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  • Explore Power of Active Nonviolence with the Catholic Church – global webinars

    Please join a series of global webinar conversations with Voices Confronting Violence with the Power of Active Nonviolence through the Catholic Church. Listen to the Church reflect on the experience of nonviolence. Hear testimonies and insights from around the world on the power of nonviolent change. Explore ways that the Church and people everywhere can nurture a more nonviolent future. Please note the languages and spread in Spanish and French speaking communities. All are welcome (you don’t need to be Catholic).

    Latin America-Caribbean Roundtable (Spanish) September 1 (2 pm UTC) Register here

    Asia-Pacific Roundtable (English) September 11 (7 am UTC) Register here

    Africa Roundtable (English and French) September 19 (12 pm UTC) Register here

    Migration in the Americas (English and Spanish) September 21 (3 pm UTC) Register here

    Learn more at the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative.

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  • New Book! Unarmed Civilian Protection

    With gratitude to Ellen Furnari, Randy Janzen, and Rosemary Kabaki for curating this fine collection of essays, Unarmed Civilian Protection: A New Paradigm for Protection and Human Security, just released from Bristol University Press.

    Ellen Furnari has been involved with accompaniment/unarmed civilian protection primarily as a researcher and consultant since 2003, as well as teaching an online course. Randy Janzen has been involved with Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) as a practitioner (accompaniment work in Guatemala), as an educator (co-creating the first post-secondary program in UCP at Selkirk College, Canada) and a researcher. Randy is currently involved in UCP work in Palestine and Burundi. Rosemary Kabaki serves as head of mission at Nonviolent Peaceforce in Myanmar.

    The frequent failure of military or armed interventions to protect civilians is well known. This edited collection provides a comprehensive account of a different, effective paradigm: unarmed civilian protection (UCP). The principles and methods of UCP have been used for many decades to protect both specific, threatened individuals as well as whole communities. Featuring contributions from around the world, this book brings together a wide range of UCP practices in order to examine their underlying theory and interrelated strategies. The book provides an important illustration of the contributions UCP can make, while also discussing its limitations and failures.

    Of particular note to those working with the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative is an essay on policing by Eli McCarthy and one on security or humanitarian aid in UCP by John Reuwer.

    This is an expensive academic book but EPub and Kindle versions are more economical.

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  • Catching Up With D. Nurkse

    Dennis Nurkse is my mentor and teacher in poetry (and life). His skillful insight during my MFA program brought to life my poetry collection Bending the Arch. I’m grateful to see this recent interview with him from Hanging Loose Press and for his shout out.–Rose Berger

    D. Nurkse is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently A Country of Strangers (2022) from Alfred Knopf. Hanging Loose published Nurkse’s first collection of poems, Shadow Wars, in 1988. He’s the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tannen Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages. Nurkse has also written on human rights and was elected to the board of Amnesty International-USA for a 2007-2010 term. Nurkse has taught poetry at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and in inner-city literacy programs, as well as at MFA programs at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Stonecoast. For the Brooklyn Public Library, he edited This Beautiful Name Is Mine, poems by inner-city children. He’s currently a long-term member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife the writer Beth Bosworth, and the wild puppy Zephyr.

    Read the whole interview.

    Excerpt:

    HLP: Are you thinking of any young poets in particular? How do you think they are managing to keep their heads above water despite all of this turmoil?

    DN: I think of poets I worked with—not necessarily young, but younger than me–dg nanouk okpik, Rose Berger, Quincy Scott Jones. Quincy wrote about police violence and, having made a statement, established connections, had to stand back and watch the killings continue. dg is Inuit and has to watch the climate collapse ten times faster in the North where her family is from. Rose’s book-so few reviews. I think they find ways to take a longer view. They inspire me. If I were connected to America just by the twenty-four hour news cycle, I wouldn’t last a minute. []

  • +Flannery O’Connor+ Aug. 3

    “I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed.”– Flannery O’Connor, 20 July 1955

    This quote is from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor died of lupus on Aug. 3, 1964, at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital. She is buried in Milledgeville, Georgia at Memory Hill Cemetery. She completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while living with lupus.

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  • THE CATHOLIC NONVIOLENCE INITIATIVE LECTURE SERIES

    More than 40 universities/colleges are collaborating for this unique five-week series (beginning Oct 3) to explore questions of how the Catholic faith, institutional church, and People of God can deepen an understanding of nonviolence today. Rose Berger will present on Oct. 10 and 11 with Marie Dennis on “Returning to and Exploring the Power of Nonviolence,” 5:00 p.m. -6:30 p.m. (Pacific U.S.) This series will follow themes in the book Advancing Nonviolence and Just Peace in the Church and the World.

    For interested university students, faculty, and staff go here: www.CNIseries.info. 

    For interested general public go here: www.fallseries.org.

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  • Video: What I Learned on My Recent Trip to Ukraine

    This 30-minute presentation is a good starting point for updating your church and community on how Ukrainians are surviving in Russia’s war of aggression. You’ll hear about peacebuilders, religious leaders, as well as facts on the ground as our 17-member delegation observed them. When accompanied with Why I Prayed in Kyiv When I Could Have Prayed from Home, this makes a nice adult education forum or small group discussion. Also look for Sept-Oct 2022 Sojourners for my cover article on the international interreligious peace delegation.

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  • Podcast: A Peace of My Mind with Rose Berger

    Photograph of Rose Marie Berger by John Noltner

    Award-winning photographer John Noltner and his partner, Karen, sold their Bloomington, MN, home a during the pandemic, bought an RV and headed out to learn about peace in America. Noltner spent three decades as a freelance photographer for magazines, nonprofits and corporations. To counter a growing divisiveness he witnessed as he traveled, he launched “A Peace of My Mind,” a multiyear, multimedia arts project sharing stories of the courage and kindness of everyday people.

    John and Karen parked their live-in van at Sojourners’ office in D.C. for a few weeks this summer. It happened to coincide with a) my first visit back to the District in a year since moving to California and b) my return from a peace mission to Ukraine. John was kind enough to interview me about the trip for both audio and print and take one of his famous portraits of me.

    A Peace of My Mind is a multimedia arts project, created by John that uses portraits and personal stories to bridge divides and encourage dialogue around important issues. Through exhibits, workshops, lectures, on-site studios, and distance learning, A Peace of My Mind leads transformative experiences that help a polarized world rediscover the common humanity that connects us.

    Listen to or read the interview here.

    Download the podcast.

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  • Nonviolence: An Essential Basis for Peacemaking

    I was very pleased to join Dan Moriarty and Loretta Castro on a panel at the Catholic Peacebuilding Network conference this week. This hour-long video looks at now nonviolence is the substrate of Catholic peacebuilding and how it applies in situations such as Ukraine and the Philippines.

  • WHY I PRAYED IN KYIV WHEN I COULD HAVE PRAYED AT HOME

    Interreligious delegation at Caritas IDP center in Irpin, Ukraine, site of war crimes committed by Russian military.

    By Rose Marie Berger

    I have just returned from an intensive trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, with an international, interreligious delegation for peace. We took our “hearing ear and seeing eye,” as it says in Proverbs 20:12, to offer public prayers for peace and to see the impacts of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unjust war.

    What we learned has disturbed us to our very bones.

    Since early March, I have been a part of a small group of religious leaders from around the world prayerfully discerning how to stop the bombing of Ukrainians by the Russian government. We have been seeking openings for the Holy Spirit to intervene for peace.

    Not long after the bombing started in February, Mayor Vitali Klitschko of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, issued a call asking religious leaders to come to Kyiv: “I make an appeal to the world’s spiritual leaders to take a stand … and to proudly assume the responsibility of their religions for peace,” said Klitschko. “Come to Kyiv to show their solidarity with the Ukrainian people … Let us make Kyiv the capital of humanity, spirituality, and peace.”

    That is how the Holy Spirit works. For two months Sojourners has coordinated with colleagues at Poland-based Europe: A Patient Association and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to put together a religious leaders’ delegation for peace in Ukraine that was prepared to travel to Kyiv and answer the mayor’s call.

    I went to Ukraine to hear Jesus speak in the language of the Ukrainian people, to see their suffering and their creative determination, to touch their wounds and understand how the word of life is surviving there. As a Catholic I believe in the “real presence” of Christ — so being really present in the flesh is part of my call and mission. The “real Presence” is the miracle that changes the “absolutely impossible” to a glimmer of the possible. … Read the rest of this article by Rose Marie Berger at sojo.net.

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  • Podcast: Back from Ukraine

    Rose Berger at UGCC Church of the Nativity of Mary in Irpin, Ukraine (Dawid Godsporek,24 May 2022)
    Rose Berger at UGCC Church of the Nativity of Mary in Irpin, Ukraine. Photo credit: Dawid Godsporek (24 May 2022)

    On Memorial Day 2022, Elaine Enns and Ched Myers interviewed Rose Marie Berger, Senior Editor at Sojourners magazine and veteran Catholic peace and justice activist. Rose was 48 hours back from a week-long international, interreligious Peace Delegation to Ukraine—the first such group to visit Kyiv since the Russian invasion began on Feb 24, 2022. The religious leaders visited Kyiv and surrounding areas. Hear the podcast.

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