Tag: peace

You don’t gotta

We walked through the Nelson Homestead at Woolman Hill Conference Center. This is where Wally and Juanita Nelson lived the last couple of decades of their lives — off the grid, growing their own food, refusing to pay taxes that funded the war machine of the United States. Carol remembers Wally and Jaunita Nelson coming to the annual conferences of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association of Massachusetts, back when she served on the NOFA Mass board, but she had no idea that they had both been civil rights activists and peacemakers.

Both of us liked the sign that Wally Nelson used to carry at demonstrations and rallies. The message is simple, but it makes you think: “You Don’t Gotta.”

Handmade sign reading "You Don't Gotta."

What to do

The war in Israel and Gaza is horrific. Here in this country, there is disagreement about what to do. People are staking out positions; to even name the positions is to take a position, because of the way you describe the different positions. I’m not particularly adept at politics, and I feel the proverbial deer in the proverbial headlights: no matter which way I go, it looks bad. Thus I was relieved to read this on The Velveteen Rabbi’s blog:

“One recent day on social media, comments from two people I respect crossed my transom within about an hour. One said (I’m paraphrasing both) that any rabbi who doesn’t call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is morally bankrupt. The other said that any rabbi who would call for a ceasefire, given Hamas’ stated goals of destroying Israel, is betraying the Jewish people. I’ve been sitting with that tension, and it feels like a black hole inside my heart. How am I supposed to know which path is most likely to lead to a future of peace and justice and coexistence in that beloved land? How would I know whether more military response or a ceasefire is likelier to bring about the just peace both peoples need? I can’t possibly know….”

Like the Velveteen Rabbi, I never studied political science, international relations, or military strategy. Yet she knows more than I — at least she’s been to Israel, and clearly has a better sense of the issues than I do. I’m glad that someone else is willing to say, “I can’t possibly know.”

All I know for sure is that the war in Israel and Gaza is really deadly (on the order of 10,000 fatalities so far, depending on which source you’re willing to trust). And this war is happening at the same time as the really deadly war in Ukraine (around 32,000 fatalities in the last 12 months). Then there are the really deadly wars that don’t get talked about much in the U.S. — Sudan, Myanmar, the Mahgreb insurgency — each of which has seen about 12,000 fatalities so far this year.

I don’t know what the path to peace is for any of these major ongoing wars. I’m not one of those religious leaders who will tell you with great self-assurance what we should do. I can’t possibly know….

Subscribed

I get most of my online news from BBC.com. I’m also a regular online reader of Religion News Service, which covers the news beat I’m most interested in, the role of religion in culture.

But I’ve put off subscribing to other online news outlets. If I want local news, I’ll go out and buy a print copy of the Boston Globe and the Quincy Patriot Ledger. But an online subscription? No thanks. The Globe and Patriot-Ledger websites are ugly, riddled with ads that hold no interest for me, and the stories I actually want to read are too hard to find.

Then today, just by chance, I stumbled across the Christian Science Monitor website. The old days when the Monitor was a daily are long gone — it’s at best a weekly now — but I quickly discovered some great journalism on their website. The story that grabbed my attention, and made me want to subscribe, was titled “Americans have a right to guns. How about to public peace?” Rather than framing the story as a partisan issue of Democratic gun control advocates vs. Republican gun rights advocates, the Monitor frames this as a story about peace: how do we achieve peace in our neighborhoods? As a pacifist, I found this refreshing.

So I subscribed. And almost immediately found a long feature article from last June titled “When $1 billion isn’t enough. Why the Sioux won’t put a price on their land”, part of a series of articles, “Reparations debate: Mending the past, forging the future.” Here again, the Monitor combines a refreshingly different perspective with good solid journalism.

The Monitor isn’t going to appeal to everyone, but for someone like me, a subscription is definitely worth the money.

Going to have to work for peace

Peace is not the absence of war,
it is the absence of the rumors of war and the panic for war and the preparations for war.

Peace is not the absence of war,
it is the absence of the threats of war and the rumors of war and the preparations for war.

There’ll be no freedom without peace.

— Gil Scott-Heron, “Work for Peace” (2001)

What we can learn from Afghanistan

Thomas Reese, a senior analyst with Religion News Service, who earned a doctorate in political science from UC Berkeley, has written a short and helpful essay analyzing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Early in his essay, Reese points out that the Trump administration made an agreement with the Taliban declaring that the United States would be leaving, and that the Biden administration is finally implementing that agreement. (This was a helpful reminder to me here that both Democrats and Republicans agreed that it was time to leave Afghanistan; it must have seemed a truly hopeless situation if those two deeply polarized parties actually agreed we had to get out.) Moving quickly past blame and recriminations, Reese’s essay gets to what I think is the heart of the issue:

“What we and our allies should learn from Afghanistan, and what we should have learned from Vietnam, is that the United States military cannot save countries from themselves. If their leadership is corrupt, if their government does not have popular support, if the country is divided by warring ethnic or religious factions, if there is civil war, the American military cannot solve their problems. In fact, history tells us that American troops often make matters worse by using tactics that cause disproportionate collateral damage and by making the local military dependent on us.”

This will be hard for many Americans to hear, but it’s obviously true: our military can’t solve every problem. Our leadership, and our electorate, needs to learn this lesson before we get involved in yet another mess like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Reese ends his essay by advocating for morality in diplomacy:

“Political realists argue that morality has no place in foreign policy, but their tactics have consistently failed. It is time to try a moral strategy that uses diplomacy rather than guns, and fights corruption rather than tries to bribe elites to do our bidding.”

I agree with Reese. Back in the 1970s, the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood was riven by conflict over Vietnam. Some members of the church thought the war in Vietnam was a moral stand against communism. Some church members thought the war in Vietnam propped up an immoral South Vietnamese regime and used immoral methods. When they called Dana Mclean Greeley as their new minister in 1971, they hoped for someone who would offer guidance out of this intra-congregational conflict. Greeley didn’t take sides on Vietnam. Instead he explained that in the nuclear era, war can no longer be considered a reasonable, sensible option. A few months after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, he preached a sermon which was even more pointed:

“War is insanity in this day and age. It is total destructiveness; it is total immorality; it is total waste. The end of war should be our goal today. Negotiation should be our commitment. We ourselves ought to be both wiser and more ethical than our fathers, but we are not.”

Back in 1975, Greeley called upon us to learn how to be ethical. Now in 2021, Reese calls upon us to be moral. I agree with them both. Rather than using the military to try to solve problems, our goal should be — as Greeley said so many years ago — to end all war.

REA: Peace Experiments

The text of the formal presentation portion of my workshop:

Let me begin by telling you about the context in which I do religious education. I’m minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, California, a mainline congregation founded in 1947. Like so many mainline congregations founded in the post-World War II era, today we struggle to adapt to new and different demographic, economic, and theological realities. In particular, we’re trying to figure out what the end of Christendom means to us as a post-Christian congregation, and we’re adapting to an intensely competitive nonprofit landscape.

Four years ago, I suggested to our lay leaders that we might do a six-week spring curriculum unit in peacemaking for K-5 Sunday school classes. That program, which I based on an old 1980s curriculum called “Peace Experiments,” was described by Geez magazine — a magazine subtitle “Holy mischief in an age of fast faith” — like this:

Continue reading “REA: Peace Experiments”

REA: “My God, what have we done?”

Leah Gunning Francis opened the first plenary session of the Religious Education Association 2014 conference. She introduced the plenary speakers, and informed us that unfortunately Gabriel Moran was not able to be present. Francis lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and given that the theme of this year’s conference is “Religion and Education in the (Un)Making of Violence,” she showed some of her photographs of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri — to the great interest of the conferees.

The first “speaker” was Andrea Bieler, Professor of Practical Theology at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal/Bethel, Germany. Bieler did not appear in person; her presentation was a video, in which she spoke, and showed various works of art and other material.

Bieler’s video began with a statement by Theodor Adorno: “The principal demand upon all education is that Auschwitz does not happen again.” Bieler extended this to other instances of systematic violence, including systemic racism in the United States, the state terrorism and “disappearances” in Argentina and Chile, apartheid in South Africa, etc.

In the video, Bieler laid out a nuanced argument, beginning with theories of memory and winding up with a discussion of remembering violence through aesthetic art. I was most interested in her analyses of several site-specific art works in Berlin, particularly the Chapel of Reconciliation, built near the site of the Berlin Wall.

Continue reading “REA: “My God, what have we done?””

UU political priorities

I long ago figured out I’m not one of the UU cool kids. Here’s one example of what I mean:

My local UU congregation is participating in a week-long nationwide peacemaking campaign from September 21-18, sponsored by Campaign Nonviolence, a “new movement to mainstream active nonviolence and to foster a world free from war, poverty and the climate crisis.” Beginning on Sunday, Campaign Nonviolence will have events in all fifty U.S. states; they are one of the sponsoring organizations of the People’s Climate March, a nonviolent action taking place in New York City.

In Silicon Valley alone, our local organization Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice is organizing a forum on poverty and structural violence, a youth workshop exploring conscientious objection, a film on climate refugees, a class on ecojustice and peacemaking (which I’m leading), participation in the Northern California People’s Climate Rally, a forum on gun safety with representatives from police and religion, a talk by the mayor of Sunnyvale on the city’s new gun control law, a nonviolent action against Lockheed Martin, and more.

But if you search the Web sites of the UUA or UU World, you will find no reference to Campaign Nonviolence. Because, you see, all the cool kids in the UU world are going to the People’s Climate March. I’m all about reversing global climate change, and environmental justice work more generally. I just wish Unitarian Universalism had a broader vision of social justice work.

Peacemaking and the REA

I just learned that the “Call for Papers Committee” of the Religious Education Association (REA) has accepted my proposal to present a workshop on our Peace Experiments program at the annual REA conference in November, 2014. The REA is an international, interfaith association of scholars and practitioners of religious education — it’s exciting that this prestigious association is interested in what our UU congregation has been doing with Peace Experiments.

While I’m all too well aware of the weaknesses of our “Peace Experiments” program, I think what we’re doing does have some interesting features. In particular, while most of the peacemaking curricula that I know about these days tend towards an essentialist educational philosophy (i.e., there are certain essential peacemaking skills that children must learn), our peacemaking program is grounded in an existentialist educational philosophy: we are trying to get children to define themselves as peacemakers, and to help them realize that who they are and the choices they make will shape the world around them.

How to be a peace activist

The fall, 2013, issue of Geez magazine is all about being a peace activist, and there’s a short eight-paragraph piece by James Wilt on the Peace Experiments program we did in Sunday school in our church (“Playing with peace,” p. 68). There’s even a nice picture of the peace quilt that the kids made under the direction of quilter Kathy Swartz. (Unfortunately, this short piece didn’t make it up on the Geez Web site so I can’t link to it from here.)

I don’t think we’re going to put this article up on the church bulletin board where kids can read it, only because I’m quoted saying: “Dan Harper, a long-time peace activist in California, calls the idea of of getting more conservative with age ‘bullshit.'” It’s a true statement, I’m not ashamed of saying it, but eight year olds don’t need to know I said it.

But it is true; I find myself getting more radical with age. The older I get, the more I realize how foolish and unproductive and morally bankrupt war is; the more I feel we have to protect our kids from war and violence. And increasingly I think most radical thing we can do is turn our kids into peaceniks. As James Wilt puts it in the article: “Now, however, instead of going to peace rallies, [Harper] hangs out with children. ‘I really think it’s the way to change the world,’ he told Geez….”

So — you want to be a peace activist? Go teach Sunday school.

Peace Quilt

A summary of the curriculum we used for Peace Experiments in online here. If you want to run Peace Experiments in your congregation, feel free to contact me for ideas.