Blessed Peacemakers
365 Extraordinary People
Who Changed the World
Kerry Walters
and
Robin Jarrell
Blessed Peacemakers
365 Extraordinary People Who Changed the World
Copyright © 2013 Kerry Walters and Robin Jarrell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
isbn 13: 978-1-60899-248-5
eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-535-0
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Walters, Kerry S.
Blessed peacemakers : 365 extraordinary people who changed the world / Kerry Walters and Robin Jarrell.
xxii + 390 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 13: 978-1-60899-248-5
1. Nonviolence. 2. Peace-building. 3. Peace—Religious aspects. I. Jarrell, Robin.
II. Title.
BL629.5.C66 W30 2013
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
For Kim & Jonah. Always.
K. W.
For my mother, June, and my father, Bob.
R. J.
Introduction
Becoming Instruments of Peace
Peacemaking is hard work because violence is the norm in our world. The going assumption in our schools, popular culture, governing bodies, and (sadly) religious institutions is that violence is inevitable and necessary: inevitable because evildoers will always try to harm good people, necessary because defensive or retaliatory violence is the only thing that will dissuade or stop them. The inconsistency of seeing violence as a tragic fact in some contexts but a virtue in others apparently doesn’t trouble most of us. Violence remains our default assumption, peace but a fleeting interlude or interruption in the normal course of events. So peacemakers who deny that violence is either inevitable or necessary have their work cut out for them. Swimming against the current is a daunting and overwhelming task.
That’s why we offer this book of peacemakers. In profiling the lives, thoughts, and deeds of people from all over the globe who offer alternatives to violence, we hope to inspire others who yearn and work for peace and justice. It helps to be reminded that one isn’t alone in the task, and that people of good will from ancient times to the present have labored to become instruments of peace in a world that too often settles for violence. It helps to hear the stories of fellow peacemakers. We learn from them, we gain strength from them, and we pass their wisdom on to the next generation. A daily reading of how they swam against the tide and created new currents can be an uplifting tonic.
The lives of peacemakers are richly diverse. They share certain core convictions, but the various contexts in which they work make each of their stories unique. Profiled in these pages are men, women, and children from all points of the compass and whose lives span twenty-five hundred years of history. Many are persons of faith—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Bahai, Jain—but some are totally secular in their outlook. Some have familiar and even household names, while others are relatively unknown. They are human rights and anti-war activists, scientists and artists, educators and scholars, songwriters and poets, film directors and authors, diplomats and economists, environmentalists and mystics, prophets and policymakers. Some are unlettered, but all are wise. A few died in the service of nonviolence. All sacrificed for it.
What are some of the core convictions that peacemakers bring to the table?
First, peacemakers believe that peace and justice are so intimately linked that one is impossible in the other’s absence. Justice is the establishment of right proportionality or fairness. When men, women, nonhuman animals, and the earth herself are treated fairly and with respect, justice reigns. Peace, as theologian Walter Brueggemann says, is characterized by a “persistent vision of joy, well-being, harmony, and prosperity.” It is a healing of fragmentation and disunity which allows justice to flourish.
Second, peacemakers understand that violence is essentially a violation, transgression, or infringement that assaults and shatters well-being. When it comes to violence, there is a frighteningly wide spectrum that includes the global environmental devastation caused by unsustainable lifestyles and public policy, the large-scale destructiveness of warfare, unjust economic and political institutions, and the turmoil of self-hatred or neurotic guilt. Moreover, violence is indiscriminate, cutting a broad swath of destruction that engulfs everyone and everything in its path. It brutalizes those who wield it, even when they do so with good intentions.
Third, peacemakers agree that a genuinely fruitful response to violence must model the proportionality and resulting concord that are the ultimate goals. Peace sustains an organic relationship between means and ends, method and goal. Justice and peace can’t be lastingly achieved through unjust policies or violent methods. To presume otherwise not only ignores lessons of history; it also violates right proportionality. As pacifist A. J. Muste famously put it, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” Responding violently to violence could lead to a temporary lessening of oppression or aggression. But it’s bought at the terrible price of perpetuating the cycle of violence that breeds oppression and aggression in the first place. Genuine justice and enduring peace can’t be imposed violently, because violence by its very nature fragments and destroys.
This doesn’t mean that peacemakers turn a blind eye to injustices that rupture peace. The nonviolence most of them embrace is an active force rather than a passive acquiescence to injustice. Some peacemakers actually dislike the word pacifism because it sounds too much like “passivity.” But nonviolence as both a lifestyle and a liberating strategy of resistance is powerful enough to convert cultures of oppression; witness the American civil rights movement and the “velvet revolutions” against Soviet domination that took place in Europe in 1989.
The fourth conviction shared by peacemakers is that conflicts between competing interests don’t magically disappear. Pacifist author Aldous Huxley and civil rights giant Martin Luther King Jr. both pointed out that whitewashing inner turmoil and oppressive social structures for the sake of surface tranquility is a phony peace doomed to collapse. For genuine justice and peace to flourish, conflicts must be faced with honesty and courage whenever they arise. The key difference is that a solution will be sought through peaceful rather than violent means. Discussion, arbitration, and reconciliation
