Size | Seeds | Peers | Completed |
---|---|---|---|
253.99 MiB | 0 | 0 | 0 |
*******************************************************************************
Nonviolence: 25 Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea
*******************************************************************************
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Information
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Type.................: Audio Book
Serial #.............: http://jimmymccarty.wordpress.com/author/jimmymccarty/
More Info............: SEEKING FIRST THE KINGDOM
Title................: Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea
Artist...............: Mark Kurlansky
Year.................: 2007
Genre................: Religio-Social
Comment..............: Narrated by: Richard Dreyfuss with a foreword by The Dalai Lama
Type.................: Studio
Duration.............: Approx. 7.5 Hours
Audio Format.........: MP3
Ripper...............: Exact Audio Copy
Encoder..............: Fraunhofer MP3Enc
Bitrate..............: VBR
Hz...................: 44,100
Channels.............: Joint Stereo
Reader...............: Lite-On
Source...............: CD
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post Information
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted by............: SoJSg
Posted on............: 8/17/2009
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Release Notes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERY SPECIAL THANKS to Pastor James McCarty for THIS REVIEW!!! YHWH bless,
brother!
********************************************************************************
Book Review: Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky
May 3, 2007 by jimmymccarty
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I just graduated from college a couple days ago and
I’m not supposed to have finished a book already. Well, I did, and it was
great! My friend and ministry partner in college, Jen Rogers, lent me the book
Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea. And let
me tell you…this is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
My sophomore year in college I was preparing for a summer trip to go to India.
Earlier that year I had begun studying Martin Luther King, Jr. on a deeper level
than I had ever been taught during Black History Month in school. I discovered
that he was heavily influenced by Gandhi. So, in order to get a better
understanding of why MLK decided to use nonviolent civil disobedience, and to
learn something of India’s history and culture, I decided to dive into reading
Gandhi’s autobiography, another biography of Gandhi, and several collections of
his writings and teachings. I was amazed while reading his story and teachings
that he was able to transform an entire sub-continent without ever raising a
finger in violence, and that he was able to live out such stringent beliefs. It
took a non-Christian to confirm in me that Jesus’ teachings were livable.
After studying the lives, works and teachings of Gandhi and MLK, and reading
John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, I was convinced and convicted of the
moral and practical insufficiency of violence in pursuing a just cause and
became a believer in nonviolence. As a Christian I am convinced that I can no
longer participate in, or support, violence in any way. It goes against the
call of Jesus. (This was a big change for me. I grew up a military child and
adored the courage of soldiers in war. War movies, and Arnold Scwarzenegger
movies, were my favorites. I also grew up looking up to several gangster
rappers who glorified violence, and as a little kid watched pro wrestling
religiously. I believed a real man always fought back. I know it is hard for
Americans to imagine violence being wrong, we were built on it!, but I did come
to this conclusion. My world completely changed after this revelation.)
I have spent much of the time since then trying to discover exactly what that
means. Am I a pacifist? Am I only against war? What about self-defense? How
far should I take this? You can check a recent blog I wrote
http://jimmymccarty.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/killing-violence/ to see some of my
related thoughts.
Well…I know I am not a pacifist if people want to understand that term as
meaning passive. I fully buy into the active nonviolence and civil disobedience
that MLK and Gandhi used. Jen was aware of my conviction, and my struggles with
defining that conviction, and therefore lent me Kurlansky’s book.
Kurlansky’s book, Nonviolence, is an interpretive history, and a very good one.
It very briefly, it is only 184 pages, covers the history of nonviolence. The
book explores four major interpretations of history: the rise and fall of
nonviolent teachings in all religions (especially Christianity and Islam), the
practical effectiveness of nonviolent resistance in world history, the practical
ineffectiveness of violence throughout history and the ways that violence has
been justified throughout history.
He does a good job in the brief space he has of fleshing out all of these
interpretations. Especially important for Christians to read is his exposition
of the decline of Christianity from a religion that wholly denounced and
condemned violence into a religion, after Constantine’s corruption of the faith,
that justifies and participates in violence on the worst level.
Some of the 25 lessons Kurlansky draws from history are:
1. There is no proactive word for nonviolence. (He explores how this is used by
governments to discredit nonviolence as a legitimate option.)
4. Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent
teachings. (He demonstrates this in numerous world religions.)
6. Somewhere behind every war ther are a few founding lies. (He did not have to
search long to find proof of this.)
8. People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
9. A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If
the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side
has won.
16. Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence. (As can be
seen in WWI leading to WWII leading to the Cold War….)
18. People motivated by fear do not act well.
24. The miracle is that despite all of society’s promotion of warfare, most
soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
These are just a few of the 25 lessons that are brought to light by looking at
the wars of history, and the alternative nonviolent resistance that was
demonstrated alongside them. There are many more just as powerful, and they all
have some historical backing in his presentation of them. My conviction in the
moral and spiritual depravity of violence, and the superiority of nonviolence,
has never been in doubt. I am fully convinced of that through my faith in the
teachings of Jesus. However, my conviction in the practical effectiveness of
nonviolence over violence in achieving desirable ends has wavered back and
forth. Kurlansky’s book helped to confirm in me the beleif that nonviolent
resistance is always preferrable to violent force both morally and practically.
********************************************************************************
********************************************************************************
Killing Violence
April 19, 2007 by jimmymccarty
On Monday the tragedy of the killing of 33 people at Virginia Tech occured.
Yesterday 171 people were killed in insurgent attacks in Baghdad. In the
current elections in Nigeria over 20 people have been killed. America is at war
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Train riders have been killed in India, again, in the
past week. Child soldiers are still being used in northern Uganda. A genocide
is occuring, as I type, in Sudan. Terrorist attacks have begun to hit northern
Africa within the past week. Our inner-cities are daily filled with another dead
body. There is murder, terror, blood and death everywhere. In the face of this
I would like to remind us of something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “For
through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through
violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence
you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out
darkness. Only light can do that.”
How can killing and violence bring peace? Violence doesn’t bring violence to an
end, it doubles the amount being committed. Revenge never brings peace. Hate
never brings love. Dr. King taught that hate, violence, and oppression not only
diminish the humanity of the victim, but also the humanity of the oppressor, the
perpetrator of the violence. In the Christian understanding, there is never a
place for violence and killing. NEVER. It goes against the teachings of Jesus:
”Love your enemy.” “Turn the other cheek.” ” Do good to those who persecute
you.” “Pray for those who do evil to you.” “He who lives by the sword will die
by the sword.” “If you hate your brother you are a murderer.” “Do not even get
angry with your brother.” And Jesus’ ultimate teaching against violence and
revenge was his death on the cross. He died for his murderers.
We, as Christians, must kill violence. There is no time or place for it. The
testimony of the church’s non-violence towards those who would do it to us is
one of our greatest testimonies.
Redemptive violence never redeems anybody. God redeems our humanity; violence
destroys it. Shane Claiborne points out
(http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/2007/04/shane-claiborne-when...
ce-kills.html) that violence destroys the humanity of the one who commits it so
much that they can no longer function as human. This is why we see the
astronomical suicide rates of soldiers who have been in combat and death row
executioners. This is why the Virginia Tech killer, the Columbine killers,
suicide bombers, Hitler, Nero, Judas, etc. committed suicide. Most of history’s
worst killers eventually kill themselves, because we are not created to take
life, but to give it. After killing another we have killed a part of ourselves
until we no longer see the reason to keep living.
The only Christian (and healthy, life giving response) to violence is love. We
must love those who kill, because as the VT and Columbine killers show us, hate
that kills flows from the lack of love. Love is our greatest weapon, and our
greatest defense. Love is what brings redemption. It is the power of
forgiveness, not the power of weaponry, that changes hearts and lives. It is
the power of grace that covers sin, not the power of death.
As we as Christians look out at the world today let us be honest about what we
are facing. We are facing a world that has over 6.5 billion people and
countless millions of automatic rifles, sniper rifles, hand guns, bombs,
missiles, tanks, knives, grenades, land mines, nuclear weapons, biological
weapons, and genius’s who would love to kill and hate humanity. Our only
response is not to meet hate with hate, or violence with violence, or death for
death. Our only response is to meet hate with love, war with peace, injury with
forgiveness and killers with grace. We must do it for it is what Jesus called
us to on the cross. The world has tried this violence for violence thing for
thousands of years and it still hasn’t worked. Let’s try something new. Let’s
kill violence instead of letting it kill us.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Install Notes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Kurlansky was born in Hartford, Connecticut. After receiving a BA in
Theater from Butler University in 1970, and refusing to serve in the military,
Kurlansky worked in New York as a playwright, having a number of off-off
Broadway productions, and as a playwright-in-residence at Brooklyn College. He
won the 1972 Earplay award for best radio play of the year.
In addition, he worked many other jobs including as a commercial fisherman, a
dock worker, a paralegal, a cook and a pastry chef.
In the mid 1970s, unhappy with the direction New York theater was taking, he
turned to journalism, an early interest–he had been an editor on his high school
newspaper. From 1976 to 1991 he worked as a foreign correspondent for The
International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The
Philadelphia Inquirer. Based in Paris and then Mexico, he reported on Europe,
West Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America, Latin America and the Caribbean.
His articles have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines,
including The International Herald Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami
Herald, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Partisan
Review, Harper’s, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Audubon Magazine, Food & Wine,
Gourmet, Bon Apetit and Parade.
In addition to numerous guest lectures at Columbia University School of
Journalism, Yale University, Colby College, Grinnell College, the University of
Dayton and various other schools, he has taught a two week creative writing
class in Assisi, Italy, a one week intensive non-fiction workshop in Devon,
England for the Arvon Foundation, and has guest lectured all over the world on
history, writing, environmental issues and other subjects. In Spring 2007 he
was the Harman writer-in-residence at Baruch College teaching a fourteen week
honors course titled “Journalism and the Literary Imagination.” His books have
been translated into twenty-five languages and he often illustrates them
himself.
Among the awards he has received are:
*
2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonviolence
*
2007 Doctor of Letters, Butler University
*
2006 Bon Apetit Magazine’s Food Writer of the Year.
*
2001 Basque Hall of Fame
*
2001 Honorary ambassadorship from the Basque government
*
Cod received the 1999 James Beard Award for Food Writing and the 1999
Glenfiddich Award
*
The children’s book, The Cod’s Tale, received the Orbis Pictus award from
the National Council of Teachers of English.
*
The children’s book, the Story of Salt, received the ALA Notable Book
Award
*
A Continent of Islands and Cod both received The New York Public Library
Best Books of the Year Award
*
Salt received the Pluma Plata award from the Bilbao Book Fair and was a
finalist for the LA Times Science Writing Award and the James Beard food writing
award.
*
1968 received the ALA Notable Book Award
*
Cod, Salt, and 1968 were all New York Times Best Sellers and along with
the Basque History of the World were international best sellers.
********************************************************************************
********************************************************************************
7 Compact Discs ripped to 7 separate Folders. Approximately 1 hour and some
minutes each CD-Rip...
SEEKING FIRST THE KINGDOM @
http://jimmymccarty.wordpress.com/author/jimmymccarty
********************************************************************************
********************************************************************************
===> Humbly brought to you by:
`-=SoJSg=-`
:wave: