“An ethic of the interim as I understand it, would allow us to fill the gap between today and tomorrow with the bodies of all who must die  before we accept the word of Christ. On the contrary, I think the Sermon on the Mount concerns us here and now, or concerns us never. In whatever modest and clumsy a way, we are called to honor the preference of Christ for suffering rather than inflicting suffering, for dying rather than killing. In that sense, all “interim ethics” have been cast aside. The time to obey is now.” -Daniel Berrigan SJ

The Time to Obey is Now: Nonviolence in a World of War

April 9, 2022, 12:00 Noon (EDT)

Frida Berrigan is a mother and community activist living in New London, CT with her husband and three kids. She writes on the human side of politics for TomDispatch, and long contributed The Little Insurrections blog to Waging Nonviolence. She is the author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, published by OR Books in 2015. The book recounts her upbringing at Jonah House, the Christian resistance community founded in the early 1970s by her parents Elizabeth McAlister and Philip Berrigan. More recently, she penned a chapter in The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids For a Just World published by Broadleaf in 2021. In New London, Frida grows vegetables, raises chickens, works with a Community Land Trust on affordable housing and pickets at nuclear submarine maker General Dynamics.

Yurii Sheliazhenko  is executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection. He obtained a Master of Mediation and Conflict Management degree in 2021 and a Master of Laws degree in 2016 at KROK University. In addition to his participation in the peace movement, he is a journalist, blogger, human rights defender, and legal scholar, an author of academic publications and a lecturer on legal theory and history.