Candace Chellew-Hodge, a United Church of Christ minister, gives spiritual survival tips to gay and lesbian Christians for dealing with antagonism in this excerpt from Bulletproof Faith.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, explains in this excerpt from An Open Heart the importance of remaining calm, with a settled peace of mind, when dealing with enemies.
Margaret Guenther, a spiritual director and retreat leader, writes eloquently in this excerpt from My Soul in Silence Waits of the "coterie of destructive little adversaries" within us.
Sam Keen, retreat leader and bestselling author, in this excerpt from Faces of the Enemy encourages us to develop a discipline of consciousness as a community of solitary individuals, because there is no way to repent en masse.
Sam Keen, in this excerpt from Faces of the Enemy, reminds us of the vital importance of substituting grief for anger, listening for the cry beneath the violence.
Dilgo Khyentse and Padampa Sangye, a Tibetan scholar and a 12th-century spiritual master, in this excerpt from The Hundred Verses of Advice steer us in the direction of not discriminating between how we treat enemies and how we treat friends.
Mary Jo Leddy, founder of Romero House and a senior fellow at the University of Toronto, considers in this excerpt from The Other Face of God how enemies are essential within the imperial consciousness that pervades our culture.
George Leonard, an American sensei, examines in this excerpt from The Way of Aikido the physical and psychological dynamics of pushing and alternatives to pushing back.
Robert Inchausti has selected from writings of the prolific Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In this excerpt from Seeds, Merton reminds us that perhaps our enemies fear us because they can find nothing in us of God's love, kindness, patience, mercy, and understanding of people's weaknesses.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, writes in this excerpt from The Garden of Truth about the essence of chivalry — sincere and detached action devoted to a noble cause — and the true spiritual meaning of jihad.
Anne Robertson, executive director of the historic Massachusetts Bible Society and a United Methodist minister, reflects in this excerpt from God with Skin On about the need to see each other as human beings and give each other a chance to clear the air.
Annemarie Schimmel, an international authority on Islamic religion and literature, in this excerpt from Rumi’s World helps us to remember hat enemies do us a favor by forcing us to seek God's aid.
Janet Cedar Spring a Zen practitioner and co-founder of Ravenswood retreat center in Wisconsin, observes in this excerpt from Take Up Your Life that entering into antagonism towards people or organizations that commit injustice entails cooperating with injustice.
Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg, Buddhist writers and spiritual teachers, encourage us in this excerpt from Love Your Enemies to use imaginative projection to help us see other people's points of view, whether we agree with them or not.
Sondra Wheeler, the Marsha Ashby Carr Professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Seminary, contemplates in this excerpt from What We Were Made For the difficulty and strangeness of praying for our enemies.
