PeaceDocs | What’s New | It’s Summertime

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:08:24 -0400

Endless wars; environmental degradation; clerical, financial, business, governmental, educational decline and fall; the crisis in the food supply; recession, unemployment, homelessness; injustice and inequality; the still-broadening gap in wealth and availability of resources across the globe and at home.
Sometimes the best course is to stop. Remain silent. Await new grace and inspiration. Good works — and work — will follow.

PeaceDocs | What’s New | Ratzinger’s Sermon on the Mount

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 10:54:27 -0400

This site emphasizes the spiritual dimensions of peacemaking, whether those be within organized religion, in the creative arts, or in the spirituality of daily living. We attempt to emphasize the positive work of peacemaking in all aspects of our lives. We are therefore sickened by recent revelations of widespread child abuse by the Roman Catholic clergy throughout Ireland and then in Germany that only reinforced the crisis begun by similar news here in the United States.
We were in Ireland as the Church’s position changed from evening news to evening news: under the relentless and courageous pressure of the media, most especially of women reporters and lay victims of abuse in the studio audiences, the Church’s stonewalling gave way to empty gesture, then to false apology, and finally to repentance: admission of horrendous guilt and guarantees of remedy, both institutional and financial. The stonewalling, it appears — as with any arrogant and corrupt corporation enjoying its immunities — was coordinated at the highest levels.
The Vatican’s most recent response in the past several weeks, like the initial reactions of the hierarchies in the USA and Ireland, has been nothing less than vile: baiting the moral conscience of the laity, perversely vaunting its own victimhood and immunities, hypocritical, anti-Semitic, homophobic and divisive, equating itself with the church as a whole, protective not of the victims of abuse past and present, but of its own privilege and position.
In our latest essay we try to come to grips, once again, with the career of Joseph Ratzinger and his effect upon the Catholic Church in the 20th and 21st centuries.

PeaceDocs | What’s New | Obama on War & Peace

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:09:48 -0500

Our latest Essay offers a summary and analysis of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech. Is nonviolence only a personal moral force? Would it have been ineffective against Hitler? and at what point? Is war still a just prerogative of the state? Is Obama serious in his call for nonviolent alternatives to war? and how can such a vision be implemented? Barack Obama sounds more like Pope John XXIII in his Pacem in Terris than the president of the United States, waging two wars. What are we to make of this remarkable speech?

PeaceDocs | What’s New | Obama’s Nobel Speech

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:12:11 -0500

Our latest Video offers an excerpt of President Obama’s Nobel Prize Speech. Is nonviolence only a personal moral force? Is war still a just prerogative of the state? How would Martin Luther King, Jr. react to this speech?

PeaceDocs | What’s New | Peaceable Old Europe?

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 21:14:24 -0500

Our latest Essay takes a look at a splendid new exhibit and catalog by NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The Lost World of Old Europe revisits the question put forward by Marija Gimbutas in the 1970s: was the civilization of Old Europe really one focused around the worship of the Goddess and one lived without war or social hierarchy and coercion?
In connection with this essay, our bibliography on Earth Spiritualities has added some new entries for Gimbutas.