Deep bow of gratitude to my longtime friend, and once grade school counselor to my sons, Marilyn Lyons, for passing this on to me. Tears. I can't wait to get this book! I am just so moved each time something emerges that I immediately know is important, wise, compassionate, powerful, loving, and deeply needed. Surely, Soldiers of Peace is among those resources which can nourish and strengthen our hearts, minds, spirits, and souls. I soak in each and every antidote that helps remind me of a larger picture and of what most matters. Truly, the wisdom here is a gift. We're all in this together. Bless us all. ❤ Molly
H.
Patricia Hynes, Review of Paul K. Chappell, Soldiers of Peace (Easton
Studio Press, 2017)
Author and prominent
peace educator Paul Chappell observed that he had 12 years of math through
calculus II, and yet uses only a fraction of his math skills in daily life. He
graduated from high school, however, illiterate in peace, literacy he
desperately needed and has dedicated his life to cultivating, disseminating and
incorporating into educational curricula.
The author’s childhood
was filled with trauma. As a mixed race, Korean/African-American/white child
growing up in Alabama, he felt himself a racial outcast. By high school, as he
readily admits, he was full of rage. But in an act of survival at the age of
19, he made a solemn commitment to transform himself. He reflects with irony
and regret that “the education system had not given me a single hour of training
to help me understand the nature of rage. … In fact, much of what I learned in
school taught me to suppress my empathy and conscience and to view purpose in
the narrow context of accumulating material wealth.”
What we are offered in
Chappell’s most recent book, “Soldiers of Peace,”
is a strategic and skillful path to radical empathy with fellow humans, within
community and in society. It is the sixth in his seven-book series, “The Road
to Peace,” a trove of insight and strategy for peace activism burnished by
wisdom and compassion.
Chappell writes with a singular
style shaped by the directness of his engineering and military training at West
Point, fused with imaginative metaphor and lessons drawn from Greek mythology
and early classics. “Soldiers of Peace” is organized around a guiding
constellation of stars: struggle, training, truth and strategy.
Waging peace is never passive,
he writes—it is an unremitting quest in which we humans struggle against
“violence, trauma and injustice in our personal lives, communities and
throughout the world.” Otherwise, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, evil triumphs
when good people do nothing. Peace is achieved only when strategic struggle for
social, economic and political justice is fueled by “purpose, meaning,
understanding, justice and gentleness.”
Training in peace
literacy is as crucial as learning reading, writing and mathematics, and it
cannot be left only to parents, Chappell cautions. Schools must teach the
history of strategic campaigns that won civil rights and women’s rights; the
arts of listening, asking questions to achieve clarity and understanding,
cultivating empathy and mutual communication; the skills of disciplined
resolution of conflict, and recognizing verbal and advertising manipulation. As
Gandhi avowed, “If peace schooling were taken as seriously as military
schooling, our world would be a much different place.” Therein lies the core
message of this book.
Please continue this
review here: https://www.juancole.com/2018/01/soldiers-nonviolence-maximum.html
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