in the current moment on the planet to completely, unilaterally, and 100 percent disarm because then we could be pushed around by anybody. That’s not what’s being advocated. What’s being advocated is a genuine slow process of disarmament. I have a slogan. I call it shifting from MAD to MUD. It means switching from Mutual Assured Destruction to Mutual Unilateral Disarmament.

Thurman’s answer to another inevitable question—the one about opposing Hitler—insists, thankfully, that there may have been alternatives available to the bloodiest war in human history. The mistake people often make is to assume that a nonviolent solution should mean no suffering on either side. Thurman points out that the cost could be quite high, but almost certainly not so high as what actually took place.

People point to the Holocaust, but the Holocaust went on in the middle of the war and the war was not stopping it. And then you never know had there been nonviolent resistance what would have happened. Had the Germans killed a couple million in France and England and here and there before realizing there was no point in occupying any country because people in the country simply would not feed them, they wouldn’t work for them, they wouldn’t do anything even if they killed them, that might have saved how many total million that did die in the World War, maybe forty or fifty million. I don’t know the number. But a lot.

A key to Thurman’s thinking, according to the interviewer, is a sense of perpetual optimism. “What keeps you so optimistic?” she asks.

It’s a moral duty. What that means is that you have to shift focus, you have to up level. If you look only at the negative things that are going on—not that you shouldn’t look at them, you absolutely should because you have to do something about every single one of them—then they infect you with their negativity. You become angry and depressed and desperate, and then you’re going to react with negativity.

He grounds his answer in an anecdote from Gandhi:

An American woman who was his disciple said, “How do you avoid getting too depressed or hopeless and all this?” And Gandhi said, “What I do when something terrible like this happens is I reflect on the great mass of people in the country or even in the world.” There was this one place where two or three hundred people were shot by some British, and then there were fifteen or twenty police killed by a mob in such and such other town, and other bad things probably happened here and there, probably some murders in the country and a few things. But hundreds of millions of people cooked dinner for each other, helped each other washing the dishes, helped each other cross roads, brought water from a well, restrained themselves from feeling angry with their neighbor when they might have started a fight, calmed down in some situation where they could have escalated. The larger fabric of society involves people interacting with some degree of altruism and empathy for each other, some degree of self-restraint, or the whole place would be in flames.

It is this insight that we hope to draw from here at Waging Nonviolence. In the “Experiments with Truth” posts, we see day after day how much is really going on—in terms of nonviolent work for justice—that so rarely sees the light of ordinary news coverage.

One last thing. At the end, he recommends The China Study, an important recent book about diet. My mother’s crazy about it, so I feel a filial duty to pass that along as well.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

- Thomas Jefferson

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”

- President James Madison

For 9 years, Daniel Suelo has lived without using money.  Dwelling in a cave outside the desert town of Moab, Utah, Suelo (as he likes to be called) has chosen to live a life beyond the bounds of commercial civilization, seeking to embody what he refers to as a moneyless “Gift Economy,” one which he believes is exhibited already in Nature.

On his website Living Without Money, which he maintains at a public library in town, Suelo notes:

All creatures, all the universe, outside the walls of commercial civilization live moneyless. That’s why nature outside civilization’s constricts, is perfectly balanced. Yet no nation on earth, even with its PhD economists, can even balance its budget.

As I perused the recent article about Suelo published in Details Magazine, I could not help but feel a profound sense of respect and admiration for him, for he comes off not as an angry, radical pariah fueled by bitterness or self-righteous indignation, but rather a peaceful and gentle spiritual pilgrim seeking to tread a genuine path of Truth.

But when I shared the gist of the article with my friend’s father, the mere thought of a man living without money generated a dismissive and mocking retort, “He is selfish. What does he do? Nothing for anyone. All he is doing is mooching off of others.”

I cringed inwardly, wanting to come to Suelo’s defense, yet not wanting to be preachy or confrontational.  The only words that occupied my headspace were not my own, they were those of Jesus.  “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” “You can not serve God and mammon.”

Since the day I came across these words, I have been struggling with the fear they provoke inside of me.  The fear is not so much of the hardships imposed by poverty, but more from the hypocrisy I may embody in failing to heed my Master’s call.  A big part of me believes that if I don’t sell my possessions that I can not truly be a disciple of Jesus and that I could not in good faith call myself his follower.

Many say that these words were an attempt by Jesus to generate an understanding of detachment and internal renunciation in the heart of his listeners. Granted. Yet what if he was also getting at something deeper? What if by calling us to empty our pockets He was trying to teach us one of God’s most intimate lessons in the art of loving? What if the only way we could realize genuine grace and mutual interdependence was by depending on the provision and sovereignty of the Creator?

Read the rest of this article »

In the New York Times this week, there’s a haunting story by Katharine Q. Seelye on a church service in Kentucky in which the pastor invited parishioners to bring their guns. Here’s the man of God himself with his submachine gun:

In addition to the church service, Seelye discusses the rising rates of gun-buying in this country, as well as NRA-stoked fears that Obama—who has mainly ignored gun issues so far—will take away their weaponry.

Even better than the article, though, are two posts on the Times’s Lede blog, which have more details from the church service and other insights from Seelye’s reporting. There’s even a discussion forming in the comments about whether a church service about guns is “heresy” and the meaning of Jesus’s mysterious remarks about swords. In America, gun control isn’t just a public policy question; it’s a theological one too. And even in Kentucky, one of the country’s most gun-friendly states, not everyone is happy to see religion conflated with gun-toting.

Terry Taylor and Diana Fulner

They’re not mentioned in the original article, but at the bottom the first of Seelye’s Lede blog posts, she discusses other Kentuckyans who are bent on doing things differently.

Clergy from some other churches and peace activists are sponsoring an alternative event, called “Bring your peaceful heart, leave your gun at home,” and today I visited with the organizers.

[…]

The executive director of the Interfaith Paths to Peace, Terry Taylor, one of the organizers, told me that he and 18 co-sponsors planned this event because they were “deeply troubled by the idea of wearing weapons into sacred space.”

He said they did not consider themselves “protesters,” per se, and did not want to be part of a demonstration at New Bethel.

They appear quite insistent on avoiding the posture of protest, and have a graceful way of explaining why:

“A protest is not the way we do things,” Mr. Taylor said. “We’re not against things, we’re for things. Going and carrying signs at that event would build unhappiness and could potentially be confrontational. They have the right to do what they want. We’re going to give people an alternative that we think is better.”

Those of us so eager to protest violence could probably stand to keep this approach in mind more too. After all, there is violence even in pulling somebody’s gun from their holster. Much better is to offer them something else that they’ll want to carry around even more, that will make them feel even safer.

Franz Jagerstatter: Letters and Writings from Prison

Edited by Erna Putz

Orbis Books, 2009

[Franz Jagerstatter, a Catholic, Austrian farmer and married father of three daughters, was beheaded on August 9, 1943 by the Third Reich at the Berlin-Brandenberg Prison. Imprisoned in March of 1943, Jagerstatter was convicted of "undermining military morale" by "inciting the refusal to perform the required service in the German army,"  and condemned to death in July of 1943 by the Reich's Military Tribunal. Jagerstatter was 36 years old when he died. In October of 2007, Blessed Franz Jagerstatter was beatified by the Catholic Church.]

In his introduction to Franz Jagerstatter: Letters and Writings from Prison, Jim Forest writes that Jagerstatter “would certainly do what he could to preserve his life for the sake of his family … [he firmly believed] self-preservation did not make it permissible to go and murder other people’s families.” Forest asks how it is that someone “so unimportant,” a relatively uneducated farmer, could see so clearly while those holding positions of leadership in the Catholic Church or in the Austrian government of the Nazi era were utterly blind. Perhaps it is not simply a matter of seeing clearly; the message of the nonviolent Jesus in the Gospels, after all, is strikingly clear. What sets Jagerstatter apart was not only his ability to see clearly but also to act upon this insight and to actually pay the ultimate price for his refusal to join the Nazis.

Accompanying Jagerstatter in his astonishing witness was his wife, Franziska, who recalled: “In the beginning, I really begged him not to put his life at stake, but then, when everyone was quarreling with him and scolding him, I didn’t do it anymore … If I had not stood by him, he would have had no one.”

Reading Jagerstatter’s Letters and Writings from Prison was the literary equivalent of walking into a burning building. Like the Catholic prelates and Austrian officials, I wanted to flee while my hide was still intact. At other points, however, tears would flow down my face as I found it harder and harder to turn away from the truth of Jagerstatter’s insight and actions. During these moments, I recalled a passage from Plato’s Republic: “We must be persuaded by the better argument.” At first glance, this statement may seem rather pedestrian, something a first year philosophy student would dutifully write down in a notebook, dredge up for the final exam and then forget.  Of course there is so much more in this statement than is revealed at first glance. Namely, that we are to come to insight by means of persuasion and not by violent force. More so, when we come upon such insight, we are to respond metanoically, which is to say, we are to change our lives and commit our entire being to this insight.

In a letter to his wife on August 8, 1943, the day before Jagerstatter was executed, he wrote, “Do you believe that all would go well for me if I were to tell a lie in order for me to prolong my life?” The lie that Jagerstatter refers to is an oath of loyalty to Hitler. Had he signed the oath – and it was placed upon a table on his jail cell each day until the day of his death – he would most likely not have been executed. In March of 1943, Franz contemplated giving his consent to serving as a military medic which, like his signature to the loyalty oath, may have preserved his life.  Though he seems to have changed his mind about this type of service in July of 1943, his wife is of the belief that the military, in their desire for total control, denied even this work to Franz. At issue was his refusal to pledge his total obedience to Hitler. His was a metanoic response to the “better argument.”

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Donald Rumsfeld took the Lord’s name in vain. Today at Religion Dispatches, I discuss the documents released by GQ this weekend, cover sheets for 2003 intelligence briefings that Rumsfeld delivered to President Bush. On them, Biblical passages sit suggestively alongside scenes of desert warfare.

With only the most cursory bit of investigation, I was able to show that in their original context, many of the passages mean exactly the opposite of what the documents used them to mean—they in fact undermine the wisdom of military might, rather than secure it. I then go on to explore the eerie resemblance between these cover sheets and the propaganda used by Islamist militants.

These pieces of official iconography—at once digital folk art and presidential artifacts—lay bare that as early as 2003 the self-image of American warmakers at the highest levels had become hardly distinguishable from the enemy’s most populist propaganda. Terrorist creations collected by West Point’s Islamic Imagery Project differ only in that they were broadcasted rather than classified.

Most of the coverage of these documents in the media has dealt with their political significance—they are a sign of Rumsfeld’s manipulation and irresponsibility. But I try to take them for their religious meaning. Believers who take these scriptures seriously should be outraged at their flagrant misuse at the highest level of American power.