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A Persistent Peace: One Man's Struggle for a Nonviolent World

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Author: Reverend Father John Dear Sj
Creator: Martin Sheen
Publisher: Loyola Pr
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$22.95~~
Buy New: $13.80
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

54 reviews
Sales Rank: 23736

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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: A nice clean hardcover, in excellent dj, of the 2008 Loyola Press 1st edition (as pictured). No marks to text. Ready to ship.

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Editorial Reviews:

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.

Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Sharing his commitment October 26, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

There are few people in the world committed to an ideal willing to dedicate their entire life to it. John Dear, SJ, is one of these. You hear about people getting "a call", and it probably happens to everyone, but most of us don't listen. And it would have been easy for him to get a degree, have a career as a lawyer or journalist, and work for peace as a sideline. But this is someone who felt the call so strongly he completely dedicated his life to it.
Simply put, he believes his life should be dedicated to living as Jesus did. Rejecting violence, promoting peace. Of course there are many who might dispute his notion of what peace is all about. But it doesn't matter what we think, we're not living the commitment.
A Persistent Peace is an autobiography that picks up Dear's life at a critical juncture. We have all seen peace activists and peace demonstrations. Through his book, we now can see the inner workings of a person completely dedicated to improving the world, and trying to live as Jesus did. Is Dear a perfect man? Absolutely not, and he'd be the first one to tell you that. He struggles with the same things the rest of us do. Selfishness, anger, self-righteousness. But he turns to God each and every time and asks for help. He makes it seem simple.
Dear travels all over the world, wherever there is strife. He gets his hands dirty, he spends time in jail. He gets to know the people he's trying to help. Even if you don't agree with what he's trying to do, its an interesting story. He brings to life people and events we've read about in a remote sort of way in the news. He reminds us these are real people and this is their life.
Should everyone try to live more like John Dear? Maybe. His level of commitment is something I can truly admire. Most of us try to live a good life. But Dear is someone who truly understands and lives his ideals. If the rest of us could try, even to a much lesser extent, to have a positive impact on our world, it would be a far better place to live.

5 out of 5 stars

MAY ANYTHNG GOOD COME FROM DUKE UNIVERSITY? CAN AN AMERICAN YET BECOME A SAINT? THIS BOOK PROVES YES AND MORE October 14, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful

This book traces the pilgrimage of the Reverend Father John Dear SJ from his days as an undergrad at Duke, through his realizing conversion and relevant pilgrimages, through his seminary formation and subsequent priestly, prophetic, courageous and orthodox Roman Catholic ministry as a commited peacemaker.

As a member of the amazon Vine critical community, I received early and gladly the Uncorrected Proof galley received by all of us here associated with the Vine program. Even before the release of the final (First) edition, I met the Reverend Father Dear in Los Alamos, New Mexico in the first days of August 2008, and asked him to sign my Galley sheets of his book. He expressed some anguished concern that it had been released to the public in this form, prior to correction and refinement. Nevertheless, he agreed to sign my copy (on loan from the Vine program), dedicating it to Peace.

Perhaps much of the carping found in the unfavorable reviews here ("auto-hagiography"??!!) are due to this rough and raw galley reaching the hands of an unsophisticated and even hostile public.

I have now at the going rate acquired the final approved edition and to find it much improved, and refined, and ready for public consumption. Please do not be dismayed by the negative vine reviews here; please do not be discouraged from purchasing this moving testimony written by this excellent spiritual writer and courageous and tireless and consistent Christian worker for peace and compassionate understanding. Read this book.

For those who seek further autobiographical material from this great priest and pacifist, you might try Peace Behind Bars: A Peacemaking Priest's Journey from Jail.

For all of the anger and the several reviews granted this autobiographical work (including ridiculous accusations of self-absorption by the great and humble priest who has given all courageously to Christ) no one notices his more theoretical work of applied theological concurrently released with Persistent Peace entitled Put Down Your Sword. Those who find this present work of autobiography to be too much about Father Dear (and what after all is an autobiography anyway??!!) might find more to their taste the later book which was published at the same time, with the subtitle: Answering the Gospel Call to Creative Nonviolence. It is a fine and moving and inspiring work which calls us ever more deeply into the mystery of Jesus Christ and our total commitment to follow Him alone. If you find Father John's autobiography too much about Father John, read Put Down Your Sword, and find out more about you, yourself, and what you are called to become, one step at a time.

2 out of 5 stars

Blessed Are the Peacemakers? October 10, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful

Blessed are the peacemakers..... So begins one of the most quoted verses in the New Testament. By such a standard, John Dear, Jesuit priest and peace activist, should be fairly blessed by now. His years of being a defender of the downtrodden have made him one of the more important voices in the social activism of the religious left.

Thus I was looking forward to reading Dear's memoir A Persistent Peace. With so much of the face of the Church given to supporting all manner of foreign entanglements and expecting Armageddon as a child would a trip to the amusement park, a voice for a consistent - even radical - stance for peace would be a welcome relief even if I disagreed with his views on many issues.

Unfortunately, the book proves to be a tedious monologue about how he is right and anyone who has the gall to see things another way is wrong. While there is a certain humor in seeing someone reason like the most tendentious of fundamentalists for the other side, even this novelty wears thin in the face of his inflated sense of his own self-importance. There is simply no perspective with the author or any hint of considering the possibility he might now and then be mistaken. If he is arrested for obviously breaking the law, then it is the arm of some incipient fascism at work. If the bishops think that military action against a nation harboring those responsible for the 9/11 attacks that murdered thousands of innocent civilians might constitute a just war, then they are sacrificing lives to the gods of death. He really needs to lay off the caffeine.

While at times engaging and even entertaining, the book bogs down in a stifling sameness that begins to sound like the sort of things you might remember political activists on campus shouting as you were on your way to class. Filled with an anger at their culture that only children of the upper middle class can afford, they would yell and plead and generally be ignored by those around them for whom politics was not the center of their existence.

One imagines the author has spent far more time with activists at protest marches than ordinary folks at some local parish. His diatribes begin to repeat themselves early on and one finds oneself skipping whole paragraphs in the hope that something more interesting will emerge on the next page. Alas, the activist in Fr. Dear gets the best of him. As he apparently subscribes to Lenin's quip that quantity has a quality of its own. Most of his stories feature him standing up to the forces of injustice and using dialogue that sounds almost as artificial as that in the Left Behind books. I would believe he made it up were it not for the fact that this is actually how political activists speak.

Often the rants are given Christian and specifically Catholic dressing. Yet even when he cites Christian language that is a part of the Church's life, I have the distinct feeling he does not understand the words the way they are understood by most Christians now and throughout history. The cause of disarmament (that he calls "peace" but is really something very different) has replaced the cross of Christ at the center of his "gospel."

As much as I wanted to read a book that gives a strong challenge to the distorted perspective on war and peace advocated by the religious right, A Persistent Peace simply does not fit the bill. In the end, the book not only is completely unfair to those with whom it disagrees, but is also persistently dull.

5 out of 5 stars

A Spiritual Adventure Story That Moves Us to Action as We Flip the Pages September 23, 2008
1 out of 2 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.

5 out of 5 stars

Thought provoking and powerful September 15, 2008
1 out of 2 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.

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