Acts of Conscience

Joseph Kip Kosek is associate professor of American studies at George Washington University.

• Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction 1. Love and War 2. Social Evangelism 3. The Gandhian Moment 4. Gandhism and Socialism 5. Tragic Choices 6. The Age of Conscience Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy is the best new work on the history of American pacifism to appear in many years. Joseph Kip Kosek offers a bold, original, and lucid brief for the importance of the tradition of Christian nonviolence in twentieth-century U.S. reform, and in the process resurrects such forgotten figures as Richard Gregg, a pioneering American advocate of Gandhian philosophy and tactics. Twenty-first-century scholars and activists alike would do well to give this book a careful reading and heed the lessons it has to teach. -- Maurice Isserman, James L. Ferguson Professor of History, Hamilton College, and author of If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left Joseph Kip Kosek effectively pushes the leaders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other radical Christian pacifists to the front ranks of the American left in the mid-twentieth century. His sympathetic, deeply-researched account of the stubborn, nonviolent resistance of his protagonists to the coercive injustice, imperial ambition, and crackpot realism of an earlier age might well instruct those who would muster the courage to challenge them again in our own time. -- Robert Westbrook, author of Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II In focusing closely on the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Joseph Kip Kosek discerns a paradoxical realism at the heart of Christian nonviolence. Even if these pacifist proponents failed in their grander dreams of limiting international warfare, they nonetheless crafted--and shrewdly publicized--an unusually effective instrument of social and political change: nonviolent direct action. Kosek's perceptive account of this twentieth-century radical vanguard brings a transnational vision to the civil rights movement and, through FOR, unveils an activist network of spectacular ingenuity and courage. -- Leigh E. Schmidt, Princeton University A nuanced portrait of an important American social movement and a well-done combination of intellectual and social history. Choice Acts of Conscience deftly illuminates mainstream Protestant pacifism. Annals of Iowa Kosek has written a key work for all who are interested in the beliefs and causes that helped shape the United States during the twentieth century and beyond. -- Anne Klejment Journal of American History If you have even a remote interest in this topic, pick up this book and read. -- John F. Piper Jr. Church History A phenomenal book, one of the best we have now on the course of liberal Protestant pacifism in twentieth-century America. -- Perry Bush, Bluffton University The Mennonite Quarterly Review lucidly and fluently written, well organized by period or theme, and braced throughout with interesting parallels and thoughtful insights. -- Michael Ferber The Sixties an outstanding contribution to peace history and American cultural and intellectual history. -- Leilah Danielson Peace and Change