I grew up with toy machine guns, plastic army men, and John Wayne movies on a black and white television set. We read the Book of Mormon as a family every morning before school, and…
Across a shattered street, a Muslim groom lifts
the train of his Christian bride as he steps over
broken glass, old tires, and miles of rubblestone.
Her face, a dark rose, is the only beauty
in this ravaged landscape.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leila watched a woman and her husband climb into the Peugeot taxi that Leila was taking from Oran to Algiers. The woman wrapped her black haik close against…
Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 180–187
It was as I waded through the sewage, stagnant in the streets of one of Africa’s biggest slums—Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya—while on an assignment with the Community of Christ-sponsore WorldService Corps in summer 2000, that I was first struck by the enormity of the world’s problems and the horrifying conditions faced by the majority of its inhabiants.
The history of empires and nation-states is often a chronicle of wars, as this sprinkling of names clearly evokes: Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, William T. Sherman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. The twentieth century, the bloodiest and most war-crazed in the history of the world, has alone been responsible for combat in which “not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.”
I am a child of the sixties. I mean this in a more literal sense than is generally understood: I was a child during the 1960s. One result is that I have a distinctive view…
A little over twenty years ago on a beautiful July day in London when the sun glittered in a cloudless sky, warm breezes blew the music of the Royal Green Jackets band across Hyde Park. English families and tourists wandered the park or settled themselves on the grass and benches to listen.
Anxiety and frustration have accompanied my resistance to the second Bush war on Iraq. I feel such discontent partly because the Roman Catholic Church in Utah tends to be ultraconservative in theology and politics. While…
Out of a dream
a fragrance overwhelms me:
not saffron, not lavender
but something in between:
Psychologists have long been interested in peace and conflicts, and have made important contributions to society’s understandings of war and peace. A small but growing number of psychologists has become involved in the peace movement…