Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. By Joseph Kip Kosek. Columbian Studies in Contemporary American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xii + 352 pp. $50.00 cloth.

摘要

Joseph Kosek’s Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy isnthe first serious work on the history of pacifism in America to appear in annumber of years. It was a doctoral dissertation at Yale, but it does not suffernfrom the ailments of many doctoral dissertations. Instead of too much detailnon too small a subject, Kosek gives his readers a reasonable amount ofninformation on a substantial subject. The topics included are pacifism innAmerica, the role of religion in American life, the importance of nonviolencenin social change in America and around the world, and the role of keynAmerican and international figures in formulating a nonviolent theory and anprocess to achieve that change. Key figures include John Haynes Holmes,nA. J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Kirby Page, Edmund Chaffee, John NevinnSayre, Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, Bayard Rustin,James Farmer, and Martin Luther King Jr. These are not all household names,neven to those familiar with the subject. Gregg in particular emerges fromnrelative obscurity. The organization that is front and center is the Fellowshipnof Reconciliation (FOR), a product of World War I. Organized in England, itnarrived in the United States in 1915.