Chapter 3 deconstructed the difficult scenario of a loved one being attacked.
In Chapter 4 Robert Brimlow answers the question “What about Hitler?”
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Tag Archives: Violence
_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 3
Chapter 2 discussed the hope of the resurrection and the life of Jesus as the core of Christian nonviolence. We dealt with the question of helping a neighbor who is being attacked and how a Christian committed to nonviolence may handle such a situation and why.
Chapter 3 leaps right into a very very difficult question: “What would you do if someone were attacking a loved one?”
I have a wife and a child. I love them and want to protect them from evil. Because of this, many things in this world are unsettling to me even more than they would be were I single and childless. Whatever I believe and do, I must live like Christ.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 2
“Pacifism is not a monolithic stance or approach to war, violence, or politics. There are varieties of it.”
The first chapter of the book distinguished between pacifism and passivity.
In chapter 2 D. Stephen Long deals with the difficult question “What About Protecting Third Party Innocents? Can we just let our neighbors die?”
Long doesn’t pretend all this is easy. He’s a reluctant pacifist who came from a military family. He doesn’t let us choose pacifism for some bogus reason. He rejects that liberal pacifism where we just say we hate war but perpetuate the conditions that make war “necessary”. He rejects the notion that war is bad because all soldiers are bloodthirsty savages. Many soldiers are and have been decent, loving, exceptional, faithful people who seem to be incapable of harboring hate, and what we call good soldiering requires “self sacrifice, disciplined community, and moral attentiveness.” He rejects the notion that pacifists are better because they don’t like war and everyone else does. Practically nobody loves war (except immature American boys who play Call of Duty all day and think war would be fun). Even the most battle-hardened want to avoid it, with few exceptions. So we can’t reject violence for cheap reasons.
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_Not Worth Fighting For_ Review: Part 1
When you think of people who believe in nonviolence, what image comes to mind? Is it someone you find distaste in? Is something about them other than their commitment making you dislike them? Now picture someone who is like you or someone you admire in every way. Then imagine them truly believing in nonviolence. Would you call them a sissy? Coward?
In my last post I introduced the chapter-by-chapter review of A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, a collection of essays on Christian nonviolence, specifically questions often asked about it by skeptics, or just curious seekers.
The first chapter opens with a common misconception worded in this question: “Isn’t Pacifism Passive?”
We come to see that this argument against peacemaking has not roots in logic or theology, but comes from what I’ve found is a mixture of semantic misunderstanding and aesthetic distaste. In her essay C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell addresses this question very well.
[note: for the sake of clarification when I speak of pacifism I will speak of it in broad terms, meaning a commitment to nonviolence, which we will see is based on the word for “passion”. Whether that means a decision never to use violence ever, we shall see as we read along.]
As with the rest of the book, Ewell leads the discussion based on five assumptions for Christians:
1) Jesus and his story are real
2) We are to be witnesses of Jesus
3) We “see thru a glass dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12), but “we do see Jesus” (Heb. 2:9)
4) Faith is a journey in which we question ourselves and shine our light for others
5) It all goes back to the life (and death, and re-life) of Jesus
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Announcing: A by-chapter review of _A Faith Not Worth Fighting For_
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the warhorses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will command peace to the nations.
-Zecheriah 9:9-10
I’ve been looking forward to reading a certain book for a while, now that I’ve had some friends recommend it to me. The book is called A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, a collection of essays about Christian nonviolence. It is a book that I already know will challenge me, will set the voice of scripture up against some things people sometimes tell me who also read that scripture a lot.
I’d like to thank Carl Jenkins for really getting me interested in the reading, and for giving me bits and pieces of his reading along the way. He did a book review. I’m doing a full chapter-by-chapter throughout the next month or so.
A Fist Full of Berries: Nobody Reads in Panem?
The Hunger Games movie is coming out on DVD tomorrow. I remember first hearing about the book. I’m like, “neat teens book idea. A little violent sounding.”
The idea sounded silly. Then I saw the movie. Then read the book. Then the others.
On the surface, the idea seems very profane. Kids killing each other. For entertainment. What has society come to? But if you read these books what you soon realize is that the book is using such a profane thing to ask questions about what entertains us, and what we are willing to embrace and accept, what we are passionate about changing and what lengths we will go to to make that happen, and what the consequences are of those lengths. And if you think that was a run-on sentence, then you see how oppression and violence can likewise run on and on and on, if we don’t do something to stop it.
Fires Will Rise: Batman Review and Commentary
[I’ll tell you when the spoilers come. You’re good for now.]
I’ve been incredibly impressed with these Batman movies. I wasn’t a real avid comic reader as a kid, but they were part of my literacy experience. Comics aren’t just stuff for kids and nerds, but the hieroglyphics of our age. They’re fantastic stories with words and images that speak of the human condition. Maybe a thousand years from now people will think Comic Con was a pilgrimage to worship American gods. Ironically, though no sane adult would claim to believe these worlds are real, we do let them affect them as reality too often. Fiction and fantasy. Fun and fear. It can inspire. It can also reflect some of the worst in us.
The film is about revolution, about the livelihood of a city, a community, about the investments people make in a community, about the consequences of our decisions, or our lack of decisions. It’s about what happens when we hide the truth, when we hide behind masks, hide underground, hide in our money, our castles. It’s about punishment. It’s about redemption. About rising.
CALEB COY 