Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice

Merton’s classic Faith and Violence makes a powerful case for a theology of resistance that speaks with enduring urgency.

Violence in the modern world is a complex matter. The majority of the world’s most egregious acts of violence are not perpetrated at the level of the individual—rather, they occur at the hands of systematically organized bureaucracies. It is this “white-collar” violence that Merton addresses in Faith and Violence. Writing at the height of the Vietnam war, Merton masterful...