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Books

We recommend these books about nonviolence.

Engage

Exploring Nonviolent Living

Laura Slattery, Ken Butigan, Veronica Pelicaric, Ken Preston-Pile

Pace e Bene Press

2005

Full of stories, exercises and resources, Engage is a workbook to learn, study and practice the nonviolent options available to us. It offers a guide for groups on how to take action for justice and peace amid war and injustice.

The Nonviolent Life

John Dear

Pace e Bene Press

2013

John Dear, Nobel Peace Prize nominee explores the questions. “How can we become people of nonviolence and help the world become more nonviolent? What does it mean to be a person of active nonviolence? How can we help build a global grassroots movement of nonviolence to disarm the world, relieve unjust human suffering, make a more just society and protect creation and all creatures? What is a nonviolent life?”

Nonviolent Lives

People and Movements Changing the World Through the Power of Active Nonviolence

Ken Butigan

Pace e Bene Press

2016

Long-time activist, teacher and author Ken Butigan has collected over 40 stories highlighting leaders and participants of some of the most important nonviolent campaigns and movements of our era including unsung heroes, inspiring actions and movements that persevered against great challenges and succeeded in changing our world.

Love is What Matters

Writings on Peace and Nonviolence

Louie Vitale

Pace e Bene Press

2015

Love is What Matters gathers the writings of a dedicated Franciscan peacemaker, Friar Louie Vitale. In this series of short essays written by Vitale over the course of nearly thirty years he recounts his nonviolent striving towards peace and justice to end war, torture, racism, poverty, climate destruction and greed in the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi.

Strength to Love

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fortress Press

2010

"If there is one book Martin Luther King, Jr. has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is Strength to Love." So wrote Coretta Scott King. She continued: "I believe it is because this book best explains the central element of Martin Luther King, Jr.' s philosophy of nonviolence: His belief in a divine, loving presence that binds all life. That insight, luminously conveyed in this classic text, here presented in a new and attractive edition, hints at the personal transformation at the root of social justice: " By reaching into and beyond ourselves and tapping the transcendent moral ethic of love, we shall overcome these evils." In these short meditative and sermonic pieces, some of them composed in jails and all of them crafted during the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights struggle, Dr. King articulated and espoused in a deeply personal compelling way his commitment to justice and to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual conversion that makes his work as much a blueprint today for Christian discipleship as it was then. Individual readers, as well as church groups and students will find in this work a challenging yet energizing vision of God and redemptive love. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Nobel Peace Prize laureate and architect of the nonviolent civil rights movement, was among the twentieth century’s most influential figures. One of the greatest orators in U.S. history, King also authored several books, including Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, and Why We Can’t Wait. His speeches, sermons, and writings are inspirational and timeless. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.

Why Civil Resistance Works

The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Erica Chenoweth, Maria J. Stephan

Columbia University Press

2011

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer o...

The God of Peace

Toward A Theology of Nonviolence

John Dear

‎Wipf and Stock

2005

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. Thomas Merton 'The God of Peace' John Dear's classic theology of nonviolence, broke new ground when it was first published as a breakthrough toward a new understanding of scripture, theology, social concerns and churches issues-from the perspective of Gospel nonviolence, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Dorothy Day. This ground-breaking study begins not just with the culture of violence, but the nonviolence of God, and the revolutionary nonviolence of Jesus. From the start, John Dear explores traditional areas of theology, such as Christology, Trinitarian Theology, anthropology, sin, redemption, theodicy, salvation, ecclesiology, eschatology, spirituality, liturgy, Catholic social teaching, the just war theory, feminism, liberation theology and the consistent ethic of life. This text will help university and theology students pursuing the theology and spirituality of nonviolence, as well as ordinary Christians and activists interested in the crucial connection between war and violence, and God and nonviolence.

Born On The Fourth of July

Ron Kovic

McGraw Hill

1976

Born on the Fourth of July, published in 1976, is the best-selling autobiography by Ron Kovic, a paralyzed Vietnam War veteran who became an anti-war activist. Kovic was born on July 4, 1946, and his book's ironic title echoed a famous line from George M. Cohan's patriotic 1904 song, "The Yankee Doodle Boy" (also known as "Yankee Doodle Dandy"). The book was adapted into a 1989 Academy Award-winning film of the same name co-written by Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic, starring Tom Cruise as Kovic. It is an exceedingly honest, personal account of one young man's experience fighting in the Vietnam War. The book was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise.

This Is an Uprising

How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

Mark Engler, Paul Engler

Bold Type Books

2016

There is a craft to uprising -- and this craft can change the world. From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and #BlackLivesMatter, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. When mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media consistently portrays them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. Yet, in this book, Mark and Paul Engler look at the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest. With incisive insights from contemporary activists, as well as fresh revelations about the work of groundbreaking figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Gene Sharp, and Frances Fox Piven, the Englers show how people with few resources and little conventional influence are engineering the upheavals that are reshaping contemporary politics. Nonviolence is usually seen simply as a philosophy or moral code. This Is an Uprising shows how it can instead be deployed as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. It argues that if we are always taken by surprise by dramatic outbreaks of revolt, we pass up the chance to truly understand how social transformation happens.
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