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…
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.