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American religious pacifism is usually explained in terms of its practitioners' ethical and philosophical commitments. Patricia Appelbaum argues that Protestant pacifism, which constituted the religious center of the large-scale peace movement in the United States after World War I, is best understood as a culture that developed dynamically in the broader context of American religious, historical, and social currents.Exploring piety, practice, and material religion, Appelbaum describes a surprisingly complex culture of Protestant pacifism expressed through social networks, iconography, vernacular theology, individual spiritual practice, storytelling, identity rituals, and cooperative living. Between World War I and the Vietnam War, she contends, a paradigm shift took place in the Protestant pacifist movement. Pacifism moved from a mainstream position to a sectarian and marginal one, from an embrace of modernity to skepticism about it, and from a Christian center to a purely pacifist one, with an informal, flexible theology.The book begins and ends with biographical profiles of two very different pacifists, Harold Gray and Marjorie Swann. Their stories distill the changing religious culture of American pacifism revealed inKingdom to Commune.

Apocalypse and millennium are often discussed in relation to Percy Bysshe Shelley's works, but there remains little sustained, in-depth analysis that singularises and magnifies their significance for his thought. This thesis offers a substantial reassessment of Shelley's thought by correlating the understanding of apocalypse and millennium to the study of the poet's apocalypticism, the symbolic universe through which to understand and discuss one's existence and ideas of futurity. This thesis demonstrates the importance of understanding Shelley's apocalyptic-eschatological perspective for a comprehensive, nuanced study of his conceptions of morality, violence, history, and religion. Chapter one analyses the expression of Shelley's apocalyptic-eschatological perspective in 'The Mask of Anarchy' (composed 1819), reconsidering the controversy that underlies the (perceived) dichotomy between the poem's violent tones and its pacifist message, to emphasise that Shelley's vision, rather than being ambiguous, understands pacifism as different from passivity. Chapter two reads 'Ode to the West Wind' (1820) and fragments often neglected in criticism - 'Orpheus' (composed 1821), 'The Coliseum' (composed 1818), and 'Fragments of an Unfinished Drama' (composed 1822) - to focus on Shelley's Temples of Nature, spaces whose millennial promise is problematised by his inexorable, yet optimistic, scepticism. Chapter three studies 'Adonais''s (1821) subversion of the traditional association of death and darkness, considering death as the millennial state of the human soul, and proposing, in this context, the kaleidoscope as a framework, hitherto unconsidered, through which to understand Shelley's famous image of life as 'a dome of many-coloured glass'. Chapter four explores 'Prometheus Unbound' (1820) to appreciate Shelley's questioning and rejection of institutionalised forms of authority that subjugate the human intellect and will, and illustrate his composite vision of apocalypse and millennium. The coda examines 'Hellas' (1822) for the ways in which it extends discussions raised in previous chapters, especially Shelley's understanding of pacifism and violence, and his considerations on the cycles of history.

\"13-year-old Tyler has a problem. He's a pacifist enrolled in a school for young assassins. His father is a legendary hitman but, worst of all, he has a secret that can get him killed. Tyler is optimistic because he has a unique weapon that nobody can beat: his razor-sharp-mind\"--P. [4] of cover.

In 1923 a few leading Dutch writers took the initiative of founding a dining club, a private society of kindred spirits and their guests who regularly dine together and discuss their shared interests. The model for this Letterkundige Kring (Literary Circle) was the PEN Club in London, established two years previously, which was an association of Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists that endeavoured to set up a branch in every country in the world. To this end, the leaders of the London establishment – the chairman John Galsworthy and the founder Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, helped by her daughter Marjorie Watts – had approached several well-known literary figures in the Netherlands. Anyone who became a member of one PEN centre was automatically welcome in all the others. As one of the national PEN centres – by 1930 there were already 46, with a total of about 3000 members – this new Literary Circle endorsed the internationalist and pacifist thinking of the international PEN club: by offering hospitality to writers from all countries and actively bringing them together, the peoples they represented would by degrees be reconciled and even ultimately bring world peace within reach. This signified that the PEN club had an idealistic and, involuntarily, also a political agenda, even though it considered itself to be emphatically a-political. This article describes how The Literary Circle fared in its early years as the PEN Centre and analyses the role it played in the literary and cultural life of the Netherlands in the 1920s. The archives covering the early years of this Dutch section have largely been lost, but it has turned out to be possible to get a picture of that period on the basis of scattered archive items and reports in the press of the time. Like its mother organisation, the Dutch PEN centre was a fairly informal enterprise that was able to steer an independent course. It was from the very beginning headed by the poet P.C. Boutens. He was also the chairman of the Vereeniging van Letterkundigen (Literary Association) (1905), which concentrated mainly on protecting the material interests of writers. There was nonetheless never any cooperation between the two organisations. They were also very different in nature. Whereas the Vereeniging van Letterkundigen relied on the largest possible membership, De Letterkundige Kring deliberately limited the number of members. All that can be established is that 94 authors, many of them living in Amsterdam or The Hague, were members for varying periods in the early years. It was quite a select company, usually of older male literary figures, which one could only join by invitation. It was however possible for outsiders to more or less follow the comings and goings of both the Dutch section and those abroad in the national daily and weekly press, with which several members of the Kring were associated. One of the most important activities of the Dutch centre was the members’ dinners, to which they invited guests, the most famous of whom were Thomas Mann (in 1924) and Georges Duhamel (in 1926), both of whom were touring several PEN centres. By the same token, three prominent and active PEN members from the Netherlands – P.C. Boutens, Herman Robbers and Jo van Ammers-Küller – were received as guests of honour at distinguished PEN gatherings abroad. From 1925, Dutch writers were also able to extend their international network at the annual PEN congress, even though at that time they were still not playing any conspicuous part, either in numbers or contributions. A large part of these congresses was in fact devoted to entertainment, though serious issues were also dealt with. A lot of attention was naturally paid to the writer’s pacifist and internationalist task, but also to the intellectual and material circumstances under which he was best able to fulfil this task, such as copyright, freedom of expression and the interests of the translator. In the first few years social intercourse was the main business of the Dutch branch too. Its exclusiveness made it a somewhat inward-looking company, where young talent remained in the minority. Partly as a result of this, the dynamism of the club could have been greater, and this was not good for its reputation. But paradoxically enough, its internationalism meant that it did at the same time look outwards, which is one of the major reasons why it must have been attractive to many Dutch writers. In this way De Letterkundige Kring made an essential contribution to the internationalisation of literary life in the Netherlands.