The “fertile moment” Eli McCarthy identifies for “an emerging just peace ethic” consists of grassroots movements, organizations for nonviolent social transformation, and the Catholic and ecumenical groups, especially Pax Christi International, whose initiatives have reached the upper echelons of the Vatican. This resulted in a 2016 conference convened by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which brought together leaders of Women and Men Religious Institutes and eighty-five other representatives from around the world. The essays in this book frame the just peace approach (part 1), show how it functions in particular cases in the United States (part 2) and internationally (part 3), and concludes with a discussion of a virtue-based just peace ethic and suggested next steps.

In the framing essays, Gerald Schlabach presents the Sermon on the Mount as a “manual” for escaping our cycles of violence, a practical approach relying on the exegesis of Glen Stassen's “Fourteen Triads” article in 1993 as well as his Just Peacemaking, both urtexts for the just peace movement. Lisa Cahill places the just peace approach within the context of Catholic social teaching from the early church to Pope Francis’ message on the World Day of Peace in 2017, accentuating the practical effectiveness of nonviolence in recent Catholic social teaching. McCarthy outlines how a virtue-based approach complements Stassen's ten core practices of just peacemaking. The essays on US cases focus on the sanctuary movement; the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; nonviolent anti-Blackness after the murder of Michael Brown; and ending the death penalty. The international cases begin with a survey of nonviolent techniques in several countries and then focus on nonviolent responses to civil war in South Sudan, gang violence in El Salvador, ISIS attacks on the Yazidis in Iraq, ethnic-driven crimes in northern Kenya, rape used as a weapon in the Congo, and armed conflict between government forces and the Moros in the Philippines. These cases are informative and powerful in portraying the heroic efforts of people striving to bring a just peace to their homelands. They are important resources for readers not fully aware of these situations, especially the international ones.

The “next steps” outlined by McCarthy in the final essay are commendable, but some, including writing letters to government leaders, eliminating dehumanizing training in the military, or infusing the United Nations agenda with policy principles leading to the ultimate outlawing of war, are likely to meet with mixed results. This is no reason not to persevere in these works, but we need, as Merton put it, not to depend on results. Take, for example, Peggy Gish, author of the Iraq case, whose Christian Peacemaking Team has worked in Iraq since October 2002 and stayed during the US invasion. This kind of work requires finding meaning and joy over the long haul, come what may; it requires, in other words, the virtue of hope. But if hope acknowledges our status viatoris, that we exist on the way, and therefore remain unfulfilled, a stronger eschatology is needed as an antidote to demoralization and despair. In short, can there be just peace without eschatology?

A related issue has to do with the just war tradition. The just peace ethic seems designed to eschew just war ethics, owing to it being co-opted so often for nationalistic and militaristic purposes. This is the strategy of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, the group launched at the 2016 Vatican conference to propagate the message. But if the just peace approach were to be brought into the mainstream within the Catholic Church, problems would arise. For one thing, it is not clear exactly where Pope Francis stands on the just war tradition. For another, Catholics, especially in government and the military, find the just war tradition useful, not for ideological cover but for evaluating policies in warfare. Moreover, the just war tradition can serve as a tool for resisting modern war, rather than acquiescing to it, as in the case of Franz Jägerstätter. Schlabach and Cahill allude to these issues, but fuller debate on them is sure to arise in years to come. We are indebted to practitioners of the just peace approach and to essays like these for showing that nonviolent peacemaking lies at the center of Christian work and witness.