Results from last Sunday's election at the
Cathedral of Hope in Dallas (and its branch in
Oklahoma City) have yet to be officially announced,
but it's safe to predict that Rev. Dr. Jo Hudson will
win the congregation's endorsement as senior pastor to
the largest gay, lesbian, and transgender congregation
in the world. When linked to the November general
election of Lupe Valdez as Dallas County Sheriff, the
election of Dr. Hudson this week may not signal a
clear trend toward lesbian leadership in North Texas,
but it is another pathmarker in hard country, and
therefore a sign worth noting.

"Dr. Hudson, where are you?" asks the famous
Mennonite pacifist John K. Stoner on a recent Friday
evening from the podium of the Cathedral of Hope. In
the pews, there are about 100 of us, and we're all
looking around for new leadership. Hudson raises her
hand from the middle of the cavernous sanctuary, where
she sits with her partner, the couple visually marked
out by their matching leather jackets. "Welcome to
your church Dr. Hudson!" jokes Stoner as the audience
chuckles along.

Stoner, with 30 years of peace activism behind him,
is working on a project named Every Church a Peace
Church (ECAPC), and this is his first official try at
converting the religious economy of Texas into a peace
faith. If ever there was a peace church ready to
bloom, it would be the Cathedral of Hope. Since 1970,
this congregation has grown from a Metropolitan
Community Church of 12 members into the free-standing
phenomenon that it is today (with live attendance in
Dallas now about 1,500 per week and many more who
watch on the web). Some day soon this sanctuary of
white stone will become a full-time peace center, as
the church grows again into a planned 11-story
structure, designed by the late Philip Johnson.
Hudson, the soon-to-be Senior Pastor looks around at
the applauding crowd, smiling.

"And where is Dan Peeler?" asks Stoner. Peeler is
Minister of Children and Families at the Cathedral and
a member of the church's Order of St. Francis and St.
Clare. We'll see the order again Saturday afternoon
during closing services, dressed in long brown robes,
reading prayers from Buddhist, Moslem, African, and
Native American traditions, lighting candles, giving
out peace stones. They handle the logistical work of
this conference, answering emails, covering the
registration table, and generally moving folks from
one thing to the next.

"Whose voice are you listening to these days?" asks
Stoner. "Whose voice do you trust?" The audience
feels the problem, responds with a few long groans.
So Stoner quotes Martin Luther King Jr., a still
trustworthy voice. It's okay to talk about long white
robes in heaven, said King once upon a time, so long
as we get shoes on people's feet down here.

Next up is Baritone Anthony Brown, who sings the
barefoot songs of America, created back in the day
when fiery white preachers shouted long sermons about
white robes, but couldn't care less who had shoes.
African American spirituals answered that insanity
with self-centering resistance, singing right through
the official religions of slavery. Talk about no time
like the present? Is it any wonder that the
psychotherapist professor of social science, who now
teaches at a Mennonite community college in Kansas,
feels the relevance of his songs returning?

Primordial nature is what Professor Brown says his
songs intone. Raw faith is what it sounds like to me:
a defiant commitment to something nowhere in sight yet
everywhere necessary, like freedom in 1805, justice in
1905, or peace today. Singing, "Oh Lord, waitin on
you; Can't do nothin til the spirit comes," Brown
breathes the prayer of an entire people who during the
last election went 88 percent the other way. Without
mystery or surprise, Brown's singing bears witness to
steadfastness. I find it impossible to suppress an
association with Paul Robeson. Next time white folks
ask out loud, where are the people of color in our
coalitions, I will have a simpler answer. Ever listen
to yourself sing?

Next up is Michael Westmoreland-White the
gregarious Baptist peace activist and outreach
coordinator for ECAPC who once as a young soldier
memorized the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the
meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers) until the
words sunk in so deep that the military discharged
him. His job tonight is to introduce the keynote
speaker, but he says a few words about his own
autobiography of pacifism first and how he came out of
the Anabaptist tradition of peace churches, inspired
by writings of the late John Howard Yoder whose 1972
book on The Politics of Jesus is most highly
revered.

And so it is time for Professor Glen H. Stassen,
son of the same Harold Stassen who in 1943 resigned
from his third term as Minnesota Governor to join the
Navy and then after World War II helped to organize
the United Nations as a way to deter war. For son
Glen, who is Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller
Theological Seminary in Pasadena, there is a personal
pain that he feels watching the current President tear
down the international institutions that elder Stassen
helped to build. Will history redeem the futile image
of the father's later career whose incessant campaigns
for president are best known by the years he did not
run? Son Glen has organized impressive arguments why
the internationalist route proposed by the Stassen
family should yet be preferred.

Stassen begins with local history. The Dallas
Peace Center, founded in 1981 by the Peace Mennonite
Church was first of its kind in the country. (In the
house tonight is Peace Center director Lon Burnham who
doubles as a state representative from Fort Worth and
Pastor Dick Davis of the Peace Mennonite Church.)
Stassen then points south toward the city of
Waxahachie, home of the Pentecostal Peace Fellowship,
which with a name like that is bound to be out
spreading word. So really, quips Stassen, this is
peace country! Thanks to Stassen we can see a few
more path-markers on our way.

"We have a better answer," says Stassen, previewing
the central thesis of his talk. As a scholar of
Christian Ethics for decades, Stassen's central
insight is that ethics of prohibition do not work. In
the Sermon on the Mount for example he finds a subtle
structure of advice that instead of saying stop that,
encourages profound alternative choices. So instead
of the peace movement saying no war, no violence, no
bombs, there should be persistent pleas for making
alternative choices. Every time we say we have a
better answer, we have a better chance of convincing
more people to listen.

His life work as a scholar has come to fruition
around a theory called ‘just peacemaking,' designed
conceptually as an alternative to ‘just war.'
Stassen's first book-length treatment of
just-peacemaking theory was published in 1992, and it
bears the marks of fresh frustration from not being
able to stop father Bush from starting the First Gulf
War. Back then, the peace community again got caught
chanting a simple no war prohibition, when already we
should have known better than that.

As if memories of Gandhi and King weren't enough to
teach us that peacemaking is about a persistent
program of active alternatives, the world had more
recently eyewitnessed a Revolution of Candles powerful
enough to dismantle the Berlin wall. Stassen was
there when that happened. And like many
contemporaries, he watched news reports of similar
achievements in nonviolence history as Marcos was
removed from the Philippines and the Shah from Iran.
Couldn't those same methods have been used against
Hussein of Iraq? There was a better way.

As a two-time wrestling champion, Stassen says it
is important that people come to feel secure in their
own strength so that they are not afraid to appear
weak from time to time. Just peacemaking, says
Stassen, requires leadership that can clearly
acknowledge personal responsibility for things that go
wrong. Leaders who are afraid to appear weak, who
need to blame everything on someone else, who always
see the world in terms of evil others and pure
selves--those leaders make lousy peacemakers. From
sounds the audience is making, Stassen knows they know
who he's talking about.

In contrast to leaders today, who bully and bomb,
Stassen is quite seriously encouraging policy
commitments motivated by the Sermon on the Mount,
guided by modesty, mercy, purity of heart, and
peacemaking. Such leadership would be international
in outreach and interdependent, not like the
treaty-smashing, UN-bashing unilateralists that crowd
our television screens these days.

Consider the contrast between Turkish approaches to
the Kurds and Russian responses to the Chechnyans, two
examples of Muslim inspired independence movements.
In Chechnya, says Stassen, we see a scorched-earth
policy of strong leadership that never wavers from its
appearance of rock-hard masculinity. Yet the
terrorism continues. In Turkey, on the other hand, we
find a doubling of per-capita spending in Kurdish
neighborhoods, engagement with Kurdish tribal
structures, and a parliament where Kurdish
representatives exceed their proportional numbers. In
this case, terrorism has receded.

But we can't reward the terrorists like that!
Stassen imitates the slogan of reaction. But
addressing grievances of people does not assist
terrorists. When grassroots get their needs met
through constructive channels, it is the terrorists
who wither away. Continue to stomp the people, says
Stassen, and daily you drive new people into the
terrorists' arms. Just look at Israel.

Another pathmarker worth noting: Sojourners editor
Jim Wallis has been on tour in Texas lately promoting
his bestsellter book on God's Politics, arguing that
the right is all wrong about religion. In Austin, for
example, Wallis drew a standing-room crowd. Of all
places to meet, Stassen and Wallis wind up together in
Waco. They were up until one in the morning Central
Baptist Time talking about Christian ethics.
Sometimes you want to be a fly on the wall. Did they
talk about Reno and Koresh?

"I'm so glad Glen deals with all these details,
putting things together in a very linear way," says
Karen Horst Cobb, the Santa Fe artist who has become a
global internet sensation for her Common Dreams
article last October entitled No Longer a Christian.
She is responding to Stassen's talk, explaining why
she has moved beyond religion into peacemaking.

"You know the first time he came, people were
expecting that Christ would be a conqueror; there were
so many who missed Jesus because of their preconceived
notions," says Cobb. "And when I hear the talk about
End Times today, I think that again people may be
letting their preconceived ideas get in the way. The
Bible says pretty clearly that Jesus is the Prince of
Peace." On Saturday afternoon, Cobb will return to
the podium to present her nonlinear message, that fear
of isolation is our root problem. To address it, she
will argue, we most crucially need courage for deeper
love.

During question period for Stassen a Lutheran
minister speaks of his efforts to resist the mad,
self-righteous blindness and pall that lately have
been coming out of his people, as if something lurking
within them has been turned loose. And now the
headlines say we're not going to attack Iran, yet?
The minister wants to know, is there any way that we
can get a vaccination for this?

Stassen says he had made a careful study of public
opinion in times of war. This hysteria always marks
the first phase, and it is fed in three ways. For 20
percent of the people, nationalism is enough of a
motivation. Just talk about our need to band together
as a nation. Another seventeen percent defer to
presidential authority, and this number quickly
doubles as soon as troops are involved, because then
they support the president and his troops. Finally,
another sixteen percent are motivated by fear of
threat, which takes you to about 53 percent majority
in favor of war before the troops are shipped off.

To just say no in the face of this mob will never
work. You have to argue that there is a better way.
Stassen says the argument for more weapons inspection
worked well enough during the buildup to Iraq and
people were sufficiently persuaded to let the weapons
inspectors do their jobs. Then the official motive
for war shifted to displacing a dictator for
democracy. Although Stassen doesn't finish the point
this evening, he has said enough to imagine how the
peace movement might have said, we have a better way
for this, too.

When the war administration shifted its rationale
to displacing a dictator, there was no international
institution similar to the weapons inspection
structure that could stand up and say give us a chance
to do that. So the anti-war movement got caught
defending Iraq's sovereign right to dictatorship. We
just said no war. Yet, we already knew enough about
Berlin, Marcos, and the Shah to make a credible case
that dictator displacement is also possible through
concerted nonviolent means. When the administration
shifted its argument to bringing democracy to Iraq, we
could have said there is a better way.

But the people are simply brainwashed argues
another questioner. What can be done until the whole
bunch have been completely re-educated? In every
church, answers Stassen, a small group can get to work
right away. It only takes a few people to call
regular meetings, talk about just peacemaking, invite
speakers, communicate with other peace groups, and
this kind of activity makes a difference. These few
people can begin the process of taking Jesus back from
those who have hijacked him.

What about Afghanistan? asks another activist.
Again, we could have talked about a better way of
confronting terrorism, one that does not kill innocent
civilians, a policing approach combined with
humanitarian development. And Iraq today? Stassen
has just completed a long memo to Peace Action arguing
that "just get out" is the moral equivalent of "just
say no" and it just won't work. Instead, we need to
speak of a better way, one that recovers
internationalist commitments to the United Nations and
human rights.

Used to be a time, Stassen reminds us, when he
could teach Southern Baptist seminary students and
argue that there are two kinds of religion:
authoritarian and compassionate. And he could of
course encourage them toward the compassionate kind.
But these days the Southern Baptists won't hear it
anymore. In fact, says Stassen, the Baptists have
become the new KGB, the secret police of the 21st
Century. Don't call them, they'll call you. Reagan
and Gorbachev were two people Stassen could work with,
but the Southern Baptists today? They are impossible.

* * *

The gift shop at the Cathedral of Hope is open late
Friday night, selling lots of books by Stassen that he
signs at a high, round table. I also need some
anniversary gifts in my bag when I arrive home
tomorrow, so I grab lots of heart-shaped things. How
handy this is for me. Books and hearts. Next stop is
the Kinkos on Oak Lawn to make flyers for tomorrow,
and a late-night snack at Lucky's Café. Between
Kinko's and Lucky's I make a wrong turn and wind up on
smooth streets lined with mansions. On your next trip
to Dallas I would recommend this haphazard tour:
Cathedral of Hope, gift shop, and Lucky's Café for
your spiritual, consumer, and nutritional needs. And
why not check out the mansions? They give you
something to think about, too.

Saturday morning they're playing gospel music at
listener supported KNON 89.3 FM. I'm looking head on
at a bright yellow city bus headed for the Martin
Luther King Jr. Center as I listen to a song that
assures me this is only a test. Based on a message
that I find today at Gospelflava.com, I take it that
this is the song by Bishop Larry Trotter and the Sweet
Holy Spirit Combined Choirs of Chicago from their
album What's to Come is Better than What's Been. All
the great American music comes out of here, you know.
Never would have been a blues had there not been a
gospel first. And had there never been a blues, well,
forget it.

I'm pondering the meaning of this gospel test as I
travel East along Inwood, where a towering medical
center on the north side of the street looks down upon
a tiny liquor store on the south side. Thinking about
this is enough to keep me distracted until I sit down
at a hamburger stand for my biscuit-sandwich
breakfast. When a slinky young woman in pink hair and
t-shirt steps in front of the drink counter to pose
like a goddess, I try not to choke. The guy with her
is dressed for business with sharp tied tie, and the
two of them keep me busy concentrating on the biscuit.
Today is my 28th anniversary for Christ's sake. I
bought hearts last night. There is a better way, I
persuade myself. Just eat the biscuit.

I have one more errand to run along Inwood. The
clerk is keeping me busy with small chat until he asks
me what brings me to town. It's a conference I say,
at the Cathedral of Hope. He freezes. You know that
church right there, and I point over his shoulder.
His eyes narrow and he nods his head a terse two
degrees. And to me, he never says another word.
Running a little late by now, I shake hands very
briefly at the registration table and already hear
Washington DC activist Damu Smith speaking in
mid-lecture, trying to wake everybody up.

* * *

"I'm proud to be an activist for Christ!" says
Smith, speaking not from the pulpit, but from the
floor at the head of the center aisle. Dressed in
full-length purple dashiki, he's chipping away at this
Saturday morning audience of white peace activists,
determined to find a thing of beauty in here before
he's done.

"The four Gospels read like an action movie,"
chimes Smith. "You see, Jesus is not just feeding
people on an individual level, but he's feeding the
multitudes. He's transforming public policy!" His
rendition of the text draws some laughs. "I mean,
soup kitchens are a nice thing to do, but what we want
is the kind of church that can't wait until the day
comes that soup kitchens are not needed! The kind of
world that pays people livable wages so they don't
have to work two, three, or four jobs the way some
people are working now!"

The audience is waking up. People running this
country today are people who do not believe in worker
justice, but that's anti-Christ, says Smith. That's
got nothing to do with Jesus. And this means that
peace from a Jesus perspective is not only the absence
of war, but the presence of justice. So if we want to
talk about true peace, we have to talk about
affordable housing. In D.C. for example new homes are
going on the market for $350,000, so let me ask you
what's that for?

"Not for the poor!" answers a voice from the
audience.

"Not for the poor?" exclaims Smith. "That's not
even for the working people. Forget the poor, that's
not even for the middle class!" Smith describes a
modest apartment that goes to rent for $1,700 per
month. "So people are living in cars, hotels,
streets, and what do they do when they have to live
like this? When they are forced to live in these
compressed circumstances and stressed communities?
What do they do? Well, not everyone is reaching out
to the Lord."

"So Black Voices for Peace is yes talking about
peace between Israel and Palestine, and yes talking
about peace in Iraq, and yes talking about peace in
Haiti and the Congo, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. But
yes we're also talking about bringing peace to the
ghettoes and slums at home, to build a World House
like a tent over which we can construct the beloved
community." Smith has sailed, of course, into pure
King, so he talks about the need to read the whole
King, the whole Testament of Hope, the inward journey,
the outward journey, the triple evils of racism,
poverty, and war, so that we understand what it means
to have a true revolution of values, and a true
movement for peace.

"YOUR friend George Bush," Smith taunts the
audience. These are Texas white folks, are they not?
So if George Bush has friends, these must be them,
right? But Smith does not hold this audience to that
hot plate. Has George Bush ever BEEN to the Cathedral
of Hope to be fed? Smith laughs. To be fed with the
word? The audience grins back. But there's one thing
George Bush has that the peace movement needs right
now. George Bush has an agenda. Not like the peace
movement, where we go into one room to talk about
peace, another room to talk about affordable housing,
another for welfare reform, and never the twain shall
meet! What we need is a World House agenda and this
means demilitarize, but it also means putting money
into affordable housing, jobs, and the concept of
justice.

Smith also references the statement by Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice that we're not going to war
against Iran, not just yet. We're living in dangerous
times, one of the most dangerous periods in the
history of the earth, and people in charge are going
around with beliefs that are going to keep us in
eternal danger. With conflict all around them, they
use language that provokes.

In his State of the Union Address, Bush talks about
Syria and Iran as evil, but what do people see? Smith
asks. They see Palestinian children being blown apart
and nothing happening to Israel. No matter how many
Palestinian homes get bulldozed or children shot, our
nation can never find its way to criticize these
things, and that's unfair. We're not asking for Bush
to declare solidarity with the Palestinian struggle,
because that will never happen in a million years, but
Mr. Bush, pleads Smith, can you be fair? If we're
going to build the beloved community, at least we can
tell the truth about what's happening. Smith is
chipping away. Time for the King chisel again.

A revolution of values is needed in this nation
whose leaders continue to use threatening and
belligerent language that puts the whole world on
edge. A revolution of values is needed in a nation
that is materially the most prosperous but spiritually
the most impoverished. How can we be moral leaders of
the world supporting South Africa all those years
while boycotting Cuba? How can we offer moral
leadership to the world when we send landmines to
Afghanistan and Angola with labels that say made in
the USA, blowing up children and causing the highest
rates of amputation in the world? What kind of moral
leadership is that?

People of faith have got to be passionate about
speaking for truth. Fifty eight percent of white
folks voted for Bush and 89 percent of Black folks
voted against him. And it's not genetic! Smith draws
a burst of laughter for this. No it's not genetic,
it's experiential. My ancestors came on slave ships,
packed like sardines, thrown overboard when they got
too sick, just tossed into the ocean, captured into
slavery and brutalized by the police. When you have
that kind of experience, you tend to think a little
differently about things. When you think about four
little girls being blown up in Birmingham, when you
can't walk anywhere without being stared at, when you
watch movies from balconies, drink from separate
fountains, carry your food in an ice box while you're
traveling. This is Smith's letter from Birmingham
jail. In a life of economic and racial privilege,
white folks (not everyone who is white has privilege I
know that but they do) tend to accept things a little
more.

Next time Smith comes to Dallas he wants to see
Black, white, Latino, Asian, young and old in THE SAME
ROOM! Bringing folks together means getting out more.
And a life in Christ, it is NOT hanging out with
people who think like you. Jesus went to dinner with
the tax collector, and people asked him why. He said
do you call the doctor to see people who are well?
Two days before the November election, Black Voices
for Peace spent the day outside the White House
talking to tourists. Smith looks up at the glorious
high ceiling of the Cathedral of Hope sanctuary, and
pleads, you have to get out of this beautiful
place!

George Bush is in the White House because 60
percent of the white people put him there. And
although we can say that homophobia and abortion
played a part, the election was mostly a widespread
referendum on Bush policies. Although Smith has been
quoting King all morning, I begin to hear subtext from
Malcolm X, the famous instruction he gave an eager
college student: go back to your neighborhood and work
on white folks. White peace activists have neither
mobilized a majority of white folks nor turned out a
minority of others for their compartmentalized
movement. Smith has been about as diplomatic as he
can be, and he promises to come back to help. But
there is such a gap.

* * *

During lunch break Peace Mennonite Pastor Dick
Davis is introducing me to a swirl of Dallas
activists, and I hand out some flyers that I made last
night at Kinkos. The Veterans for Peace table is
staffed by someone who flew down from Minnesota, and
when I sit down to eat, I meet Moravians from
Pennsylvania. Moravians, they explain to me, belong
to a pre-Reformation peace church, founded upon the
ashes of martyr John Huss who died singing in
1415.

"So what are you doing here," they ask me, glancing
at my flyers from the War Resisters League. "Isn't
the War Resisters League secular?" I almost say
socialist, too, but decide to swallow the provocation
with my lunch. I'm a sympathetic secularist I
explain. I take a William James approach to religious
experience. We all have some kind of faith, I think.
The fourth person at our table is a beaming activist
from Dallas, and lunch passes very quickly.

* * *

For the afternoon breakout session, I will look for
Professor Jeff Dumas, leading expert on the problem of
military conversion. In fact, I recruited Professor
Dumas into this gig so that I could sit here and take
notes. We are assigned to a room in the children's
wing. Everyone who enters says something about the
bright colors. Dumas needs no flair to keep his
listeners engaged for the next hour. No notes, no
slides, no handouts. He barely moves his hands or his
voice. He just has this mind that turns out quiet but
thoughtful words.

Dumas picked up his scholarly interest in military
conversion from the founder of the field, the late
Seymour Melman of Columbia U (see
aftercapitalism.com). And some kind of fate has
planted Dumas here. If the Dallas-Fort Worth
metroplex were a state, it would rank in third or
fourth place in its ability to attract military
contracts.

Dating back to researches begun during the Vietnam
era, Dumas finds two main reasons why people support
military spending. They think it makes them safe, and
they think it's good for the economy. But military
spending is making the world much more dangerous, says
Dumas, and military spending is only good for certain
vested interests. In searching for alternatives to
military spending we are seeking to remove obstacles
to peace. But we also have to address public
anxieties about the damage they fear after the flow of
military dollars has been cut off.

People see the bases, the workplaces, and the
paychecks that come with military spending, says
Dumas, but they don't see how military spending causes
the industrial base of an economy to shrink or how
this shrinkage in turn contributes to huge trade
deficits. Military spending is turning our economy
into a second rate economy and the administration is
making the world more dangerous. When people fear the
conversion of a military economy, it's because they
can see what they will be losing: "The abstraction of
after is harder to see."

The Pentagon's own data on base closings
demonstrate that when military spending is converted
to a civilian economy, more jobs are created. We hear
planes right now landing at nearby Love Field, a
one-time military base that has a long and prosperous
history as a center of growth for civilian enterprise.
Likewise with the old Bergstrom Air Force Base at
Austin, now home of the Barbara Jordan terminal. Says
Dumas: "We don't even know the examples that we are
sitting on top of."

At the end of World War II, one third of the
national economy of the USA was militarized, and it
was successfully reconverted into a booming civilian
economy. A lot of planning went into that effort, not
by pacifists, but by corporate leaders who wanted
economic growth. Today, says Dumas, the challenge is
both easier and harder. It's easier because there are
fewer industries to convert, but harder because the
vested interests that most need converting are not
"going back" to their civilian activities. Since the
Korean War, the USA has developed a permanent war
economy. Converting this economy presents both
psychological problems and concrete issues.

The world of military research and production is
totally different from the civilian kind. Military
engineers design primarily for maximum performance in
specialty areas. Military engineers don't focus on
cost. In the military, if a project is funded, the
costs will be covered. In civilian life, of course,
cost is very important. Also, military engineers are
often asked not to think about their place in the
larger plans. They just work on their
compartmentalized projects.

The story of two refrigerators: Dumas goes shopping
and finds two refrigerators priced $150 apart. What's
the difference? he asks the salesman. Why this
refrigerator here is made from space age plastic
strong enough to re-enter the atmosphere! In other
words, it's a military refrigerator.

Is military work inherently more interesting?
That's an argument Dumas hears from time to time. So
he tells the story of the English aerospace engineer
who met a child with spina bifida and built a little
vehicle for him to play in. That project, says the
aerospace engineer, was the most satisfying and
interesting challenge of his life. But what about the
size of civilian paychecks? Well yes, answers Dumas,
military contractors who turn civilian do have to give
up about ten to twenty percent of their income.

One more story: in 1996, Dumas was hired by the
famous nuclear lab at Los Alamos to prepare for
conversion to civilian life, and they found a civilian
problem to work on. The plastics engineers at Los
Alamos would work on methods of plastic production
that would eliminate toxic waste. Green plastic? Go
figure. As soon as the project was announced, guess
what happened? Congress cut the funding.

Meanwhile, Congress continues to fund weapons
programs that the Pentagon itself has been trying to
cut. Even the most conservative constituencies can be
reached with these facts, says Dumas. Congress cuts
productive research programs on the one hand as it
funds useless weapons elsewhere. Dumas has developed
quite a bit of expertise here in Texas talking to
conservative audiences about military conversion.
There is no need to assume, he says, that the work
can't be done: "I know you can do this," he says. "I
know this can be done."

In conversation between elders at the table,
several of them Mennonites, a consensus emerges that
the European Union is the economic force to watch
these days, where a much more intelligent mix of
social and military policies is going to prove that
the USA, in the grip of its own paranoid fantasies of
evil, is choosing a second-rate path. Because winning
a war against terrorism, says Dumas, has nothing to do
with the size of the military. In the near term,
terrorism is best fought through superb intelligence
and diligent police work. In the long term (like
Stassen said last night) the most effective policies
against terrorism involve resolute commitments to
human rights and development.

Conversation continues at the table, way past time.
Dumas is conducting a masterful seminar and people
are reluctant to go. So it is no reflection on the
fine presentation by Karen Horst Cobb that I arrive
back in the sanctuary late and tired. I hear what she
is saying about love, the centrality of love, the way
we have not paid enough attention to it. There is a
deeper conversion at stake, a revolution of values, a
profound choosing. I stare into a candle that I hold
and listen to the prayers that people have shared for
millennia on various continents and times.

Thanks to the Order of St. Francis and St. Clare, I
pick up a smooth stone on my way out the door. Using
stones like this, Cobb has encouraged all of us to
build a Cairn, an Ebenezer, a little arrangement of
stones that would signify a pathmarker through rough
country. If we build these little pathmarkers, they
will show our hope that a path to peace can be found.
What else would Jesus do?