Carolina Calvo

Dr. Lipsker

Humes 104

9 May 2026

Campus Commentary #4

The 2026 Maloney-Lotts Lecture was “Faith and Resistance: The Role of Nonviolence in a Violent World”. The speakers were Reverend Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, and Leela Prasad, professor of religious studies at Brown University. The lecture was the second part of the series, where the night before, the screening of the film Ahimsa Ghandi: The Power of the Powerless was shown. This second part that I attended was the reflection of that film with a Town Hall-style lecture and the focus was “Faith in Action”.  

The goal of the speakers was to bring a religious perspective to the resistance of violence in our communities that was and is currently going on. Greg Snyder, a professor at Davidson, opened up with remarks about how Jesus would respond to the state of the country, and quoted teachings from the Christian Bible. “The bible tells us to visit those in prison, not to put them in prison. Not to deport them.” The focus of the town hall was heavily on ICE, since it was recently after the murders that ICE committed of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and ICE deporting innocent people and harming them. 

Prasad and Taylor spoke about how the teaching of non resistance is a big circuit, and how there are teaching from across the globe that we can look at for inspiration and that have created a chain reaction of non resistance in a peaceful way- starting from Tolstoy in Russia to Gandhi in South Africa and India, and Martin Luther King in the United States. 

Leela Prasad talked about the principle of nonviolence, and how nonviolence is an integral part of ahimsa. Ahimsa is the Sanskrit word for “nonviolence”. An integral part of ahimsa is that not only does it mean not to cause physical violence, but also to avoid causing harm for individual thoughts, words, and actions. Another aspect of ahimsa is ahimsa compromise- to find common ground. “In most contexts, my truth and your truth are relative,” Prasad explained. Prasad stated that one has to expand the idea of violence to understand nonviolence, and that the field of violence and nonviolence is much wider than we think it is. “Ahimsa has an embryonic connection to truth. What is love? What do we mean by love? Nonviolence is  critical to ahimsa” (Prasad). 

Adam Taylor talked about Dr. King’s vision of the beloved community, and how it  is similar to ahimsa. He explained how Dr. King’s pilgrimage to India was where he learned about ahimsa and the philosophy of nonviolence. He brought those teachings back to the US, and with that included the six principles of nonviolence. “It isn’t a philosophy but a moral way of life,” explained Taylor. The six principles of nonviolence are:  

1. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people 
2. It seeks friendship and understanding
3. It Seek to defeat injustice and not people 
4. Suffering can educate and transform
5. Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate. Agape love 
6. Nonviolence believes that the universe and/or God, whatever you choose to believe, is on the side of justice

During the town hall, both Prasad and Taylor discussed how we can change our every day attitudes and practices with ahimsa and the six principles of nonviolence in mind, so that we can ultimately resist the injustice that is happening in our communities. Taylor stated, “The misuse and abuse of ICE is the tip of the spear of how the administration is trying to have power and control. We are on the path of tyranny and authoritarianism.” For example, they said that the whistle and the cell phone have been tools for nonviolence before, and that we can use them to record and alert the horrific actions of ICE. 

Prasad and Taylor were successful because they brought in new terms that were very relevant to the topic but introduced it in ways that were new to the audience, specifically, ahimsa. They explained how nonviolent attitudes and practices can be applied in different ways in our lives. For example, the power of economic choice. We have the power of deciding where we put our money, and should be mindful about what organizations support the Trump administration. They also emphasized that “street level things” need to happen. For example, driving immigrant kids to school, delivering groceries for those who cannot risk being exposed due to their status, writing letters to congress members. They enunciated, “Authoritarians thrive when people feel as though the are powerless. Be active.” I appreciated how they gave concrete examples of how the audience could be involved in a very hopeless time. They left an encouraging message for the people that were there to listen. 

Prasad and Taylor addressed the uncertainty that many people were feeling in the room about the trajectory of the United States. I appreciated how they would make clear statements about the urgency of the situation, like “Racial profiling is happening with the actions of ICE” and “Trump’s actions are a huge attack of rule of law and due process”. 

I know that these are my personal and political beliefs, and I can confidently say that most people in the room were on the same page. I wonder if there were people in the room that disagreed with the opinions of Prasad and Taylor, but the town hall was clearly on navigating these hard political times, and it seemed like the audience was going to be from people that agreed that these were hard, political times. I think that this made Prasad and Taylor effective with their arguments, because they didn’t have to convince the audience that what is happening in our country right now is wrong– they could just go straight to the point about tools on how to navigate the circumstances in a resistant yet nonviolent way. Something that I really liked is this point that they brought up: “It’s easy to think back and think that the civil rights movement was inevitable. But the reality is that it was only a small minority of people that were engaged in the risky protests.” It’s a source of inspiration to think about that, to think about what the tipping point of a movement is. It makes me think about the statistic that it takes 3% for people to care for a cause for it to be enough to gain momentum for a movement.