As a pacifist for my entire adult life, I find the DIALOGUE call for papers too inviting to ignore. During the Vietnam War thirty-five years ago, I came to grips with what pacifism requires of…
Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 75–94
However, Mennonites and Latter Day Saints may be spiritual cousins. A sympathetic comparison of the origins of both movements may illuminate their past and also assist in contemporary living of the gospel of shalom.
LDS attitudes towards war and peace in general have been covered fairly comprehensively in the past decade or so. The attitudes are complex and generally attempt to strike a balance between the duty to defend one’s life, family, property and liberties on the one hand, with the commandment to renounce war as a tool of Satan on the other. While there is more than enough material in LDS scriptures and commentary to support a number of positions, until very recently any dichotomy in LDS attitudes towards specific wars has generally been seen only in the context of U.S. foreign policy.
To that lit spot ahead
is as far as you’ll walk:
open green, bounded by pale shrubs
you can’t name, sky
in clabbery cloud, light blue showing through.
Storm coming, your father would say.
Speak now in the voice of peace.
The poets of the world are rising,
rising against the storm.
Speak in your poet’s voice,
In 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, announced his Agenda for Peace. Within it, he encouraged member states to become more actively involved in “peacebuilding,” a vaguely defined term that seeks to…
Standing as we still do on the brink of a new millennium, Latter-day Saints share with their neighbors and friends across the globe a profound interest in the fortunes of twenty-first-century war and peace. Not only do we wish to live our lives and raise our children under a quiet sky in safety and peace, far from the addictive savagery to which humankind sinks in time of war, but as an increasingly international church committed to sending missionaries into all the countries of the world, who could dispute the advantages if all those countries were at peace?
The Bishop in Neal Chandler’s story “The Call” counsels a young man: “It’s not easy to be a real writer. . . .” How true, especially when you want, as did the bishop in Neal’s…
Douglas F. Tobler, Writing Something That Matters
Jerry and Dixie Partridge, Good Wishes to the New Staff
Robert Rees, In Praise of Editorial Teams
Maryann Webster was born in San Francisco and grew up in north ern California. She received an MFA and a Research Fellowship award from the University of Utah where she now teaches. Recent exhibitions of…