Matt Wiebe’s blog about faith and life.
Mark Van Steenwyk has an interesting post up at Jesus Manifesto called The 25 Lessons of Nonviolence. I don’t agree with all of them (and Mark doesn’t necessarily either), but they are thought-provoking nonetheless.
A few of my favourites:
Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive […]
I’m currently reading John Howard Yoder’s seminal The Politics of Jesus, and there are many times when I could have posted excerpts. Yoder discusses how modern ethical theory is obsessed with first defining the meaning of history and then grabbing the right handle to move it in (what we have identified as) the right direction. […]
This has to be one of the more fascinating stories I’ve seen in a long time. New Yorker Julio Diaz gets robbed at knifepoint, and then calls out to his mugger that “If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you […]
Although I am convicted of the truth of nonviolent and pacifistic approaches to everything, suppose for a moment, that we’ll grant that there are enemies out there that must be defeated by force. This enables us to look at the logic of violence from this angle: what if we did, indeed, defeat all of our […]
Going the second mile is a cliché that nobody understands the meaning of. At least, that’s the conclusion that I came to after reading Walter Wink’s interpretation of this saying of Jesus in his book The Powers That Be. I’ve already covered his interpretation of turning the other cheek and giving up your cloak in […]
My last post dealt with Walter Wink’s interpretation of “turning the other cheek” in The Powers That Be. Moving on the the next section, he deals with Mat. 5:40, in which Jesus says “if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.” I must admit, this is […]
