PeaceDocs | Bibliography | Introduction
INTRODUCTION
As never before religious motivations and personal faith are affecting and defining the most important issues of public policy and life facing us today: peace, justice, our life in community and on the earth. In recent years, however, religious traditions have had an increasingly conservative and reactionary impact on these issues, and many thoughtful people, both religious and non-religious, spiritual and non-spiritual, have away from any movements or discourse that bases itself on religious or spiritual foundations. This is regrettable, since there remain lively and powerful religious and spiritual traditions that underlie many progressive motives. If, in the end, as William James noted in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the test of all religious beliefs lies in the lives they produce: “you will know the tree by its fruits.” A comparison of Martin Luther King and Christopher Hitchens, for example, might lead one to embrace religious belief without further discussion. And so it is worth examining some of the fruits of these traditions. This is why I have returned to this project after many years of more narrowly defined historical research.
What Is Christian Peacemaking?
While its terms and limits are always evolving and growing, this tradition has always defined peace as something active: not passive or acquiescent, not flattering to evil or retreating into indifference or silence, but activist, struggling for justice and motivated by Christian charity. The Christian tradition sees peace as a force that must confront evil, but at the same time must love the evildoer and convert that evil to good. For the Christians “turning the other cheek” is not the answer to violence, but only the question that confronts violence at its roots with the reality of peace. From there it seeks to find new answers, to actively solve problems in new ways. While the Christian tradition has often been equated — unjustly — almost solely with the just war, even this perversion of Christian principle has retained a kernel of this truth: that the religious person cannot passively acquiesce to evil, that he or she owes duty and service to the human community, and that this service must go beyond a simple “no” and involve self-sacrifice and struggle.
As the materials in this bibliography will show, many Christians throughout the history have understood this truth, but only recently, in the twentieth century and in the wake of its holocausts, have the various Christian churches — including the traditional peace churches — seriously begun to question their own assumptions about the nature of this struggle and about this sacrifice and service. Thus in recent decades the term “pacifism” has begun to be replaced by “peacemaking” as the definition of Christian action — not that “pacifism” has been rejected, but that our understanding of its meaning has taken on all the fullness and activism of the Christian meaning of “peace” as a force of love and justice in the world. At the same time, especially since Pope John XXIII, the church as a whole has begun to explicitly reject the just-war tradition as a theology, and to see it as an idolization of war. Today, therefore, we talk of “nonviolence” and active resistance instead of “passive resistance.” We can describe nonviolent revolutions and “people’s power” because we have actually seen them at work, and when we discuss resistance to war, we fully realize that this is only one part of an active and positive embrace of justice and love for the victims as well as the agents of violence and exploitation. The examples of the many individuals in the following selections will show, if nothing else, that there is certainly nothing “passive” about the life of the peacemaker.
THE SCOPE OF THIS WORK
The following bibliography, then, is a guide to the literature on this peace tradition in the Christian church. It covers material ranging from ancient Greek, Roman and biblical concepts of peace, through the message of peacemaking in the Gospels, the early church, the peace movements of the Middle Ages, the humanist peacemakers of the Renaissance and early modern Europe, the missionary peacemakers of the age of discovery, and Christian plans for world peace and international law from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. In this century it includes materials on the crisis of conscience and complicity faced by Christians during the world wars, the revolutionary impact of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, and contemporary Christian peacemaking in Europe, the Third World, and in the United States.
Topics covered include all forms of Christian peacemaking: pacifism in the traditional sense, key elements of the just-war tradition that include attempts to limit war, to define the justness of conflicts, and to clarify the role and rights of conscience, the place of international law in Christian thought, theologies of peace, liberation, and social justice, and well as those mystical, apocalyptic, and even contemplative elements of Catholicism that have contributed to our understanding and practice of peace.
This bibliography hopes to be as comprehensive as possible, and therefore includes a wide variety of materials. Primary sources include theological and philosophical works, canon law, penitential literature, the lives of the saints, the tracts of pacifist missionaries, of humanists and European internationalists, accounts of popular peace movements from the Middle Ages to the present, selections from church councils throughout Christian history, including key texts in Latin American Liberation Theology, modern papal bulls, including Pacem in Terris and Populorum Progressio, and the writings of contemporary Christian peacemakers around the world.
Secondary sources include a wide range of materials. Since peace history is a relatively new field, and will be approached by many with limited historical background to its issues and personalities, I have chosen to include a fair number of general, and more specialized, historical surveys of the periods covered. For certain eras, for example that of the Roman Empire and early church whose culture, social life and religious assumptions were so different from our own, I have had to include a large amount of secondary studies that attempt to establish the social ethos, the prevailing value system, of the age. In such cases only by understanding the social and moral milieu in which Christianity grew can one really understand the nature of its efforts at making peace. Such secondary works are thus intended to both ground the study in its historical reality and to provide ready reference to either the general student or the professional specialist. Many of these general works have been superseded over the past two decades and will be expanded or replaced in this bibliography with newer titles.
Because my definition of peace follows contemporary Christian practice, the works listed here are often not restricted simply to narrowly defined peace movements or statements: they also include works on the Christian monastic tradition, on nonviolent missionary work, on the work of the church for social justice. While the church’s teaching on economic justice certainly forms a part of this teaching on social justice, this is really a topic that belongs to another special field of research and is not included here. These and such topics as earth and creation spirituality, women’s, gay, black and liberation theologies will soon be treated here in on the online version of my Liberation Theologies.
Directly relevant secondary materials include surveys of peace concepts and movements, studies of key thinkers from the early church through the twentieth century, monographs on special aspects and individuals, specialized scholarly articles and more general encyclopedia articles, specialized philological dictionaries, and — especially for the twentieth century — articles from magazines, newspapers, and newsletters on the activities of individual peacemakers, groups and movements. In all areas published books, articles, and available dissertations are included. Unpublished papers and archives will be listed if and when links to their online versions become available.
The materials assembled here cover the literature, both secondary and primary, in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. I have aimed to be as comprehensive as possible when dealing specifically with the Christian peace tradition as discussed above, but have been more selective with historical background materials, with the tangential literature on the just war, and with the most recent periodical literature of current events. When comprehensive bibliographies on particular topics already exist, as for example on Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day or the Berrigans, I have generally cited only these but have also included those materials, whether listed in these bibliographies or not, that I have found particularly worthy of mention.
The Entries
This bibliography originally included materials up to November 1986. In many cases studies that were written in the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of this century and incorporated into later research have not been included, since their findings or their usefulness as research resources have been superseded. The entries themselves are arranged by chronological topic, and then alphabetically by author or by title where there is no author. All entries are numbered consecutively, and cross references are by number entry. Entries that occur in more than one section or chapter generally contain a shortened author and title entry, along with a cross reference to the original citation.
The number and division of chapters in this book has been devised to follow as closely as possible the sequence in my narrative account, The Catholic Peace Tradition. This is so the user of the bibliography can have an easy frame of reference to this narrative history, and that the reader of the narrative can easily assemble the research materials used for any particular topic or period. Only one chapter in this book, “Introductory,” does not follow this pattern. This chapter, instead, contains materials that are of a general use for the study of peace, or materials that occur in more than one chapter and for which an initial reference here, without annotation, has proven more convenient for use and later citation. The length of my comments varies, of course, with the importance or difficulty of the interpretation of the material. In occasional entries I have also included personal comments on the importance of the materials or taken issue with interpretations. In some cases I have listed materials that I have not seen, but I have so noted all these instances. In cases of subsequent editions of works cited, I have found it sufficient simply to note this in the main entry.
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