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 […]
Here’s the opening lines from a new article by Charles Colson:
I have been surprised by the number of Christians who have given up on politics this year. “I don’t like either candidate, so I’m staying home,” some say.
I get fed up with the vain posturing and empty promises, too. But not voting is not an option—it’s both […]
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. […]
William T. Cavanaugh’s seminal 1995 essay “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State” seeks to dismantle the myth of the modern secular state as the peacemaker who stepped onto the scene a few hundred years ago to quell religious violence. Instead, Cavanaugh argues, the […]
Perhaps analogous to Thoreau’s adage that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” is something like “inner city-dwellers live in varying levels of constant fear.”
I say this as someone who recently moved to a pretty rough neighborhood in Winnipeg, where the fearful whispers of people who find out that we live in “that neighborhood” […]
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 […]
