Book Review: Captivity, 118 days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World without War

I just finished reading the book, Captivity, 118 days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World without War, by James Loney, fellow Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) member and Catholic Worker

I would suggest to anyone that is seeking to create a better world to pick up this book.

The book is the story of when James Loney and three other Christian Peacemaker Teams members, Tom Fox, Harmeet Singh Soode, and Norman Kember, were kidnapped in Iraq while participating in delegation and held for 118 days. It is a book about humanity in all its paradoxes - a humanity that searches for freedom and forgiveness.

James Loney tells his story through the human experience -the real human experience of being a peacemaker in a place at war. In the book, the peacemakers don’t make peace. The war continues to rage. People continue in captivity all over the world. There is no hero in the story. However, he does show us that peacemaking can be done daily in the worst of circumstances. It is done in his resistance to the dehumanization of captivity – the cleaning of the room and the washing of the clothes. It is done in the daily struggle to see his kidnappers as human beings – the praying for the captor’s sick sister and the massaging of the back of his captors.

Through the telling of his experience, Loney tells the story of the world that searches for liberation from the captivity of violence and war. He writes as a reminder of the true human cost of war: the hundreds of thousands Iraqis that have been killed, the young soldiers occupying the country that have lost their lives, and of course Tom Fox, who was taken away and killed on the 79th day of captivity. He writes on day 111, “Killing- any kind, no matter for what – all killing disgusts me. I’m sick to death of it. Seeing it on the news, hearing about it, watching movies about it. The glorification and idolization of it. The money that’s spent on it. The orders and justifications for it. There must come a day when killing will finally be seen for what it is: a collective insanity, a moral scourge, a blasphemy against God and against the human.”

Furthermore, Loney’s experience shows the terrible cycle of violence that we have created, while also demonstrating a way out of it – forgiveness. As Loney states at the end of the introduction, “It is the story my captivity and what I saw there – of the human spirit and freedom, of violence and the war and the way to find our liberation from it. As with any paradox, there is no answer to it; it can only be lived. I tell this story in hope that we might yet find another way.”

Thank you for sharing your story James Loney.