Profiles in Moral Courage

• Batul Al-Zubeidy -- A Refugee’s Voice Against War
  For moral guidance on Iraq, McCarthy listens not to generals but to Batul Al-Zubeidy, an eighteen-year-old Iraqi refugee in his D.C. high school class.
  1,022 words · 4 min read
• Catholic Professors Who Chose Conscience Over Comfort
  Three Catholic professors with a combined 114 years of teaching — Peter Walshe, Michael True, and Tom Lee — and what they learned about conscience and tenure.
  1,145 words · 4 min read
• Daniel Berrigan (1921– ) — An Apostle of Peace
  Writing Daniel Berrigan's obituary while the Jesuit priest is still very much alive — a preemptive tribute to a life of war resistance and truth-telling.
  726 words · 2 min read
• Daniel Berrigan and the Catonsville Legacy
  Forty years after Berrigan and eight others burned draft files with homemade napalm in Catonsville, Maryland, the act still divides — and still matters.
  1,052 words · 4 min read
• Daoud Nassar and the Tent of Nations
  While Bush talks peace at Annapolis, Palestinian farmer Daoud Nassar is in Washington trying to save his family's hilltop farm from Israeli bulldozers.
  717 words · 2 min read
• Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker at 75
  They said the Catholic Worker would die with Dorothy Day; seventy-five years later, the movement she co-founded has 185 houses and shows no sign of fading.
  919 words · 3 min read
• Dorothy Day and the Radical Catholic Worker
  An evening at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in D.C.'s Petworth neighborhood — vegetarian meals, a Moyers documentary, and the radical works of mercy.
  1,274 words · 5 min read
• Doubting Thomas and the Longest Vigil
  For nearly twenty-eight years, William Thomas sat across from the White House with a sign reading 'Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty' — the longest protest vigil in American history.
  918 words · 3 min read
• Dr. Osama Al-Salami -- Healing in the Shadow of War
  While Cheney hails Iraq as a successful endeavor, Dr. Osama Al-Salami tells McCarthy's students what the war actually did to his country and his life.
  790 words · 3 min read
• Eugene Patterson and the Courage of the Southern Press
  In the Deep South of church bombings and George Wallace, editor Eugene Patterson wrote a daily column of conscience — and never once flinched.
  773 words · 3 min read
• Eunice NCR
  Every time McCarthy left Eunice Kennedy Shriver's company, the same thought followed: I must become a better person.
  661 words · 2 min read
• Eunice Shriver and the Special Olympics Revolution
  The Special Olympics as Eunice Shriver's long answer to a world that had written off people with intellectual disabilities — and how she changed it.
  338 words · 1 min read
• Father Horace McKenna and the Slow Miracle
  In the basement of a Jesuit church near the Capitol, the legacy of Father McKenna lives on — a weekly support meeting for 110 homeless men, one slow miracle at a time.
  802 words · 3 min read
• Father Robert Drinan -- Faith Inside the System
  When the Pope ordered Father Drinan out of Congress, the Jesuit priest obeyed — but five terms of progressive lawmaking had already been done.
  785 words · 3 min read
• Gabriel Bol Deng --A Lost Boy Finds His Voice (fragment)
  Out of southern Sudan and into Syracuse: Gabriel Bol Deng, one of the Lost Boys, arrives in America with no language, no skills, and a story that demands telling.
  173 words · 1 min read
• Garry Davis -- The World Is My Country
  In 1948, a Broadway actor and former bomber pilot walked into the American embassy in Paris, renounced his citizenship, and declared himself a citizen of the world.
  703 words · 2 min read
• Gary MacEoin and the Politics of Liberation
  At ninety-four, Gary MacEoin had written twenty-five books from the villages of Latin America — explaining, in the old-fashioned way of legwork, how wealth and poverty are linked.
  743 words · 2 min read
• Gene McCarthy and the Courage to Challenge War
  November 1967: a fierce storm hits Washington, and Senator Gene McCarthy, seeing no one else with the nerve, announces he will challenge a warmaking president.
  1,273 words · 5 min read
• George McGovern and the Soul of Politics
  The Wednesday after losing forty-nine states to Nixon, George McGovern arrived at National Airport — and the warmth that met him there said more than the vote count.
  822 words · 3 min read
• Joan Baez and the Discipline of Nonviolence
  At sixty-one, Joan Baez's voice is more sonorous than sopranic and her hair is graying — but the discipline of nonviolence she learned from her parents hasn't aged.
  1,097 words · 4 min read
• Joan Kroc and the Politics of Generosity
  Joan Kroc had a private jet, a yacht, and $1.7 billion — but her inner wealth was what mattered: an active conscience that gave most of it away to peace.
  771 words · 3 min read
• John Lewis and the Conscience of Congress
  At the fortieth anniversary of King's last sermon, Congressman John Lewis takes a question about war taxes — and has an actual bill to answer it.
  107 words · 1 min read
• Kathy Boylan and the Prayer for Peace
  One of McCarthy's favorite agitators: a Catholic Worker member who feeds the hungry, gets arrested at peace demonstrations, and serves prison time.
  737 words · 2 min read
• Macedonia -- What It Takes to Stop a War
  A Missouri journalist goes to Macedonia not to cover a war but to study how one was prevented — and finds proof that violence is not inevitable.
  1,355 words · 5 min read
• Mary McGrory and the Art of Reporting
  A walk through downtown Washington with Mary McGrory — the columnist who made legwork literal and never took a cab when she could buttonhole a source on foot.
  1,054 words · 4 min read
• Maya Wind and the Courage to Refuse War
  At twelve, Maya Wind watched a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem street; at fifteen, she joined a group of Palestinian and Israeli youth choosing another way.
  744 words · 2 min read
• Meeting Dorothy Day
  McCarthy met Dorothy Day twice — once at the Catholic Worker farm and once at a Trappist monastery — and both encounters left a mark that decades haven't erased.
  369 words · 1 min read
• Osama
  An Iraqi doctor speaks to five classes of McCarthy's students while Cheney, from inside the Green Zone, calls the war phenomenal and remarkable.
  790 words · 3 min read
• P Berrigan Obit
  Philip Berrigan, who believed with King that an unjust law is no law at all, died at seventy-nine after four decades of imprisonment and unyielding pacifism.
  1,107 words · 4 min read
• Paul Wellstone and the Politics of Heart
  Would McCarthy like Wellstone as much if his politics ran the other way? The answer was always yes — the warmth and wit were human, not ideological.
  739 words · 2 min read
• Philip Berrigan -- A Life of Nonviolent Resistance
  A Catholic trying to become a Christian: Philip Berrigan's life of early-century faith, prison, and the conviction that defiance of state violence is what the Gospel demands.
  813 words · 3 min read
• Sargent Shriver and the Politics of Life
  Traveling with Sargent Shriver meant never arriving on time — former Peace Corps volunteers kept stopping him to say he had changed their lives.
  967 words · 3 min read
• Scott Nearing and the Madness of War
  A phone call to a hundred-year-old radical in Maine, to say thank you for showing how to live simply so others can simply live.
  945 words · 3 min read
• Sister Lenore Gibb -- Baseball, Poverty, and Grace
  In the Dominican Republic's most rabid baseball nation, the insider to talk to is a Grey Sister who knows the game and the poverty behind it.
  2,193 words · 8 min read
• Sister Lenore Gibb and the Real Big Leagues
  Sister Lenore Gibb in San Pedro de Macorís, where the big leagues are less about baseball contracts than about rescuing kids from the poverty that produces players.
  2,357 words · 9 min read
• Stanley Hauerwas and the Politics of Christian Pacifism
  After Time named him America's best theologian, Stanley Hauerwas became Stan the Man — but the pacifism came first, long before the fame.
  1,908 words · 7 min read
• Stuart Feldman and the Fight for Veterans
  The people who really scorned Vietnam veterans were not protesters but the members of Congress who sent them to war and looked away when they came home.
  76 words · 1 min read
• The Art of Nursing
  In 1966 McCarthy met a nurse named Mavourneen Deegan; weeks later, against cautious advice, they married — and her love of nursing became part of his education.
  585 words · 2 min read
• Thomas Merton -- A Contemplative Against War
  Thirty years after his death, Thomas Merton remains one of the century's towering thinkers — a monk who wrote fifty books and four thousand letters from a Kentucky monastery.
  2,904 words · 11 min read
• William Sloane Coffin -- A Radical Christian Conscience
  The problem people had with Reverend Coffin was his habit of taking radical Christianity into the fortresses of the comfortable — like Yale, like Riverside Church.
  766 words · 3 min read
• Women as Peacemakers
  Why women tend to be the superior students of peace — not because of genes, but because victims of violence have less patience for theories about its necessity.
  401 words · 1 min read
• “Hello, My Name Is Eunice”
  At a family Mass in the Shriver living room, Eunice Kennedy Shriver passes her faith to her grandchildren with the same efficiency she brought to everything else.
  979 words · 3 min read