A Question of Faith
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A History of the New
Zealand Christian Pacifist Society
by David Grant |
Format
120pp,
297 x 210mm, burst bound, gloss laminated 280gsm soft cover. Text
includes many b/w photos.
Price
Was
NZ$29.95, Now just $10.00 + postage
Publication info
ISBN 0958227586
Published July 2004
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On this page
On the evening of 2 June 1941, Christian Pacifist Society activist,
Presbyterian Minister and well-known poet Basil Dowling mounted the
drinking fountain in Wellington’s Pigeon Park to commence a public
denunciation of war. Like those before him he faced certain arrest and
imprisonment. When he later wrote on why he tried to attempt the
improbable he began his explanation by stating that it was, "simply a
question of faith."
This stand was typical of the idealism and courage shown by members
of the Society.
In March 1936, Wellington Methodist Minister Ormond Burton and his
circuit steward A C Barrington established the Christian Pacifist
Society of New Zealand open only to adult communicant members of
mainstream churches. This represented both the culmination of a long
period of burgeoning pacifist sentiment within the Methodist Church and
in particular, its Bible Class, and the beginning of New Zealand’s most
assertive pacifist movement both before and, as much as it was possible,
during World War II.
Christian pacifists opposed all war, at all times irrespective of
political developments. They shared a fundamental and absolutist belief,
based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, that war was a moral and ethical
sin in God’s eyes.
Their beliefs led many members to publicly protest against World War II
for which some were jailed, to
become conscientious objectors and suffer detention in camps for indeterminate
sentences and after the war to establish a community at Riverside near Motueka.
David Grant, New Zealand's foremost author on this topic, draws on
his personal interviews with members from the 1980s onwards and other
research to tell the stories of these committed men and women, and of
the organisation they formed. The book includes 30 photographs from the
author's collection, several of which are published here for the first
time.
David Grant is a professional historian based in Wellington. This is
his eighth publication. He became a full time, free-lance writer in
1990, partly because of the pleasure he experienced in researching and
writing Out In The Cold: Pacifists and Conscientious Objectors in New
Zealand During World War II (Auckland 1986), and the post-graduate
university work that preceded it.
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