"Our possessions are the source of our violence. Fearing that others desire what we have…… we seek self-deceptive justifications that mire us in patterns of injustice which can be sustained only though coercion." (Stanley Hauerwas: The Peacable Kingdom p.86)

Stanley Hauerwas is an American theologian from the Methodist tradition who has been described as "a thorn in the side of … Christian complacency for more than 30 years". He is a radical pacifist whose controversial views on patriotism (he thinks it's a dangerous thing) are hardly part of the mainstream of American political - or indeed religious - discourse.

But I don't think that one has to be a card-carrying pacifist to admire the ethical consistency of Hauerwas's writing; and I am particularly struck by what he has to say about 'possessions being the source of our violence'. The great wars that will be the focus for Remembrance ceremonies nationally and locally this month, as well as the smaller, forgotten, wars that continue to blight human lives and disfigure our world, can all be explained by an attachment to, or a desire for, possessions on the part of nations or individuals. The desire to possess more land, natural resources, money, even more human beings: this is what underlies all conflict, however much the desire is disguised with noble sentiment. It is right for us, each November, to continue to remember those who have lost their lives in human conflict; it is also right that we should recover a sense of penitence about the human attachment to possessions that leads to such conflict.

In his introduction to The Peacable Kingdom Hauerwas writes that "non-violence is not just one implication among others that can be drawn from our Christian beliefs; it is at the very heart of our understanding of God." It is this God who, in Christ, invites us to become part of a kingdom in which the powers of this world have been dispossessed by a cross, the ultimate symbol of reconciliation.