I lived and worked in a refugee camp in 1985, and traveled back nearly twenty times, including his beatification Mass in San Salvador. To me, he is the epitome of the modern day prophet who denounces war, poverty, and killing, calls people to be converted to the nonviolent Jesus, and announces the coming of God’s reign of justice, disarmament and peace.

On today’s new episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I speak with Professor Todd Walatka of Notre Dame, author of a new book, “Words of Life: The Preaching of St. Oscar Romero.”

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Todd Walatka teaches about Catholic theology after Vatican II, Latin American theology, Catholic social teaching, and Christian spirituality. He is also the editor of Óscar Romero and Catholic Social Teaching, which examines the life of Romero in light of contemporary work for justice and human development.

“If you hear Romero’s words or know anything about his life, you immediately think, ‘This is the gospel!’” Todd says. “Romero asked us: ‘What is the Good News today? What does it demand of our very lives today? Romero truly believed that the Word of God can change our lives.”

Discover more about Saint Oscar Romero here:

orbisbooks.org

beatitudescenter.org

🌻, John

“Go for 20 minutes to a special olympics event and write down what it feels to be in that space.”

On this episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I speak with Tim Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, a global movement to end discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities. Tim expanded the organization from one million athletes to over six million athletes in more than 170 countries around the world.

After passing on the CEO torch, he wondered how the spirit of the athletes of Special Olympics might provide a model for our divided world. He started a conversation with hundreds of young people, faith leaders, educators, philosophers, scientists, activists and political figures on how we might reclaim our common humanity.

He formed the nonprofit UNITE which uses what he calls the “Dignity Index,” a new tool to help Americans disagree without demonizing each other.

Tim went to Yale, got his Master’s degree from Catholic University, and a Doctorate in Education from the University of Connecticut. Before joining the Special Olympics in 1996, he co-founded and currently chairs the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the leading school reform organization in the field of social and emotional learning (SEL).

On the side, he is a Hollywood producer of several films including “Amistad.”

He is coauthor of “Fully Alive – Discovering What Matters Most,” and co-editor of “The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening.” In May, Notre Dame awarded him the Laetare Medal.

“My parents were innovation machines,” Tim tells me. “They were problem solvers.”

His mother started the Special Olympics by asking, “’What if we just spoke each others’ language and ate each others’ food?’” That was peace-building.

Last year the volunteer army of human goodness created 80,000 Special Olympics events.

“Go to an event! There’s a recognizable presence of human dignity and therefore divine energy. There’s a different vibrational field. The Special Olympics is a peacemaking movement.” www.specialolympics.org

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When I ask Tim about Unite and the Dignity Index, he says it’s based on the insight that “our problems are not based on our differences but how we treat each other when we differ. When we treat each other with dignity, we have a good chance of solving our problems. We try to learn how to treat each other with dignity and reduce contempt.”

Listen in as Tim describes various ways to respond to others in keeping with human dignity. God bless you!

🌻, John

beatitudescenter.org

Father John Dear

Rev. John Dear hosts The Nonviolent Jesus podcast with iconic guests from all corners of the world where spirituality, peaceful activism, and the nonviolent Jesus inspire, encourage and sustain your mind, soul and spirit.

www.dignity.us

www.timothyshriver.com

In the late 1970s, my grandmother gave me a pamphlet about Franz. I was amazed by the story of a young Austrian farmer, born on May 20, 1907, who in 1936 married Franziska, the local sacristan at their church in St. Radegund. Franziska was a saint, and so he tried to become one, too. Together, they inspired me.

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When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, nearly everyone in Austria supported the Nazis. In February 1943, Franz received a letter ordering him to turn himself in and join the Nazi military, where he would be sent off to the Russian front. He went and spoke with several priests and even the bishop. Each one of them said it was his duty as a Catholic to fight for Hitler. But what about Jesus? he asked them. So Franz refused to fight, was arrested, imprisoned, taken to Berlin, brought before the Nazi high court, condemned to death for “undermining military morale,” and beheaded on August 9, 1943.

I’ve been studying him for decades, and in the 1990s, became a friend of Franziska and her family.

In this episode, I talk about Franz and Franziska, his beatification in Austria, and some concluding lessons, which I hope will encourage you in your own commitment to the nonviolent Jesus.

In particular, I think Franz demonstrates a new political mysticism, a sanctity that is a threat to empire and the culture of war. I think this has to become the new norm, as it was in the early Church.

“As a Christian, I prefer to do my fighting with the Word of God and not with arms,” he wrote from prison. “We need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead spiritual weapons—and the foremost among these is prayer…Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.”

Listen here and be inspired!

🌻, John

I propose that John rewrote the Gospel story to portray Jesus as the God of life who calls humanity in the person of Lazarus out of the tombs of death, out of empire, violence and war, and commands us to unbind humanity from the trappings of death and let humanity go free in the fullness of life and resurrection peace.

We’ll review how the male disciples promise to walk with him but never show up; how the professional mourners weep over Lazarus, even though they just tried to stone Jesus to death; how Martha tries to stop Jesus’ nonviolent resistance; and how Jesus announces, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever is fully alive here and now in the present moment of resurrection peace, and believes in me as I walk the way of life and nonviolence and confront the forces of death, will never die.”

“Do you believe this?” he asks us.

As Jesus approaches the tomb, he issues three new commandments:

I will conclude that this is the climactic call of John’s Gospel, and our mission today: to take away the stone that keeps humanity stuck in empire, war, poverty, racism, injustice, fascism, greed, MAGA, and the culture of death; to call humanity forth out of the culture of death, and to unbind one another to live free in the new life of love and peace.

Listen in and see what you think. I hope you like it.

You can get my Orbis book if you want to go deeper into this political reading of John 11. Sign up for interactive webinars with me on beatitudescenter.org

🌻, John

On this week’s new episode of The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast, I speak with my friend Dr. Catherine Meeks, a nationally recognized leader in racial healing and founder of the Turquoise & Lavender Institute for Transformation and Healing.

Her latest book is Bridging the Rivers of Difference: A Proclamation of Unity in Resistance.

Her other books include The Night Is Long but Light Comes in the Morning: Meditations on Racial Healing, and The Quilted Life: Reflections of a Sharecropper’s Daughter. She spent 25 years as chair of the African American Studies program at Mercer University.

“I grew up poor and black in Arkansas, and my way in the world is to connect to the spiritual and God and the way people should be treated right,” she says. This country was founded on the notion that some humans were worth more than others, included black people and women. The Constitution wasn’t talking about us. The Heritage Foundation has been working militantly with Project 2025, but we have to be willing to stop having a hierarchy of human value.”

“Racism has injured us all,” she continues. “Everyone has been wounded by it. The culture in the US reinforces the notion that people of color are inferior to white people, but we’re all made in God’s image and we all deserve to be treated right. We have to create new narratives and trust each other enough to work for the general welfare that benefits everybody, not just one set of people.”

“We need to recognize the nonviolent Jesus. To dehumanize another person is violent while Jesus was always respecting people. There is no Jesus for warmongers. War is never going to end other wars. We need to reimagine what nonviolence really is about. I see this moment as a time to come to grips with what kind of human we want to be.”

beatitudescenter.org

Turquoise & Lavender Institute for Transformation and Healing

🌻, John

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On this week’s episode of The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast I speak with my friend scripture scholar Wes Howard-Brook, author of several great books, including his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God.

He also has a free YouTube channel “The Radical Bible,” his study of the Bible as a whole called, Come Out My People!: God’s Call out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond.

He just published a smaller, more accessible version of it called: Creation or Empire: A Choice of Religions in the Bible and Beyond.

He tells us: “The Bible is not a bunch of rules or a bunch of pull quotes.”

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“The heart of my work is trying to re-establish a passion for biblical literacy, because as all indigenous cultures know, as a people, you are the stories that carry you forward.

“The Bible is a set of narratives, poems, proverbs, and other texts that were written by our Israelite and Judean ancestors to get their children to grapple with one central question: what kind of people does God intend us to be?

“The Bible proposes two choices: the religion of creation and the religion of empire. Jesus enters into that 2,000 year old argument among his people: are we to be a powerful empire in the name of God, centered in Jerusalem, to which all the nations will stream and bow down to us and our God? Or is creation the temple; do we find the Creator in the creation, and every created being is part of that?

Jesus plainly and explicitly sides with the religion of creation and resists empire.”

We were so inspired by this Bible scholar to find the Creator in creation and resist empire!

Find his book here

Sign up for more podcasts and interactive zooms here: beatitudescenter.org

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🌻, John

On this week’s episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I speak with my friend Lisa Sharon Harper.

Lisa is a theologian, speaker, author, activist, and trainer who has worked in Ferguson and Charlottesville, as well as South Africa, Brazil, Australia, Ireland, and across the U.S.

Her 2022 book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World--And How To Repair It All, was named “Book of the Year” by Word and Way. Her 2016 book, The Very Good Gospel, was named “Book of the Year” by the Englewood Review of Books.

After her leadership at Sojourners magazine, she founded Freedom Road, where she is the host of its podcast and column on Substack. The Huffington Post named her one of 50 Women Religious Leaders to Celebrate on International Women’s Day. www.freedomroad.us

When I asked her about these days of social injustice, white supremacy, and permanent war-making under Trump, she said she cries every day.

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She told three stories:

1. Her time in Ferguson in August, 2014 after Michael Brown was killed by a white policeman; her time in Charlottesville, VA, when she was present in the protest against Trump’s neo-Nazis who killed Heather Heyer;

2. Our experience in the D.C. Central Cell block jail after protesting at the Supreme Court on the 40th anniversary of the U.S. death penalty.

3. Her organization, Freedom Road, which trains people of faith to take public action for justice, as well as her recent best-selling books.

Listen to this episode here

Read about her 2022 book Fortune: How Race Broke My Family And The World--And How To Repair It All here

“Nonviolence is the only way for people who are not on the upside of empire to fight back,” she concluded.

“Nonviolence is the only way to not be at war with God.”

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Listen in and be inspired by this peacemaker to carry on!

🌻, John

This week I speak with one of the great peacemakers of our time, my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi of Bethlehem, Palestine.

Zoughbi is a lifelong Catholic Palestinian activist, organizer and teacher of Gospel nonviolence.

Long ago he founded the Wi’am Center, the Palestinian Conflict Transformation Center in the center of Bethlehem. Wi’am is widely recognized as a place of nonviolent conflict resolution that helps Palestinians in the day to day struggle for justice and peace (www.alaslah.org)

For the last few years, he has also served as the president of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, which is the oldest peace group in the world (www.ifor.org).

Whenever you think you are working too hard for justice and peace, remember Zoughbi!

“This is the first time in history that Bethlehem and Jerusalem are separated, that you cannot travel between them,” he says. “We are living in reservations, separated from each other. Bethlehem is becoming a smaller reservation surrounded by 23 settlements and many outposts.

The West Bank is a prison; Gaza is a concentration camp. Every day, we see more prisoners, houses being demolished, state violence, settler violence, environmental violence. The situation is moving from worse to the worst.”

“I want my people to live their life and know their rights, to work for a culture of acceptance, to resolve conflict nonviolently. We are exposing the atrocities of the Occupation, and ask people to be in solidarity for us.

We are all global citizens of a global world. I want all Christian brothers and sisters to walk in our shoes. Come and visit! Stop aiding and supporting Israel, its weapons, wars and occupation.

“I don’t want the Holy Land to become a museum without people.”

When asked about the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, he says, “Our dream is to educate all children in the world in peace and nonviolence, to get all religious leaders to preach the refusal of war, terrorism and violence, to get everyone to work for a world without war and nuclear weapons.”

Zoughbi reminds us of how Jesus was during Roman occupation: “Jesus was soft on people, but hard on the system,” he concludes.

“He asks us to love each other and to struggle against injustice…. Be the salt, the yeast and the light… Hope for me is a form of nonviolent struggle. We are going to become the Beloved Community one day!”

Listen to the voice of a Palestinian peacemaker in Bethlehem here speaking words of encouragement for all of us and be transformed!

Next week on The Nonviolent Jesus podcast: on her bestelling books, her involvement at Charlottsville and Ferguson, and the remnant of peacemakers that is here now.

More information on The Nonviolent Jesus at The Beatitudes Center here

🌻, John

This week on The Nonviolent Jesus podcast I speak with one of the great peacemakers of our times, my friend Mel Duncan about unarmed civilian protectors and the Nonviolent Peaceforce that has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.

Mel has been a leader in developing the practice of unarmed civilian protection for over two decades:

He started providing nonviolent protective presence along Nicaragua’s northern border in 1984 during the Contra war. In 2002 along with David Hartsough and Mary Lou Ott he co-founded Nonviolent Peaceforce nonviolentpeaceforce.org

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s “nonviolent civilian protectors” provide direct protection to civilians caught in violent conflict and work with local groups to prevent further violence and sustain peace in a variety of conflict areas including South Sudan, Ukraine, the Philippines and the United States.

Mel has represented Nonviolent Peaceforce at the United Nations where the group has been granted Consultative Status. Recent UN global reviews as well as Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions have cited and recommended unarmed civilian protection. The American Friends Service Committee nominated Nonviolent Peaceforce for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2018 Nonviolent Peaceforce received the Luxembourg Peace Prize.

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Since retiring in 2023, Mel has helped organize a team of unarmed civilian protectors who are now working in Palestine as “Unarmed Civilian Protection.” He worked there for six months in 2025. For the past few months during the ICE occupation, he has been providing protective presence in St. Paul where he lives.

When I asked about Palestine, he said, “The violence has intensified greatly since the attacks on Iran and Lebanon. It’s provided a cover for Israelis to brutally attack Palestinian civilians.

What can people do? As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, we pray with our feet. Know that the Kingdom of God is here and now; it’s a consciousness in all of us. Even when it’s hopeless, we can continue on.”

Mel tells us how thousands of people over the last 25 years have learned Nonviolent Peaceforce skills to take back to their own communities.

There are now over 60 other civil society groups now doing this kind of work in 24 areas of the world.

Mel says: “We stress the two hand approach: we resist the injustice with one hand while we reach out to the humanity in every one of us with the other.”

You can listen to The Nonviolent Jesus podcast here

More information on interactive Zoom programs with peacemaking thought leaders and activists on creative nonviolence can be found on beatitudescenter.org

🌻, John

“I find the aging process quite exciting!” — Joyce Rupp

This week on the Nonviolent Jesus podcast I speak with the beloved spiritual writer Joyce Rupp about her newest Nautilus award-winning book “The Years of Ripening: Reflections on Aging in the Later Years”

An international retreat leader and conference speaker, Joyce is the author of three dozen bestselling books on compassion, grief, aging in midlife and in the later years, prayers and poems for every occasion, reflections on nature, and a memoir.

Among her bestsellers are Boundless Compassion; Return to the Root; Jesus Guide of My Life; Constant Hope; Dear Heart Come Home; Praying Our Goodbyes; Inviting God In; and Walk in a Relaxed Manner. Orbis Books also published Joyce Rupp: Essential Writings.

She is a member of the Servite community (Servants of Mary), was a volunteer for Hospice for fifteen years, and lives in West Des Moines, Iowa.

“Elderhood is really all about surrender,” she tells me as we discuss her new book, The Years of Ripening. “But I like the word ‘acceptance’ better.”

She shares with us her thoughts on the aging process, self-compassion, surrender and vulnerability.

“The serenity prayer is the prayer of elderhood, not just for AA!”

You can listen to the podcast with Joyce Rupp here

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Be encouraged, inspired and lifted up!

You can also order her 2026 Nautilus Award winning book “The Years of Ripening: Reflections on Aging in the Later Years” here

“Acceptance and being with the process of surrender and letting go lead us to being at home in the heart of God. We can’t give in to discouragement,” she concludes. “It doesn’t get us anywhere!”

More podcasts and interactive Zoom teachings can be found on beatitudescenter.org

joycerupp.com

IG: @joyceruppauthor

Thank you for your support!

🌻, John

If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to listen to Part 1 first here

Co-author Michael Okinczyc-Cruz is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership in Chicago where he is a community organizer. He is also a professor at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University of Chicago.

“One cannot look at our current political moment and not think about Jesus,” Dom Crossan says. “

Their new book, Jesus and Justice, reflects on Jesus as a grassroots movement organizer of nonviolent resistance, and combines Dom’s scholarship with Michael’s organizing work on the streets of Chicago.

“In Chicago,” he says,“you could encounter Border Patrol and ICE agents roaming the streets, arresting people based on the color of their skin. Conditions were so horrific in detention, one local judge described it as a concentration camp. We organized thousands of people to protest these conditions, and our grassroots movement has made some progress.

The distinctive nature of our work is nonviolence in all our actions and our words. This is how we follow Jesus.”

“This path of nonviolence is the only path to an approximation of God’s reign,” Dom concludes.

“What’s happening in our country is a revelation of who we are. We have a savage culture. We need people of good faith to be engaged, organize nonviolently and take risks and action to pursue and live out God’s reign in our hearts and here on earth.”

Listen to this week’s Nonviolent Jesus podcast here and for more information, visit beatitudescenter.org

🌻, John

The following is an excerpt from my book “The Nonviolent Life” published by Pace e Bene Press in 2013:

If we do not want any more bombings here at home, we must stop bombing people abroad and figure out a way to live in peace with everyone on the planet. If we justify our all-American violence and warmaking, why shouldn’t millions of our victims feel justified to do violence against us? So goes the age-old policy—“an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”—which Gandhi said just leaves us all blind and toothless, armless and legless, and maybe just plain dead.

That’s the way of the world, and the predicament that we all find ourselves in these days. A world of total violence—with 30 wars, a billion people starving, 3 billion people living in poverty, 20,000 nuclear weapons on alert, corporate greed decimating the world’s poor, and catastrophic climate change threatening us all.

This world of permanent war, greed and destruction has become normal, routine, and legal. We have grown used to it. Violence is everywhere, and we typically come to the conclusion that there’s nothing that can be done about it. We think of guns, drones, bombs and nuclear weapons as “necessary” evils. We don’t even speak of progress toward a more peaceful world. It’s violence morning, noon and night. It surrounds us, overwhelms us, eats away at us, and consumes us. Indeed, it has become a plague that touches everyone, a virus that infects and spreads and kills.

If we want to speak of a new “nonviolent life” for ourselves, we have to recognize first of all the current life we lead—our “violent life.” We are violent. And our violence has made us selfish, narcissistic, fearful, unwise and miserable. We hurt one another, kill one another, ignore the deaths of millions, and do nothing to stop the spread of this plague of violence.

Violence is, for us, a way of life. Or rather, a way of death that masquerades as a way of life.

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The time has come to end violence as a way of life because it only brings death. It does not work, it does not make us happy, it does not lead to any kind of progress except further violence and death. The time has come to unlearn the ways of violence and to learn the way of nonviolence. Just as the alcoholic can choose to give up the bottle and become sober, people of violence can renounce violence and become sober people of nonviolence.

This is possible.

As we move closer to the brink of global destruction, it is, in fact, the only sane, rational, intelligent choice to make.

I propose that each one of us reject violence as a way of life and consciously choose to live a life of nonviolence; practice and teach others the way of nonviolence; and do our part to build a global grassroots movement of nonviolence.

This is our only alternative in the face of our committed violence, global illness, and common insanity. We need to work toward committed nonviolence, global healing and common sanity.

Inspiration for living a nonviolent life is found on The Nonviolent Jesus podcast every Monday with guests that will surprise you, encourage you, and uplift you. You can listen here to Bishop Mariann Budde on her experiences at the National Cathedral and a year later in Minneapolis.

🌻, John

On today’s new episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I speak with my friend, author, and theologian John Dominic Crossan, perhaps the most widely read scripture scholar in the world. This is the first of two back-to-back episodes with Dom.

John Dominic Crossan is an Irish-born biblical scholar with post-doctoral diplomas in exegesis from Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and in archeology from Jerusalem’s École Biblique.

He has been a Catholic priest, a Co-Chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a President of the Society of Biblical Literature, and is professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul university in Chicago.

His many books include: God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome; How to read the Bible and Still Be a Christian; Resurrecting Easter; Excavating Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; Who Killed Jesus?; The Historical Jesus; The Essential Jesus; Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography; and his memoir, A Long Way from Tipperary.

In our conversation, he tells his fascinating journey to “the historical Jesus,” and how this became a global movement.

At 92, after a lifetime of writing about the historical Jesus, he wonders about the fate of humanity.

Part Two will discuss his next book with Michael Okinczyc-Cruz, Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God’s Reign on Earth Then and Now.

Listen now here

For more information on our interactive Zoom teachings, podcasts and more, go to beatitudescenter.org

🌻, John

The Holy Spirit makes all the difference.

Only after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, when the terrified disciples were hiding in an attic, when the fire of the Holy Spirit came upon them, did they take to the streets as Jesus did. From then on, they denounced injustice and idolatry, nonviolently resisted the empire and its violence, announced the risen Savior and his new life of nonviolence, engaged in civil disobedience and give their lives for the coming of God’s reign of justice and peace.

The Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus pushed them out into the world as instruments of God’s disarming love. They were no longer afraid. They were bold, daring, courageous, subversive and dangerous–just like the nonviolent Jesus. They finally became the people he formed them to be—people of creative, active nonviolence in a world of deadly violence.

But before we pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit upon us, I think it is helpful to name the horrific reality of these dark times, namely, that we are possessed in varying degrees by the evil spirits of war and violence.

The evil spirit seeks to discourage us, to keep us quiet, indifferent, apathetic and afraid, to tell us there’s nothing we can do.

The evil spirit wants us to mind our own business and look the other way while it stirs up war and kills our sisters and brothers.

The evil spirit is behind every act of violence, every bomb, every murder, every execution, every starvation, every nuclear weapon, every injustice, and every war.

The evil spirit says there is no God of peace; that nonviolence doesn’t work; that you can’t love your enemies; that you need nuclear weapons to protect you; that you better support your country’s wars; and that there is nothing you can do anyway.

The evil spirit wants the church to be passive, divided, helpless, hopeless, and going along with every war and injustice.

The evil spirit tells you you you are nobody, that God does not love you, that God can’t wait to throw you into hell, that Jesus failed and is not risen, that violence works, that might makes right, that enemies are meant to be eliminated, and that you better be very, very afraid.

In other words, there is no hope.

But we know better.

As Christians we live in the Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus. We know that if we live in his Holy Spirit, if we let his Holy Spirit guide us and lead us, that we will know the fullness of life, that we will surrender ourselves to the God of peace, that we will find meaning, hope and joy in discipleship to the nonviolent Jesus.

So, on Pentecost, we beg God to give us the Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus, that from now on we would live in his holy spirit and let him guide us, push us out into the word, speak through us, use us, and make us instruments of God’s disarming, universal love.

The Holy Spirit reminds us that we are God’s beloved children, that we are called to follow the nonviolent Jesus on the road to peace, that we are sent to be God’s peacemakers in a world of war.

The Holy Spirit disarms our hearts of our inner violence and sends us forth into the world of violence to be disciples and apostles of Gospel nonviolence.

The Holy Spirit pushes us to speak the truth and seek God’s reign of universal love and peace here and now.

But as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, living in the Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus has political consequences. We are the people who are unafraid to speak out publicly against the Trump administration’s war on Iran and funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, occupation of Palestinians, and war on Lebanon. We speak out against corporate greed, growing fascism, white supremacy, systemic racism, dismantling voting and civil rights, executions, the building and maintenance of nuclear weapons, the use of fossil fuels, the destruction of the environment, and “the filthy rotten system” that leaves billions of sisters and brothers to suffer and die in extreme poverty and relievable disease.

The Holy Spirit pushes us to rock the boat, to resist the U.S. empire, to march in the streets, and cross lines to end war and injustice. The Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus lead us to organize and join nonviolent grassroots people power movements for disarmament, liberation, justice and creation. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to recognize every human being as Christ, as our very sister and brother, and so the Holy Spirit helps us to love our neighbors and our enemies. The Holy Spirit invites us to pray and prays within us and guides us into the love of God where we discover to our shock and amazement, that God is a God of love, a God of compassion, a God of peace; that Jesus is indeed risen and alive and leading us on the road to peace; that all we have to do is surrender our will and do the will of the God of peace.

St. Ignatius wrote that the spiritual life is a matter of discerning the spirits, following the peace and consolation of the Holy Spirit, and living in that Holy Spirit of Jesus. My hope and prayer is that we might always live in the Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus, and so we pray:

Come Holy Spirit of peace, lead us in peace, on the path of peace, to the God of peace, to a new world of peace for all.
Come Holy Spirit of nonviolence, lead us to reject violence and practice active nonviolence.
Come Holy Spirit of compassion, lead us from revenge and retaliation to mercy and compassion.
Come Holy Spirit of forgiveness, lead us from anger and resentment to forgive everyone who ever hurt us that we might reconcile with everyone.

Come Holy Spirit of justice, lead us from injustice and apathy in the face of injustice to seek justice for all humanity and all creation.
Come Holy Spirit of hope, lead us out of despair to take action for hope.
Come Holy Spirit of truth, lead us from the culture of lies to the truth of universal love and peace.
Come Holy Spirit of love, lead us from hatred, fear and indifference to the fullness of love, that we might become extensions of God’s universal love.
Come Holy Spirit of life, lead us to resist the systems of death and embrace the fullness of life, that we might live and let live and seek the God of life!

Come Holy Spirit of the nonviolent Jesus, guide us to become his disciples, apostles, prophets and saints, that we might follow in his footsteps, carry on his campaign of universal nonviolence, and share in his resurrection peace.

We ask this in the name of the nonviolent Jesus. Amen.

Thanks for reading to the end, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work, and listen to The Nonviolent Jesus podcast every Monday on your favorite podcast platform for more encouragement, inspiration and insights.

🌻, John

Today on The Nonviolent Jesus podcast, I speak with Bishop Michael Curry who served as the 27th presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church. Elected in 2015, he retired in 2024.

Throughout his forty years of ordained ministry, Bishop Curry has been a prophetic leader, particularly in the areas of racial reconciliation, climate change, evangelism, immigration policy, and marriage equality.

Bishop Curry is the author of five books, including the best-seller, Love Is the Way, as well as, The Power of Love; Crazy Christians and Following the Way of Jesus.

He captured the world’s attention when he preached at Harry and Megan’s wedding at Westminster Abbey and called the whole world to love.

“A Christianity that doesn’t take the way of Jesus, his way of radical unconditional love, his way of nonviolent living, always goes wrong. Sacrificial love is the way of God and the way of life!”

“As Duke Ellington said, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!’”

Bishop Curry talks about Jesus as an organizer, and what he asks us to do when we join the movement of God, and what that movement means. His enthusiasm is infectious and his words run deep.

When I asked for his parting words of encouragement, he said this is “a long distance walk, so we need each other, we need community.”

Then he sang the old spiritual: “Walk together children, and don’t you get weary; there’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land!”

If you need encouragement, inspiration, and want to “hold on to hope in troubled times”, you want to listen to this episode with Bishop Michael Curry today (and it’s worth a repeat).

https://rss.com/podcasts/the-nonviolent-jesus-podcast/2793535

On this week’s episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I speak with Kate Common on the nonviolent origins of the Hebrew community as she describes in her new book, Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, the Bible, and the Future of Christianity (Orbis).

Dr. Kate Common is the Assistant Professor of Public and Practical Theology at Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and the Theologian-in-Residence at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Northampton, MA. (katecommon.com)

She reports that decades of archeological evidence from the “highland settlements” now prove there was no genocide as Israel entered the promised land.

Instead of conquest and genocide, the Hebrews originated from a peaceful, nonmilitaristic movement of indigenous people who formed egalitarian communities living outside the reach of the Egyptian empire.

“In the battle of Jericho, in the book of Joshua, Israel’s army kills everyone-- men, women, children and livestock. Suddenly, with a case of “story whiplash”, human violence—genocide--is condoned by God,” she explains.

Instead of conquest and genocide, the Hebrews originated from a peaceful, nonmilitaristic movement of indigenous people who formed egalitarian communities living outside the reach of the Egyptian empire.

“These people never had a conquest story until 500 years later in 722 BCE when Israel was terrorized and conquered by the Assyrian empire. Later, they wrote their origins story as a conquest of the promised land, portraying themselves like the brutal, genocidal Assyrians!” That false narrative has been used ever since to justify violence, and two of the great heresies, Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism.

“Until we had developed the field of archeology, our knowledge of ancient Israel was the Bible - 100 years ago that changed.”

White European colonists who killed millions of indigenous people and enslaved millions of Africans invoked this image, as did the white racists who created South Africa’s apartheid, and the Israeli warmakers and Christian Zionists who justify the recent genocide in Gaza.

Secretary of War Hegseth recently invoked the genocide described in Joshua to defend the US and Israeli war on Iran.

Listen to Kate Common here and discover new insights in the biblical origins of Hebrew and Christian peacemaking.

For more information on our podcasts and interactive Zoom talks, visit us at The Beatitudes Center here

Kate Common’s book “Undoing Conquest” and my newest book “Universal Love” can be found at Orbis Books

Thank you for reading this far, we appreciate your support!

🌻, John

This week on The Nonviolent Jesus podcast I speak with my friend Bishop Mariann Budde of the National Cathedral. She received global attention last year during the interfaith prayer service at the National Cathedral when she called upon Trump to show “mercy” to people.

As a reminder, here is an excerpt of her sermon:

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now (...).”

“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands, to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honour the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. The good of all people in this nation and the world.”

Mariann Budde is the first woman elected to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC and the National Cathedral. Before that, she served for 18 years as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. She is the author of three books, most recently, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith.

“I knew for months that I would be preaching at an interfaith service,” she tells me. “We didn’t know if Trump would come. I felt two things. I had to speak the truth about the dangers of praying for unity as a country when we were as a people and our elected officials had no intention of working toward that unity. I knew, too, there were many people who were terrified and wondered if there was a place for them with his return, so I took the opportunity to remind the most powerful person in the country that he could afford to be generous and merciful.”

One year later, this past January, she returned to Minneapolis and spoke at rallies denouncing the ICE raids and killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. “There was a sense of resolve, horror, exhaustion, fear and defiance. I’ve never been part of anything like it.”

Listen to Marian Budde here

More podcast episodes and interactive Zoom talks on Beatitudes Center

Thank you for reading this far, we appreciate your support.

🌻, John

“One is called to live nonviolently,” Daniel Berrigan once wrote, “even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

In some ways, that statement sums up the life and teachings of the legendary priest, author, poet and activist Daniel Berrigan, my friend and teacher who would have turned 100 on May 9^th, 2021. The only way to survive in the world of violence, indeed, to live and thrive and even make a difference, he insisted, was through the daily life of creative nonviolence.

Dan was famous for his way with words. He put an original twist on everything, making any statement for justice and disarmament more mysterious, poetic, challenging even mystical.

Twenty years ago, when I was going through his archives at Cornell for my collection, Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings, I discovered his unpublished notes for a talk he gave on nonviolence, probably in 1964 or 1965. He spoke of “the nonviolent mystique,” which he said was more important than “the nonviolent tactic,” and went on to speak about “the nonviolent mystique in action.” Such puzzling expressions still have the power to take us deeper into self-understanding, and the contemplative depths of movement-building.

“Nonviolence sees itself at its best, as indivisible, and at its least, as potentially universal, that is, as a way of life that is simply human,” he said. “So you always note among responsible people both a profound spiritual root and a profound political responsibility.”

Here was his point: the nonviolent person was “a person of history and a person within history, the person who believes that history has a future, the one who within normal times can save normal times from their idolatries—neglect of the poor, growing bourgeois selfishness, weapons of war, and the other realities around us. So the nonviolent person is a person there. Period. In normal times, in crucial times.”

That, to me, as his friend, editor, fellow priest, and now literary executor, sums up the extraordinary, prophetic life of Daniel Berrigan: he was a person of nonviolence within the history of violence who through mystique and action helped transform the times and even history toward nonviolence. I don’t know what greater compliment can be paid of anyone.

***

I first met Dan soon after entering the Jesuits in the early 1980s, at the Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania. We stayed up late that first night talking. I remember asking him how in the world I could ever work for peace.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked me. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t live in fear. Live in faith and hope and peace.” I was shocked. No one ever said such things to me. I decided then and there to give it a try. Later, I realized: we all need a teacher who tells us not to be afraid.

Right from the start, I saw his fearlessness. To me, he was Gandhi. He was a tower of faith, so it felt like I was sitting with St. Peter or St. Paul. In fact, I had never meet anyone before who exhibited such faith. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met anyone like that since. Dan believed in God and Jesus, but as the God of universal love and as the instrument of that daring, universal nonviolence love, and he acted like he believed. And paid the price. Dearly. He let the chips fall where they may, as he used to tell me. But no matter. He kept going, right until his last breath, trusting in the God of peace, cursing the false gods of war and violence, adhering to the nonviolent Jesus, and doing what he could to spread the revolution of Gospel nonviolence.

The next morning, Dan stood in front of a little podium before our small group of retreatants and started to talk about Jesus, using the letter to the Ephesians as his text. He said:

The world is a kingdom of death, and into this world walks the great Yes of God, the Christ, bringing trouble and all sorts of dislocations, unmaskings, law-breakings, and truth-telling. The disarmed God and the disarming of God in Christ is the great scandal of history. We are not yet a disarmed church because we are not yet worshippers of a disarmed God. God comes to us disarmed in Christ … Christ does the wrong things, in the wrong places, at the wrong time, to the wrong people. Today, we are asked to live out the drama of the disarmed Christ in a world armed to the teeth. To confess Jesus these days is to work for disarmament, justice and peace.

I was astonished then, and I’m still astonished. I know these quotes by heart because I still have the notes I took that morning long ago. Dan told me that following Jesus meant working publicly for peace and justice. If you are not working for peace and justice, you are not following Jesus. It doesn’t matter how pious you are, how connected you are to a religious institution. Discipleship to the nonviolent Jesus in a culture of permanent war and violence requires radical, active, creative, public nonviolence.

***

Daniel Berrigan was born on May 9, 1921 the fifth of six boys. He grew up in Syracuse; entered the Jesuits in 1939; was ordained a priest in 1952; and published his first book of poetry, “Time Without Number,” in 1957, which won the Lamont Poetry Award. Dan quickly became well known as a poet, and published a book a year from then on, some 50 books of poetry, essays, theology studies, journals, plays, and scripture studies. At Dan’s 85th birthday party, Kurt Vonnegut said to us, “For me, Daniel Berrigan is Jesus as a poet.”

By the mid-1960s, with his brother Phil, Dan became a leading voice against the war in Vietnam. On October 22, 1967, there was a massive mobilization on the Pentagon. Dan took a busload of Cornell students to the protest and suddenly, they all marched forward to face arrest, so he joined them. He was the first priest in U.S. history arrested in the cause of justice and peace, and with that, believe it or not, opened up a new tradition in the Catholic Church that continues to this day.

In February 1968, he traveled to North Vietnam with Howard Zinn. While there, the United States bombed Hanoi. They hid out in a shelter for a full week as U.S. bombs fell above him. He got the point. He was ready to up the ante.

On May 17, 1968, a month after the killing of Dr. King, Dan and Phil and seven others entered a draft board house in Catonsville, Maryland, took some 300 draft files out to the parking lot and, in front of the press, poured homemade napalm on the draft records and burned them. He then distributed one of the greatest statements in resistance literature:

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, for the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”

Their action attracted massive press coverage around the country, even the world, and eventually led to over 300 similar demonstrations that systematically ended the draft and hastened the end of the war. You will not read this anywhere, nor will you hear about this on Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on the Vietnam War. There is no mention of the Berrigans, though I tried my best to reach out to the prestigious filmmaker.

The draft board raids were the key. In the days before computers, when type-written records were it, the destruction of paper records throughout the Northeast meant that thousands of young men could not be drafted to kill for the US! The days of the Vietnam War were numbered.

Dan and his friends were, of course, found guilty. He spent the summer of 1969 writing his popular play, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” but the war only worsened. So instead of reporting to prison, in April 1970, he went “underground.” For months, Dan traveled around, speaking to the media, appearing on the national news, writing major articles against the war, and infuriating J. Edgar Hoover and his henchmen.

In the summer of 1970, he appeared one Sunday morning in a Philadelphia church to give the sermon. “We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power,” he told the congregation. That August, he was arrested on Block Island, Rhode Island, and sent to Danbury prison where he barely survived the next few years.

Dan became one the most well-known priests in the world, if not its most well-known, the world’s first radical priest since Edmund Campion was hunted down by the British royalty. He consistently called the Church to abolish the just war theory and return to the nonviolence of Jesus. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine, interviewed by none other than Dick Cavett, and referred to in songs by Paul McCartney (“Too Many People”) and Paul Simon (“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”). Given the church scandals of today, it’s hard to imagine his radical daring-do.

While underground, for example, Dan wrote an open letter in the Village Voice to the Weathermen, inviting them to reconsider their violence and use the tactic of nonviolence in their resistance to the war.

“The death of a single human being is too heavy a price to pay for the vindication of any principle, however sacred,” he wrote.

That, I submit, is his most important teaching and worthy of reflection for the rest of history.

In other words, he said, there is no cause however noble for which we will ever again support the taking of a single human life. We do not kill people. We do not support killing. We do not kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong. We work to stop the killing. And so, we will not join the U.S. military, we will not send our kids into the military, we will urge young people to quit the military, and we will resist the military and its wars for the rest of our lives. The future is a world without war, a new culture of justice and nonviolence that we can barely imagine, but is within our grasp if we dare work for it.

One of the most amazing aspects about Dan and Phil Berrigan was that they kept at it. The press grew bored, the crowds stopped showing up, their book sales dwindled, the movement died, the world worsened–and they kept at it. That is one of their greatest legacies.

On September 9, 1980, Dan, Phil and six friends, walked in to the General Electric headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and hammered on unarmed nuclear weapon nosecones. The Plowshares Eight were arrested, convicted and faced up to 10 years in prison. Theirs was the first of some 100 “Plowshares actions”–including the one I did with Phil in North Carolina in 1993, for which I faced 20 years in prison. Here’s what Dan said during his famous 1981 trial:

The only message I have to the world is: We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly … It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.” There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to people. There are other projects I could be very helpful at. And I can’t do them. I cannot. Because everything is endangered. Everything is up for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that — everything.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Dan spoke each week around the country. He continued to publish a steady stream of poetry, essays, journals and then, a long series on the Hebrew prophets. He served as a hospital chaplain in a New York hospital for the poor, and then at St. Vincent’s Hospital, ministering to AIDS patients. In 1984, he traveled to El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later published his journal from the experience, “Steadfastness of the Saints.” In 1985, he traveled to South America where he helped out in the movie, “The Mission,” with Robert DeNiro, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson.

Throughout those years, Dan formed and participated in a little Manhattan peace group, which he named “Kairos.” There we met with friends every other Tuesday night for 30 years — one of the greatest experiences of my life. Every few months, we planned nonviolent actions and got arrested against some injustice, usually at the military recruiting station in Times Square or the Riverside Research nuclear weapons laboratory (until they closed it!) or the U.S.S. Intrepid War Museum on the Hudson River. Along the way, Dan was supported by our two greatest friends—actor Martin Sheen and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

By the mid-2000s, Dan was frail and tired. He was never sick; literally, he never suffered any major disease, never had cancer, never had surgery. In fact, he never took a pill! But he began to spend long hours every afternoon in bed. By 2010, he was actively declining. We moved him to the Jesuit infirmary in the Bronx, where I visited him every three months over the next few years until his death.

What people do not know is that he was resented, if not actively, hated by other Jesuits since the 1960s. No Jesuit should become that famous, no matter what, so he was despised by many. I remember that during practically every visit to the Jesuit infirmary during those years, most of the other Jesuits would avoid him so as not to have to speak with him—all because of his public stand for peace. Some would not get in the elevator with him. His friends and relatives, on the other hand, surrounded him with love, and he knew it. And so, he felt loved till the day he died on April 30, 2016, one week before his 95^th birthday.

****

I spent a thousand evenings, maybe thousands of evenings with Dan, over the decades, and he would always stop the meal or the visit or the trip, and insist that his guests go around and share about their lives, their struggles, their hopes and their dreams. Every occasion in his presence turned into a life-changing, spiritual experience. In that sense, he really was a Christ-figure. He was concerned about our lives and what we were doing with the precious gift of life, especially faced with this all-consuming culture of death. “What are we doing with our lives? What does it mean to be a human being? Can we become people of nonviolence?” These were questions I heard Daniel Berrigan ask repeatedly.

You can find clues in his poetry and writings:

A fairly modest urging—
Don’t kill, whatever pretext
Leave the world unbefoulded.
Don’t hoard.
Stand somewhere.

*

The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare…
— our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege —
was
civil
obedience

*

Walking by the sea
I put on like glasses
on a squinting short-sighted soul
your second sight
and I see washed ashore
the last hour of the world
the murdered clock of Hiroshima

“We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price,” he wrote in No Bars to Manhood. “And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total — but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war, at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”

Dan taught us to let go of results and to work for justice, disarmament and peace as an ordinary part of our day-to-day lives, whether or not it would make a difference. Do the good because it’s good, he said. Speak the truth because it’s true. Work for peace and justice because that’s what the God of peace and justice wants. Do what we can, and leave the outcome in God’s hands. From now on, nonviolence and nonviolent resistance are our ordinary day-to-day life. Just trust that it will one day bear good fruit.

When I went to him for advice as a 22 year old novice, he said: “All you have to do is close your eyes to the culture and open them to your friends.” When my friend Ken Butigan sought him out for advice, Dan said, find a good group of friends that you can pray with and march with, and everything will work out.

“Some people argue that equanimity achieved through inner spiritual work is a necessary condition for sustaining one’s ethical and political commitments,” he once said in an interview. “But to the prophets of the Bible, this would have been an absolutely foreign language and a foreign view of the human. The notion that one has to achieve peace of mind before stretching out one’s hand to one’s neighbor is a distortion of our human experience, and ultimately a dodge of our responsibility. Life is a rollercoaster and one had better buckle one’s belt and take the trip. This focus on equanimity is actually a narrow-minded, selfish approach to reality dressed up within the language of spirituality.” This again is quintessential Berrigan.

“I know that the prophetic vision is not popular today in some spiritual circles,” he continued. “But our task is not to be popular or to be seen as having an impact, but to speak the deepest truths that we know. We need to live our lives in accord with the deepest truths we know, even if doing so does not produce immediate results in the world.”

***

“If you are going to spend your life resisting death,” he told me when I was 22, “you better learn how to live life to the full.” He both resisted death and lived life to the full more than anyone I have ever known. He walked every day, enjoyed healthy food and a drink or two every evening, and loved friends and laughter and nature and poetry and books and people. At the end of our regular daily community evening Mass, before drinks and dinner, he offered the (hilarious) ritual announcement: “We’ve been good long enough.”

Dan lived as if the resurrection of the nonviolent, revolutionary, executed Jesus was true, that the worst had already happened, that the outcome was indeed in better hands than ours, and that despite the evidence, there is reason for hope, and all we have to do is go forward an enact that hope in organized grassroots movements of disarmament, justice and peace.

“Jesus didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” he said to me and friend once when we were having a mass and a picnic in Central Park. It was Easter Sunday—I don’t remember when–and I was commenting that I was appalled that Jesus even came back, and that he remained so nonviolent and loving after all he been through, including his arrest and execution. His response remains with me to this day. Dan taught that the resurrection of Jesus meant we were called to carry on his campaign of nonviolence, and live out the “slight edge of life over death.”

This was the breakthrough of Daniel Berrigan in modern Christian history. Here’s a favorite passage he wrote in an obscure publication long ago, which I hold as one of his greatest teachings:

“Once there was a dead man, a criminal, a subject of capital punishment. And lo! He refused to stay dead. He stood up. As the authorities shortly came to sense, this was an earthquake in nature; in the nature of law and order, in the nature of death, the nature of war. For in the nature of things, as defined by the nation state (a great one for deciding what the nature of things is) — dead men stay dead. The word from Big Brother, the word that gives him clout, inspires fear, is—a criminal, once disposed of, stays disposed!

Not at all. Along come these crazies shouting in public, “Our man’s not dead, He’s risen!” Now I submit you can’t have such a word going around, and still run the state properly. The first nonviolent revolution was, of course, the Resurrection. The event had to include death as its first act. And the command to Peter, “Put up your sword.” So that it might be clear, once and for all, that Christians suffer death rather than inflict it.

All worldly systems and arrangements are simply by-passed by the Resurrection,” Dan said on another occasion. “If death has no hold over people, in the sense that they’ve exorcised their fear of death — then what’s left worth fearing, or worth hoping, from any worldly structure? They deserve, one and all, the feisty appellation conferred on them by Dorothy Day, ‘The filthy rotten system.’ I take it she was referring to their main function, multiplying the metaphors and means of death. The end of such a world, as she realized, was not only near. The end has occurred.

Dan walked and talked and practiced resurrection. Dan referred to all his peace work as living in the resurrection. That’s why I define resurrection as having nothing to do with death, having not a trace of violence in you. Resurrection means total nonviolence. Dan knew our survival was already guaranteed, so he said, we need not be afraid, or violent or discouraged. We are heading toward resurrection! Here, in my opinion, is his greatest teaching:

Since 1980 and all the Plowshares actions, some of us continue to labor to break the demonic clutch on our souls, of the ethic of Mars, of wars and rumor of wars, inevitable wars, just wars, necessary wars, victorious wars, and say our no in acts of hope. For us, all these repeated arrests, the interminable jailings, the life of our small communities, the discipline of nonviolence, these have embodied an ethic of resurrection. Simply put, we long to taste that event, its thunders and quakes, its great Yes. We want to test the resurrection in our bones. To see if we might live in hope, instead of the thicket of cultural despair, nuclear despair, a world of perpetual war. We want to taste the resurrection. May I say we have not been disappointed.

That’s the gauntlet that Dan threw down before us — to taste the resurrection, to pursue the heights and depths and length and breadth of creative nonviolence.

Despite the insanity of the world and the times, we have been given a beautiful example of a Gospel nonviolent life. Like Dan, we too can stand up and say No to racism, war, greed, poverty, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction. We too can base our lives on loving kindness, building community, practicing nonviolence, speaking out publicly, advocating for a new culture of peace, and spreading the vision of a new nonviolent world far and wide. This is the mission, whether or not we make a difference, and like Dan, we can go forward, knowing that we, too, will not be disappointed. May we carry on his mission of peace and nonviolence, and herald the coming of a new world without war, poverty, racism, nuclear weapons or environmental destruction, a new culture of justice and peace.

—May, 2021

If you are still reading, thank you for being here, we appreciate your support:

ICYMI: This week’s episode of The Nonviolent Jesus podcast includes recordings of Dan reciting his poetry, as well as a song from Dar Williams, you can listen right now here

Find more books on Dan Berrigan and his writings on OribisBooks.org

More episodes and interactive Zoom meetings are available on our website beatitudescenter.org

🌻, John

---I first met Dan soon after entering the Jesuits in the 1982 at a retreat and we stayed up late talking. I was 22 and giving him excuses why I could never stand up publicly and work for peace and justice and finally he said, “What are you afraid of? Don’t be afraid. Don’t live in fear. Live in faith and hope and peace.”

No one ever said that to me. I decided to give it a try. Later, I realized: we all need a teacher who tells us not to be afraid. Here’s what he said the first morning of our retreat: The world is a kingdom of death, and into this world walks the great Yes of God, the Christ, bringing all sorts of trouble, all sorts of dislocations, unmaskings, law-breakings, and truth-telling.

The disarmed God and the disarming of God in Christ is the great scandal of history. We are not yet a disarmed church because we are not yet worshippers of a disarmed God. God comes to us disarmed in Christ ... Christ does the wrong things, in the wrong places, at the wrong time, to the wrong people. Today, we are asked to live out the drama of the disarmed Christ in a world armed to the teeth. To confess Jesus these days is to work for disarmament, justice and peace.”

Dan told me that following Jesus meant working publicly for peace and justice. If you are not working for peace and justice, you are not following the nonviolent Jesus. In 1984, Pax Christi asked me to interview him. At the end I blurted out, “So what’s the point of all this again?” And he said, “All you have to do is make your story fit into Jesus’ story.” That was so helpful. A few years later, he began a weekend retreat saying, “If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood…”

---Over the years, I saw and heard him teach the Sermon on the Mount and trash the just war theory because it has nothing to do with the Gospel or Jesus. It’s actually based in Aristotle, but now, with nuclear weapons, you can never meet any of the conditions of the just war theory.

Thank God with Pope Francis and Pope Leo the church is now beginning to reject the just war theory and return to the Gospel of nonviolence, even as most theologians and right wing church commentators refuse to acknowledge this development. So for example, here’s what Dan wrote in the early 1980s: “I was in Europe some time ago speaking on the nuclear question. I came in the wake of an internationally known moral theologian. He said, “The Berrigans are off base. They are talking about the Sermon on the Mount as thought it were realizable now. What we really need is an ethic of the interim.”

Dan continues: “An ethic of the interim as I understand it, would allow us to fill the gap between today and tomorrow with the bodies of all who must die, before we accept the word of Christ. On the contrary, I think the Sermon on the Mount concerns us here and now, or concerns us never. In whatever modest and clumsy a way, we are called to honor the preference of Christ for suffering rather than inflicting suffering, for dying rather than killing. In that sense, all ‘interim ethics’ have been cast aside. The time to obey is now.”

Finally, Dan lived as if the resurrection of the nonviolent, revolutionary, Jesus was true, that the worst had already happened, that the outcome was indeed in better hands than ours, that death does not get the last word, and that despite the evidence, there is reason for hope, which he called the slight edge of life over death, and all we have to do is go forward in the footsteps of the nonviolent Jesus in pursuit of disarmament, justice and peace.

You can find more about Dan Berrigan, practicing nonviolence as a way of life and our guests on The Nonviolent Jesus podcast on beatitudescenter.org

Listen to Dan reciting his poems here

🌻, John

ICYMI: On this week’s episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I offer reflections on the life, witness and teachings of my friend and mentor, the legendary peacemaker and war resister Rev. Daniel Berrigan who died ten years ago this week on April 30, 2016, just before his 95th birthday. [Visit www.danielberrigan.org] 

 https://beatitudescenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Podcast-S2E69-on-Daniel-Berrigan-for-the-10th-anniv.-of-his-death.mp3

This special episode begins and ends with my friend Dar Williams singing her great song “I had no right” about Dan, and features recordings of Dan reading three of his poems.

Dan was born in 1921, was a Jesuit priest, poet, author of 50 books, lecturer, and antiwar activist who was arrested over 200 times in protests. I’ll share about his two great actions, the Catonsville 9 and the Plowshares 8, and talk about his teachings on resistance, peacemaking, nonviolence, hope, detachment from the results of our action, and Jesus.

Here’s a quintessential Dan Berrigan statement:

“The Bible teaches in many places and warns, denounces and illumines this one bitter truth: the violence of humans is, in essence, genocidal, mass suicidal. War is not itself until it is total war, claiming the total person, the human family in its entirety, universal life. Such a will, in our lifetime, creates weapons to match its madness, and for once, the weapons are equal to the will. They are as merciless as we are; they at length resemble us, our alter ego. War has thus become the ultimate anti-Christ, the obscene god of death, condemning all of life to capital punishment.”

I consider Dan one of God’s greatest prophets of peace. Please listen in to this special episode and be inspired by Dan to stand up, speak out, and take action for justice, disarmament and peace!

🌻, John