Draw Your Weapons

'How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperilled world?'
In Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defence of life lived by peace and principle. Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature and theology, Sentilles tells the true stories of a conscientious objector during World War II and a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib. In the process she challenges conventional thinking about how violence is waged, witnessed and resisted.

Draw Your Weapons stirs and confronts, disturbs and illuminates. A single book might not change the world, but this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way you see the world—and that makes all the difference.

A former theologian, Sarah Sentilles completed her undergraduate degree at Yale and both a Masters and a Doctorate at Harvard. She was a college professor for over a decade before becoming a full time writer and is now a passionate advocate for life lived by peace and principle. Her previous books are Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton, A Church of her Own: What Happens When A Woman Takes the Pulpit and Breaking Up With God: A Love Story. She lives in Idaho.

'A unique and necessary book that makes a passionate, thought-stoking argument.' John Jeremiah Sullivan

'Now more than ever, the world needs a book like Draw Your Weapons. With mastery, urgency and great courage, Sarah Sentilles investigates the histories of art, violence, war and human survival. In her haunting and absorbing narrative, the act of storytelling itself becomes a matter of life and death.' Ruth Ozeki

'Draw Your Weapons is as much about peace as it is about war; it is as much about life as it is about death…You will be riveted, educated, implicated, and changed by this book.' Emily Rapp

'A beautiful, harrowing, and moving collage that portrays the making of art as a powerful response to making war. Every reader will feel profoundly changed by it.' Alice Elliott Dark

'Fearless, stirring, rhythmic, this book pulses with energy and is full of insights, dark yet ultimately hopeful.' Nick Flynn

'A beautiful, haunting book so original that it is a genre unto itself—a poem, a sermon, a polemic, a memoir, a narrative. I won't be able to think of our era of constant conflict without recalling Sentilles's lessons, her imagery, and her prophetic voice.' Franklin Foer