PeaceDocs | Bibliography | Preface
PREFACE
The following annotated bibliography was originally the second in a three-part study that hopes to document the history of the Judeo-Christian peace tradition from the Hebrew bible to the twentieth century. Its purpose is to show that there truly is a continuing, unbroken, and self-sustaining stream within that religious tradition that bridges the gap between its biblical roots and the religious peacemakers of our own time. This series of studies hopes to reach the teacher, student, or general reader who might want a basic introduction to the Judeo-Christian peace tradition, those who seek readings in a course on religious or peace history, and scholars who want an introduction to the materials and issues involved in the research on this field.
The first part of this study, The Catholic Peace Tradition. (Orbis Books, 1986, reprint Peace Books, 2002) is a narrative history ranging from the biblical antecedents of our concepts of peace through the Gospels and early church, the peace movements of the Middle Ages, the Humanist tradition of peacemaking, and the problems and promise of peace in the early modern world, ranging from the missionary pacifists of Latin America to the papacy's work for international peace. In the twentieth century the book covers the issues of the world wars and the role of Catholics in furthering war or peace, the revolution in church life accomplished by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, and peace movements today in Europe, the Third World, and the United States. The history was accompanied by extensive annotation and a complete bibliography, but the limits imposed by the size of the book and its purpose as an introductory survey precluded discursive notes and lengthy comments on citations. The second volume is the present annotated bibliography.
The third volume, included here as a collection of downloadable source readings, offers selections from the primary sources used in both The Catholic Peace Tradition and cited in this Peace Bibliography. This includes selections from the Bible, writings of the early church, canon law and penitential texts, the lives and sayings of the saints, histories of popular peace movements, monastic texts on the meaning and practice of peace, missionary accounts and plans for nonviolent conversion, humanist tracts, accounts of individual witnesses for peace, episcopal and papal letters, and the decrees of church synods and councils.
The purposes of the present online bibliography are several: the first is to update the research on The Catholic Peace Tradition from the late 1980s, when research on these first two books was completed, to the present. Most of the entries in the present bibliography have already been cited in the first book. The second purpose, really an expansion of the first, is to provide the researcher with a detailed analysis of all these and more recent works as the basis both for detailed study of the first book and as a guide for further research in this field. The third purpose is to arrange these materials by topic and period, so that the student will have framework for study and reading. Many of the titles cited in the first two books, especially more general introductions to topics, are have by now been superseded and are in the process of being updated here. Many more books on this peace tradition have appeared in the past two decades, and will be included over time.
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