U.S. CatholicFebruary 2017 Gerald Schlabach first started thinking about peace and violence in the mid-1980s. He and his wife worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua during a time of ongoing civil revolution. A member of the Mennonite church at the time, he was tasked with figuring out how the historically pacifist church should…
Tag: pacifism
“Confessional” nonviolence and the unity of the Church:
Can Christians square the circle?
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 34, no. 1 (2014): 125-44. Abstract: Both within and among churches that have traditionally held to just war teaching, various formulas in the last 50 years have allowed for the recognition that Christian pacifism is a respectable tradition alongside just war. It is not obvious, however, how historic peace churches…
Must Christian pacifists reject police force?
Abstract: Chapter 5 in A Faith not Worth Fighting for: Addressing Commonly Asked Questions About Christian Nonviolence, eds Tripp York and Justin Bronson Barringer, The Peaceable Kingdom Series, no. 1 (Eugene OR: Cascade Books, 2012). Click here to download or read on Academia.Com.
Just Policing, Not War:
An Alternative Response to World Violence
For decades, the Catholic Church and historical peace churches such as the Mennonites have come together in ecumenical discussions about war and peace. The dividing point has always been between pacifism, the view held by Mennonites and other peace churches, and the just war theory that dominates Catholic thinking on the issue. Given the transformation…
At Peace and Unafraid:
Public Order, Security, and the Wisdom of the Cross
Co-edited with Duane Friesen Many Mennonites are clear about avoiding the violence of war and some types of police activities. Less clear, though, is the extent to which Mennonites should participate in the coercive systems needed for safe, stable and peaceful communities. This book provides theological reflection on this and other questions of Mennonite nonviolent…
Just policing:
how war could cease to be a church-dividing issue
Abstract: Might Christians who have long been divided along just-war and pacifist lines agree some day that just policing—and only just policing—is legitimate? In an essay first written as a resource for the first international dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics, the author offers a thought experiment on what would be necessary for war eventually to cease to be…
Just policing, not war
America magazine July 7, 2003 Virtually every Christian tradition is trying to have it both ways on war. Twenty years ago the U.S. bishops published The Challenge of Peace, which explicitly paired just war and pacifism as legitimate Christian responses to war. Three years later, Methodist bishops in the United States made a similar affirmation. And…