Human Rights and Non-violence in a Culture of War and Injustice

To be delivered by John Dear, SJ

The Hawke Centre Focus on Rights series

Thursday 8 March 2007

Jointly presented by Pace e Bene Australia, the Decade to Overcome Violence Committee of the South Australian Council of Churches, and The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, UniSA

Information on the topic discussed by John Dear at this lecture may be found on his web site at: www.johndear.org

John Dear, a Jesuit priest from the United States, is a peace activist and organizer, a lecturer, retreat leader, and author/editor of 20 books on peace and non-violence. In the context of world that accepts human rights violations of many kinds – from homelessness, the lack of affordable medicine and hunger, to torture – he situates war and nuclear weapons as the ultimate human rights violations. For Dear, the means and the end are one. We cannot achieve peace and justice by waging war and supporting systems of injustice. We can’t protect human rights by any methods that violate human rights. War can never stop terrorism because war is terrorism.

Dear sees the world’s crisis as an addiction to violence as a way of solving problems. He presents an active nonviolence which seeks to confront, heal and transform the world’s violence at every level, from the personal, to the international and the global. But Dear’s nonviolence is not passive. It is active, creative, provocative, challenging. It shows the need for all of us to eliminate violence in our own lives, but also to stand up - publicly, actively, and peacefully – against all forms of injustice. It is also far more than a tactic or strategy. It is way of life.

In a world threatened by war, nuclear annihilation and the militarisation of space, our very future may be at stake. Dear quotes Martin Luther King - “The choice for the world is no longer violence or non-violence. It’s non-violence or non-existence”.

More details can be found at his website: www.fatherjohndear.org 

** Gold coin or note donation gratefully accepted towards the work of Pace e Bene Australia **

Jointly presented by:

While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of: strengthening our democracy – valuing our cultural diversity – and building our future.