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.
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