noncooperation with everything humilating

The first principle of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

- César Chávez

hat tip to "God's Politics" blog

On Easter, the US service death toll in the Iraq War hit 4000. What responsibility does the church have to raise issues of war and peace, of torture and punishment, of politics and power? Was Jesus "political" or not? These issues also are swirling around questions of race and class especially brought up by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's preaching. Some assert that we should "leave politics out of the pulpit," while others believe we should "preach prophetically," and "speak truth to power," in our preaching. These issues are vitally important to engage at this point in our nation's history, and working through the conflicting thoughts about "Church" and "power" and "politics" are vitally important. What is the Church's role? Hmmmm..


From CNN....read the whole article HERE.

Grim milestone: 4,000 U.S. service employees dead in Iraq war

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Four U.S. soldiers died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Sunday, military officials reported, bringing the American toll in the 5-year-old war to the grim milestone of 4,000 deaths. Eight of those killed were civilians working for the Pentagon.

Troops emerge from a bunker after receiving the "all clear" Sunday following a truck bombing in Mosul.

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The four were killed when their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device while patrolling a neighborhood in southern Baghdad, the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq reported Sunday night. A fifth soldier was wounded in the attack, which took place about 10 a.m. (3 a.m. ET).

The U.S. milestone comes just days after Americans marked the fifth anniversary of the start of the war.

Meanwhile, estimates of the Iraqi death toll range from about 80,000 to the hundreds of thousands, with another 2 million forced to leave the country and 2.5 million people displaced within Iraq, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

President Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq on March 19, 2003, after months of warnings that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

U.N. weapons inspectors found no sign of banned weapons before the invasion, and the CIA later concluded that Iraq had dismantled its weapons programs in the 1990s.

Hussein's government fell in early April 2003, and Iraq's new government executed him in December 2006.

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The news of the 4,000 mark came on the same day that Iraq's national security adviser urged Americans to be patient with the progress of the war, contending that it is "well worth fighting" because it has implications about "global terror."

Read the rest HERE.

merton on nonviolence

I could quote Thomas Merton every day of the year, ... there is so much there for the picking, the following quote was on the "God's Politics" blog ... and I am very aware of how much we need to re-examine and lift up some theologies of nonviolence, of peacemaking, and reconciliation as it seems war is becoming more and more entrenched. We seem to be reaching a point of nearly perpetual war in the Middle East and elsewhere. Merely singing, "ain't goin' to study war no more" will not be enough, and church people need to grapple with the complexities of war in this 21st century. I commend Rowan Williams' book, "The Truce of God" which takes a thoughtful, full, deep and complex approach to war, peacemaking, and issues today. I will write on Williams' book in a later post, but until then, here is Thomas Merton's quote:

Very often people object that nonviolence seems to imply passive acceptance of injustice and evil and therefore that it is a kind of cooperation with evil. Not at all. The genuine concept of nonviolence implies not only active and effective resistance to evil but in fact a more effective resistance... But the resistance which is taught in the Gospel is aimed not at the evil-doer but at evil in its source.

- Thomas Merton
from Passion For Peace