As part of the Mercy Peace Forum, Michael Baxter is set to talk about peacemaking during war during a virtual webinar 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10.
Baxter’s presentation is titled, “The Grace of Doing Almost Nothing: Reflections on peacemaking amid the perplexities of war in Ukraine and Gaza.”
Every semester, the Mercy Peace Forum sponsored by the Peace History Society holds a webinar on a current issue related to peace. The three Mercy universities that host the series are Georgian Court University, Gwynedd Mercy University and UDM.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are perplexing in their claims of justice. While there exist clear reasons for going to war in each situation, when we take a longer and wider view, the call to go to war becomes unavoidably ambiguous and deeply dangerous. In the presentation, Baxter will look briefly at these situations, review Richard Niebuhr’s famous “The Grace of Doing Nothing” essay, which was written in response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and then discuss taking a similar stand now.
Baxter is a visiting associate professor at McGrath Institute for Church Life at University of Notre Dame. He taught eight years at Regis University in Religious Studies, four years at DePaul University in Catholic Studies and 15 years at Notre Dame in the Theology Department. He also co-founded Catholic Worker communities in Phoenix and South Bend, and helped revive the Catholic Peace Fellowship in 2002.