Living Peace: A Spirituality of Contemplation and Action Book

For John Dear, a Jesuit priest and a respected leader of the ecumenical peace movement, the spiritual life is a combination of contemplation and action, of maintaining inner peace and projecting that peace onto the greater world. It is the spirituality exemplified by the lives of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and others throughout history who remained true to the highest ideals while addressing the most difficult problems and conflicts of the real world.

As a tireless advocate for social justice and human rights, Dear has followed that path in his own life, and in Living Peace, he describes his journey. Breaking down the life of peace into three parts—an inner journey, a public journey, and the journey of all humanity—he shares the spiritual practices that have sustained him and teaches readers how to integrate them in their own lives.

Publishers Weekly

The Fellowship of Reconciliation is the oldest interfaith peace group in America, its members having included Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Helen Prejean. Now its director gives readers a succinct, moving paean to peace, in which he suggests that peacemaking on a world level first requires making peace within. Dear advocates long amounts of time in prayer, and peaceful prayer at that not just talking to God, but listening for God. Dear recommends that readers take up Ignatian prayer, in which one meditates on a Scripture passage and imagines one's way into the biblical scene (though readers will have to turn elsewhere for a truly thorough introduction to this method of prayer). "To live a life of peace," writes Dear, we must also practice peace "with the whole world," so in the second section, he turns to "The Public Journey." Worldwide peacemaking begins with an active choice for peace: Dear himself committed his life to peace while on a trip to Israel during the war with Lebanon. Some of the book's most encouraging passages recount Dear's own efforts at peacemaking: stays of execution he was instrumental in bringing about, trips to war-torn El Salvador, protests against Trident nuclear submarines. Remarkably, Dear never sounds moralistic or self-congratulatory; the book reads more like one friend sharing his experiences with another. In this inspiring little book, Dear proves himself the William Sloane Coffin of our day. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.