Student Work

• A Humbling Beginning
  A high school student discovers what he really wants to be — and it starts with a basketball and ends with something larger.
  768 words · 3 min read
• Am I Going to Die Today?
  A university student confronts binge drinking culture after a night that forced the question no one wants to ask themselves.
  1,145 words · 4 min read
• Ambivalence About Violence - A Reflection on Vietnam
  A student wrestles with the Vietnam War and the unsettling realization that ambivalence about violence is itself a kind of position.
  1,337 words · 5 min read
• An Interview with Colman McCarthy
  A Georgetown student interviews the professor who made him rethink everything — and discovers that the best questions are the ones without easy answers.
  1,158 words · 4 min read
• Changing Myself - A Journey to Nonviolence
  At forty-five, a law student quits a career and starts over — finding in Gandhi's words a map for remaking not the world, but herself.
  4,393 words · 17 min read
• Conflict, Love, and Listening
  A student who had never taken a class about peace discovers that the first step toward it might just be learning to listen.
  1,109 words · 4 min read
• Fear-Based Learning and the Failure of Education
  An argument that America's public schools run on fear — and that twenty million students deserve something better than anxiety as a teaching method.
  1,050 words · 4 min read
• Feminism and Nonviolent Resistance in Vieques
  How the feminist movement in Puerto Rico helped stop the Navy's bombing of Vieques — through civil disobedience, arrest, and refusal to be silent.
  1,329 words · 5 min read
• Got Peace?
  A student essay anchored in Sargent Shriver's insight that we never own anything until we give it away — that's the heart of peace.
  1,469 words · 5 min read
• He Is Still Fighting - A Reflection on Animal Rights
  A visceral account of an animal's resistance — three steps backward before being yanked forward — and what it means to keep fighting.
  1,286 words · 5 min read
• Learning to Serve - A Reflection on Peace Work
  A University of Iowa student realizes that poverty, hunger, and violence had always been abstract — until this semester made them real.
  1,395 words · 5 min read
• Media Bias and the Politics of News
  A student examines four news sources during the Iraq War and finds that bias is less about what's reported than about what's left out.
  1,753 words · 7 min read
• Patriotism and Peace in Country Music
  An exploration of how country music moves between flag-waving patriotism and quiet peace — and why both impulses live in the same chord.
  1,771 words · 7 min read
• Reflections on Peace Studies and War
  A semester-long journal beginning with one thought: traditional schooling teaches history based on war, and calls it education.
  4,956 words · 19 min read
• Rethinking Violence - Death Penalty and War
  A self-described wishy-washy thinker on capital punishment finds that a peace studies course has a way of clarifying things.
  1,221 words · 4 min read
• Teaching Peace Across Classrooms - A Student Reflection
  A graduate student reads McCarthy's work and discovers that spreading peace studies across schools is both captivating and frustratingly uphill.
  1,605 words · 6 min read
• True Heroes
  A short essay asking who the real heroes are — and arguing that America rewards the wrong ones.
  417 words · 1 min read
• Vegetarianism and the Ethics of Nonviolence
  An argument that when people think of violence, they rarely think of animals — and that unlike some violence, this kind has no defense of self-defense.
  1,548 words · 6 min read
• Violence, Memory, and Survival
  A memoir that begins with a little girl asleep in a car and her brother whispering — and moves toward something much harder to speak about.
  1,214 words · 4 min read
• War, Self, and Peace in Thomas Merton
  A student takes on Merton's claim that 'war is hell' has become meaningless — hackneyed, dull, ponderous — and tries to make the words mean something again.
  1,254 words · 5 min read
• What a Wonderful World? A Student Reflects on Justice and Nonviolence
  Every Tuesday morning in Washington, a student spent an hour with four sixth-grade boys from River Terrace Elementary — and learned more than he taught.
  1,819 words · 7 min read