The Covenant of Peace

by Maurice Friedman

Overview

We live in an age of compounded crises, an age of hot and cold war and the constant threat of total annihilation by the weapons that we ourselves have perfected. It is an age more and more bereft of authentic human existence, and even the image of such existence increasingly deserts us. Those who cannot accept the compromises of our age run to the extremes: the yogi and the commissar, the saint and the political actionist. The one prayer which seems least likely to be answered, the prayer we have almost ceased to pray, is Dona nobis pacem, "Give us peace." War, cold war, threatened war, future war, has become the very atmosphere in which we live, a total element so pervasive and so enveloping as to numb our very sensibility to the abyss which promises to engulf us.

In our age three great figures have emerged, each of whom in his way is a peacemaker: Mohandas Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and Martin Buber. Each in his own way and on his own ground: Gandhi, who found the meeting point of religion and politics in satyagraha, a laying hold of the truth, or "soul force," which proved effective in liberating India as it is also proving effective in liberating the Negro communities of the South; Schweitzer, whose Christian love has expressed itself in a practical "reverence for life" and whose concern for all of life extends from befriending a pelican to repeated pleas for outlawing nuclear weapons; Martin Buber, who has found in the Biblical Covenant a base for real meeting between peoples and real reconciliation between conflicting claims. Many, who like myself hold Gandhi and Schweitzer in reverence, turn nonetheless to Martin Buber and to the dialogue which meets others and holds its ground when it meets them, for the road to peace in the modern world.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940161735077
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	08/23/2018
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #110
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	153 KB

About the Author

Maurice Friedman was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, received an S.B. in Economics from Harvard University in 1942 and spent the next three and a half years in Civilian Public Service camps and units for conscientious objectors. In 1947 he received an M.A. in English from Ohio State University and in 1950 a Ph.D. in History of Culture from The University of Chicago. From 1946 to 1951 he taught English at Ohio State and Friends University, Wichita, Kansas; Humanities in the College of the University of Chicago; Masterpieces of World Literature at Washington University, St. Louis, and Philosophy at Ohio State.

He has been Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, since 1951, on the faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York City since 1954, and on the faculty of the Washington (D. C.) School of Psychiatry since 1956. He has been Assistant Professor of Religion at Columbia University, Visiting Professor of Religious Philosophy at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, Lecturer in the Biblical Covenant and Contemporary Images of Man at Pendle Hill, and Guest Lecturer in “The Image of Man and Psychotherapy” at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City.

Maurice Friedman has been on the teaching staff at Pendle Hill together with Eugenia and later David and Dvora, the summer of 1957, the fall of 1959, and the winter and spring terms of 1965. In 1960 they spent ten months in Israel and Europe on a fellowship for research on Problematic Rebel and in 1966 they again will go to Israel for research on Martin Buber: Encounter on the Narrow Ridge (McGraw-Hill, 1966 or 1967). In 1961 Maurice Friedman was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Vermont. During the spring and summer of 1965 he was on the Faculty of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, Purchase, New York. He belongs to a working party on the “Quaker Movement.”