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Introduction: Knowledge in Exile -- The League Is the Thing: International Society's Super-University -- Plowshares into Swords: Knowledge, Weaponized -- Internationalist Dunkirk: International Society in Exile -- The Rover Boys of Reconstruction: International Society in the American World -- Coda: Great Leaps Forward.
A critical history of Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict Eminent historian Arno J. Mayer traces the thinkers, leaders, and shifting geopolitical contexts that shaped the founding and development of the Israeli state. He recovers for posterity internal critics such as the philosopher Martin Buber, who argued for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs. “A sense of limits is the better part of valour,” Mayer insists. Plowshares into Swords explores Israel’s indefinite deferral of the “Arab Question,” the strategic thinking behind the building of settlements and border walls, and the endurance of Palestinian resistance.
★ Publishers Weekly starred review Parkland. Las Vegas. Dallas. Orlando. San Bernardino. Paris. Charleston. Sutherland Springs. Newtown. These cities are now known for the people who were shot and killed in them. More Americans have died from guns in the US in the last fifty years than in all the wars in American history. With less than 5% of the world's population, the people of the US own nearly half the world's guns. America also has the most annual gun deaths--homicide, suicide, and accidental gun deaths--at 105 per day, or more than 38,000 per year. Some people say it's a heart problem. Others say it's a gun problem. The authors of Beating Guns believe it's both. This book is for people who believe the world doesn't have to be this way. Inspired by the prophetic image of beating swords into plows, Beating Guns provides a provocative look at gun violence in America and offers a clarion call to change our hearts regarding one of the most significant moral issues of our time. Bestselling author, speaker, and activist Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin show why Christians should be concerned about gun violence and how they can be part of the solution. The authors transcend stale rhetoric and old debates about gun control to offer a creative and productive response. Full-color images show how guns are being turned into tools and musical instruments across the nation. Charts, tables, and facts convey the mind-boggling realities of gun violence in America, but as the authors make clear, there is a story behind every statistic. Beating Guns allows victims and perpetrators of gun violence to tell their own compelling stories, offering hope for change and helping us reimagine the world as one that turns from death to life, where swords become plows and guns are turned into garden tools.
In September 1980, eight Catholic activists made their way into a Pennsylvania General Electric plant housing parts for nuclear missiles. Evading security guards, these activists pounded on missile nose cones with hammers and then covered the cones in their own blood. This act of nonviolent resistance was their answer to calls for prophetic witness in the Old Testament: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war.” Plowshares explores the closely interwoven religious and social significance of the group’s use of performance to achieve its goals. It looks at the group’s acts of civil disobedience, such as that undertaken at the GE plant in 1980, and the Plowshares’ behavior at the legal trials that result from these protests. Interpreting the Bible as a mandate to enact God’s kingdom through political resistance, the Plowshares work toward “symbolic disarmament,” with the aim of eradicating nuclear weapons. Plowshares activists continue to carry out such “divine obediences” against facilities where equipment used in the production or deployment of nuclear weapons is manufactured or stored. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their actions, this volume helps us better understand their motivations, logic, identity, and ultimate goal.
In his farewell speech, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned us of the dangers of a military-industrial complex (MIC). In Paul Koistinen's sobering new book, that warning appears to have been both prophetic and largely ignored. As the final volume in his magisterial study of the political economy of American warfare, State of War describes the bipolar world that developed from the rivalry between the U.S. and USSR, showing how seventy years of defense spending have bred a monster that has sunk its claws into the very fabric of American life. Koistinen underscores how during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, the United States for the first time in its history began to maintain large military structures during peacetime. Many factors led to that result: the American economy stood practically alone in a war-ravaged world; the federal government, especially executive authority, was at the pinnacle of its powers; the military accumulated unprecedented influence over national security; and weaponry became much more sophisticated following World War II. Koistinen describes how the rise of the MIC was preceded by a gradual process of institutional adaptation and then supported and reinforced by the willing participation of Big Science and its industrial partners, the broader academic world, and a proliferation of think tanks. He also evaluates the effects of ongoing defense budgets within the context of the nation's economy since the 1950s. Over time, the MIC effectively blocked efforts to reduce expenditures, control the arms race, improve relations with adversaries, or adopt more enlightened policies toward the developing world-all the while manipulating the public on behalf of national security to sustain the warfare state. Now twenty years after the Soviet Union's demise, defense budgets are higher than at any time during the Cold War. As Koistinen observes, more than six decades of militaristic mobilization for stabilizing a turbulent world have firmly entrenched the state of war as a state of mind for our nation. Collectively, his five-volume opus provides an unparalleled analysis of the economics of America's wars from the colonial period to the present, illuminating its impact upon the nation's military campaigns, foreign policy, and domestic life.
Join Chris Martin for a poetic walking tour of hell—or is it heaven? In this wickedly clever collection, Martin asks how we go about living in the tension between protesting lunatic politicians and picking up the kids from school, mourning a dying Earth and making soup, combating white supremacy and loving our dear ones. Martin’s poems pick at the tender scabs protecting our national and individual identities, and call for more honest healing. Things to Do in Hell channels 2016 anger into 2020 action with sophisticated, rhythmic verse that compels us to beat our swords into ploughshares and join the fight.
The writings of the prophets make up over a quarter of the Old Testament. But perhaps no other portion of the Old Testament is more misunderstood by readers today. For some, prophecy conjures up knotted enigmas, opaque oracles and terrifying visions of the future. For others it raises expectations of a plotted-out future to be reconstructed from disparate texts. And yet the prophets have imprinted the language of faith and imagination with some of its most sublime visions of the future - nations streaming to Zion, a lion lying with a lamb, and endlessly fruiting trees on the banks of a flowing river. We might view the prophets as stage directors for Israel's unfolding drama of redemption. Drawing inspiration from past acts in that drama and invoking fresh words from its divine author, these prophets speak a language of sinewed poetry, their words and images arresting the ear and detonating in the mind. For when Yahweh roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem, the pastures of the shepherds dry up, the crest of Carmel withers, and the prophetic word buffets those selling the needy for a pair of sandals. The Dictionary of the Old Testament: Prophets is the only reference book of its kind. Not only does it focus exclusively on the prophetic books; it also plumbs their imagery of mountains and wilderness, flora and fauna, temple and Zion. It maps and guides us through topics such as covenant and law, exile and deliverance, forgiveness and repentance, and the Day of the Lord. Here the nature of prophecy is searched out in its social, historical, literary and psychological dimensions as well as its synchronic spread of textual links and associations. And the formation of the prophetic books into their canonical collection, including the Book of the Twelve, is explored and weighed for its significance. Then too, contemporary approaches such as canonical criticism, conversation analysis, editorial/redaction criticism, feminist interpretation, literary approaches and rhetorical criticism are summed up and assayed. Even the afterlife of these great texts is explored in articles on the history of interpretation as well as on their impact in the New Testament.
We Are At War The greatest battles fought today never make the news. They are neither fought with boots on the ground nor jets in the sky, yet their casualties far exceed all the combats ever fought with missiles and tanks. These battles happen in cyberspace, the assault weapons are technologies and tools that fit into the pockets of anyone who cares bear them, the ammos are software and apps that can be downloaded in seconds with just a click, and the victims are the very users who own them but are yet to realize that they are fully at war. In the midst of such intense warfare with weapons of mass distraction, majority of Christians have taken the worst battle position possible—naïve, unarmed and online—and as a result we have become one of the most badly hit on the battlefield. This book is an urgent response to the sprawl of casualties within the church who barely realize they’ve been hit, yet are losing their vital signs one click at a time. If you have a smart phone in your pocket, chances are high that you also have your wounds; this book is an urgent attempt to take out the bullets, stitch those wounds and rearm you for a calculated offensive. Your gadgets are about to be remodelled from regular tools to weapons of war.
During the summer of 1800, slaves in and around Richmond conspired to overthrow their masters and abolish slavery. This book uses Gabriel's Conspiracy, and the evidence produced during the repression of the revolt, to expose the processes through which Virginians of African descent built an oppositional culture. Sidbury portrays the rich cultures of eighteenth-century black Virginians, and the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, senses of identity that emerged among enslaved and free people living in and around the rapidly growing state capital. The book also examines the conspirators' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, and the complicated African and European roots of their culture. In so doing, it offers an alternative interpretation of the meaning of the Virginia that was home to so many of the Founding Fathers. This narrative focuses on the history and perspectives of black and enslaved people, in order to develop 'Gabriel's Virginia' as a counterpoint to more common discussions of 'Jeffersonian Virginia'.