Hutter was born in the Tyrol region of modern-day northern Italy. A hatmaker by trade, he was exposed as a young man to the teachings of wandering Anabaptists, converted, and soon began preaching himself. Leaving his homeland in 1533 to escape persecution, Hutter traveled to Moravia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, and lived there for two years, building and shepherding a number of congregations. When largely Catholic Moravia expelled the Anabaptists two years later, Hutter was arrested and transported to prison in Innsbruck. He was held there for several months and regularly tortured to force him to recant his religious views and to divulge the whereabouts of other Anabaptist leaders. Hutter refused to be broken, however, and the authorities, enraged by his stubbornness, sentenced him to his horrible death. Had Hutter cooperated, they would have settled for “mercifully” beheading him.
The followers of Hutter, who call themselves Hutterites, continue to practice the communal ownership and absolute pacifism he defended and died for. Persecuted numerous times by both church and state over the past four hundred years, the Hutterite community nearly died out in the nineteenth century. But several rural settlements in North America are now flourishing, keeping Jacob Hutter’s ideal of Christian nonviolence alive.
26 February
Naim Ateek
2 February 1937—
Following the Way
Only two percent of the people in Israel and the Occupied Territories identify themselves as Christian. The overwhelming majority of their neighbors are Jewish and Muslim. So a Christian Palestinian is apt to feel doubly vulnerable: first as a second-class citizen because of Jewish domination, second as an outsider among his own mainly Muslim people.
The Reverend Naim Ateek knows this vulnerability firsthand and has turned it into a tool with which to promote justice and reconciliation. Born in the Galilee region, he and his family were forcibly relocated by Israeli soldiers to Nazareth in 1948 when their family home was taken over by Jewish settlers. He studied in the United States, was ordained an Episcopal priest, and returned to Nazareth to practice his ministry.
During his many years of parish work, he had ample opportunity to reflect on the parallel between the story of Jesus’ persecution and crucifixion and the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people. Ateek came to see the subordination of Palestinians, especially Christian ones, as a replay of Christ’s passion. Influenced by the liberation theology then being developed by Latin American thinkers, he came to the conclusion that the very vulnerability of Christian Palestinians gave them a vantage point from which to preach Christ’s message of peace, nonviolence, and reconciliation. “We are Palestinian Christians,” he writes. “This is certainly not our only agenda, but if we are not concerned with justice and peace and reconciliation, what is our faith really about? It’s part of our responsibility as Christians—part of being faithful to the truth and to our baptismal covenant—to respect the dignity of every human being and speak out about injustice.”
To help his fellow Palestinian Christians grow into the ministry of justice and peace, Ateek founded the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in 1989. Based in Jerusalem, Sabeel strives to “make the gospel relevant ecumenically and spiritually” by defending the Christ-centered “sanctity of life, justice, and peace.” Through education, advocacy, and public witness, the Sabeel Center’s intent is always to preach a “spirituality based on love, justice, peace, nonviolence, liberation and reconciliation for the different national and faith communities,” and thereby break the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians on the one hand and Christians, Jews, and Muslims on the other.
Ateek chose the name “Sabeel” carefully. It’s the Arabic word for “the Way,” a reference to what the earliest Christians called the nonviolent teachings of Christ. But it also means “a spring of water,” testifying to Ateek’s deep conviction that nonviolence offers living and revivifying water to a land long parched by conflict.
27 February
Gautama Siddhartha
ca. 563 BCE—ca. 483 BCE
Nonviolence and Enlightenment
Prince Siddhartha, born into the powerful warrior caste in what is now Nepal, had a protected and pleasure-filled childhood. His father, hoping to insulate the boy from life’s miseries, kept him a virtual prisoner inside the extensive palace grounds. But young Siddhartha, increasingly curious about the outside world, finally persuaded a servant to take him beyond the palace gate. Once outside, he encountered scenes that shocked him to his depths: hungry and emaciated children, ill, lame, and aged people, and corpses being prepared for cremation. In one fell swoop he realized that life is full of suffering. Shaken to his roots, he fled the palace in the dead of night and retreated into the forests to search for meaning. He finally discovered it—his title, the Buddha, means “the enlightened or awakened one”—and shared his insights with the world.
The Buddha taught that the world’s suffering is the result of unfulfilled craving. Our desires upset the equilibrium of our minds, giving rise to thought patterns that create artificial polarities such as mine/yours, desirable/undesirable, and love/hate. This fragmentation of our awareness of the world encourages a fixation on self, which the Buddha argued is itself an illusory construct created by craving, and this in turn breeds animosity toward those whom we fear pose a threat to the self’s satisfaction. Violence, then, springs from self-deception spawned by the failure to control craving. It’s a habit of thought that risks becoming so engrained as to seem natural.
To shed the delusional tendency to violence, the Buddha recommended a regimen of behavioral therapy: gradually rid oneself of craving by recognizing that desires only enslave and that it’s better to be free, and practice behavior that encourages the letting go of craving. The Buddha summarized this teaching in the Four Noble Truths, recommendations for cultivating inner equilibrium and a right relationship with the world.
One of the central principles in the Buddha’s teaching is the importance of nonviolence, or ahimsa. If we control our cravings, we control the fear, ignorance, egoism, and self-deception that create violence. Not wishing to suffer ourselves, we recognize that it’s wrong to inflict suffering upon any living thing. One of the most eloquent expressions of this commitment to nonviolence is in the Brahmajala Sutta, a summary of Buddhist ethics from the Theravada tradition. In it, the Buddha instructs his bhikkhus or monks by using himself as an exemplar. He tells them that he “abstains from the destruction of life. He has laid aside the rod and the sword, and dwells conscientious, full of kindness, compassionate for the welfare of all living beings.” He has laid aside all weapons, mental as well as physical, doesn’t take what isn’t given, blocks his ears to idle chatter or hurtful words, doesn’t start or end quarrels, and strives to be trustworthy by refusing to utter falsehoods. The Buddha’s point is that nonviolence, the mastery of craving which too often leads to rancor and strife, is both the path to and the fruit of enlightenment.
28 February
Linus Pauling
28 February 1901—19 August 1994
Prophet of Sanity
After his death, the magazine New Scientist named Linus Pauling one of the greatest scientists of all time. But during his lifetime, particularly in 1962, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear weapons work, many people in the United States saw him as at best a Soviet stooge. A decade earlier, the State Department had refused him a passport because of his activism. Life magazine called the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize a “weird insult [to the people of America] from Norway.” The Senate Internal Security Committee, the Senate equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee, blasted him as a mouthpiece for the