A lifelong Episcopalian and inveterate Bible-thumper, Stringfellow was a Protestant in the most etymological sense. He saw Christianity as a call to dissent. The great Reformed theologian Karl Barth recognized this, and urged an audience at the University of Chicago in 1962 to “Listen to this man!” Barth saw in Stringfellow’s writing a “theology of freedom” more concerned with proclaiming the gospel than with catering to the habits and fads of American society—a theology unwilling, as Stringfellow put it, “to interpret the Bible for the convenience of America.” Barth also saw in him a way of doing theology free from the pomp and insularity of academia.

That Stringfellow has remained mostly ignored in academic theology is at least in part his own doing. He would say that, for the sake of vocation, he had “died to career,” both in law and theology. Though he did quite a lot of each, he refused to define himself by the professional standards of either—they’re principalities in themselves. His writing is decidedly vernacular even when demanding, the product of reading far more from the Bible and the newspaper (as Barth urged preachers to do) than from the theological canon. “A person must come to the Bible with a certain naivety,” Stingfellow wrote; “one must forego anything that would demean God to dependence upon one’s own thoughts.” What he wrote is a model for serious, engaged, and yet decidedly lay theology, carried out with a sense of both play and dire seriousness. Caught as we are between the blogosphere rabble and the over-specialized academy, we need more of this today.

Best of all, the folks at Commonweal?realized that they had an article by Stringfellow in their archives: a 1972 call to “Impeach Nixon Now.?What’s so special about that??you might ask. Weren’t a lot of people calling for Nixon’s resignation?in 1972??The thing is, the article is dated May 26. The Watergate break-in was June 17 of that year, less than a month later. Stringfellow’s concern, though, was more serious than what ultimately brought about Nixon’s resignation: above all, the continuation of a brutal, illegal, unnecessary war.

We should have listened.

The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.? We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a?political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Mahmood also discusses her debt to Talal Asad, whom I interviewed, also for The Immanent Frame, earlier this month.

In this interview, Butler stressed a theme that is actually the starting point for the discussion of nonviolence in her recent book Frames of War: the co-implication of violence and nonviolence, where neither can quite escape the other. I pushed back a bit, and so did she.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors.?Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

He brought back a sack full of Afghan scarves, and offered me my pick of them. The one I chose, the yellow one, is what I’m wearing now. What the picture doesn’t show, but which was the first thing I noticed when I put it on, is the smell. One scarf smells strongly; the smell of Eric’s sack of them is tremendous. He didn’t notice it when he was in Kabul, because everything smells this way there. With my scarf on, I’m carrying that city with me today, into the new year. I’m breathing the city that my country has occupied for nearly a decade now.

I can try to describe it, but I’ll never succeed. It’s a bit like the smell of a wood fire, but there’s much more too. There’s also the trace of burning trash, which people use to supplement their insufficient wood and coal, for heat and cooking. There’s smog in it too, from a city where people can’t afford anything but the lowest-grade gasoline in cars, and where the snow-capped mountains all around trap it in. There’s also dust, because the cars are driving over mostly unpaved roads. And there’s the hint of unnamable filth, from the scattered sewers that run along the roads, open to the air. This would be just unsanitary in a city of thousands. But Kabul has swelled to four million, thanks to impoverished refugees pouring in from the war-ravaged countryside, their ancestral land lost and trading good, clean air for what I’m smelling now.

In late 2001, I met a woman who worked at the Pentagon. When she learned I had been protesting the invasion, she argued with me. She said, as we parted, that someday I’d understand that this was right. I’d get over it. Well, I still don’t. I haven’t.

The year to come will only really be new if we make it that way. Let our mere prayers for peace be made acceptable by our actions, by our willingness to shed the pride and importunity that keeps us trying to have our way with drone strikes and night raids. They will fail. There is no victory from making widows and orphans. In a new year made truly new, we will no longer accept the waste and horror of war as the policy of normalcy. We will stop trying to take what isn’t ours. We will starve the bottomless hunger for revenge, and sit down with our enemies, and eat together.

Let God be the first to know, and Congress second: it’s a new year. War, the demon-mother of poverty, is no good in our sight, and we are the ones who can stop it. This year, may the four million human beings in Kabul breathe clean air again. Amen; let this be done.

The question is: “Can religion be apolitical?” What they have in mind, being British and all, is the recent revelation of Catholic priest Fr. James Chesney’s involvement in IRA car bombings in the 1970s. Being the chauvinistic American that I am (and a pretty sporadic news-reader lately), I didn’t mention Chesney. But the question presented simply too good an opportunity to summon the rarely-summoned memory of my favorite theologian. Here goes my answer:

Religion is politics. It just is. The great French sociologist émile Durkheim was right almost a century ago when he wrote of religion as “an eminently social thing”. We learn it (or don’t) at our mothers’ breasts and cling to it (or not) as we set out into the world. We speak the word of God with human lips and hear it with human ears. The ways we do so are our first inkling of what a good society should look like. And that inkling forms habits of how we bother to treat one another. How we treat one another is politics.

Few have known this quite as well as the Episcopalian lawyer-theologian William Stringfellow, a man who followed Karl Barth’s advice to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. “There is no option in this world of abstention from politics”, he wrote. “Everyone everywhere is involved, whether intentionally and intelligently or by default or some moral equivalent of it.” So, no: religion cannot be apolitical. But people can think it is, and that’s when it becomes truly dangerous, or at best vapid and naive.

Keep reading to watch me rather recklessly equate spirituality with terrorism.

I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-of-thumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture.

Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right?

Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.

Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to comment and encourage. Fleshing this piece out, in particular, and putting it before readers means a lot to me.

Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.

What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.

He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.

I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.

Read the other essays over at Happy Days.

What does it take to imagine that nonviolent approaches to conflict might be possible? Millennia-old religious traditions? A prophet? Common sense? Certainly the last place one would expect to find it: a race of hardened warriors in a hardened land, where a gun is part of the common attire and tribal feuds last for generations.

Yesterday evening, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened T.C. McLuhan’s 2008 film—decades in the making—The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace. It tells a story desperately in need of being told: the life of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the towering Pashtun leader who worked with Mohandas Gandhi in the nonviolent struggle to rid colonial India of British rule. After that, he worked to dissolve the incendiary lines of cultural and religious identity that marked Pakistan from the beginning. In all, he spent a third of his 98-year life in prison.

Those interviewed in the film refer again and again to a “miracle”: that Khan, a product of the chaotic tribal region in present Pakistan and Afghanistan, could have become a “Badshah”—an “emperor”—of peace. And that he mobilized a hundred-thousand-strong nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgar, whose soldiers wore locally-spun red cloth, symbolizing their commitment to shed blood for the cause of peace and freedom. Amidst a supposed culture of killing, Khan came to realize that violence can only lead to defeat and the only victory worth having is a nonviolent one.

At the time, many assumed that Khan learned his methods from Gandhi. Or perhaps through his British schoolteacher, Reverend Wigram. No, Khan insisted, he had come to them on his own, through his Muslim faith and through the traditions of his people.

The most powerful parts of the film are those with the 82 Khudai Khidmatgar soldiers—5 of whom were women—that McLuhan managed to gather by traveling among remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan. All in their nineties at least, they spoke proudly of their service and of their devotion to the ideals that Khan taught. Khan was the son of a wealthy landowner, and he had a British education. But, by and large, not these men and women. Yet somehow, they fail to act out the barbarous stereotype that everyone—inside and out—seems to have about their society. Their witness reminds us, in fact, that traces of nonviolence are deeply ingrained in every human society, no matter how warlike. We forget this too easily when violence is all that titilates us enough to make headlines.

The Frontier Gandhi could hardly be more timely, yet it also runs the risk of being lost in the same senseless politics that kept its subject so marginalized and persecuted throughout his life. India-Pakistan tensions were palpable in the voices of those in the present trying to claim or disown Khan. Pakistan has erased his memory from the schoolbooks, and former President Pervez Musharraf even appears in the film, calling the Badshah a detractor from the Pakistani cause. For Indians, however, he represents a vindication for the Gandhian legacy which they claim. During the incredibly violent period of partition between India and Pakistan, which Khan and Gandhi opposed, the Khudai Khidmatgar stood guard over Hindu homes and property in Pakistan to protect them from Muslim mobs. While the film shows people on Pakistani streets for whom Khan’s name doesn’t ring a bell, a gaggle of Indian schoolgirls gives a glowing account of his accomplishments.

Worrying also is the appeal that this film might have for Western forces engaged in a war precisely where Khan lived and worked. Might promoting his story give rise to a more “passive” resistance? When Taliban fighters give up their guns to become meek peacemakers, one might imagine, it’ll be a whole lot easier to install a pro-Western nation state over the “lawless” tribal regions, ridding the universe of terrorism once and for all. Hamid Karzai, incidentally, praises Khan in the film. One can only hope that the convictions of Gandhi and Khan are true, that there is no weapon more powerful than nonviolent struggle, and that those who wield it, even against the American war machine, would truly and meaningfully win.

At his death in 1988, Badshah Khan showed one last time his mastery as an artist of human spirit. Though he died in a hospital in Pakistan, he insisted on being buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, across the Khyber Pass. His family objected, but he insisted. And so it was. Thousands poured over the border, with no papers or passports. The Afghan civil war went on hold for a few days. Business as usual—warfare as usual—stopped for a while so that people could celebrate the vision of a great man.

But there was a bomb. 15 people died, out of the hundreds of thousands who came in peace, in defiance of normalcy. There was a bomb, so the funeral was on the news.

With a black hood covering my head, all I could see outside was blurry and dark. The outside couldn’t see in. After an hour of standing still, my muscles began to ache terribly. The cardboard sign I carried felt like a slab of concrete. Sounds blended and muffled, and their quiet rebelled against the busyness that the shadows were transacting. Constantly, the shadows took pictures of us, and stared, and reacted. I was one of about a dozen that day dressed in hoods and orange jumpsuits, standing silently in a row before our altar and our stage, the White House.

To find out what on God’s green earth I was doing, take a look at my new essay at The Huffington Post about the little stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, “The Pennsylvania Avenue Circus.” It’s an odd and wonderful place, full of the posturing and tourism and security and passion that makes Washington such a seductively strange city. When I used to work downtown, one of the best parts of my day was the ten seconds it took to cruise through there on my bike, trying not to crash into the tour groups or the Secret Service.

Growing up in D.C., I was always fascinated how the buildings there claim to be imbued with power. Here’s a passage on the subject from a memoir-in-progress:

On the way to the museum, we would pass the Pentagon and the marble monuments to war. The Capitol stood in the backdrop. If I looked hard enough, could power be seen? Perhaps, in the the city’s wide avenues, which trace out Masonic symbols. Or in the blind eye they cast on the horrific neighborhoods. Unlike Rome, a fortress on hills, we built D.C. in a swamp, as if all its wars would be distant ones. It felt like a privilege to be so close to the center of power, and I couldn’t understand why people chose to live elsewhere in the country.

Hope you like the new essay.

One of the highlights of my trip up to Brown last week was the chance opportunity to hear Stout speak again, on March 6th. This time, his title was “It’s a Boy: How Militarism Has Corrupted the Republic.” Again, I am deeply grateful to see him taking up this matter—it comes at a time when I am in the process of finding ways to engage militarism in my own work. To find him with the same things on his mind is deeply encouraging. Stout exercises philosophy of a kind that gives me hope for the whole enterprise—that it might be heartfelt and engaged while also, as a matter of course, rigorous.

Stout’s title repeats the short message sent by physicist Edward Teller at the successful detonation of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952: “It’s a boy.” The phrase is, I can’t help but notice, a far cry from what Robert Oppenheimer famously muttered seven years earlier at the Trinity test (pictured above), invoking the Bhagavad Gita: “I am death, destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer’s words attempt to grapple with the human consequences of the event. Teller’s jauntily embrace them. Since the Founding Fathers, who knew from experience the dangers of imperialism, Stout argues that our politics has grown far too casual about dominating others militarily. The public’s willingness to not only accept the false premises of the 2003 invasion of Iraq but, a year later, to reelect its perpetrators, is the most astonishing symptom of our civic atrophy. We have set a very dangerous precedent.

As a pragmatist, he calls for us—not the leaders but us—to step up with more robust “practices of accountability.” Citizen institutions must act as a “counter-power,” preventing those in government from exercising force arbitrarily. Only through them, our potentially-despotic republic can become, truly, a democracy. The consequences of failing—which may now be already inevitable—are drastic, far more than any of the far-flung conflicts that defined the “American century.” As countries like China and India grow ascendant, the world will hold them, at the very least, to the standards of the superpowers that preceded them. If we cannot show that a democratic, just exercise of strength is possible in this world, we may suffer the consequences firsthand at the mercy of others.

One might quickly ask: To what standards do we hold leaders accountable to in the first place? How do we agree? Stout, for instance, evaluates Iraq from the perspective of just-war tradition, while I would push for a more radical pacifist ideal. Fortunately, one need go little farther than Stout’s earlier writings, such as Ethics after Babel and Democracy and Tradition. There, he offers compelling accounts of how the very process of democratic institution-building can create—and has often created—the conditions necessary for a habitable agreement.

My favorite moment in the talk was Stout’s response to a question about what advice he would give Obama. He started trying to answer, then stopped himself. As appealing as it seems to have the ear of the Commander-in-Chief, his argument isn’t meant for the president alone. Far from it. The work of establishing these conditions, and of reconciling moral traditions, is anything but a gnostic exercise to be carried out at the highest levels. It cannot be worked out by professional philosophers alone, nor by benevolent leaders. All people share in the burden of philosophy, in the responsibility to hold those in power accountable, and in the opportunity to enact their philosophies through civic institutions. After all, we can only know the truth of what we actually try, and democracy will only come when we act democratically.

Like Edward Teller, American democracy, such as it is, still takes its bombs far too lightly. As citizens, we have failed to own up to the responsibility we bear. The consequence has been a far too casual habit of violent domination, with military abroad and prisons at home. Benevolent pronouncements, which we hear much of lately, are not enough. Says Stout, rightly, America’s enemies “mock our talk of liberty because our bases speak louder than our words.”

That’s a funny statement for a writer to deal with. What do I have but words and theories? Well, the difference between Oppenheimer and Teller was so plainly evident in their words. Their theories unleashed nuclear force. In theories and words, one can at least take the means and ends of destruction seriously, for what they are, never permitting them to slip into the disguise of lightness.