Call no.: 261.873 W726
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The title of the book refers to The Peace and Truce of God that was a medieval European movement of the Catholic Church. The movement applied spiritual sanctions in order to control and stop the violence of feudal society and constituted the first organized attempt to control civil society in medieval Europe through non-violent means. It began in 989 AD and survived in some form into the 13th century.
This book addresses questions about our fears in regard to violence as these apply to the modern era and discusses these using the insights provided by the gospel and the cross. The discussion includes modern concerns in regard to the violence that we experience daily; for example, catastrophes involving complex modern technology as well as terrorism, the terror of the occult as so often expressed in film (The Exorcist), psychopathic violence, uncontrollable animal attacks etc. that are so often presented to us in the mass media in one form or another. The author feels that many of these notions lead to feelings of being unable to address these anxieties and the attendant moral dilemnas that can lead us to a detachment, including a moral one, from the troubling issues we are presented with daily.
The discussion centres on the nature of the violence that we experience today and disusses what is peace and the nature of the peace and the grace of God that is the antidote to the debillitating effects that these violences have on us. The author does not pretend to provide answers to these troubling issues. Instead, using mostly Christian concepts but also drawing insights from other religions, he has suggested “…how the Christian faith offers some resource for meeting these fears and for reinforcing resistance to those aspects of our culture that will maim and even kill us as human agents if they are left unchallenged.”