Download or read book The Pacifist Conscience written by Peter Mayer and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Conscience written by Louisa Thomas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Norman Thomas and his brothers' upbringing prepared them for a life of service-but their calls to conscience threatened to tear them apart Conscience is Louisa Thomas's beautifully written account of the remarkable Thomas brothers at the turn of the twentieth century. At a time of trial, each brother struggled to understand his obligation to his country, family, and faith. Centered around the story of the eldest, Norman Thomas (later the six-time Socialist candidate for president), the book explores the difficult decisions the four brothers faced with the advent of World War I. Sons of a Presbyterian minister and grandsons of missionaries, they shared a rigorous moral upbringing, a Princeton education, and a faith in the era's spirit of hope. Two became soldiers. Ralph enlisted right away, heeding President Woodrow Wilson's call to fight for freedom. A captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, he was ultimately wounded in France. Arthur, the youngest, was less certain about the righteousness of the cause but sensitive to his obligation as a citizen-and like so many men eager to have a chance to prove himself. The other two were pacifists. Evan became a conscientious objector, protesting conscription; when the truce was signed on November 11, 1918, he was in solitary confinement. Norman left his ministry in the tenements of East Harlem, New York, and began down the course he would follow for the rest of his life, fighting for civil liberties, social justice, and greater equality, and against violence as a method of change. Conscience reveals the tension among responsibilities, beliefs, and desires, between ideas and actions-and, sometimes, between brothers. Conscience moves from the gothic buildings of Princeton to the tenements of New York City, from the West Wing of the White House to the battlefields of France, tracking how four young men navigated a period of great uncertainty and upheaval. A Thomas family member herself (Norman was Louisa's great grandfather), Thomas proposes that there is something we might recover from the brothers' debates about conscience: a way of talking about personal liberty and social obligation, about being true to oneself and to one another.

Download or read book The Pacifist Conscience Edited by Peter Mayer written by Peter MAYER (Writer on Political Science.) and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War written by Cynthia Eller and published by Praeger Publishers. This book was released on 1991 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was pacifism an acceptable response to Hitler's military and moral assault? This volume analyzes the moral and religious arguments justifying an individual's opposition to war while answering this question. Drawing largely on interviews with sixty World War II conscientious objectors, including those who served in military non-combatant or civilian roles and those who were jailed as violators of the Selective Service law, this study provides an oral history of the difficulties encountered as a conscientious objector in the Last Good War, and uses World War II as a case study for examining how people arrive at the moral decisions they act upon. Faced with the moral certainty of the Allied position in World War II, pacifism was clearly an unpopular position at that time. This work provides a thorough description of the political and social history of pacifism prior to and including World War II and describes the wide variety of theological, political, and moral beliefs on which pacifism is grounded. The discussion focuses on the factors that defining the pacifist attitude and actions, and also considers the consequences of those actions. Contrary to generally accepted views, the pacifist's concern with the future ramifications of his or her decisions is affirmed. Careful documentation and an interdisciplinary scope offer oral historians, historians of World War II, World War II conscientious objectors, pacifists, and the general public a solid and scholarly look at pacifism.

Download or read book War and Christian Conscience written by Fahey, Joseph J. and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This primer on war and the Christian conscience begins in an imaginary college classroom as students react to news that the draft has been reinstated. ""Why cant I finish college?"" asks one student. ""Why do I have to go?"" These urgent and personal questions offer the entry to a clear and comprehensive outline of the basic Christian responses to the problem of war. As Fahey shows, the Christian tradition has supplied a variety of answers, including pacifism, just war teaching, the ethic of ""total war,"" and the vision of a ""world community."" In the face of these different approaches, how are we to decide which one is right? And more basically, how does one go about forming ones personal conscience? For all who ponder these moral challenges--whether as young people facing the question of military service, or as counselors, chaplains, or teachers--this book offers an essential and practical guide.

Download or read book Liberty and Conscience written by Peter Brock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the act of conscientious objection entered modern consciousness most strikingly as a result of the Vietnam War, Americans have long struggled to reconcile their politics, pacifist beliefs, and compulsory military service. While conscientious objection in the twentieth century has been well documented, there has been surprisingly little study of its long history in America's early conflicts, defined as these have been by accounts of patriotism and nation-building. In fact, during the period of conscription from the late 1650s to the end of the Civil War, many North Americans refused military service on grounds of conscience. In this volume, Peter Brock, one of the foremost historians of American pacifism, seeks to remedy this oversight by presenting a rich and varied collection of documents, many drawn from obscure sources, that shed new light on American religious and military history. These include legal findings, church and meeting proceedings, appeals by nonconformists to government authorities, and illuminating excerpts from personal journals. These accounts contain many poignant, often painful, and sometimes even humorous episodes that offer glimpses into the lives of conscientious objectors of the era. One of the most striking features to emerge from these documents is the critical role of religion in the history of American pacifism. Brock finds that virtually all who refused military service in this period were inspired by religious convictions, with Quakers frequently the most ardent dissenters. In the antebellum period, however, the pacifist spectrum expanded to include nonsectarians such as the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the New England Non-Resistance Society. A dramatic, powerful portrait of early American pacifism, Liberty and Conscience presents not only the thought and practice of the objectors themselves, but also the response of the authorities and the general public.

Download or read book Acts of Conscience written by Joseph Kip Kosek and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In response to the massive bloodshed that defined the twentieth century, American religious radicals developed a modern form of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles with new uses of mass media. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi, these "acts of conscience" included sit-ins, boycotts, labor strikes, and conscientious objection to war. Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Kip Kosek traces the impact of A. J. Muste, Richard Gregg, and other radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice. These dissenters found little hope in the secular ideologies of Wilsonian Progressivism, revolutionary Marxism, and Cold War liberalism, all of which embraced organized killing at one time or another. The example of Jesus, they believed, demonstrated the immorality and futility of such violence under any circumstance and for any cause. Yet the theories of Christian nonviolence are anything but fixed. For decades, followers have actively reinterpreted the nonviolent tradition, keeping pace with developments in politics, technology, and culture. Tracing the rise of militant nonviolence across a century of industrial conflict, imperialism, racial terror, and international warfare, Kosek recovers radical Christians' remarkable stance against the use of deadly force, even during World War II and other seemingly just causes. His research sheds new light on an interracial and transnational movement that posed a fundamental, and still relevant, challenge to the American political and religious mainstream.

Download or read book Pacifisme The Pacifist Conscience written by and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Pacifist Conscience written by Peter Mayer and published by London : Hart-Davis. This book was released on 1966 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Exercise of Conscience written by Harry R. Van Dyck and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inherent tension exists between the pacifist conscience and the prevailing mentality of the populace in a country at war. Although today the term "conscientious objector" evokes images of the Vietnam era, every war in U.S. history has brought forth men who, for the sake of their consciences, refused to bear arms. World War II was no exception. Exercise of Conscience is the memoir of Harry R. Van Dyck, one of the nearly twelve thousand men who were thrust into hastily organized Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps during that war. Van Dyck, whose Mennonite heritage was the foundation of his conscientious objector status, spent nearly four years in the CPS. He experienced the numerous scenes of adventure, drama, and humor that made up daily life in the camps for a heterogeneous collection of men whose only common bond was their "exercise of conscience." As Van Dyck writes, life as a conscientious objector during this time could be anything but peaceful. Faced with public resentment, many COs were subjected to verbal or physical abuse by impassioned "patriots"; others made the difficult decision to renounce their pacifist positions and join the armed forces. Some conscientious objectors waited years before they were allowed to leave the CPS camps and return to civilian life. Van Dyck's memoir examines the principles, motives, and dilemmas of the pacifist, out of step with a society intensely engaged in a popular war, raising issues that are of concern to all who are interested in peace in our time. The COs story is not without significance; Van Dyck's compelling narrative captures the ambience of this unique time and place and illuminates an important portion of American history.

Download or read book Why I Am a Universal Pacifist Conscience Objector written by Neil Mitchell and published by . This book was released on 1982* with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Public War Private Conscience written by Andrew Fiala and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05-02 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public War, Private Conscience offers a philosophical reflection on the moral demands made upon us by war, providing a clear and accessible overview of the different ways of thinking about war. Engaging both with contemporary examples and historical ideas about war, the book offers unique analysis of issues relating to terrorism, conscience objection, just war theory and pacifism. Andrew Fiala examines the conflict between utilitarian and deontological points of view. On the one hand, wars are part of the project of public welfare, subject to utilitarian evaluation. On the other hand, war is also subject to deontological judgment that takes seriously the importance of private conscience and human rights. This book argues that the conflict between these divergent approaches is unavoidable. We are continually caught in the tragic conflict between these two values: public happiness and private morality. And it is in war that we find the conflict at its most obvious and most disturbing.

Download or read book Contingent Pacifism written by Larry May and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major philosophical treatment of contingent pacifism, offering an account of pacifism from the just war tradition.

Download or read book Conscience in America written by Lillian Schlissel and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Peace to War written by Paul Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the Pentecostal peace witness extended throughout the movement and around the world-but was eventually muted and almost completely lost in the American Assemblies of God. This book, which is "gripping, powerful, and prophetic," says Amos Yong, tells the story of that shift. "The antiwar, Christian, pacifist sentiments of the Assemblies of God that Alexander describes . . . juxtaposed in close proximity to their pro-war and anti-pacifist passion and identification with America . . . is simply striking," comments J. Denny Weaver, in the C. Henry Smith Series Editor's Foreword. The implications, observes Cheryl Bridges Johns, Professor of Christian Formation and Discipleship, Church of God, "are worth examining by all traditions asking, 'Will our children have faith?' At the same time, mentions Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Religion, Harvard Divinity School, Alexander's narrative "suggests that Pentecostals may yet reclaim this invaluable element of their heritage."

Download or read book Pacifism and Citizenship written by Kimber M. Schraub and published by US Institute of Peace Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The clash between concepts of pacifism and perceptions of citizenship has long provoked fierce argument. Sparked by presentations from life-long pacifist Elise Boulding and political scientist Guenter Lewy, the debate in this volume is passionate and profound, ranging across such issues as the political role of pacifists and the character of American pacifism since World War II.

Download or read book Battles of Conscience written by Tobias Kelly and published by Random House. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war five of these individuals: Roy Ridgway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way -- people both determined and torn -- and travel from Finland to Syria, India to rural England, Edinburgh to Trinidad. Although conscientious objectors were often criticised and scorned, figures such as Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury supported their right to object, at least in principle, suggesting that liberty of conscience was one of the freedoms the nation was fighting for. And their rich cultural and moral legacy -- of humanitarianism and human rights, from Amnesty International and Oxfam to the US civil rights movement -- can still be felt all around us. The personal and political struggles carefully and vividly collected in this book tell us a great deal about personal and collective freedom, conviction and faith, war and peace, and pose questions just as relevant today: Does conscience make us free? Where does it take us? And what are the costs of going there? '[An] excellent book' - DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A moving tribute' - SPECTATOR