A Peace Media Clearinghouse launched this morning, a joint project of the US Institute of Peace Center of Innovation for Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding and the Georgetown University Conflict Resolution Program. You can find documentaries, films, shows, podcasts, songs, video games, and other multimedia about peace and conflict management; use them in your work as… Read More »
With all the coverage of tea parties it is an excellent teaching moment to talk about the revolutionary roots of the real Boston Tea Party and initiate a discussion about whether Britain could have been removed from the American colonies nonviolently. (This is one of Colman McCarthy’s discussion questions in lesson 6 of the Class… Read More »
On the American RadioWorks website you can listen online, download, or read the transcript of a story about a young American soldier, Sergeant Gray, who served in the Iraq war for a year, but died a strange death once he got back from Iraq. The story details his mother’s search for the cause of death… Read More »
The 16-week “University” Class of Nonviolence contains a Darrow essay, “Resist Not Evil,” an early argument for restorative justice rather than the more typical vengeful justice. A temptation would be to augment this essay by showing a video clip from “Inherit the Wind,” the excellent play based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, but this does… Read More »
On Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts” yesterday Diana Ivey read Saki’s short story “The Toys of Peace“: “Harvey,” said Eleanor Bope, handing her brother a cutting from a London morning paper of the 19th of March, “just read this about children’s toys, please; it exactly carries out some of our ideas about influence and upbringing.” “In… Read More »
PDF File (1.3 MB, 40 pages): Eleven Tolstoy Short Stories Yesterday I noted that I find the two “War and Peace” extracts in the 16-week “University” Class of Nonviolence uninspiring: neither useful for the study of nonviolence nor interesting when divorced from the magnificent novel. Yet, it would be absurd to assign Tolstoy’s “War and… Read More »
There is one Tolstoy essay in the 8-week Class of Nonviolence, the intriguing “Patriotism or Peace,” in which Tolstoy proposes that the two are inherently incompatible. In the 16-week “University” Class, there are five more. At the San Antonio peaceCENTER, we have always scheduled two hours for each session and, to be frank, I’d be… Read More »
Many years ago the peaceCENTER developed a teaching tool called “The Great Peace March,” an illustrated timeline of peace and justice history, that we can hang on the wall, project on a screen or play as a bingo-type game. It begins with the first recorded practitioners of civil disobedience, Shiprah and Puah, the midwives who… Read More »
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the NorthBy Thomas J. Sugrue(Random House, 2008) The Civil Rights Movement is often taught as if it was a purely southern phenomena and the Class of Nonviolence, by looking at civil rights through the lens of the life and works of Martin Luther King,… Read More »
Last night’s César Chávez Interfaith Service at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church ended, as always, with a rousing sing-a-long of “De Colores,” the anthem of the United Farm Workers of America. The first time someone attends a César Chávez (or Hispanic History Month) event can be awkward, as everyone but YOU seems to know the… Read More »