Musings on Peace

I have felt disturbed since reading last night that US forces killed Osama bin Laden. Since then it has been sitting in the back of my mind but I had trouble putting words to my reaction. This afternoon I read an excellent blog post that helped clarify things for me: “Osama bin Laden is dead. [...]

Note: I cross-posted this at my other blog, Books and Other Miscellany. I was excited to read This Side of Peace, by Hanan Ashrawi, because I have not read (or even come across) many books by either women or non-Westerners about peace. Ashrawi is a high-ranking woman in the Palestinian movement and

I continue to struggle with something I have written about on this blog before, which is how to take actions that uphold my ideals. I have not written much here recently, in part because I have not felt particularly inspired in the past few months. In fact, I have at times felt quite hopeless and [.

Note: I cross-posted this at my other blog, Books and Other Miscellany. I was really looking forward to The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo. I had high expectations that it would provide me with a deeper understanding of how “evil” comes about. Unfortunate

Note: I cross-posted this on my other blog, Books and Other Miscellany. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community is a collection of eight essays by Wendell Berry. Although each essay is on a different topic, covering subjects such as economics, conservation, tobacco farming, war and peace, Christianity, an

Wendell Berry on the first U.S.-Iraq war (from the essay “Peaceableness Toward Enemies,” in the book Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community): This war was said to be “about peace.” So have they all been said to be. This was another in our series of wars “to end war.” But peace is not the result of [...]

Creating a world and culture of peace is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. In a jigsaw puzzle, each individual piece by itself gives only a glimpse of the picture of which it is a part. It is only when all the pieces interlock together that the whole picture becomes clear. Peace is the same [..

Is it possible for meaningful dialogue to occur over the internet? I ask myself this question over and over when I see the comment threads on prominent feminist blogs such as Feministe and Feministing. There are often huge flare-ups in the comments around topics of race, privilege, and other such in

In most conversations, we talk at each other, often without even really hearing what the other party has to say. As others speak, we are already preparing in our head how we are going to respond. This sort of conversation is often sufficient to get us through the day – we pick up on the [...]

This interesting perspective on tolerance is from the novel In Lucia’s Eyes, by Arthur Japin: [T]olerance is not the same as acceptance. It is actually closer to the opposite: tolerance like this is a clever means of repression. If you accept others as equals, you embrace them unconditionally, now a