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.
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