Islam has come to be associated with hatred and terrorism, which has resulted in many thinking that Islam (and all Muslims) are fundamentally violent. Chaiwat Satha-Anand’s collection of revised essays featured in Nonviolence and Islamic Imperatives attempts to undermine such a narrative and reframe Islam in terms of peace and nonviolence. To achieve this goal, Satha-Anand argues that Islam’s core values require nonviolence and supports his argument by providing examples from the Prophet Muhammad and contemporary Muslims.

Focusing on what he considers “one of the most important and enduring expressions of twentieth-century political imagination and action and one ever more important in the struggles of the present century,” Howard Caygill’s On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance provides a thorough and challenging look into the concept of resistance. Recognizing that ‘resistance’ itself resists conceptualization, Caygill develops a clear means to understanding its nature, its usage in a variety of writings and situations over the past century and a half, (...) and a logic for how to sustain proactive resistance in the face of total domination or contemporary technologies. (shrink)

Dario Martinelli examines the nature of songs of social protest (SSPs) in Give Peace a Chant: Popular Music, Politics and Social Protest and provides readers with a book that is engaging, provoking, and enjoyable. Martinelli’s research is thorough, astute, and structured in a way that is both rigorous and accessible. Combining typology with several case studies, Martinelli achieves his stated goal of showing how context, song lyrics, and the music itself are organic and equally important elements that constitute SSPs.

William Irwin gives readers a deeply moving and insightful work into human relationships, our connection to others, the nature of reality, the pursuit of flourishing, and human nature in general. Little Siddhartha centers on three generations of family and explores how they respond to the pressures of life, their place in the world, and the fractured relationships that result. Starting with the younger Siddhartha’s mantra of “Eat, drink, and be merry,” and ending with a concerted chant of “Om,” Irwin weaves (...) a tale that explores the spiritual recesses of human existence, calling on readers to understand, forgive, and most importantly, to listen. (shrink)

In this essay, I continue Nicholas Wolterstorff’s work of developing a rights-based theory of ethics called eirenéism, which maintains the good life only occurs when justice—as a moral state of affairs where agents enjoy the goods to which they have a right—is achieved. As a result, justice is eirenē (the Greek word for peace). In the process of developing eirenéism I explain how eirenē differs from other conceptions of peace, and I offer several interpretive arguments for how best to understand (...) eirenéism in relation to better-known competing ethical theories, like utilitarianism, virtue ethics, duty ethics, and care ethics. (shrink)

Sara Trovato’s Mainstreaming Pacifism: Conflict, Success, and Ethics provides a thorough and engaging argument for why pacifism is an effectual means for creating social-political justice and peace. Standing up to claims that pacifists are politically passive and accepting of injustice, Trovato shows that the peace of pacifism is compatible with the fight for justice. By showing that pacifists can consistently retain their ideals while fighting for justice, Trovato offers an alternative to effective means of violence. In her words, “violence can (...) effectively be replaced with other effectual forms, or combinations of effectual forms.”. (shrink)

Kobade teaches that we must recognize all individuals as links in a familial/community chain from ancestors, to the present, and to future generations. With the recognition of kobade, individuals are then called to develop kwe—knowledge of one’s self that is theoretically anchored to and generated through one’s particular ancestral and lived experience. Kwe is a deep personal knowledge that is produced by combining the past with the present through everyday actions. It creates an attitude and process of engagement with the (...) world that responds to oppression by refusing domination of all kinds and generates new ways of engaging and living one’s grounded normativity. Grounded normativity is what stabilizes and motivates a life of meaning that participates in an embodied radical resurgence. (shrink)