Monday Merton

There is hardly a nation on earth today that is not to some extent committed to a philosophy or to a mystique of violence. One day or other, whether on the left or on the right, whether in defense of a bloated establishment or an impoverished guerrilla government in the jungle, whether in terms of a police state or a ghetto revolution, the human race is polarizing itself into camps armed with everything form Molotov cocktails to the most sophisticated technological instruments of death. At such a time, the doctrine that “war is the will of God” can be disastrous if it is not handled with extreme care. For everyone seems in practice to be thinking along some such lines with the exception of a few sensitive and well-meaning (mostly the kind of people who will read this book).

– Thomas Merton, Thoughts on the East, p. 50.