Some people think that if you have a position of Christian nonviolence, you don’t have anything to say because you’re excluded from making discriminating political judgments.
Nonviolence
John K. Stoner 9-01-2001
Are we doomed to descend ever-deeper into rage on the road, revenge in the workplace, and ruin in the home?
Rose Marie Berger, Susannah Hunter 9-01-2001
An individual's right to refuse active military service on the grounds of conscience is a "fundamental aspect of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion..."
David Hartsough, Mel Duncan 7-01-2001
'There is no better legacy we can leave than an effective nonviolent peace force.'
Stacia M. Brown 7-01-2001
The Veterans of Hope video series profiles nonviolence activists from around the world.
Dan Buchanan 1-01-2001
Since 1915, the Fellowship of Reconciliation has been the most influential faith-based peace organization in the United States and, indeed, the world.
Eugene Martin 11-01-1999
Kosovo’s peaceful leader Ibrahim Rugova has not received press attention until recently.
David Hartsough 7-01-1999
Before the war, a vigorous nonviolent movement sought justice for Kosovo. Their call for support from the world went unheeded.
Vincent Romano, Matt Schroeder, Neera Singh 7-01-1998
Young people are the keystones of any culture. Youthful energy is needed to get work done in society. We provide new ideas, physical labor, laughter, the human connection to the future and the world community, and the push for reform and change in society.
So, in the United States, why are teen-agers considered nuisances? Why do we have one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world? Why are we spending $267 billion on the military to train youth to kill, and $42 billion on all other education? How can our government claim to provide security when its priorities place young people near the bottom of an expendable pile?
This past January, 17 young adults of many faiths and nationalities came together at Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania for Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Peacemaker Training Institute (PTI), a weeklong nonviolence training program to engage youth in exploring activism.
Our training provided us with the space to get to know other equally passionate young people. At Kirkridge, we met students who have started their own campus groups to address some of the root causes of violence and insecurity: poverty, homophobia, hunger, human rights abuses, and their college’s investments in the military. They have founded their own peer mediation programs, support groups for rape victims, magazines, and peace and justice radio shows.
Vincent G. Harding 1-01-1983
Image via Seattle.roamer / Flickr
This article originally appeared in the January 1983 issue of Sojourners.
Somehow Martin King refuses to die within us, among us. Fifteen years after it was delivered, his historic Riverside Church speech, "Beyond Vietnam," reappears and thrusts upon us a King we had largely chosen to forget. Even now it would be tempting to take this cry from the heart of a driven, searching, magnificent brother and file it away as a document for museums and other honorable places.
But neither the fiery signals rising from some of our latest potential Vietnams in Central America, South Africa, or the Middle East, nor the mounting anguish of the betrayed and disinherited of our own land will allow us to escape the unresolved issues of the past or avoid the costly and accurate vision of our comrade in the faith. The speech not only requires us to struggle once more with the meaning of King, but it also presses us to wrestle as he did, with all of the tangled, bloody, and glorious meaning of our nation (and ourselves), its purposes (and our own), its direction (and our own), its hope (and our own).
Recently the name of Martin Luther King Jr. has been in the public arena primarily as the person whose birthday should or should not become a legal holiday. But this rather smoothed-off, respectable national hero is not the King of "Beyond Vietnam." Those who have, with all the best and most understandable intentions, pressed for King's birthday as an official holiday seem to have enshrined the King of 1963. In a way, that is a more comfortable image for us all: the triumphant King of the March on Washington, calling a nation and a world to a magnificent dream of human solidarity.
But all that,was before the assassins' bombs ripped out the life of the Sunday School children in Birmingham, before the fires of rebellion scourged the northern cities and moved King into Chicago, before the cry of black power was raised, before courageous and radical spokespersons like Malcolm X and the leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had begun to testify against the steadily rising tide of destructive U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, before King decided to break what he called the silence of betrayal and speak his own truth concerning his nation's role in Vietnam and in all the world's non-white revolutionary struggles.
Sometimes we wish to forget that by April 1967, King was a beleaguered public figure. He had refused to join the fearful litany of condemnation mounted by the civil rights establishment against the militant demand for black power, and for that he was fiercely attacked by moderates and liberals. On the other hand, some of the younger black and white radicals seemed to think that their best contributions to revolution were measured by the harshness of their criticism of King's nonviolence and "moderation."