Today – January 21, 2013 – would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 84th birthday, had he lived to see it. Dr. King is best known as a crusader for racial equality, and as perhaps the key figure in the civil rights movement that sprung up throughout the United States in the 1950’s and 60’s. Drawing on strategies employed by Ghandi in India, King advocated a form of resistance that was nonviolent, but pointedly effective. He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, boycotts of segregated buses, marches through Washington D.C. and in cities throughout the south, and more. Through the efforts of King and all those engaged in the civil rights movement, the racist underbelly of our country was exposed and could no longer be ignored.
King’s struggle against forms of oppression and violence did not stop with racism, but especially in the later years of his life, began to extend to other conflicts and wars. He critiqued the military-industrial complex of our nation, which had, at the time, recently led us into a controversial and bloody war in Vietnam. And he began to understand and protest the ways that race and class colluded to disenfranchise entire sets of people. In his famous “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” speech, given just one day before he was assassinated, King said, “Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.”
So, today, on this day set aside each year to remember Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy, it seems somehow fitting that I am planning to attend a ceremony launching a new peace ministry: ReconciliAsian. When I first moved to southern California almost four years ago, some of the first people I met were Hyun and Sue Park Hur, a couple committed to church planting and peace education in the Korean and Asian American context.
Although when we think of the word “missionary” or “mission worker,” it often conjures up visions of a person, perhaps usually white, 
traveling from the United States to another country in the name of evangelism. These words can carry a lot of racist and imperialist baggage with them. But Hyun and Sue have a different idea about what it means to be an Anabaptist missionary. Although neither of them grew up in Mennonite contexts, they found themselves drawn to the Anabaptist witness of peacemaking, and they see themselves as mission workers in the Los Angeles context, teaching and preaching about Jesus’ nonviolent ministry in the Korean-American context and beyond.
. Published from 1995-2007, this collection of 16 books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins offer what theologians might call a “Christian dispensationalist” reading of the biblical book of Revelation. Using a literal interpretation of John’s apocalyptic vision in Revelation, LaHaye and Jenkins offer a fictional account (although one can guess that the authors believe they are depicting biblical truths) of a post-rapture world, where the “Tribulation Force,” a group of people left behind who come to the Christian Faith, must wage war against the anti-Christ. Over its 
. Although perhaps not a direct response to the Left Behind series, Flinchbaugh’s book offers a welcome alternative vision of what the story of Revelation might be saying to us as Christian: a vision that grows out of a deep-seated belief in the power of non-violence, illustrated primarily through the life and witness of Jesus Christ. And, Flinchbaugh offers you a fascinating, fun story to boot.
, Chris Hedges writes, “Every society, ethnic group or religion nurtures certain myths, often centered around the creation of the nation or the movement itself. These myths lie unseen beneath the surface, waiting for the moment to rise ascendent, to define and glorify followers or members in times of crisis. National myths…are stoked by the entertainment industry, in school lessons, stories, and quasi-historical ballads, preached in mosques [and churches], or championed in absurd historical dramas that are always wildly popular during war…National myths ignite a collective amnesia in war. They give past generations a nobility and greatness they never possessed.”
