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Written during the 1970s and early 1980s at the height of Daniel Berrigan''s work to stop the Vietnam war and nuclear weapons, The Nightmare of God offers a stunning commentary on the book of Revelation as a textbook of nonviolent resistance to empire. It begins in jail, where Berrigan sits after a 1976 protest at the Pentagon. As he takes us through the book of Revelation, Berrigan suggests that apocalyptic language and imagery are used to name Death (and its empires and wars) as anti-Christ, and challenges us to do the same today, to name every empire and war as anti-Christ, anti-humanity, anti-creation. Written with poetic insight and prophetic passion, Berrigan urges us to resist the culture of war as the early Christian heroes and martyrs did, so that we can end the suffering, heal humanity and join our place to worship the God of peace. Tom Lewis-Borbely''s photo etchings complement the literary images. Daniel Berrigan describes Tom''s art as healing ""the ancient killing split between ethics and imagination.""

Description:This new edition of Daniel Berrigan's classic autobiography To Dwell in Peace, with a new afterword by the author, takes us through his childhood in Syracuse; his early years as a Jesuit, teacher, priest, and poet; his bold 1968 Catonsville Nine action, when he poured homemade napalm on draft files in opposition to the U.S. war on Vietnam; and his ongoing civil disobedience, which led to his going underground and subsequent two-year imprisonment. We read of friends like Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, and his brother Philip Berrigan, with whom he participated again in the 1980 Plowshares Eight disarmament action. Daniel Berrigan's breathtaking story and the poetic way he tells it inspire and challenge us to resist war, pursue nuclear disarmament, and undertake a similar journey to peace, hope, and justice. Endorsements:""A powerful and poetic account of Berrigan's life and work, as well as a prophetic call to go forth in faith striving towards the long promised blessing reserved for peacemakers.""--Martin Sheen, actor and activist ""Daniel Berrigan is a poet and prophet for these times. This autobiography offers a compelling look at his own life, the fertile ground from which Daniel Berrigan's timely word has come. The courage, the clarity, and the persistence of that word bear compelling witness to his vocation as a messenger of the Word of God.""--Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine""A masterpiece, a literary work of art and a document of historic value.""--John Dear, Jesuit activist and author, in the foreword to this new edition About the Contributor(s):Daniel Berrigan is an internationally known voice for peace and disarmament. A Jesuit priest, award-winning poet, and the author of over fifty books, he has spoken for peace, justice, and nuclear disarmament for nearly fifty years. He spent several years in prison for his part in the 1968 Catonsville Nine antiwar action and later acted with the Plowshares Eight. Nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize, he lives and works in New York City.

This extraordinary book, written during the four months that Daniel Berrigan was resisting arrest and living underground, is an unexpected gift. Rather than being merely an account of a fugitive's life, this is a spiritual work of the highest order, the work of an unusual man brooding over injustice, war, and love and setting forth his vision of what a man can become.His starting point is St. John of the Cross, from whom the author draws the inspiration that informs his unorthodox ""commentary"" on The Dark Night of the Soul. Here, John is the guru, the master to whom the disciple comes for enlightenment, the one whose vision inspires the disciple as he searches for his own vision.As the ""commentary"" moves on, it becomes the instrument by which Father Berrigan extends his own moral commitment to explore and reaffirm his spiritual philosophy, his concern for the world, his intense desire to awaken and move society in a nonviolent way. The result is a magnificent outpouring of prose and poetry--intense, personal, witty; the exposition of the heart of a man.

In The Discipline of the Mountain Daniel Berrigan offers ""ways of imagining our plight"" through the poetic vision of Dante's Purgatorio. There can be found ""a faithful vision, an alternative, a truthful image of God, of ourselves, of history."" Berrigan employs free, poetic adaptation of the original--its themes, moods, discourses, encounters--with a prose commentary relating the text to political-moral issues of the present day. With its themes of lust and hatred, religious strife and ecclesiastical corruption, military power and oppression, the Purgatorio is an apt allegory of modern society. Thirteenth-century kings and princes shade into twentieth-century colonels and shahs and juntas. The Discipline of the Mountain is evocatively illustrated by Robert F. McGovern.

The Monk - The Artist - The Aunt - The Essayist - The Woman - The Jesuit - The Mother - Self-PortraitBerrigan's Portraits is his first completely biographical work, and it is perhaps his most intimate book. Here he speaks candidly of some of the people he has known and admired, people of fame and people who will probably never be memorialized or even remembered outside these pages.Here are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin--guides to the vision that has inspired Berrigan's own witness to Christian peace. Here is an unknown woman painter, dying of cancer but gifted with uncanny powers of insight. Here are members of Berrigan's own family: a tough-minded aunt, who found in the currently outmoded pieties of the past a remedy for the terrible day-in-and-day-out of the religious life; his own mother, providential, foreseeing, compassionate. Lastly there is a self-portrait--not in a convex mirror, not a picture at an exhibition--of what has been the meaning of these various people and of their influence on him and his work.

I have a sense that the times themselves, apart from more or less deliberately created crises, render strong things fragile, and fragile things mortally endangered. The times themselves are a permanent crisis. So writes Daniel Berrigan in this journal of reflections and musings from the late 1970s. First published in 1981, this book traces Berrigan's work after his release from Danbury Prison in 1972 for his part in the Catonsville Nine antiwar demonstration--from his experiences in Palestine, Northern Ireland, and France (where he lived with Thich Nhat Hanh), to his experiences as a teacher in Manitoba and Berkeley. Throughout, Berrigan ponders the commands of Christ, the struggle to be faithful to these commands, and why so few take them seriously. With wit and wisdom, Berrigan shares his faith journey and encourages us to stay faithful to that journey, to be peacemakers for the long haul.

One of Daniel Berrigan's best works, Minor Prophets, Major Themes, offers poetic, insightful commentary on the books of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachai. From his own experience in the prophetic struggle to end war and injustice, Berrigan brings these ancient texts to new life and uses them to shed light on the life and death struggles for justice and peace today. The author takes these often neglected prophetic works and shows how they speak to us with even greater urgency, pushing us to become a prophetic people, to take up the major themes of justice, disarmament, nonviolence, compassion, and peace. There is simply no other commentary like it.

Committed radical that he is, Daniel Berrigan, launches his personal rockets against the social evils that disturb and preoccupy him. Beginning with a long autobiographical piece he traces the influences that brought him first to a radical stance and then to a direct confrontation with society. From this very intimate statement he develops his theme of a need for nonviolent revolutionary change in his reflections on his own trial and sentencing, in his thoughtful examination of the true implications of Christianity, and in his consideration of prophets as revolutionaries. In a long dialog with an SDS student about the 1969 Black/White confrontation at Cornell University, he relates the questions raised by that crisis to the larger crises of American life. Finally, he directs two stinging parables at the well-fed and the complacent. Probing and provocative, this work illuminates starkly the agonizing decisions people must make.

To become and be a mature human being, to be alive, in the midst of such a drama in which all people do in truth live, describes a radical participation. To be alive means, as Father Berrigan puts it, enduring the crisis of grace. The fruit of the gift of Christ to this world is an unequivocal and utterly vulnerable immersion in the world as it is. . . . It means living in such a way that life is welcomed as the extraordinary gift which life is and, then, honoring that gift by extravagance: by giving one's own life away. They call us dead men, and we live, wrote St. Paul. Berrigan's immersion into Pauline theology has allowed him to present his deepest concerns for the Church's role in the world. Knowing that the Church can not live in retreat from life, he illuminates the implications of the Triple Revolution-race, peace, and technology- for committed Christians who wish to see true renewal within ecclesial life. --From the Introduction by William Stringfellow