Perspectives from Religion with John M. Whiteley investigates aspects of the role, development, and co-evolution of some of society’s most important formative and stabilizing institutions on search for peace, as well as the influences of gender, socialization, and human nature. The particular formative and stabilizing institutions which are examined include government, business, religion, education, and the family.
The intent is to make more accessible to learners the diversity of perspectives and multifaceted insights which characterize contemporary American thinking about the problem of achieving peace in the nuclear age.
The interviewees included a broad diversity of what they chose to emphasize. Cardinal Bernardin thought “peace is possible but not inevitable.” Father Hesburgh thought “nuclear weapons pose the greatest moral challenge ever to face humankind.” Father Berrigan so opposed U.S. government policy on nuclear weapons that he was willing to so defy prescribed restraints on protest that a sentence to a term in Federal prison was the result. Pulitzer Prize recipient and MacArthur “Genius” Jack Miles characterized the role of religion in the world as that of “a wild card in a 52 card deck of cards.” Pastor William Sloane Coffin of the Yale Chapel and Riverside Church told an anecdote of why people do not build more Cathedrals today: “It takes convictions to build a Cathedral and people today only have opinions.”
Leonard Beerman – Releasing Powerful Armies of Moral Strength – 1984
William S. Coffin -It Takes Conviction to Construct a Cathedral – 1984
Seymour Siegel – The Lessons of History and the Problem of Evil – 1984
Daniel Berrigan – Turning Warheads into Plowshares: How Shall We Educate People to Goodness in a Bad Time?
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin – Peace Is Possible, But Not Inevitable -1984
Theodore M. Hesburgh – The Greatest Moral Problem Ever to Face Mankind – 1984
Theodore M Hesburgh – Peace in a Worldwide Community – 1984
David N. Saperstein – Religion, Politics, and the Lessons of History – 1985
Jack Miles – Religion is a Wild Card in a 52 Card International Deck Not a Code That Enables Us to Read the Future
Jack Miles – A Pleas for Post-Colonial Reconciliation: The Last Testament of Christian de Chergé