“Why Civil Resistance Works” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen, the 2011 groundbreaking study on civil resistance.
Their study found that “between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.”
And Erica Chenoweth’s TED Talk:
Just before a battle with the Gauls at Borbetomagus, Saint Martin of Tours (316-397), then a military officer, determined that his faith in Christ prohibited him from fighting, saying, “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight.” He was charged with cowardice and jailed. In response to the charge, he volunteered to go unarmed to the front of the troops.
This ten-minute video talk is the fifth part in a series of Lenten reflections by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
CHRISTIAN UNJUST/JUST WAR MORAL THEORY
“The effort one is obliged to make in order to acquire moral certainty that an action is morally permissible is to be measured by the importance of the action itself and the consequences which can be reasonably anticipated. If the life of a neighbor is liable to be imperiled by actions of ours, we must choose the safest course of action so as to avoid this evil effect. War with its dire consequences can never be waged on the grounds of probable right.” —Rev. Bernard Haring, C.SS.R., THE LAW OF CHRIST, Vol I, Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur (1960)
This ten-minute video talk is the second part in a series of Lenten reflections by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
“It is all but impossible to get a person to see a truth if his or her livelihood or status, or even just comfort, depends on him or her not seeing that truth.” — Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practise to deceive!” Marmion, Walter Scott
Interesting speech given by Noam Chomsky on “Just War” at West Point in 2006. What is interesting about it is that he traces thought on Just War back to two people, “Hugo Grotius, famed 17th century humanist, who founded the dominant framework of thinking on laws of war” and Rousseau in the 18th century. There is no mention of Saint Augustine or Christianity, though he goes on to outline basic tenets of Christian Just War theory.
Meanwhile, he says, “In brief, my own conclusions are that the literature merits careful attention, but is ultimately not very instructive about just war; secondly, that the notions of human nature should be at the heart of the discussion, although serious inquiry into this is still in its early stages; and third…” Well, I would think that notions of human nature might be something the Church has a little bit of insight on, and might be able to speak to in an inquiry on just war. Yet, Christianity has no place in his discussion. Maybe there is a reason for this.
In his conclusion he states: “…what can one learn from just war theory? My feeling is that from the literature on just war, we learn mostly about the prevailing moral and intellectual climate in which we live.” And he’s right. Christians and Christianity have nothing to offer, it seems, nothing to say, nothing to add to help shape and influence the moral and intellectual climate in which we live when it comes to war. The Vatican seems to have plenty to say about war, but who listens to them? Certainly not Catholics, so why should anyone else? Christianity has become irrelevant on this issue, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Here is the text of Chomsky’s speech.
The following was posted on a Facebook page for American military people.
Image posted on Facebook page of American WOLF PACK.
Here is a lecture given by Clarence Jordan from Koinonia Farm in Georgia.
The following is one of five lectures that Clarence delivered at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1962. To read more of this lecture and others, see Henlee Barnette’s “Clarence Jordan: Turning Dreams into Deeds.”
“Since many questions have been raised about the Christian and war, the Christian and violence, nonviolence, and so forth, I thought perhaps that tonight I would just kind of share with you some of the experiences which we have had in this whole area ourselves. Now, to begin with, Koinonia committed itself to the idea of nonviolence, and it was rooted in the theological concept that God is love, and that the basis of this s the Golden Rule. So, in 1942, when Koinonia was begun, we boldly asserted that – even to a nation at war- that this was out of keeping with the Christian teaching. …
Now it was not until 1956 that the race thing began to horning on us and that we had many, many opportunities to practice this whole business of nonviolence. But, in the earlier days, the opposition to us centered around this view on nonviolence.
We had hardly been there just a few days when an old farmer came down and he was all upset. He said, “I want to tell you something. You know what I don’t like about you folks?”
I could have given quite a catalog of things, but I said, “What?”
He said, “I don’t like it ’cause you won’t fight.”
I said, “Who told you we wouldn’t fight?”
He said, “That’s what they’re telling around here. You won’t fight.”
I said, “Well, you got us wrong, Mister. We’ll fight.”
“Will you fight?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “we’ll fight.”
He said, “How come you ain’t at the war if you’ll fight?”
I said, “Well, we don’t fight with those kinds of weapons.”
He said, “How do you fight?”
“Well,” I said, “we fight with love, and justice, and truth, and mercy, and prayer, and patience, and forbearance.”
And I saw I was losing him. Any time you start talking to a South Georgia farmer and ask questions, you’re going to lose him. So I had to get a little bit more concrete.
Well, I happened to see one of our mules with his head stuck out of the barn down there and a big old ear flopped over and a long old face – looked like this farmer! So I said, “You see that old mule?”
“Yeah, I see him.”
I said, “If you happen to walk down there by that old barn and that old mule reached out and bit you in the seat of the britches, would you bite back?”
“No, I wouldn’t bite that mule back.”
I said, “Well, why not?”
“‘Cause I ain’t no mule.”
I said, “Alright, I’ll take your word for it. You’re no mule.” And I said, “What would you do?”
He said, “I’d get me a two-by-four and I’d beat his brains out.”
“Oh,” I said, “in other words, you wouldn’t let the mule choose the weapon? If he wants to bite, you ain’t going to bite, huh? You’re going to get a weapon that the mule can’t use and you’ll beat its brains out.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s what I’d do.”
I said, “That’s the way it is with us, too. It isn’t that we won’t fight. We just don’t fight on the devil’s level. We don’t let him choose the weapon. You go to a jungle and want to fight with a lion, you going to let the lion choose the weapon? No! He chooses tooth and fang or fang and claw. You choose fang and claw and that lion will beat you. You better not let him choose the weapon. You better choose the weapon. So it is with us Christians. We choose the weapon. We do not let the devil choose our means of fighting.”
See the full text of this sermon here: Transformed Nonconformist
Here is another post I found on the Facebook page of a group called “Tried and Tested: America’s Warriors”:
So I guess “looking the reaper in the eye” is fine and all, but is that our highest end?
From Emmanuel Charles McCarthy: “Amidst the multiplicity of causes in which a person can choose to participate, there may be one that is intrinsically universal and holds instinctive priority for each human being and for all humanity. This does not mean that other causes are irrelevant or unimportant. It simply means that there is an inherently primordial cause that rationally must not be relegated to second place and that rationally must enter into our choices of other causes and the strategies and tactics we employ to pursue these other causes. Whether we realize it or not, we all live and choose by a hierarchy of values, a hierarchy of what we consider worthwhile. It is to this hierarchy of values that the picturesque old saw, ‘He is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,’ speaks.”
The following ten-minute YouTube video is the first of fifteen 10-minute videos on the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies that McCarthy made at a studio in Birmingham, England, in 2012. We will point the other 14 as they become available.