With the Grain of the Universe: Reexamining the Alleged Nonviolent Rejection of Natural Law

This essay challenges the prevailing presumptions concerning the antithetical relationship between nonviolence and natural law. In conversation with the representative natural law positions offered by J. Daryl Charles and Jean Porter, I turn to the framing of the relationship between the new law and the natural law in Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” and appeal to the writings of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas (sometimes against themselves) in order to argue that nonviolence can and should affirm natural law in some form if it intends to claim to represent “the grain of the universe.”