The Acorn Journal

Vol. 25 is Greg Moses’s final issue as editor of The Acorn. It opens with “Roots and Shoots of Sagacity: Editor’s Introduction and Farewell,” signed from Austin, Texas in June 2026, in which Moses hands the editorship to Associate Editor Sanjay Lal, effective with Volume 26 in 2026. The issue was assembled in the wake of an unheeded call for papers framed in response to the closing chapters of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? — King’s warning about “unregenerate segregationists” prepared to pursue “a native form of fascism,” set against his call for a “true revolution of value” that moves “beyond slogans for their solution” (“Beyond Slogans for Solutions: Where Do Pacifism and Nonviolence Go from Here?”). The CFP, dated November 2024 and issued for rolling submission through 2025, asked contributors to frankly assess “the challenges of our day” and pointed to Rev. William J. Barber’s continuation of King’s Poor People’s Campaign as a model of resistance already underway. Although the call itself failed to inspire any submissions, the spirit of the contributions nevertheless articulate robust answers to King’s leading question: Where Do We Go from Here?

Two articles anchor the issue. Muhammad Husnain Haider and Zainab Imran contribute “Abdul Ghaffar Khan: The Frontier Gandhi’s Legacy of Leadership and Non-Violence,” a detailed history of the Khudai Khidmatgar (Red Shirt) movement that Khan built among the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier Province — tracing Khan’s turn from a failed, violence-adjacent Hijrat emigration scheme to a disciplined nonviolent movement grounded in Islam and Pashtunwali. Along the way Haider and Imran trace Khan’s alliance with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress against the brutality of oppression that was exemplified by the 1930 Kissa Khani Bazaar massacre, in which British armored cars killed some two hundred unarmed protesters — an atrocity that, by Khan’s own account, only strengthened the movement’s resolve and swelled its ranks from 500 to 50,000. In another article, Daorsa Kamberi explores “The Delicate Art of Exercising Enlightenment in Extraordinary Circumstances” by reading Kant’s essay on Enlightenment against the literary strategies Ismail Kadare used to smuggle moral critique past Enver Hoxha’s censors in communist Albania. Kamberi shows how Kadare deployed the flattering “corrective mask” of The Winter of Great Solitude, the inverted-sacrifice allegory of The Three-Arched Bridge, and the surveillance dystopia of The Palace of Dreams — to embody a resilient, if non-ideal, form of Kantian Enlightenment that survives even when public reason itself becomes impossible. Both articles point the way toward fruitful topics and methods of nonviolence research.

The issue’s two Features are both Author Meets Critics forums centered on books by members of the journal’s editorial circle. “Ascending the Nonviolence Continuum” brings Predrag Cicovacki, Jennifer Kling, and Danielle Poe to bear on incoming editor Sanjay Lal’s Violence, Nonviolence, and Moral Worth. Lal’s central move is to relocate nonviolence from physical action to attitude — a willingness not to harm, a positive concern for others’ well-being, and a refusal to sacrifice one’s own moral worth. Lal argues that violence and nonviolence are best viewed not as strict binaries but as poles of value along a continuum that is capacious enough to hold both Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s armed resistance and Gandhi’s own qualified acceptance of violence. Cicovacki pushes Lal to define “moral worth” more precisely and questions whether the continuum model can survive without some account of absolute value; Kling, drawing on Audre Lorde and bell hooks, worries that the book’s Gandhian psychological picture presumes a settled, truth-seeking self that oppressive conditions like gaslighting can dissolve, and raises the “paradox of dehumanization”; Poe extends Lal’s reconceptualization of popular culture to her own viewing habits (reality television), asking where the line falls between a charitable nonviolent reading and an excuse for complicity. In another Author Meets Critics session, “African Philosophy for Kenya and the World,” critics Samuel Imbo and Mechthild Nagel assess Gail Presbey’s intellectual biography of Henry Odera Oruka, the Kenyan philosopher of “sage philosophy” who evaluated traditional African wisdom against contemporary global concerns, especially ecocentric environmental ethics and restorative justice. Imbo, who studied under Odera Oruka at the University of Nairobi, offers a firsthand recollection of Fr. Joseph Donders’s underappreciated role in early Kenyan philosophy; Nagel presses further into Odera Oruka’s abolitionist theory of punishment, arguing for missed points of contact with Angela Davis’s concept of fugitive freedom. The author and critics converge on Odera Oruka’s prescience as an anti-colonial philosopher as they contemplate critical tensions that resulted from his conscientious application of traditional paradigms.

An Appendix, “Sage Philosophy Here and Now,” closes the issue and makes the Odera Oruka connection explicit. Moses frames it as a direct follow-up to the Presbey Author Meets Critics forum, presenting three previously unpublished pieces by Rev. Dr. Philippe SHOCK Matthews as contemporary examples of the kind of community sage Odera Oruka documented — evidence that “sages in the here and now are not as rare as the work of existing professional philosophy would suggest.” In the three articles archived here, Matthews explores the lasting lessons of the Black Panther’s community programs, the spiritual legacy of Nun, Ptah, and Atum, and the pernicious architecture of Black Oppression that persists in the world today. Thus, the decade ends with several suggestions for further research.

Vol. 22.2, published in Fall 2022, is a memorial tribute to Bat-Ami Bar On, who died on November 16, 2020. Bar On was a feminist philosopher of social and political violence, a longtime member of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, and, in the editor’s description, someone whose analytical work was inseparable from her moral seriousness: “When The Acorn asked Bar On to review a book on refugee policy, she felt compelled to teach the book in class to get the fullest possible grasp on its value.” Guest editor Court Lewis, who shepherded the memorial section from a 2022 CPP panel at the APA Central Division, describes Bar On as committed to producing “carefully reasoned arguments that were not only intellectually and academically insightful, but more importantly, contributed to the creation of a more just, peaceful, and nonviolent world.” The three tribute essays that follow are edited versions of those panel papers. A fourth article, by Jyotsna Kapur on Tagore’s play Dak Ghar in the Warsaw Ghetto, arrived independently while the issue was coming together — a coincidence the editor reads as “cosmic synchronicity,” since both strands of the issue converge on the same imperative: in the face of authoritarian violence, never relinquish your humanity.

Jennifer Kling opens the tribute section with “Resettling Refugees: State Obligations, Egalitarian Concerns,” a direct continuation of Bar On’s final research project on the international refugee system’s accelerating collapse. Kling recalls a formative encounter with Bar On at a CPP conference where Bar On — characteristically matter-of-fact — told the young graduate student that her paper was definitely philosophy, identified two distinct arguments in it, and said, “Keep going!” The essay itself argues, following Bar On and Serena Parekh, that refugee camps are morally and politically untenable extra-legal structures that warehouse people without political voice rather than protect them, and whose average stay has reached twenty years. The burden therefore falls back on states to resettle, but Kling’s principal contribution is to show that equitable resettlement faces a dilemma under both distributive and relational egalitarianism — either the distribution of goods is unfair across receiving states, or the social and political relations in hostile states impose further oppression on the resettled. Her way forward, drawing on King’s 1965 UCLA speech on law and attitude, is to argue that states carry secondary obligations: not only to resettle, but to enact laws, policies, and programs likely to cultivate the social norms of inclusivity that make equitable resettlement possible over time. Wim Laven’s tribute, “Daring to Be Good,” works from Bar On’s co-edited collection of feminist ethico-political essays to reconstruct her five-step method for confronting evil as a practice of meaningful political citizenship: acknowledge the atrocities present in daily life; refuse to participate in evil done in one’s name; engage critically and specifically with the suffering of real people; ask what future self you are willing to become; and act politically rather than theoretically. Laven anchors the argument in Bar On’s critique of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” rhetoric, where he shows how her Arendtian analysis of fascism cuts through the false dichotomy between denouncing terrorism and condemning the violence carried out in response to it. Court Lewis rounds out the tribute in “Citizen-Soldiers in the American Cultural Revolution,” using Bar On’s framework on nationalism, fascism, and citizen-soldiers to analyze the contemporary MAGA movement as a Cultural Revolution in the Maoist sense: a propaganda-driven mobilization of “culture-soldiers” who deploy ethnic myth, mind viruses, and manufactured existential threat to wage a war for cultural purity that undermines democratic institutions and politics itself. Lewis argues that what makes Bar On’s work urgently relevant is precisely her insistence on naming the phenomenon clearly — fascism is fascism — without thereby legitimating the rhetoric of the demagogue who invokes evil to justify his own violence.

Jyotsna Kapur’s “When Children Die, What Can Theater Do?” stands apart from the tribute section in its archival and philosophical method, but it belongs unmistakably to the same moral territory. On July 18, 1942, children in Janusz Korczak’s orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto performed Tagore’s 1912 play Dak Ghar (The Post Office). Three weeks later, Korczak, his co-teacher Stefania Wilczyńska, and nearly two hundred children were marched to the trains for Treblinka; none survived. Drawing on Korczak’s Ghetto Diary, Walter Benjamin’s theory of children’s play, Hans Jonas’s concept of eternity, and Tagore’s expansive understanding of death as reintegration into the cosmos, Kapur reconstructs why Korczak chose Dak Ghar — a play about a dying boy who waits for a letter from the King — as a final gift to children facing certain death. Tagore himself conceived Amal not as a child but as a metaphor for the adult soul awaiting liberation from convention; Korczak saw Amal as a child, cast the play entirely with children, and apparently gave them space to improvise rather than memorize lines. The poet Władysław Szlengel, who wrote the performance invitation, described the result as transcending “mere acting” because it was “the work of children.” For Kapur, the performance was simultaneously an act of political internationalism — a Jewish children’s performance of a supposedly “Aryan” play, subverting Nazi mythologizing — and an act of philosophical defiance. By staging Amal’s starlit death in the cramped orphanage, Korczak helped the children taste what Jonas calls eternity, the transcendence that connects individual life to all life, and to assert through art their membership in a humanity the Nazis were trying to erase. The issue closes on the image Kapur draws from Korczak’s diary: as Abrazka, the boy who played Amal, led the last march to the trains — violin in hand — he embodied the violinist from the Isle of Parrots that Korczak had written about months before, the player whose defeat he had already foreseen and whose beauty he had already mourned. The universal injunction that unifies Bar On’s philosophy and Korczak’s pedagogy is the same: even in the death grip of fascism, do not relinquish your humanity.

Vol. 22.1, published in July 2022, takes literature, poetry, science fiction, and fantasy seriously as vehicles for peace philosophy. The editor’s introduction, framed by Angela Y. Davis’s memory of the moment King was shot — the sudden collapse of someone who had seemed invulnerable — sets the issue’s central preoccupation: the relationship between mortality, courage, and the practice of nonviolence. What does it mean to be human in a world that requires superhumanity of its most committed peacemakers? The issue approaches that question from multiple angles — speculative fiction, televised utopia, young adult narrative, biography, and political philosophy — insisting throughout that literary and imaginative forms are not decorations on top of peace theory but constitutive of it.

The feature article, Amir Jaima’s “The Untold Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Cyborg,” carries the issue’s thesis most boldly. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and the critical race framework of João Costa Vargas and Joy James, Jaima argues that Black heroism in American culture is structurally forced into the impossible — the Black candidate for heroism must be either sub-human or superhuman, never simply human. King’s historical arc is told as a speculative narrative: beginning with the 1956 Montgomery bombing, when an anonymous network of Black scientists offer King covert body armor, Jaima traces King’s transit through invulnerability (the 1958 Izola Curry stabbing, the 1962 Roy James assault) toward his eventual, deliberate choice to shed the technology and reclaim his mortality. The story is woven from historical fact and controlled fiction, blending King’s own words — especially the “I See the Promised Land” speech delivered the night before his death — with invented scenes to argue that King’s embrace of vulnerability was itself the most radical act of nonviolence: a death of the spirit refused, and a human death accepted. Jaima’s piece demonstrates the power of “literature as philosophy,” practicing the issue’s thesis rather than merely announcing it.

The issue’s feature discussion is a transcribed book launch event for José-Antonio Orosco’s Star Trek’s Philosophy of Peace and Justice: A Global, Anti-Racist Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022), organized by Concerned Philosophers for Peace and moderated by the editor. Orosco, joined by Andrew Fiala, Jennifer Kling, and Maurice Hamington, argues that Star Trek is not merely a source of philosophical illustrations but a sustained, self-consistent argument for a particular vision of humanity: rational, cooperative, capable of learning from history, and committed to what Gene Roddenberry called IDIC — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. The conversation ranges across Star Trek’s complicated relationship to militarism (Fiala’s question), its treatment of refugees and the Prime Directive’s tension between noninterference and humanitarian obligation (Kling’s question), and the resonance between Star Trek’s moral storytelling and Feminist Care Ethics (Hamington’s question). Orosco’s most pointed argument is that Critical Race Theory is not optional equipment for peace studies but a necessary tool: any utopian future that does not reckon with the legacies of white supremacy and colonialism is not a vision of peace but a fantasy of forgetting. King’s famous intervention — persuading Nichelle Nichols to remain as Lt. Uhura after the first season — becomes a hinge point: King recognized that Star Trek’s vision of an integrated future was worth fighting for in the present. For Orosco, Star Trek’s deepest lesson is that the battle for peace is also a battle for the imagination of the future.

Three book reviews complete the issue. Tom Hastings reviews Rivera Sun’s The Crown of Light (Rising Sun Press Works, 2021), the fourth installment in Sun’s Ari Ara young adult series, offering a grandfather’s endorsement grounded in decades of nonviolence training. Sun’s narrative centers on a Peace Force modeled on the real-world Nonviolent Peaceforce — itself the living descendant of Gandhi’s Shanti Sena — and Hastings praises her ability to embed sophisticated conflict transformation theory, restorative justice practice, and the philosophy of unarmed civilian protection into fiction that never feels rhetorical. Krishna Mani Pathak reviews Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Tagore & Gandhi: Walking Alone, Walking Together (Aleph Book Company, 2021), a scholarly account of what Mukherjee calls “the most creative encounter in the making of modern India.” Pathak finds particular value in Mukherjee’s patient attention to the men’s correspondence, their substantive disagreements — on swadeshi, Non-cooperation, the burning of foreign cloth, Gandhi’s claim that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was divine punishment for untouchability — and the deeper friendship that survived every rupture. The lesson Pathak draws, pointedly, is for contemporary academic and political culture: that critical dialogue conducted in genuine mutual respect is itself a model of the world both men were trying to build. Court Lewis reviews Michael H. DeArmey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), noting DeArmey’s ambitious expansion of Kantian cosmopolitanism to address what he calls “transnational evils” — genocide, slavery, torture, terrorism, and the destruction of the Earth. Lewis focuses on DeArmey’s three-tiered theory of dignity, which grounds moral worth not only in rational autonomy but also in ends-directed life processes and in the capacity to care for others, and on DeArmey’s commitment to bottom-up, community-building solutions alongside top-down policy reform. Taken together, the three reviews mirror the issue’s larger argument: that peace literacy requires expanding our sense of what counts as philosophical source material — to include the television series, the literary imagination, and the bonds of friendship that nurture peaceful aspirations at the frontier where fantasy engages fact.

Vol. 20 is a special issue guest-edited by Anthony Sean Neal under the title “Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Spiritual Left.” The issue arrives, as its September 2021 date signals, during a period of acute national reckoning — the year following George Floyd’s murder, a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, and a pandemic that had already stripped away many of the comfortable distances between philosophical ideas and lived experience. Neal’s editorial introduction sets the issue’s ambition squarely: to recover Thurman and King not merely as icons of the civil rights struggle but as systematic philosophers of human and community development, thinkers who forged their ideas under conditions of legalized oppression and whose resources are, precisely because of that forging, available to anyone facing the existential demand to survive and flourish under adverse conditions. Neal acknowledges that Thurman is often de-contextualized — read as a spiritual universalist while the racial friction that never left his writing is quietly set aside — and that King is similarly fixed in time and space as a historical monument. The issue aims to read both figures in a more enlivened way, and to demonstrate the continuity of their philosophical lineage into the present.

The issue’s centerpiece is an Author Meets Critics forum titled “Thurman’s Philosophical De-Mystified Mysticism,” organized around Neal’s 2019 monograph Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism: Love Against Fragmentation (Lexington Books). Neal’s introduction to the forum argues for a new framework in Thurman studies, one that does not allow a repeat of prior scholarship’s inattention to Thurman’s embeddedness in the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle (1896–1975). The book’s central claim — that love, for Thurman, is the force that overcomes fragmentation and constitutes the good community — is critiqued from two directions. Critic Michael Barber  brings Emmanuel Levinas to bear, noting a structural contrast: where Thurman grounds the obligation to love in the internal commitment of the one who loves, Levinas locates it in the commanding face of the one to be loved; and where Thurman’s mysticism reaches toward oneness, Levinas raises concerns about any monism that risks absorbing the singular other. Barber also presses on the philosophical standing of Thurman’s grandmother, Nancy Ambrose — a figure Neal reads as both historical person and ethnographic symbol of the African philosophical heritage transmitted through the Spirituals — asking about the evidentiary basis for her African origins and her relationship to Heideggerian thrownness. Critic Eddie O’Byrn focuses on love as a mystical force and challenges Neal’s phrase “weaponized love,” arguing that the vocabulary of weaponry counteracts the very ethos it is meant to invoke. O’Byrn also calls for more explicit treatment of Thurman’s relation to Gandhi — particularly the 1935–36 “pilgrimage of friendship” to India — and to King, whose debt to Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited is well documented. Neal’s replies are searching and self-critical: he defends the “weaponized love” formulation as a deliberate disruption meant to force focused reflection on how love could overcome violence, while acknowledging that the phrase resists easy substitution; he develops the symbolic significance of Grandmother Nancy’s oral transmission of the Spirituals; and he offers a rich account of the Thurman-King relationship through the shared metaphor of the Dream, reading King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a generational answer to Thurman’s exhortation in Meditations of the Heart to “keep alive the dream.”

Neal’s own article, “‘A Fulfillment So High’: New Directions in African American Philosophy for the Study of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr.,” extends the issue’s philosophical program by proposing four concepts as an organon for reading Thurman and King in tandem: Existential Transformation, Self-Altered Destiny, Self Examination, and Rejection of Irrelevance. The argument’s key move is to demonstrate that while Thurman and King were certainly engaged in the liberation of Black people from racial oppression, their philosophical resources are not exhausted by that context. The four concepts constitute a framework for self-transformation that is universally available — relevant, Neal argues, to anyone confronting oppressive conditions. The concept of Rejection of Irrelevance receives particular development through Neal’s contrast between proximal and distal reading: proximal readings enhance the portrait of the material condition of the subjects framed in a text and create relevance for readers in analogous conditions, while distal readings manufacture the distance of irrelevance. Thurman’s “sound of the genuine” and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” are both read as exemplary performances of this rejection — each author insisting that knowledge be answerable to those with their backs against the wall.

Two additional articles complete the issue’s scholarly conversation. Larry Perry offers “Beyond Black Churches: Toward an Understanding of the Black Spiritual Left, featuring Du Bois, Bethune, Thurman, and Black Lives Matter,” drawing on Leigh Schmidt’s genealogy of the American spiritual left to construct a parallel Black genealogy. Perry’s central argument is that Schmidt’s otherwise rich portrait lacks the material to clothe the distinctly Black concerns of figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurman himself — concerns shaped by racism, the ambivalent legacy of Black churches, and the particularities of Black politics. Perry traces the lineage from Du Bois’s naturalist religiosity and prophetic racial-justice hermeneutics, through Bethune’s pluralist late theology (shaped in part by Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited), to Thurman’s founding of the interracial, religiously pluralistic Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco in 1944, and finally to Black Lives Matter founders Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, whose eclectic spirituality — liberation theology, Ifá, and street-as-sanctuary — constitutes for Perry the movement’s most recent manifestation of Black Spiritual Leftism. The issue closes with a pointed exchange between J. Edward Hackett and Paul C. Taylor. Hackett’s article, “Kingian Personalism, Moral Emotions, and Emersonian Perfectionism,” argues that Taylor’s influential essay “Moral Perfectionism” — published in the commemorative volume To Shape a New World — commits hermeneutic violence against King by translating him into an Emersonian moral perfectionist while displacing the personalism King claimed for himself, that his teachers endorsed, and that frames his entire account of the Beloved Community as constituted by agapic love. Taylor’s reply, “Reading King’s Personalism, Or Not,” defends philosophical translation as a legitimate enterprise distinct from intellectual history, comparing his Emersonian reading to translation across natural languages — unavoidably imperfect but preferable to silence for those who do not speak the original idiom.

Vol. 19.2 carries the subtitle “Gandhi 150, Part II” and arrives in March 2021 — a date that says almost as much as the contents. Work on the philosophical themes had been well underway before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mass movement for Black Lives Matter, or the catastrophic Texas winter infrastructure failure of February 2021 that left millions without electricity or water; and yet, as the editor’s introduction notes, the concepts assembled here illuminated each of those crises with uncanny precision. Associate editor Sanjay Lal steps into the guest editor role for this issue. The introduction — written by Moses from Austin during Spring Break 2021 — is organized thematically rather than sequentially, weaving the issue’s contributions across four interlocking strands: religion and democracy, Gandhian economics, the over-demandingness of pacifist leadership, and the syndemics of militarism. The presiding spirit is still Gandhi at 150, but the issues pressing on every page — a pandemic, a racial justice uprising, a state’s collapsed infrastructure, the approaching twentieth anniversary of September 11 — ensure that these studies in pacifism and nonviolence are being tested in real time.

The issue leads with two Author Meets Critics forums that together place Gandhian philosophy at the center of two live debates in political and religious thought. In the first, Douglas Allen, author of Gandhi After 9/11, meets critics Lal and Karsten Struhl. Allen’s project is to free Gandhi’s philosophy from the dogmatisms and absolutes that have sometimes accumulated around it — remaining faithful to Gandhi’s own flexibility while also, where necessary, challenging his inflexibilities and blind spots. Lal and Struhl engage Allen in what the introduction calls a “robust dialogue,” inviting readers into the living intricacies of Gandhian wisdom rather than the comfort of settled positions. The second forum centers on Lal’s own book, Gandhi’s Thought and Liberal Democracy, with critics Jeff Shawn Jose, Douglas Allen, and Michael Allen. Lal’s argument is that the liberal state’s nominal separation of religion from public life does not achieve genuine religious neutrality — it merely vacates the field to anti-democratic religious dogmatisms that operate with full force in civil society, as school rituals, as cultural presumptions, as political power. Inspired by Gandhi’s ecumenical practice, Lal argues that a democratic state ought to exercise engaged, constructive interest in religious education, better to cultivate the conditions for a more genuinely democratic common life.

Three articles and a collaborative afterword extend the issue’s Gandhian economic and ethical inquiry. Sanjay Lal’s “Revolutionary Nondualism” takes up the charge — familiar from Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Stoicism — that philosophical traditions counseling detachment from the material world cannot coherently generate arguments for protecting the poor or providing a social safety net. Lal argues that Gandhi’s nondualism is a case in point: seemingly vulnerable to the same objection, it nonetheless contains the resources for a robust anti-poverty ethics, one that holds personal responsibility and structural remedy in tension rather than allowing either to dissolve the other. Michael Allen’s “Techno-Satyagraha” arrives, as the introduction notes, with particular force against the backdrop of Texas’s infrastructure collapse. Drawing on Gandhi’s own practice of spinning thread as a model of economic self-reliance, Allen argues for a Gandhi-inspired approach to political economy that is anti-dogmatic and technologically responsive — neither capitalist nor socialist in any fixed sense, but negotiating resilient relationships between regional, national, and global scales. Federico Germán Abal’s “Why Pacifist Leadership Overcomes the Over-Demandingness Objection” takes on the standard dismissal of pacifism as saintly and therefore impractical: Abal’s move is to distinguish between the obligations of ordinary moral agents and those of people who explicitly assume leadership roles within peace movements. While many people may lapse from strict pacifist practice without moral failure, those who take on the mantle of pacifist leadership have accepted a higher standard — and holding them to it is not over-demanding. Lal and Allen close the issue with a joint afterword, “Gandhi’s Economics and the ‘Defund the Police’ Movement,” in which their two articles’ differing approaches to Gandhian political economy are brought to bear on a controversy at the center of the BLM summer: the call to redirect resources away from police and toward community infrastructure and social services.

Three reviews anchor the issue in its urgent contemporary moment. Gail Presbey reviews Sarah Azaransky’s This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement, which reconstructs the interreligious dialogue between Black theologians in the United States and Gandhian satyagrahis in India that was formative for the American civil rights movement. The exchange was a genuine two-way critique: Gandhi challenged the racism embedded in American Christianity; Black religious philosophers questioned Hindu caste. Azaransky pays particular attention to Bayard Rustin — who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. from 1956 and stood with King and John Lewis at the 1963 March on Washington — as a living conduit between the two traditions. Presbey’s review lands in an issue that opened with a description of John Lewis, in the last days of his life, standing on a Washington street freshly painted with the words “Black Lives Matter”: the historical arc from Gandhi to Lewis to the summer of 2020 is made palpable. Tom Hastings reviews War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, edited by Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino and grounded in Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project. Hastings takes readers on what the introduction calls “a grim tour” of the syndemics of post-9/11 militarism: the direct killing and wounding of civilians, the long-lived damage of unexploded ordnance and toxic chemicals, and the psychological and social traumas that continue to accumulate two decades on. Will Barnes reviews Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, finding in Butler’s work a decisive refusal of the saintly model: Butler’s nonviolence is not obedience to a morally impeccable superego but a demand for the equal grievability of all lives. Drawing on Freud and Fanon, Butler argues that in a world where violence is thoroughly normalized, the nonviolent resister embodies a scandalous rupture — and connects the equality of embodied life to a social ethic of shared infrastructure, an insight Barnes finds critically anticipatory of the very disaster that struck Texas as the issue was going to press.

Vol. 19.1 arrives under the sign of Gandhi 150 — the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — and takes that anniversary as both its organizing occasion and its quietly interrogative frame. The editors’ introduction, co-written by Sanjay Lal and Greg Moses, titled “From Canons of Peace to Shoots of Resistance,” opens with a claim about relevance: however different our world is from the one Gandhi was born into in 1869, the values he lived by — above all the commitment to truth and nonviolence as inseparable — remain not merely historically interesting but urgently instructive. What the title promises, and what the issue delivers across its features and reviews, is a journey from the center of that canonical inheritance outward toward voices and modes of knowing that peace philosophy has not always acknowledged as its own. By the time the reader arrives at the final review, the canon itself is being asked to examine the assumptions it has carried unexamined.

The issue opens with Doug Allen’s feature article, “Mahatma Gandhi’s Philosophy of Nonviolence and Truth: The Key Values and Concepts for Gandhi 150 and the Future,” which serves as the issue’s philosophical anchor. Allen — a scholar with decades of sustained engagement with Gandhian thought — offers what the editors describe as a “one stop” source for Gandhi’s core concepts: satyagraha, ahimsa, swaraj, sarvodaya, the relation between means and ends, and the irreducibility of truth-seeking to any single tradition or method. The ambition is not to reduce Gandhi to a slogan but to show the full complexity of what it actually means to affirm nonviolence as a way of life — a complexity, Allen argues, that our present world has been systematically led to underestimate. The issue’s second feature takes up a question that Gandhi himself made central: the ethics of forgiveness and duty. In an Author Meets Critics forum built around Court Lewis’s book Repentance and the Right to Forgiveness, three critics — Greg Bock, David Boersema, and Jen Kling — engage Lewis’s argument that wrongdoers have not merely an interest in but a right to forgiveness. The forum becomes, as the editors observe, a masterclass in what Lewis calls “ethical eirenéism” — a reconciliatory approach to moral disagreement, inspired by Nicholas Wolterstorff, that holds competing frameworks in productive tension rather than forcing premature resolution. Virtue ethics, care ethics, feminist ethics, and liberation ethics each take a turn illuminating and challenging Lewis’s argument, and Lewis’s responses demonstrate that genuine comparative ethics need not dissolve into relativism.

The review section opens on canonical ground. Matthew Rukgaber reviews Philip J. Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History, a synthesis of Kantian critical philosophy organized around the question of universal peace. Rukgaber follows Rossi’s effort to connect the transcendental critique of reason to a cosmopolitan ethics, finding the project impressively unified — and yet also noticing the fractures. Kant’s system, on Rukgaber’s reading of Rossi, is both ambitious and practically oriented in ways that keep us seeking peace without ever guaranteeing its achievement: a rigorous honesty about moral philosophy’s limits that preserves, rather than diminishes, the force of the Kantian imperative. Charles Fink reviews the collection Tolstoy and Spirituality, edited by Predrag Cicovacki and Heidi Nada Grek, a volume that approaches the Russian novelist-philosopher as a serious religious and ethical thinker rather than merely a literary figure. Fink guides readers through highlights that include Robert Holmes’s examination of the Gospel teachings underlying Tolstoy’s doctrine of nonresistance to evil and Abdusalam Guseynov’s account of how the meaning of life and the meaning of love interweave throughout Tolstoy’s mature work. Marilyn Fischer — an accomplished Addams scholar — reviews the third volume of the Selected Papers of Jane Addams (University of Illinois Press), which documents the 1890s: the founding years of Hull House, Addams’s lectures to the School of Applied Ethics, her role as mediator of the Pullman Strike, and her celebrated visit to Tolstoy. Fischer’s review lands with particular urgency, as the editors note in their introduction, at a moment when anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States had crystallized into detention camps and family separation — returning readers to a decade when immigrants were a center of organized social solidarity rather than a target of state violence.

The final three reviews carry the issue’s argument from canonical resource to urgent present to radical reimagination. Paula Smithka reviews a collection drawn from Concerned Philosophers for Peace, edited by Jen Kling, which opens with chapters on the philosophical foundations of respectful human relationship: John Lawless on how commitment to autonomy entails commitment to relational care, and Barrett Emerick on silencing as a form of epistemic violence with an institutional as well as an interpersonal form. The collection moves outward from these foundations into white fragility, resistance, climate change, the concept of nonkilling, and the moral necessity of art. Jerry Kendall reviews George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, a manifesto for narrative transformation: Monbiot’s diagnosis is that the standard political binary leaves both sides sharing the “external values” — self-aggrandizement, competition, accumulation — that make the climate and political crises intractable, and his prescription is to build and strategically deploy a new story organized around the “intrinsic values” of compassion, connectedness, and solidarity. The issue closes with Court Lewis reviewing Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance — a book that refuses, by its very title, to treat indigenous knowledge as peripheral. Simpson’s account centers the Nishnaabeg concepts of kobade (the recognition of all individuals as links in a familial and community chain connecting ancestors, present, and future generations) and kwe (self-knowledge theoretically anchored to and generated through one’s particular ancestral and lived experience). These are not supplements to a Western philosophical canon of peace; they are, Simpson insists, forms of knowing that the canon’s assumptions about center and periphery have systematically suppressed. The editors close their introduction here, inviting readers — some of us for the first time — to start over and venture a whole new language of peace.