QUOTES

Thomas Merton on Nonviolence
Very often people object that nonviolence seems to imply passive acceptance of injustice and evil and therefore that it is a kind of cooperation with evil. Not at all. The genuine concept of nonviolence implies not only active and effective resistance to evil but in fact a more effective resistance... But the resistance which is taught in the Gospel is aimed not at the evil-doer but at evil in its source.

Soldier Suicides: Counting the Forgotten Casualties of War (by Logan Laituri)
Days ago, another article, from AlterNet, described a recent CBS investigation that found an alarming trend in those who have served our country. I would never have believed the finding had it not been for the devastating news Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) received last Tuesday. One of our active members had taken their own life. Their spouse, another IVAW member who suffers from PTSD, had found the body the night prior. In 2005, an average of 17 vets committed suicide every day. No, that is not a typo: 17 every day. Reported by SOJOURNERS Dec. 2007

New Priority
The costs of servicing the RAF’s Tornado planes will be subsidised by the Conflict Prevention Fund, a confidential memo shows. Money set aside to clear landmines and remove arms from conflict zones is to be raided to pay a private defence contractor to keep Tornado jets flying in Iraq, according to a confidential memo seen by the Guardian. The Ministry of Defence plans to pay BAE Systems from the multimillion-pound Conflict Prevention Fund - which covers projects such as destroying weapons in Bosnia and landmines in Mozambique - to subsidise the £5m-£10m cost of servicing each of the six planes. The move follows a cost-cutting plan which has backfired for the MoD because of increased military action in Iraq. Guardian/UK 10 March, 2008

“Even victors are by victories undone.” John Dryden

Holy Mischief: On May 17, 1968, nine men and women entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, removed several hundred draft records, and burned them with homemade napalm in protest against the war in Vietnam. The nine were arrested and, in a highly publicized trial, sentenced to jail. Listen to the words spoken by Father Daniel Berrigan on that day:

"Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, 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."

Reconciliation
This love of God for the world does not withdraw from a reality into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the reality of the world in the harshest possible fashion. The world takes out its rage on the body of Jesus Christ. But he, tormented, forgives the world its sins. Thus does reconciliation come about.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Meditations on the Cross