RS 236: Religion and Nonviolence

(1 Unit)
This course charts the development of differing conceptions of religiously motivated political non-violence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by way of several intergenerational, international and inter-religious conversations. We begin with the influence of American Quaker abolitionism on the work of Russian novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy. We then shift to the letters exchanged between Tolstoy and the young M.K. Gandhi, and the influence of Tolstoy in Gandhi’s formulation and practice of nonviolent resistance. Finally, we will study the influence of Gandhi’s thought and work on American Civil Rights leaders like Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as Catholic pacifists like Dorothy Day, among many others. Staff