7 Books for Bible geeks and other interested readers.
Feature
Julie Polter 11-01-2010
Writers who want to let both their faith and their creativity run free are finding a home in the Christian literary underground
Julienne Gage 9-01-2010
Trinity University found the future of education -- hiding in its own neighborhood.
Marcellus Andrews 8-01-2010
An economist explains why reducing the deficit will require big cuts in military spending.
Ben White 8-01-2010
The Israeli group Zochrot seeks to introduce fellow Israelis to the people who lived on the land before them -- and to engage Jews and Palestinians in an open recounting of their painful common history.
Ryan Rodrick Beiler 7-01-2010
Palestinian Christians call for a nonviolent movement to end the occupation.
Sondra Haaga, Bob Sabath, Amy Barger 7-01-2010
An intergenerational conversation on why we need Christian community, and where to find it.
Catherine Cuellar 6-01-2010
Churches in Dallas engage in the hard work of transformation in the wake of last year's Justice Revival.
David Cortright 5-01-2010
As the nations of the world review the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in May at the United Nations, they gather at a time of unprecedented hope for genuine progress toward disarmament. The new receptivity to nuclear abolition is reflected in the “New START” treaty between the United States and Russia, and was sparked by private initiatives led by former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and other senior security experts and officials in many countries.
Yet behind the spirit of hope for a world without nuclear weapons lie deepening doubts about the sincerity of the nuclear-armed states. They vow in speeches and international conferences to get rid of these weapons, yet in their national security policies they cling to the bomb and show no sign of abandoning nuclear deterrence. A broad consensus exists on the urgency of stemming proliferation, yet little progress is visible in attempts to persuade North Korea and Iran to abandon nuclear capability. A critical juncture may be approaching. If the soaring rhetoric of disarmament cannot produce policy results soon, efforts to build support for nuclear abolition could collapse in cynicism, and an opportunity may be missed to advance international security.
Those who cling to nuclear weapons believe that nuclear deterrence has kept the peace and must be preserved to prevent world war. Security concerns are the fundamental justification for maintaining nuclear weapons. Those of us who wish to eliminate these weapons must address these concerns, and show how a strategy of progressive denuclearization is a better and more effective strategy for enhancing security. We must take on the deterrence argument, pointing to its weaknesses but also its potential transformation in a post-nuclear world. In short, we need a theory of disarmament that matches moral passion with political realism.
Jim Rice 5-01-2010
Sami Awad’s vocation is to tear down walls in the Middle East. As executive director of the Holy Land Trust, based in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Awad works to build bridges between Palestinians and Israelis—and between Christians, Muslims, and Jews—as a necessary path to peace in the region. He was interviewed by Sojourners editor Jim Rice this winter while Awad visited Washington, D.C., to address a gathering of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.
Sojourners: What is the role of nonviolence in the liberation struggle and search for peace and security in Palestine and the broader Middle East?
Sami Awad: Nonviolence is the only option that Palestinians should engage in and the only option we have, in terms of resisting occupation. At certain points, I could have seen it as a strategic option, where people look at it and say, is it the right way to engage in or not to engage in? But now, I have come to the conclusion where I see it as the only option that Palestinians should engage in. It’s very important for us to realize this and focus all our efforts on nonviolence.
From a strategic point of view, we understand our strength. The strength of the Palestinians is in the people. We don’t have weapons. We don’t have armies. We don’t have training in military warfare. But we do have the power to unite the community, and the struggle for liberation and the struggle to end occupation is something that people can be united around.
What are the foundations for your philosophy of nonviolence? I grew up in a Christian family, which always said that reconciliation and seeking peace is the way we should go. The struggle for me was balancing my upbringing with an occupation that was treating us as Palestinians in a very unjust way. The question “How do you resist this injustice but not engage in violence” was always a challenge for me.
My uncle, Mubarak Awad, established the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in the mid-’80s. As a teenager, I started finding myself in that center, where I could really be engaged in standing up and saying no to the occupation and no to injustice, but in ways that also addressed my own faith-based background, which is not to engage in violence toward those who do this to us.
Sami Awad 5-01-2010
For 2,000 years, everywhere Jewish people went, they have suffered. They have been discriminated against. They have been attacked. You can think of all the things that they’ve experienced, leading up to the Holocaust. For me, as a Palestinian, my engagement in nonviolence should also be to address the issues that prevent Israelis from being what they should be, to be able to see themselves as humans who have dignity, who should have respect in the international community.
It has not been an easy process for me to engage in this. It led me to Auschwitz and Birkenau, where I have visited twice. Once, outside of Birkenau, we were sitting in the grass in a circle and reflecting on our experience. Busloads of Israeli children came in, because every Israeli child of 13 to 16 years gets the chance to come and visit Auschwitz with his or her school. They got off the bus and began walking on the railroad track with their Israeli guides. They had big Israeli flags wrapped around them, and they were singing nationalistic Hebrew songs.
After they finished visiting the different sites, they came back and sat in circles, and they began talking about what they’d experienced. The Israeli guides were standing in the middle of the circles, and all of them were saying the same thing. They were saying, “See what happened to us? You see what the Nazis did to us?” Many of these children probably had their grandparents or great uncles and aunts killed in these camps. Afterward, when they’re sitting in the circle, you can see how the experience was very traumatizing for them. You would assume that these guides would take this as an opportunity to say, “Never again.” But their message was: “You see what the Germans did to us? Well, guess what? It’s not over. If they have a chance, the Palestinians will do exactly the same thing to us as the Nazis did.”
