Author Archives
PURPOSE: Our Author Archives is an index of the most frequent contributors to our site, mostly those with five or more articles. We have posted an extensive amount of material, numbering in the thousands of pages, and are constantly seeking ways to make it more readily accessible. We welcome your ideas and input.
NOTE: Please click on the names below to go to the archive page for that author.
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KEN BUTIGAN is director of Pace e Bene, a nonprofit organization fostering nonviolent change through education, community and action. He also teaches peace studies at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago.
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MAX COOPER writes on Indian Philosophy and Religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Comparative East-West Philosophy, American and English literature, and Gandhian studies. Much of his work can be found at his academia.edu page.
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DOROTHY DAY (1897-1980) was an American journalist, social activist, and Catholic convert. In her youth she was a Communist fellow-traveler, and all her life called herself either an anarchist or a “personalist”, after a movement started by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. Dorothy voiced the sentiment countless times that all states were inherently totalitarian, and dedicated her life to serving the homeless and poor. In the early 1930s, along with fellow activist Peter Maurin she co-founded The Catholic Worker, a radical, nonviolent, pacifist newspaper and movement that continues to combine aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action. The cause for making Dorothy a saint has been formally inaugurated by the Catholic Church, and she can now be referred to officially as “Servant of God”. The literature on Dorothy is extensive. A Google or Wikipedia search would be good starting points. The Catholic Worker also has an excellent Dorothy Day section on their website, where they have posted all of her Catholic Worker writings.
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JOHN DEAR has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize, most notably in 2008 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; but that does not tell a fraction of his story. One of the most prominent peace activists in the world, he has been arrested more than 75 times for peace and nonviolent protests. He was Executive Director of Fellowship of Reconciliation (1998-2001) and founder of the Bay Area Pax Christie. He has received several peace awards, including the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award 2010. He is a prolific writer. Among his works are: Disarming the Heart: Toward a Vow of Nonviolence; Our God Is Nonviolent: Witnesses in the Struggle for Peace and Justice; Seeds of Nonviolence; etc. Visit his website for a more extensive bibliography, and to read other of his articles, speeches, and sermons.
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Since the early 1960s JIM FOREST has been one of the foremost leaders in the peace and nonviolent movements. He was the editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper, and cofounder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship; Vietnam program coordinator for Fellowship of Reconciliation, and editor of Fellowship magazine; secretary general of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation; and more recently founder and director of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and editor of the Orthodox journal, Communion. His many books include All Is Grace: a Biography of Dorothy Day and Living With Wisdom: A Biography of Thomas Merton. His own website has a list of his publications, and more of his essays.
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Gandhi was a prolific writer, his Collected Works now numbering 98 volumes. We have chosen, therefore, to post only those Gandhian texts relating to neglected aspects of his work. For example, his Constructive Programme was one of his chief concerns in the last ten years of his life, and yet has been misunderstood or ignored. His correspondence with Bart de Ligt is also relatively unknown, yet relates to controversies over whether or not satyagraha was a viable strategy against Nazi domination, a controversy far from being resolved.
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JOSEPH GERACI is the director of the Satyagraha Foundation and editor of our website. In 1968 he was a member of the radical Christian commune, Emmaus House, in East Harlem, New York. From 1968-1976 he was a member of the Catholic Worker community, living mostly at the farm commune in Tivoli, New York. He served as a member of the Catholic Worker newspaper editorial collective, contributing articles about Danilo Dolci, the Italian nonviolent movement, and an organic orchard he planted at the farm. His last novel is The Path of the Gods (Strand Publishing, London).
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WILLIAM J. JACKSON is our Literary Editor and a regular contributor. He was born and grew up in Rock Island, Illinois, and studied at Goodman Theatre School at the Art Institute of Chicago, at Lyndon State College in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom,” and at Harvard University where he earned his PhD in the Comparative Study of Religion in 1984. He is professor emeritus of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University. He was the first Lake Scholar (2005-2008) at the Lake Family Institute on Faith and Giving, Philanthropic Studies Center, Indiana-Purdue University. His academic specialties are the comparative study of religion, Asian arts and literature, South Indian bhakti (devotion) in the lives and works of singer-saints. He is also an authority on Fractal Geometry in the Humanities, that is, recursive patterns in music, literature, art, and architecture. His awards include a Research Fellow, Bellagio, Italy Research Center Rockefeller Foundation, 2000; and Contemplative Practice Fellowship Program, American Council of Learned Societies, 2000. Most recently Dr. Jackson has published a novel, Gypsy Escapades, New Delhi: Rupa & Co, 2012, on the themes of terrorism and satyagraha. Another novel also came out recently, The Singer by the River, an ebook available from Sruti magazine, Chennai. It is an historical novel about South India’s greatest composer, Tyagaraja. Further information about Dr. Jackson is available on Indiana University’s website and at academia.edu.
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MARY ELIZABETH KING is professor of peace and conflict studies at the University for Peace and a Rothermere American Institute Fellow at the University of Oxford (UK). She is also distinguished scholar with the American University’s Center for Peacebuilding and Development, in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The New York Times on Emerging Democracies in Eastern Europe, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.: The Power of Nonviolent Action, and Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. During the U.S. civil rights movement, she worked alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation), in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She co-authored “Sex and Caste” with Casey Hayden, a 1966 article viewed by historians as tinder for second-wave feminism. For biographical information, more articles, bibliography, et al. please consult her website.
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GEORGE LAKEY co-founded Earth Quaker Action Group, which won its five-year campaign to force a major U.S. bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining. Along with college teaching he has led more than 1,500 nonviolence workshops on five continents, and nonviolence activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among his many articles and books, he is the author most recently of Toward a Living Revolution: A Five-Stage Framework for Creating Radical Social Change, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016; and Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right—And How We Can, Too, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017.
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VINAY LAL is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India (especially cinema), the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, contemporary American politics, and the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi. He is the author or editor of over fifteen books. His exceptional blog site gives a full biography, and list of his publications, and is regularly updated with a wealth of articles on India.
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The Dutch pacifist BART DE LIGT (1883-1938) was pastor of the Reformed Church at Nuenen, Netherlands, where Vincent van Gogh’s father had been pastor 25 years before. He was a member of the League of Christian Socialists, and founder of the International Anti-Militarism Bureau. At a meeting of the War Resisters’ International in 1934, he presented his famous “Plan of a Campaign Against All Wars and Preparation for War”, which took a firm stand against fascism and Nazism. The full text was included in The Conquest of Violence (1937, with an Introduction by Aldous Huxley), one of the earliest and still one of the most important interpretations of Gandhian nonviolence. See especially Bartolf’s article for a summary of de Ligt’s life and work
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TERRY MESSMAN is the editor and designer of Street Spirit, a street newspaper published by the American Friends Service Committee and sold by homeless vendors in Berkeley, Oakland, and Santa Cruz, California; he is as well editor of the website with the same name. For more than three decades Terry has been the program coordinator for the AFSC’s Homeless Organizing Project.
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The Norwegian philosopher ARNE NAESS (1912-2009) is one of the foremost environmental thinkers of the twentieth century, often referred to as “the father of deep ecology”. Less well known is that he was also a major theorist of Gandhian nonviolence, or more specifically of active nonviolent resistance, satyagraha. His two Gandhian volumes were published in small editions as Gandhi and Group Conflict: An Exploration of Satyagraha, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974, and Gandhi and the Nuclear Age, Totowa (New Jersey): Bedminster Press, 1965. He was a major interpreter and theoretician of satyagraha, on a par with Joan Bondurant and Krishnalal Shridharani.
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GEOFFREY OSTERGAARD (1926-1990) was Professor of Political Science, University of Birmingham (England). He was a leading member of the anarcho-pacifist movement, which rejected the use of violence for social change, basing its social principles on the communitarian theory of Kropotkin, Ruskin’s Unto this Last, and Gandhi’s social reform principles. He was a prolific writer, contributing regularly to the anarchist publications Anarchy and Freedom as well as to Peace News. Among his many books, we might cite as of importance to nonviolence theory, Nonviolent Revolution in India (1985) and especially The Gentle Anarchists (1971), co-authored with Melville Currell, a definitive study of Gandhi’s social reconstruction principles and movement.
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Winin Pereira and Jeremy Seabrook
Perhaps best known as the founder of the Centre for Holistic Studies in Mumbai, a research center dedicated to providing resources to support a vision of society based on social justice and harmony with the natural world, WININ PEREIRA is also the author of numerous books and articles. His titles include: Tending the Earth: Traditional Sustainable Agriculture in India, Bombay: Earthcare Books, 1993; Inhuman Rights: The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997 and Global Parasites: 500 Years of Western Culture, Bombay: Earthcare Books, 1994, co-authored with Jeremy Seabrook.
JEREMY SEABROOK is a prolific writer with a career dating back to the late 1960s. Besides having written novels, his numerous books on social justice and environmental issues include: Notes From Another India, London: Pluto Press, 1995; Children of Other Worlds, London: Pluto Press, 2001, a comparison of child labor in nineteenth Century London and present-day Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives, Oxford: New Internationalist TM Publications Ltd, 2004. His website offers more information, lists of publications, et al.
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DEVI PRASAD (1921-2011) was a studio potter, peace activist, artist, and in the 1960s and 70s acting director of War Resisters’ International (WRI). As a child he was educated at Rabindranath Tagore’s school, Shantiniketam, and in 1944 Gandhi invited him to his ashram at Sevagram to teach pottery. Besides spinning cotton and weaving cloth (khadi), the most famous of Gandhi’s methods of self-sufficiency, Gandhi also valued and encouraged all the crafts, and insisted they be included in the curriculum of his ashram schools.
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NATHAN SCHNEIDER is an editor at wagingnonviolence.org and the author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. He writes about religion, reason, and violence for The Nation, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Religion Dispatches, and AlterNet. Besides being an editor at Killing the Buddha, he has own website at nathanschneider.info.
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GENE SHARP (1928-2018) is one of the world’s leading experts on the history, theory, and practice of nonviolence. His three-volume work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973) is considered essential reading for anyone interested in any aspect of nonviolence and nonviolent struggle. He is Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and was for thirty years a research fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. He is also founder of the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, a non-profit organization concerned with nonviolent action and conflicts.
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VANDANA SHIVA is a world-renowned physicist, ecologist and author, and Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology. In her role as a visionary activist, she has been battling for decades for India’s food security and farmers’ rights, as well as global ecological sustainability. Among her many awards is the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize), 1993, for her pioneering insights into the social and environmental costs of the dominant development process, and her ability to work with and for local people and communities. Besides contributing to navdanya.org, she also maintains seedfreedom.info, and her own site vandanashiva.com.
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STEPHEN ZUNES is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, and chair of the university’s Middle Eastern Studies Program. He serves as senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, is an associate editor of Peace Review, a contributing editor of Tikkun, and chair of the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Visit Stephen Zunes’s website for a list of his publications and further biographical information.
