Author Marshall King ’92 is the next guest on the Peacebuilder podcast. King is the author of “Disarmed: The Radical Life and Legacy of MJ Sharp” (Herald Press, 2022).
King speaks Feb. 15-16 at EMU and in Harrisonburg. Learn more.
The book tells the story of Michael “MJ” Sharp ‘05, whose commitment to peace and peacebuilding led him to work with Mennonite Central Committee and the United Nations. Sharp spent most of his life grappling with both the concepts and realities of militarism and war, violence and peacemaking.
His murder on 2017 while working with the United Nations as an armed group expert sent shockwaves around the world. He was ambushed with UN colleague Zaida Catalán of Sweden, who was also killed. The investigation into his death is ongoing; dozens were sentenced to death in late January.
Host patience kamau starts the “Peacebuilder” conversation with King. But the topic of Sharp’s life and legacy continues in a series of linking episodes of Mennomedia’s podcast “-ing”. Check out the series as host Ben Wideman interviews MJ’s parents Jon and Michele Sharp, his peers and fellow students at EMU, and David Nyiringabo MA ‘20, a graduate of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who was the first beneficiary of the MJ Sharp Peace and Justice Endowed Scholarship.
King was drawn to Sharp’s story through “an early sense of injustice” at his murder and the sense that Sharp’s life was the story of “a modern Anabaptist …wrestling with the world.”
“I felt like MJ had actually gone into the world and, and was doing some of the peacemaking work that we often talk about, that we often, you know, proclaim to believe. But MJ was actually out there doing it and then for a time was missing and inevitably found dead,” King said. A career journalist who also knows the Sharp family, he was especially attuned to the knowledge that there existed “a longer telling of the story other than just the headlines.”
King shares about the hard work of earning trust and building relationships with people who knew Sharp well. He traveled to Sweden and Germany, to Kansas and New Mexico, using skills he’d practiced from a lifetime in journalism.
“At one point I calmed my anxiety by saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s just 60 to 80 newspaper columns strung together in a book,” King said.
One of the major questions he asked about Sharp, whom he calls at turns smart and savvy and wise, was “What could he teach us?” Yet King also learned much from listening to people around the world whose lives intersected with Sharp’s. “[In] just about every interview I did, there was a moment… where I just marveled at something wise that someone said, or some observation or some piece that MJ had taught them. And that being in the presence of that over and over again was an immense gift. I tried to pack the book with as many of those as I could.”