Joel Mathis

 My tendencies toward pacifism -- I'm not sure I have the right to call myself a total pacifist -- stem from a few influences. My dad was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, one of the few young men in his community who was accorded that status by the local draft board. And when I was an adolescent, my family moved into a Mennonite community, and I eventually attended the local Mennonite Brethren college, and the Menno tradition of Christian pacifism left its mark on me even after I left the church. Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week has made me realize that there was a third factor in all of this: For my entire life, the United States -- the country where I live, and thus the context for my dovishness -- has pretty much always been  on offense . We go to other countries and make them feel the "shock and awe" of our tanks and bombs and missiles, but we have never been in the position of so many Ukrainians right now, making life-or-death choices to def

Though I'm not ethnically Mennonite, and though I'm lapsed, I was tribalistically pleased this morning to discover that one of this year's recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Leymah Gbowee, is a grad of Eastern Mennonite University . And the announcement took me all the way back to August, when discussion heated up about another Mennonite college—Goshen—and its decision not to play the "Star Spangled Banner" before games, citing its warlike nature . Reasonable people can disagree on that topic, I think, but all too often the negative reaction was simply smug : NBC Sports' Rick Chandler weighed in, saying: "I suppose we could have followed the example of the Mennonites and simply fled, giving the nation back to the British. But then we’d all be playing cricket." That quote has stuck in my craw for two months now. But what Chandler—what a lot of people—don't understand is that Mennonite pacifism isn't about "fleeing" conflict, nec