Reviews for Put down Your Sword: Answering the Gospel Call to Creative Nonviolence

The average rating for Put down Your Sword: Answering the Gospel Call to Creative Nonviolence based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-12 00:00:00 Robert Hodgson This work is part treatise on nonviolence, part narrative journal, and part eulogy as John walks us through his pilgrimage of violent locations, war torn countries, and our very own country while affirming non-violence. His aim is to encourage all people to live our responsibility to our neighbors; to be responsible to all of creation through non-violence. Throughout this journey he calls out the powerful, often by name, who rule over our poor and marginalized brothers and sisters. But his criticism is not solely for the powerful, but also those of use who sit by and are complicit through our inaction. His work is prophetic as he rails against the violent empire of the US, as we further stir the pot of violence, and refuse to help our poor, marginalized neighbors; neighbors whom we have marginalized. Constantly he refers back to how much destruction we engage in despite considering ourselves generous and Christlike. He sees the need for our repentance, and he himself has prayed and confessed his part in violent participation. This work is the kind of work evangelicals need to read, not just for its treatise on non-violence, but for our own liturgical practices. As evangelicals we fall short; by leaving behind traditions and replacing them with our shallow, superficial practices, we have lost touch with the reality in which we live. We have lost sight of what it means to have the responsibility to love our neighbor. Having neglected our responsibility to our neighbors, we are guilty of partaking in violence. Each memory he shares, each stop on his own pilgrimage, is full of the incarnation and deep peace of the gospel. He illuminates the paradoxical nature of the non-violent kingdom conquering the violence of this world; the violence of an empire bending and breaking those who who stand in its way. That, I think, is my favorite part of his work. As he shares his journey and his stories, he illustrates a depth to the poverty, the pain, the destruction, that is both grieving, but at the same time paradoxically beautiful, as only the gospel can make it. His book illuminates the beauty of humanity while sharing the results of violence done to our brothers and sisters in this world, and it is within this confluence of violence and peace, of destruction and responsibility, that the hope of the gospel unfolds. As he explores violence among us, and done by us, he does not stop at war. Or killing. Instead he gets to the systemic issues of poverty, of power, of greed, of furthering our own selfish goals and bank accounts at the expense of others. He takes a holistic view of violence, condemning the myriad ways in which we seek to benefit at the expense of others' bodies, minds, and wellbeing. In the end, despite the violence, despite the blind eye we and our imperial government turns, this book brings with it a hope. A hope that by imagining a world of peace, by asking what we need to do to achieve such a world, we will one day succeed in it. A hope that violence will not always have the last word.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-26 00:00:00 Sam Dirickson 2.5 stars. A weird little book. A disjointed mix of diary entries, tributes to activists, peacemakers, and martyrs, and the author's own musings and accounts of his own peacemaking and nonviolent protest activities. I'm left a bit unsure what to make of it. The chapter on Colombia is the best. It's heartbreaking in its depictions of first-hand accounts of Colombians who suffer at the hands of the US backed paramilitary terrors, with hundreds being killed or displaced to make way for multinational corporations to take over their land. The rest is a sometimes insightful, sometimes bland mix of platitudes about how bad nuclear war and American imperialism is and a strange, almost bragging and ultimately offputting treatment about how many times Dear and his friends have been arrested for civil disobedience. It almost feels like he is fetishizing being arrested and mistreated in the name of nonviolent activism. I'm sympathetic to Dear's thesis that Jesus advocated a nonviolent approach, but for some reason his treatment left me a bit cold.