Daniel Berrigan Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Their Violence and Ours

Attacks on property do not always undermine a political cause

July 16, 2020 • by William E. Scheuerman

How should we make sense of the political violence that has sometimes accompanied Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests? What about the state’s violent response to peaceful protest, or the dangerous acts committed by right-wing counter-protestors? Speaking on Canadian radio in the wake of 160 riots that shook U.S. cities during the ...

Enough Is Enough

The power of violence and the power of non-violence

June 4, 2020 • by Jeremy Varon

Now everywhere quoted, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” serves as a thoughtful shorthand for understanding the jagged edge of today’s unrest. But even in Dr. King’s time, it was not particularly radical wisdom. In 1967, the Kerner Commission was tasked by ...

The Lies of War

Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War

May 8, 2018 • by Michael Stewart Foley

Most everything one needs to know about Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s epic interpretation of the Vietnam War is evident in their summary of the conflict in the film’s eighteenth and final hour. “The Vietnam War was a tragedy, immeasurable and irredeemable,” declares narrator Peter Coyote. “But meaning can be ...