Written by top practitioner-scholars who bring a critical yet empathetic eye to the topic, this textbook provides a comprehensive look at peace and violence in seven world religions. Offers a clear and systematic narrative with coverage of Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Native American religions Introduces a different religion and its sacred texts in each chapter; discusses ideas of peace, war, nonviolence, and permissible violence; recounts historical responses to violence; and highlights individuals within the tradition working toward peace and justice Examines concepts within their religious context for a better understanding of the values, motivations, and ethics involved Includes student-friendly pedagogical features, such as enriching end-of-chapter critiques by practitioners of other traditions, definitions of key terms, discussion questions, and further reading sections

Issued in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response.

This book offers a thorough and accessible analysis of Catholic teaching on war and warmaking from its earliest stages to the present. Moral theologians Thomas Massaro and Thomas A. Shannon begin with a survey of the teachings on war in various religions and denominations and then trace the development of Just War theory and application, review the perspective of several Catholic bishops, comment on the bishops' pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, address contemporary developments in light of 9-11 and the United States war with Iraq, and conclude with theological reflections. Complete with recommended readings, Catholic Perspectives on Peace and War offers an informative and thoughtful moral analysis that helps readers navigate the rapidly changing terrain of war, warmaking, and peace initiatives.

This book scrutinizes the events of 1919 from below: the global underside of the Wilsonian moment. During 1919 the Great Powers redrew the map of the world with the Treaties of Paris and established the League of Nations intending to prevent future war. Yet what is often missed is that 1919 was a complex threshold between war and peace contested on a global scale. This process began prior to war's end with mutinies, labour and consumer unrest, colonial revolt but reached a high point in 1919. Most obviously, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 continued into 1919 which signalled a decisive year for the Bolshevik regime. While the leaders of the Great Powers famously drew up new states in their Parisian hotel rooms, state formation also had a popular dynamic. The Irish Republic was declared. Afghanistan gained independence. Labour unrest was widespread. This year witnessed the emergence of anti-colonial insurgency and movements across Europe's colonies; in metropolitan centres of Empire, race riots took place in the UK and during the 'red summer' in the US, anti-colonial movements, as well as an important moment of political enfranchisement for women but their expulsion from the wartime labour force. 1919 has many legacies: the first Arab spring, with the awakening of nationalism in the Wilsonian and Bolshevik context; the moment (as a consequence of Jallianwala Bagh) that Britain definitively lost its moral claim to India; the definitive announcement of Black presence in the UK; the great reversal of women's participation in the skilled occupations; the first Fascist movement was founded.

This searching critique of the United Methodist Bishops' pastoral letter on war and peace in a nuclear age, by America's foremost Christian ethicist, exposes theological flaws from which flow gaps in moral argument and strangely utopian politics. Never before has In Defense of Creation been more thoroughly analyzed. At the same time Paul Ramsey gives a full-length and detailed comparison of the Methodist document with The Challenge of Peace by the U.S. Catholic Bishops. Issues of nuclear ethics, as seen by the leaders of two major churches, are set fully in view for the first time in a single volume. This "ecumenical consultation" is broadened by drawing extensively on the writings of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The book's larger purpose is to construe an encounter between Christian just-war tradition and Christian pacifism. This comparative discussion of Christian ethics should be of interest to any reader concerned about the nuclear crisis. Some of the questions confronted in these pages are: What do people mean by "nonviolence"? Should we never kill another human being, or never kill another human being unjustly? Do Christian pacifism and Christian just-war teachings have anything in common in their understanding of the Christian moral life? Do different interpretations of the person and work of Jesus Christ give rise to Christian pacifism and to just-war participation? Are these irreducibly different options equally valid for followers of Christ? Do the tests of discrimination and proportion lead to the same prohibitions on war and limits in war in a nuclear age? With an epilogue by Stanley Hauerwas, this volume offers the unusual event of two Methodist laymen engaged in lively debate over their church and the modern world.

Belief in God in the face of suffering is one of the most intractable problems of Christian theology. Many respond to the spiritual challenge of evil by ignoring it, blaming God, or insisting on the inherent meaninglessness of life. In this book, William Greenway contends that we don't have to deny our moral selves by either ignoring evil or abandoning our moral sensibilities toward it. We can open our eyes fully to suffering and evil, and our own complicity in them. We can do so because it is only in this full acceptance of the world's guilt and our own that we make ourselves fully open to agape, to being seized by love of others and God. Inspired by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the Christian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Challenge of Evil lovingly explains how we can look squarely at the overwhelming suffering in the world and still, by grace, have faith in a good and loving God.

On November 10, 2017, Pope Francis became the first pontiff in the nuclear era to take a complete stand against nuclear weapons, even as a form of deterrence. At a Vatican conference of leaders in the field of disarmament, he made it clear that the possession of the bomb itself was immoral. A World Free from Nuclear Weapons presents the pope’s address and original testimony from Nobel Peace Prize laureates, religious leaders, diplomats, and civil society activists. These luminaries, which include the pope and a Hiroshima survivor, make the moral case against possessing, manufacturing, and deploying nuclear arms. Drew Christiansen, a member of the Holy See delegation to the 2017 United Nations conference that negotiated the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, helps readers to understand this conference in its historical context. A World Free from Nuclear Weapons is a critical companion for scholars of modern Catholicism, moral theology, and peace studies, as well as policymakers working on effective disarmament. It shows how the Church’s revised position presents an opportunity for global leaders to connect disarmament to larger movements for peace, pointing toward future action.

This book deals with the history and future of the concept of ‘world peace through law’ (WPTL), which advocates replacing the use of international force with the global rule of law. WPTL calls for replacing war with the global rule of law by arms reductions, including the abolition of nuclear weapons, global alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and various enforcement mechanisms. This book sets forth a three-part proposal: 1) arms reductions – primarily the abolition of nuclear weapons, with necessarily concomitant reductions in conventional forces; 2) a four-stage system of global alternative dispute resolution (ADR), utilizing both law and equity; 3) adequate enforcement mechanisms, including a UN Peace Force. The core of this proposal is alternative dispute resolution mechanisms—international ADR. International ADR would consist of a four-stage process of compulsory negotiation, compulsory mediation, compulsory arbitration., and compulsory adjudication by the World Court. The fundamental proposition of this book is that the use of alternatives to war, global ADR, is the ultimate solution to the problem of peace. The full implementation of WPTL will entail a vast array of progressive initiatives on many fronts, including abolition of nuclear weapons, with the global rule of law being the capstone to all of these developments. This book will be of great interest to students of peace studies, arms control, international law, and world politics.

Contributions by leading peacemakers such as Lisa Sowle Cahill, Terrence J. Rynne, John Dear and Ken Utican, Rose Marie Berger, and Maria J. Stephan advance the conversation about the practice of nonviolence in a violent world, Jesus and nonviolence, traditional Catholic teaching on nonviolence, and reflections on the future of Catholic teaching. The book concludes with Pope Francis's historic Message for World Peace Day in 2017.