In 2005, Brian Nichols, a fugitive who had murdered three people while escaping from a courthouse was on the loose in the Atlanta area. You might have heard about this on the nightly news or possibly how it ended. Here’s a summary from Wikipedia:
It was later learned that around 2:00 a.m. on March 12 Nichols approached a woman named Ashley Smith in the parking lot of the Bridgewater Apartments. He pointed a gun at her and said “If you do what I say, I won’t kill you”. He forced her inside her …

In 2005, my senior year at Wheaton College, in my ‘Christian Thought’ class, I participated in a debate on the topic: “Christians can Support and Participate in War.”
I was on the CON side, in line with my still being formed beliefs on what a Christian stance regarding war should be. I like resurrecting old writings and so I figured I’d share my opening statements from this debate I had in my college class. I’m not sure if I would hold so strongly to some of my points any more, …

I return this week to an individual story, this one has been around for a while, from Terry Dobson a fourth degree black belt:
 
The train clanked and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon. Our car was comparatively empty – a few housewives with their kids in tow, some old folks going shopping. I gazed absently at the drab houses and dusty hedge rows.
At one station the doors opened, and suddenly the afternoon quiet was shattered by a man bellowing violent, incomprehensible curses. The man …

I’ve started a series on stories of Nonviolence, basically sharing real life stories that I’ve heard over the past few years that tell of creative nonviolent responses to crime and violence. The reason I began these posts was that in my conversations over the last several years it seems quite rare that people have ever heard of actual creative nonviolent responses, aside from maybe the Civil Rights movement in the USA.
My posts last week talked about Nonviolent movements against the Nazi’s during World War II and was taken …

The brutalities of the Nazis stand for many people as the ultimate refutation of nonviolence. Surely, they reason, only violence could have stopped Hitler. The facts indicate just the opposite.

This is a long excerpt from an amazing book, The Powers That Be, by Walter Wink. After coming to a belief, simply through reading Jesus’ call to “love your enemies”, that violence was not an appropriate action for Christians, a friend of mine on my dorm floor gave me this book. It was formative in helping me make further sense, not only of Jesus’ teachings, but also of the rich history of nonviolence in the Christian faith.
Toward the end of the book it includes a handful of stories, one of …

Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”