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A Persistent Peace: One Man's Struggle for a Nonviolent World | 
| Author: Reverend Father John Dear Sj
Creator: Martin Sheen
Publisher: Loyola Pr
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $11.47
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Avg. Customer Rating:  51 reviews
Sales Rank: 14618
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 440
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.6
ISBN: 0829427201
Dewey Decimal Number: 271.5302
EAN: 9780829427202
ASIN: 0829427201
Publication Date: August 1, 2008
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Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
John Dear, SJ, has been arrested more than 75 times. He has spent more than a year of his life in jail. He has been mocked by armed U.S. soldiers standing outside the doors to his New Mexico parish. All this because he so fervently believes in peace.
Dear's unflappable persistence in speaking and acting on behalf of peace stems from his life-changing decision in college to leave behind his frat-boy, party-all-night lifestyle and instead become a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. In turn, that decision has, over many years, led him to live out the Beatitudes of the nonviolent Jesus in every dimension of his life rather than simply quote them when convenient from time to time.
A Persistent Peace, John Dear's autobiography, invites readers to follow the decades-long journey and spiritual growth of this nationally known peace activist, and to witness his bold, decisive, often unpopular actions before government officials, military higher-ups, and even hostile representatives of the Church. With heroes such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, it should come as no surprise that John's activism has taken him to many places including war zones all over the world.
From his conversion to Christianity, to his calling to become a Jesuit, to the extreme dangers and delights of a life dedicated to truly living out the radical, forgiving love of Jesus, Dear's incredible story will touch anyone who believes in the power of peace. Perhaps most important of all, readers will come to understand through John that the most important disarmament of all is the one that happens inside each heart when we finally let go of our own self-righteousness, resentment, and anger.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 46 more reviews...
 A Spiritual Adventure Story That Moves Us to Action as We Flip the Pages September 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
After writing more than a dozen books on the religious roots of peacemaking and inspiring tales of great spiritual activists like Gandhi, John Dear, SJ, gives us a spiritual adventure story. These are his memoirs of a life transformed from a half-drunk frat boy at Duke University, sometimes turning only glazed eyes toward the rest of the world, to a deeply introspective Jesuit priest willing to risk his own imprisonment to keep pushing the cause of peace around the world.
This book is a page-turner. It's more than 400 pages, but Dear takes us sometimes almost breathlessly from one spot somewhere on the globe to another, one dramatic public action to another.
At points, he relishes the fun. Late in the book, for example, he writes about a scathing article he published during a stay in Ireland that stirred a backlash from at least some Irish Catholics. Dear writes: "And the priest named for orchestrating the attack, for stirring up trouble for the poor Irish church, was that notorious Jesuit Father John Dear."
So, why a spiritual adventure story like this now?
In his introduction to this memoir, Dear's friend Martin Sheen gives us one important answer. "Courage," Sheen writes, "is often described as the first virtue from which so many other virtues flow. It is certainly the most admired virtue and the one most devoutly wished for, and while its source remains a mystery, courage is universally acknowledged as the very best part of the human character. Courage is breathtakingly abundant in John Dear."
As a journalist who has covered religious movements for nearly a quarter of a century, I'm amazed at the huge chasms between branches in the family of faith. This year (2008), Desmond Tutu is leading an effort to nominate Dear for the Nobel Peace prize. In Catholic circles, Dear is fairly well known, especially among Catholics drawn toward the peace-and-justice movement associated with the Berrigan brothers and Bishop Thomas Gumbleton. However, Dear is largely unknown in other huge swaths of Christianity. Since reading a galley of his book several months ago, I have asked groups of mainline and evangelical Christians about him - and I usually get blank stares in response. That surprises me partly because from 1998 to 2000, Dear was director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York City, a historic branch of the global peace movement that includes many Protestant groups. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in 2001, Dear was back in the news, this time very involved as a chaplain working with hundreds of affected men and women.
This question of Americans' awareness of him isn't an idle concern, because Dear's vocation for a quarter of a century has been as a modern-day prophet for peace. He wants people to see what he is doing in daring public actions to protest the modern machinery of war. He wants people to listen to him and to read his words in these many books he has published since the mid 1980s.
Dear argues that the greatest spiritual failing of our era is blindness, a loss of our imagination to even envision a peaceful world and perhaps a loss of our souls in the process. We need reminders of how life can be lived.
Sheen is correct in his introduction. Why a spiritual adventure story now from this prolific writer? Because this is precisely what the dire and anxious era of the early 21st century needs. We need prophets. We need examples of spiritual imagination. We need to find courage and creativity.
I heartily recommend this book.
Thought provoking and powerful September 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book tremendously and find that I can't stop thinking about it. Fr. Dear's witness for peace is remarkable, and serves as a clarion call to all of us who consider ourseleves to be Christians: the world is burning with violence and injustice, and we are called by Jesus to fight the flames with love and nonviolent resistance. Highly recommended! I loved it, and feel very challenged to do something (anything!) for peace.
 Prophetic soul or Gandhi wannabe? September 10, 2008
John Dear is a dear person, without doubt. But this memoir leaves me of two minds about him. One one hand, he is a sincere idealist who sees in the gospels a call to non-violent resistance to evil. By seeking to rid himself of hatred and violence, he hopes to emulate Jesus. On the other hand, he comes across as naive (and worse, ineffectual) about the world in which he lives. His attempt, for instance, to pray the Pentagon into peace seem as silly and useless as the Yippies' attempts to levitate the place with mind power.
Like many progressives, Dear honors non-violent saints like Dr. King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day and the Berrigans. His efforts to get his Jesuit order to pay more than lip service to their gospel mission (as opposed to their secular mission to win football games and hang out with the powerful) is exemplary. There's just an immaturity about him that makes even his most right-headed gestures seem faintly ridiculous.
I would have liked to see more of Dear himself on the pages. He speaks of his own inner violence -- but what does it look like? He speaks of Jesus as non-violent, but I would like to see an exposition of this topic, rather than to take it as given. And Dear does not help us understand why most of his fellow Jesuits take a more hard-headed approach to following Christ than he does. He also does not share his personal insights into the difficult question of whether *all* evil can be surmounted by non-violence, or just some. The Kings, Gandhis and Days flourished in cultures that at least held onto the fiction of being moral in the Judeo-Christian sense. In truly evil cultures, the Dears of the world are the first to get shot. But if, in some otherwordly sense, success against evil is besides the point, Dear does not explain. Is he a prophet or a fool? Hard to tell.
My wife also read the book and it's her excitement about it that kept me reading. It's nice to know that people who take the gospel so seriously still exist. But if they more likely to repel than to attract, are they doing humanity any favors?
A saddening and inspiring story at the same time September 4, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
People who spend time in Prison are violent criminals, not men of peace. "A Persistent Peace: One Man's Struggle for a Nonviolent World" is the story John Dear, a man who converted to Christianity later in his life and decided to take up the call to spread Jesus's famous words - 'love thy neighbor as you love thyself.' The wisdom, while celebrated by many, isn't universally accepted, as his stands against several get him into trouble. A saddening and inspiring story at the same time where one can have such a positive message for it to be ignored, "A Persistent Peace" is a must for anyone seeking a biography of a different sort.
A Persistent Peace September 3, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is a very readable book. It is inspiring and personally challenging.
A must read for those involved with social movements.
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