American history abounds with a rich tradition of literature dealing with nonviolence. In a work that spans from the seventeenth century to the present, Michael True brings to light the strong but long-neglected strain in American culture: nonviolence as an active response to conflicts and divisiveness. In identifying writings about action for social change, he distinguishes literary works from peace advocacy and nonviolence and relates them to broad currents of United States history. The Quakers of the 1680s and abolitionists of the 1850s, the sanctuary Movement and Plowshares of the 1980s, novelists (from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer) and poets (from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov) all have written powerful works on nonviolent action. Through this literature, the author explores the beauty of an important theme in American literature. At a time when people face widespread injustice, True reminds us that nonviolence holds a significant place in our country's history.

Through an original and close reading of the key literature regarding both revolutionary violence and nonviolence, this book collapses the widely-assumed concepts of violence and nonviolence as mutually exclusive. By revealing that violence and nonviolence are braided concepts arising from human action, Peyman Vahabzadeh submits that in many cases the actions deemed to be either violent or nonviolent might actually produce outcomes that are not essentially different. Vahabzadeh offers a conceptual phenomenology of the key thinkers and theorists of both revolutionary violence and various approaches to nonviolence. Arguing that violence is inseparable from civilizations, Violence and Nonviolence concludes by making a number of original conceptualizations regarding the relationship between violence and nonviolence, exploring the possibility of a nonviolent future and proposing to understand the relationship between the two concepts as concentric, not opposites.

This book combats the notion that nonviolence is basically something new by stressing its Eastern origins and emphasizing the extent to which many of the recent manifestations of nonviolence are found in the Third World.

Abraham argues that a theological imagination can expand the contours of postcolonial theory through a reexamination of notions of subjectivity, gender, and violence in a dialogical model with Karl Rahner. She questions of whether postcolonial theory, with its disavowal of religious agency, can provide an invigorating occasion for Catholic theology.

What happens when a five-century tradition of Christian pacifism no longer needs Jesus to support nonviolence? Why does secularity cause this dilemma for Mennonites in their theology of peace? Layton Boyd Friesen offers an ancient theology and spirituality of incarnation as the church's response to the non-resistance of Christ. He explores three key aspects of von Balthasar's Christology to help Mennonite peace theology regain its momentum in the secular age with a contemplative union with Christ. This volume argues that the way to regain a Christ-formed pacifism within secularity is to contemplate and enter the mystery unveiled in the Chalcedonian Definition of Christ, as interpreted by Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this mystery, the believer is drawn into real-time participation in Christ's encounter with the secular world.

Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics. This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.

In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas' work to social and political movements.