If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? . . . If John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?
A terrified boy huddles in his father’s arms moments before an Israeli bullet kills him; a baby girl sits smiling in a stroller moments before a Palestinian bullet extinguishes her life. These are but two recent reports of the violence that blights life in the land where the Prince of Peace once called humanity to follow him.
Books
Visions of a Better World
Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence
Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt focus on the first half of Thurman’s life, finding there not only the deep and complex roots of his mature works, but also a far-reaching influence on historical events and actors.
In
a blog post at the Wall
Street Journal, Conor
Dougherty describes a video game behavior that demonstrates what Century
writer Scott
Paeth calls "a distaste for playing evil."
According to Dougherty, gamers are finding ways to take some of the most
violent games and tweak characters or characters' behavior so that they
participate in the game with one notable difference--they don't kill.
The other day I left the office around lunchtime and walked over to the Occupy Chicago gathering outside the Board of Trade. At the corner waiting for the light to change, I stood next to a protest drummer who fit the stereotype well: unshorn, unkempt and not much over 20.
Has the lion been considering
lying down with the lamb in Washington DC? If so I missed it--but this seems to
be the assumption behind a couple recent commentaries.
Books
Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Volume One
New Testament Reflections on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking
By Ched Myers and Elaine Enns
Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Volume Two
Diverse Christian Practices of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking
There isn't a tidy way to write about forgiveness. It's the whole gospel, for sure. But you've got to deal with the sin that preceded it and the damage that won't go away no matter how much reconciliation follows it. You've got to deal with the stop-start nature of relationships, the silence and paralysis of pain and shame, and the fact that we fail at least as much as we succeed.
During the early 1950s, the Century’s editors could hardly be classified as strategists in the war for civil rights, but they tried their hand at analysis and expressed sympathetic support for both the commanders and the ground troops.
The promise of Isaiah 65 is that God is doing a new thing. There will be a new creation: a new heaven and a new earth. In this new dispensation things are going to change big time. “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” No longer must one consume another to survive in this new world.
