Seizing the Nonviolent Moments

Life is filled with opportunities to practice nonviolence. If we kept track, we'd be surprised at how often we get to choose a violent or nonviolent response to a given situation. Seizing these moments is a spiritual practice that shapes a nonviolent heart. Many people doing this together shapes the heart of a nonviolent world.

This book is a humble and accessible approach to nonviolence based on the belief that no one is perfectly nonviolent. We are all works in progress. Each chapter presents an imaginative interpretation of a scripture story about seizing a nonviolent moment that sheds new light on nonviolence and its spirituality.

Stories of contemporary peacemakers woven throughout offer lessons for living a spirituality of nonviolence for our times. Prophetic words from the US Catholic bishops emphasize the essential role of peacemaking in renewing the earth. Questions following each chapter inspire personal reflection and make the book a welcome resource for classrooms, parishes, and small groups.

The more we seize the nonviolent moments in our lives, the more we are transformed by them. And the more we experience the power of nonviolence within ourselves, the more we believe in its potential to transform our troubled world.


""At a time when church teaching has once again embraced Jesus's radical rejection of all violence, most Christians still struggle to follow Him. With her deep insights from Scripture, prayerful reflections and challenging questions, Nancy Small enables us to 'seize the nonviolent moments' of everyday life as a path to profound conversion. On this path, readers of the book will now sing with new awareness and new hope, 'Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.'""
--Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, retired auxiliary bishop of the Detroit archdiocese, Detroit, Michigan

""Even those who have already committed to nonviolent living will find in these pages gems of wisdom born out of long practice confronting the violences of our world. Nonviolence, according to Nancy Small, is the 'act of tilling our inner seedbed over and over and tending to our spiritual soil so that new growth will sprout.' The violent world in which we live desperately needs this new growth. This book should be required reading for all Christians.""
--Marie Dennis, Co-President, Pax Christi International, Washington, D.C.

""This is an exquisite invitation to taste nonviolence for the first time or to reflect on the complexity and grace of nonviolence for the active practitioner. Small's exegesis of the Scriptures is brilliant and compelling, asking the reader to return to the 'breadbasket of our soul' to see what resources each brings to a world blessed, broken, and hungry for peace.""
--Mary Carter Waren, St. Thomas University, Miami, Florida

Nancy Small is a hospice chaplain, spiritual director, and a seeker of peace. She is a former national coordinator and a current Ambassador of Peace with Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace movement. Nancy is an Oblate of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie who holds a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary and a spiritual direction certificate from the Center for Spirituality and Justice. She lives in Worcester, Masssachusetts with her husband, Carl.