Cold War Letters – Thomas Merton

In Jim Forest’s discussion of his own conversations/letters with Thomas Merton, he addresses Merton’s non-violence thoughts… even though in the context of the Nuclear Arms Race and the Cold War, the discussion is eerily relevant today…

“…if the conditions of a just war were taken seriously, no war could be considered just insofar as it targeted no combatants or used weapons of mass destruction. As he put it to a correspondent in Kansas: Though not a total pacifist in theory myself, I certainly believe that every Christian should try to practice nonviolence rather than violence… Killing achieves nothing.

The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers