On this zoom program, we welcome back longtime activist, teacher, author, and organizer Dr. Ken Butigan, who recently retired after a long career teaching peace and nonviolence at DePaul University in Chicago, but continues to serve on the staff of www.paceebene.org, the Franciscan based peace and nonviolence organization.

Thirty years ago, Ken wrote and published a ground-breaking booklet, From Violence to Wholeness: The Spirituality and Practice of Active Nonviolence, which could be used as a ten week program or a guidebook for an intensive weekend workshop to explore nonviolence as a creative, powerful, and effective process for addressing and resolving the conflicts in our lives and in the world. Drawing on the vision of Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Day, this is the best program on nonviolence in the country, and offers churches, groups, and communities many helpful resources and skills to deepen the journey from fear to freedom, despair to hope, and violence to wholeness.

Thirty years later, tens of thousands of people have taken this workshop, bought the book, and learned the fine art of active nonviolence through Ken and this book. On this program, we’ve asked Dr. Ken Butigan to walk us through the basics of this introduction to the spirituality and practice of nonviolence. We recommend that participants order a copy of the book at www.paceebene.org beforehand so they can perhaps help guide others in a local group through the process.

Besides teaching at DePaul and working at Pace e Bene, Dr. Ken Butigan has worked for decades with many change movements, and was a key leader with the Pledge of Resistance, which helped prevent the Reagan Administration from a full on US invasion of Nicaragua; the Nevada Desert Experience, a campaign that helped end US nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site; “The Declaration of Peace,” which helped shift US opinion against the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and end that war; and “Campaign Nonviolence,” the national week of nonviolent action, usually around September 21st. He is a leader of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a global effort to help the Vatican learn the vision of Gospel nonviolence and implement it on a global scale (See: www.paxchristi.net) He is the author of several books, including Nonviolent Lives and Pilgrimage Through a Burning World. Ken lives in Chicago with his family.