The World Together blog : Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
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Nonviolence for white people
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Sometime in the mid-60s, when America’s black-led freedom movement was at the center of daily news, a white man asked Malcolm X why he did not accept and teach the nonviolence of Martin Luther King. Malcolm replied that he had not experienced a great deal of nonviolence in America. “If you believe in nonviolence,” he said, “why don’t you go teach some nonviolence to white people.”
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21st Century Freedom Ride
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Whenever my friend Jim Douglass calls, I listen. Ten years ago, when we stood together in the morning sun outside a hotel in Baghdad, Jim hugged me and Leah, then stepped back and smiled. “It’s going to be a wonderful day,” he said. We were scared, and Jim knew it. But he was right. It was a wonderful day. In the midst of the tragedy that was happening all around, we lived the Good Samaritan story at a little place called Rutba and the course of our whole life changed.
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Jesus on the playground: International Day of Peace in a Post-Christendom Culture
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
For International Day of Peace at the public Montessori school my son attends, we had a peace parade. Black, white, and brown kids followed a peace dove puppet down the street to a public park and sang songs about peace on earth. They bowed to one another, in Asian fashion, and pledged to recognize the force for peace in one another. It was a heart warming site on a beautiful fall morning.
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An immeasurable response to gun violence
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Between the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the domestic terrorist attack at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the shooting at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., it’s been a terrible few weeks for gun violence in America. These high-profile shootings have stirred up earnest conversation about why Americans have so many guns and why we so often use them to shoot one another. Parents at the park and neighbors on street corners are searching for answers, even if politicians have decided that nothing can be done about gun control in an election year. After the violence of this summer, the blood cries out from the ground, demanding something from us all.
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How to start a community
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Every week, I hear from people throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand who are longing for genuine Christian community. They’ve heard a story or read a book about the new monasticism, and they want to know where it’s happening, what it looks like in practice and how they might be part of it. Several years ago, we launched an online directory to help folks connect to communities close to them. Our School for Conversion hosts weekend visits for interested people to come and see what’s happening in a community, living alongside its members while taking a course we call “Intro to Christianity as a Way of Life.” For the past couple of years, we’ve had a “Nurturing Communities Project” to help young communities connect with older ones, cross-pollinating passion and wisdom, energy and experience.
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Bruderhof: Reviving a radical tradition
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
I love to tell the story about how, in the 1930s, when Dietrich Bonhoeffer was resisting the Nazis in Germany and praying for a “new monasticism that has in common with the old a strict adherence to the Sermon on the Mount,” a little community of believers, calling themselves the “Bruderhof,” gathered around a simple mission: to live out Jesus’ instructions in the Sermon on the Mount.
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After nine years: Nonviolence in Iraq
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Tomorrow marks nine years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. I wrote last week about how I was born again to nonviolence in Baghdad and Rutba. Yet, as much hope as I saw in those small acts of radical love, I’ve wrestled in prayer over these past nine years as I’ve watched the spiral of violence in Iraq continue — and, in many ways, worsen. What are we to do when nonviolence doesn’t seem to make a difference? What do we say to people who just want their lives back?
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#Kony2012: Is nonviolence not an option?
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Armed with the power of social media, some young North American activists set out last week to take on one of the most violent rebels in the Great Lakes region of Africa, Joseph Kony. They’ve called their campaign Kony 2012, and they’re determined to get rid of Kony and bring the children he’s abducted home by the end of this year.
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Waiting with Mary: ‘Being’ rather than ‘doing’
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
I’ve been thinking recently about Mary, the young woman whose eyes were opened to God’s messenger, whose womb was opened to God in human flesh. The Greeks call her theotokos — the God-bearer. She is the one who welcomed Jesus to make his home in her. Blessed among women, she is a model for us. She’s not just an inspiration for a house of hospitality. She is one.
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