#teamnonviolence

[gospelofthekingdom]

"I felt like a man in Germany in the 1930s trying to explain why Jews ought not to be sent to the concentration camps. It all seems so utterly clear. You do not murder. You do not kill the innocent. You do not treat people like blemishes on the landscape, or communities as parcels of real estate, or nations as squares on a chessboard. Yet no group seems more distant from these facts than American (and Catholic) Americans. I have all but given up talking to Catholic audiences about Christ; I simply talk about justice, raw basic justice. I think I’ve come to understand why natural law made its way into our Church. It was simply an attempt to ask us to be, if not holy, then just. At least that.

How is it that we have become so insensitive to human life, to the wonders of this world we live in, to the mystery within us and around us.”

Jim Forest, in a letter to Thomas Merton the evoked the infamous “Letter to a Young Activist” from Thomas Merton to Jim.

p. 191

[gospelofthekingdom]

Like war, growth at any cost is an outmoded and discredited concept.

Bill Mollison

[gospelofthekingdom]

Questionnaire

1. How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.

-Wendell Berry, Questionnaire

[gospelofthekingdom]

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

 Wendell Berry

[gospelofthekingdom]

I am not angered that the Moral Majority boys campaign against abortion. I am angry when the same men who say, "Save OUR children" bellow "Build more and bigger bombers." That's right! Blast the children in other nations into eternity, or limbless misery as they lay crippled from "OUR" bombers!

Leonard Ravenhill

[gospelofthekingdom]

"All these impositions are being made about not "meeting violence with violence" and allowing "peace to prevail" imply a connection that has not been established: the protesters as responsible for the slain cops. They're gonna run with this narrative. And this narrative is going to be used to quell and manage protests against policing practices. So those of us protesting find ourselves, oddly, on the defensive pronouncing to the world that we are not killers as we simultaneously speak out against our own hunting. Our burden is heavy, today and always."

Jared Anthony Loggins

[gospelofthekingdom]

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016): Anti-War Legend and Boxing Great Dies at 74

Boxing great Muhammad Ali, known around the world as a humanitarian who spoke out forcefully against racial inequality, social injustice, and the Vietnam War during the 1960's, has died at the age of 74.

Drafted for by the U.S. government into the Vietnam War in 1967, Ali refused to go.

"My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America," he famously said. "And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail."

And separately, he is quoted as saying:

[gospelofthekingdom]

Hi Friends! I contribute to a journal named In Communion. It's run by the Orthodox Peace Fellowship [OPF] an officially endorsed organization of the Assembly of Canonical Bishops of the U.S that seeks to fulfill the Christian peacemaking vocation and works of mercy--whom I'm representing in New Orleans at an ecological convergence later this month. We just started a new Facebook page and twitter feed. If the peace tradition rooted in the consensus patrum are of interests to you, please like, follow, and all that good stuff to keep in touch with what we're up to!