TITLE: Radical Christian Pacifists
SPEAKER: Joseph Kosek
EVENT DATE: 03/25/2009
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 74 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
Joseph Kip Kosek, assistant professor at George Washington University, discussed the impact of radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice, at the Library of Congress. Kosek, the author of "Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy" and a former fellow of the Library's John W. Kluge Center, talked about his book. According to Kosek, in response to the massive bloodshed that defined the 20th century, American religious radicals developed an effective new form of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles with new uses of mass media. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi, these "acts of conscience" included sit-ins, boycotts, labor strikes and conscientious objection to war. Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Kosek traces the impact of radical Christian pacifists on America.
Speaker Biography: Joseph Kosek, who teaches American studies at George Washington University, finished the research and writing for this book while he was a Kluge Center fellow at the Library of Congress from 2007 to 2008. Kosek received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1997, and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University in 2004. He was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians in 2005. The prize is awarded annually for the best-written dissertation in the field of American history.
