For me, the great question as a Christian is: “How do we follow the nonviolent Jesus more faithfully in this culture of violence and war?” I think about this question morning, noon and night. And I always come back to the basic three steps—contemplative, active and prophetic nonviolence. More than ever, in the age of...

Today, Pope Francis released the annual World Day of Peace Message for January 1, 2017, called “Nonviolence-A Style of Politics for Peace.” This is the Vatican’s fiftieth World Day of Peace message, but it’s the first statement on nonviolence, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-in history. We need to...

Not long ago, the legendary theologian Walter Wink and his wife June invited me to lunch with friends in Santa Fe. It was a blessing to enjoy their company, but I’m still nervous around my old friend Walter. I consider him one of Christian history’s greatest scripture scholars because of his ground-breaking analysis of the...

Open your Bible to Matthew 5 and you will never be the same. Gandhi and King called those passages the grandest manifesto of nonviolence ever written—beginning with the storied Beatitudes. Grand for a number of reasons—for their poignancy and conciseness, for their sheer poetics, for their morality and practicality. But grand, too, for a subtle...