Frost, J. William

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Swarthmore College Works Religion Faculty Works Religion 12-1-1997 Review Of "The Pacifist Impulse In Historical Perspective" Edited By H. L. Dyck J. William Frost Swarthmore College Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion  Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation J. William Frost. (1997). "Review Of "The Pacifist Impulse In Historical Perspective" Edited By H. L. Dyck". Church History. Volume 66, Issue 4. 862-864. DOI: 10.2307/3169273 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-religion/100 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religion Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. 862 CHURCH HISTORY presents his argument with grace and lucidity, and the book is full of graphic vignettes that capture the tone, texture, and significance of past cultural practices and social attitudes. Wolffe's reach as a cultural historian is truly impressive. Not only does he trawl to good effect among various levels in the sea of culture-ranging from high culture (for example, T. S. Eliot), middle-brow tastes, and mass culture (for instance, Boy '.s Own Paper)-he also investigates with great subtlety and insight a wide assortment of cultural forms, from public monuments and rituals on the one hand to religious music and ecclesiastical architecture on the other. God and Greater Britain is synthesis of the first order, a book that anyone interested in modern British religion or, for that matter, the general phenomenon of religion and nationalism in the modern world, will want to read. One can only hope that the publisher will oblige and issue an edition that the wider public can afford. Emmanuel CoUege, University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario BRIAN CLARKE The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective. Edited by HARVEY L. DYCK. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1996. xiv+ 444 pp. $70.00. In addition to his publications on Eastern European history, Peter Brock wrote seven books and many articles on peace history. So it is appropriate that the twenty-three papers delivered in his honor at a conference in 1991 and now published in a festschrift deal with people who believed that all wars were morally wrong. Readers of this journal will be most interested in the twelve articles discussing the relationship of Christianity, Buddhism, and Gandhi to peace; however, because they might also find useful the papers on secular pacifism, this review will summarize the themes in each article. Scholars and the general public use "pacifism," a term originating in 1902, to describe a wide variety of religious, social, and political movements. Martin Ceadel provides a typology of ten kinds of pacifism by, for instance, distinguish-ing political advocates from ethical pacifists and those who make peace the primary motive from others who make religious obedience primary. Charles Chatfield derives his distinctions from historical grounds and cautions that intellectual definitions often simplify the complex relationship between peace aspirations and actions. Peter van der Dungen surveys the origin of peace history through the writings of two early-twentieth-century Dutch writers,Jacob ter Meulen and Bart de Ligt. The most striking feature in the sections on religion is the omission of any papers dealing with major Christian denominations. Religious peace here is not the just war traditions but the nonresistance of the early church, Anabaptists, and Quakers. Luise Schottroff,John H. Yoder, and James Strayer contribute to ongoing debates. Schottroff provides a feminist analysis of the Sermon on the Mount showing that appropriate peacemaking behavior for a man, such as BOOK REVIEWS 863 going the second mile, would have had different meanings if done by a woman. Yoder, insisting that the real issue was not early Christians against war but service in the military, shows the difficulty of using existing sources to establish any one pattern. He argues that the main transformation after Constantine lay not in attitudes to war (although it was evil), but in views of God's relation to the social order. Strayer, insisting on the varieties of early Anabaptists and the initial minor role of pacifism, stresses that the real theme of these rapidly evolving movements was from radicalism to apolitical nonresistance. Donald Durnbaugh describes two hundred years of the Church of the Brethren's peace witness as at first echoing pietist and Mennonite influences for sectarian noninvolvement and changing after 1914 to working to change social conditions. Hugh Barbour, using the writings of Edward Burroughs, pictures the early Quaker peace testimony as different from either Mennonite withdrawal or later social activism and as growing out of a religious experience termed the "Lamb's War," during which evil was purged both inwardly and outwardly. In contrast,Jack Marietta portrays the Quaker Assembly in colonial Pennsylvania as compromising pacifist witness but enjoying widespread political support by providing justice in the courts and economic opportunity. Thomas Kennedy maintains that British Friends rediscovered a peace witness during the Boer War and that during World War I women Friends radicalized pacifism to mean absolute noncooperation with the government and socialism. Finally, Irwin Abrams shows how the press interpreted the award in 1947 of the Nobel Prize to Quakers as due to relief work rather than pacifist witness against war. The essays dealing with a peace witness of Hindus, Buddhists, and Gandhi provide basic introductions and cover an enormous range. Klaus Klostermaier deals with "Himsa" and "Ahimsa" in Hinduism from the Rgveda to modern India; Roy Amore goes from the social context of pre-Buddhist India to modern Ceylon and demonstrates the effects of Buddhist nonviolence. Stephen Hay provides an overview of sources influencing Gandhi's nonviolence and a comparison with Kant's Perpetual Peace. More specialized is James Hunt's analysis of Tolstoy and English Tolstoyians' influence on Gandhi. The last section of the book ignores religion in focusing on modern secular peace movements. Sandi Cooper shows how patriotic Italian and French peace advocates before World War I thought that peace and self-defense could be ensured by replacing professional armies with democratic citizen militias. Michael Lutzker evaluates the American peace movement 1894-1917 by focus-ing on two leaders: Nicholas Murry Butler, president of Columbia, whose advocacy of international law and arbitration changed after 1914 into full-blooded patriotism and anti-Communism; and the equally patrician Oswald Garrison Villard, who under the impact of the war became a vigorous critic of armaments and defender of free speech. Bertrand Russell's initial enthusiasm for the 1917 Communist revolution as a bringer of peace and his disillusion-ment by 1920 is the theme of Richard Rempel.Jo Vellacott shows that the peace 864 CHURCH HISTORY activities of the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom during and after World War I were neither nationalist nor internationalist, but "transna-tionalist" in which the boundaries of countries became irrelevant. The morality of the Allied bombing of German cities has received consider-able attention, but a similar modern debate on the food blockade of Europe is lacking. V. Aleksandra Bennett focuses on Vera Brittain's attempts to enlist support of Anglican bishops as well as the general public for sending food to occupied areas. The weakness in the postwar peace movement in France and Canada is the theme of Norman Ingram and Thomas Socknat. French pacifists labored under the false labels of being pro-Petain and unsuccessfully sought to distinguish their brand of peace from that of Communist organizations. The Canadians had a Red scare in which peace advocacy seemed subversive, a label easy to apply because a few of the leaders participated in Communist-front organizations. Like many festschrifts, the quality of articles varies greatly, partially because not all authors agreed on the nature of the audience. I found most new information in the essays of Kennedy and Bennett and less help from the articles on Eastern religion. Overall, this book provides additional insights on many subjects but does not fundamentally change our understanding derived in large part from reading Brock's works on the pacifist movements. The conference and the resulting book are appropriate ways of saying to Peter Brock, "Thank you!" Swarthmore CoUege ]. WILLIAM FROST Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Mission to Rural America: The Story of W. Howard Bishop, Founder of Glenmary. By CHRISTOPHER]. KAUFFMAN. New York: Paulist Press, 1991. x + 298 pp. $16.96. This is a biography of Father W. Howard Bishop (1885-1953), founder of the Home Missioners of America and the Home Mission Sisters of America, also known as the Glenmarian Missioners. Detailed here are the gestation of Bishop's idea of a Catholic mission society dedicated to an apostolate among the rural inhabitants of the United States and the course of his labors toward its practical realization in the Society of Home Missioners. Although he focuses here on a fairly small topic for a church historian of his stature, Kauffman, whose several works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Catholi-cism have been widely received with praise and gratitude, has again done a commendable job. Depending amply on Bishop's personal journal of his forty-year priestly career, Kauffman develops a sympathetic but balanced depiction of Bishop's complex personality. The founder of Glenmary is portrayed here as an in-tensely self-conscious man, ecclesiastically astute and diplomatic, and devout in the pre-Vatican II spiritual mode. His character is shown to have been consti-

Review Of  The Pacifist Impulse In Historical Perspective  Edited By H. L. Dyck

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Review Of The Pacifist Impulse In Historical Perspective Edited By H. L. Dyck

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