Tuesday, December 2, 2008

A Century of Peace Making, made possible through a Carnegie-Whitney Award

Anthologies/Readers

UNESCO. (1980). Peace on Earth: A Peace Anthology. Paris: UNESCO.
Peace on Earth is a tribute to the memory of the late Pope John XXIII and to UNESCO’s commitment to international peace as stated in its Constitution. The anthology serves this noble purpose by including “beautiful, poetic, and well-written” writings from all parts of the world across time, with the hope that they’d touch the heart and mind of readers. In addition to sharing humanity’s common dreams and voices for peace, the selections also reflect UNESCO’s broad-minded and realistic view on constructing peace in the world -- with the inclusion of writings on the foundations of peace; the role of politics, alliances and the balance of power; economic, social, religious and moral factors that would favorably or adversely affect peace, with writings on equitable relations among states, education for peace, and observance of human rights. This anthology supports very well the vision of peace in the UNESCO Constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”


Barash, D. P. (2000). Approaches to Peace: A Reader in Peace Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
This Reader offers an academic, scholarly approach that explores “ways of approaching peace” in its six chapters: Approaches to War, Building “Negative Peace,” Building “Positive Peace,” “Nonviolence,” “Religious Inspiration,” and “Peace Movements, Transformation, and the Future.” True to its claim as “a core curriculum” on peace studies, this Reader offers a unified form for each chapter that includes an analytical/ introductory essay, core selections on the topic, Study Questions, and Suggestions for Further Reading. With the inclusion of Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Daoist, Jewish classics, the majority of the selections are from modern and contemporary thinkers, writers, scholars, and peace-makers such as Sigmund Freud, Johan Galtung, Henry David Thoreau, Elise Boulding, Vaclav Havel, and etc. The editor’s championship for peace is evident in his statement that peace studies/this reader “is scholarly, but not disinterested. It does not simply encourage the study of peace, but is in favor of peace: peace, we proclaim, is better than war.”

Personal
Camus, A. (1946). Translated by Dwight Macdonald. Neither victims nor executioners. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, ©1986.
This 1986 edition offers a precious introduction, “An Ethic Superior to Murder” by R. Scott Kennedy and Peter Klotz-Chamberlin that acknowledges Camus’ foresight and threads Camus’s argument as relevant from World War II to the War against Vietnam. Eloquent and unambiguous in his moral position, Camus addressed the 20th century as the century of fear and the grave realities of World War II, the rise of totalitarianism, fascism, Nazi Germany, military powers, imperialism, tyranny, the nation state, technology, and violence in the name of Just War. Camus urged individuals to take personal responsibility, to challenge the justification and legitimization of war and violence, to engage in dialog/reflection/thinking, to break the cycle of violence by saying No to be either a victim or an executioner. Despite of accusations of being a Utopian, Camus held firm his position that in a murderous world, people are to reflect on murder and make a choice. For him, the choice is clear: “Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion… the former has a thousand times the chances of success… that words are more powerful than munitions.”

McCarthy, C. (2002). I'd Rather Teach Peace. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Colman McCarthy, renowned columnist of the Washington Post, accounts his journey teaching peace-making in schools, juvenile prison, and university classrooms in the D.C. area. Driven by a deep personal question that gripped the author, “Can peace-making be taught and learned?” McCarthy planted the seeds of peace in students, teachers, administrators and established courses on the history, theory, and practice of nonviolence in school curricula. He has taught over 5,000 students, trains college students, and directs the Center for Teaching Peace, a non-profit where his wife and three children are also involved as teachers. McCarthy’s teaching is rooted in his vision that we organize our society in such a way that peace becomes a strong, enduring, and moral force. The book offers daring revelations of politics in Washington, discussions on nonviolence, pacifism, and conflict management as well as wisdom, idealism, and urgency in peace education. McCarthy applies ideas/ideals to practice based on a firm belief that “the peaceable society is not only possible, it is inevitable – if we press on, starting today. Tomorrow is too late.”

Weil, Simone, (2005). “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” in War and the Iliad. New York: New York Review Books.
Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” is collected in War and the Iliad, which also includes two other essays: Rachel Bespaloff’s “On the Iliad” and Hermann Broch’s “The Style of the Mythical Age: An Rachel Bespaloff,” and an “Introduction: A Tale of Two Iliads” by Christopher Benfey. The essays were written by three contemporaries in war-torn Europe, who fled to America, bearing the burden and suffering, and continued the fight in their own ways. Simone Weil presented the Greek epic as the embodiment of force that subjected the human to “a thing” -- “a force that kills.” Force kills love and grace; it destroys a city; human suffering is laid bare, undiluted; no one is exempt, friends or foe. Simone Weil argued against those armed with the superiority of their religion and refused to see human misery as universal – both “human and divine,” as deceived by illusion, exaltation, and fanaticism. In the end she reveals her greatest compassion for human suffering by asserting the pervasive destructive power of force: “No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is…there is no refuge from fate.”