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Pentecostals and Nonviolence explores how a distinctly Pentecostal-charismatic peace witness might be reinvigorated and sustained in the twenty-first century. To do so, the book examines the nature of the early Pentecostal commitment to nonviolence, and investigates the possibilities that might emerge from Pentecostals and Anabaptists entering into conversation and worship with each other. Contributors engage the arguments surrounding the heritage of Pentecostal pacifism in the United States and then move toward exploring nonviolence and peacemaking as crucial for contemporary Christianity as a whole. Ranging from theology, testimony, and pastoral ministry to interchurch relations, activism, and protest, this diverse collection of essays challenge and invite the whole church to the task of peacemaking while exploring the distinctive, and often neglected, contributions from the Pentecostal-charismatic tradition.

The Old Testament Roots of Nonviolence brings together a number of issues, showing how they fit together in one exciting story. These issues are: 1. War and Peace 2. The Great Commission (being missional) 3. Social justice and social change over time in the biblical setting
This book reveals the continuity of the Old and New Testaments in the development of these three major themes over millenniums of time in the unfolding biblical story of God's creation, tough love, and redemption of the social order. It presents biblical faith as a providentially guided process in the community of faith resulting in global social change that can be observed and described as yeast in bread or seeds in soil as Jesus taught.

This book documents some of the pacifist and social justice convictions of early Pentecostals, many of whom were called traitors, slackers, cranks, and weak-minded people for extending Jesus' love beyond racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. They wrestled with citizenship and Jesus' prohibitions on killing. They rejected nation-worship, war profiteering, wage slavery, patriotic indoctrination, militarism, and Wall Street politics–and many suffered for it. They criticized governments and churches that, in wartime, endorsed the very thing forbidden in their sacred book and civil laws. They recognized the dangers of loving your country too much, even more than Jesus and his words, and viewed nation-loyalty as a distraction from a higher and more inclusive loyalty–devotion to God. These articles, once accessible only to academics, are now available to the public. These voices, often forgotten within today's mainstream Pentecostal history, offer an opportunity to revisit the passions of early Pentecostal leaders and to examine Pentecostalism in fresh ways.

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Today Islam is often associated with violence, more so than other world religions. In the center of this reception of Islam is the concept of jihad, which has been distorted by many. On the one hand, there are some Muslims who take jihad as a reference point for their violent crimes against innocent people. On the other hand, the concept is intentionally used to promote fear against Islam and its adherents. This study challenges these presentations of jihad by exploring the late Muslim theologian Said Nursi's jihad of nonviolence. The book shows how Nursi's teaching concerning nonviolent struggle, reconciliation, and religious tolerance has much in common with Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.