We arrived at Loyd Park on a gorgeous spring afternoon, the kind that makes you feel as though the world has taken a deep breath. Loop A had been completely overtaken by the 27th annual Be Happy Chili and Wing Cook-Off, so we settled into a site in the quieter Loop G. Site 196 suited us just fine. We set up camp, finished the last few hours of our workweek, and waited for the weekend to begin.

When the laptops finally closed, we raised a glass of sangria to officially kick-off the weekend. After a simple Date Night dinner and a leisurely walk, we settled around the campfire. Our conversation eventually turned to the heavy news of the week, specifically recent remarks by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth regarding military operations in Iran. His briefings have reminded us why he is exactly the wrong person to hold his job.

What unsettles us isn’t a foreign‑policy disagreement, it’s Hegseth’s tone. He is an avowed Christian and yet he delights in violence, death, and destruction. His briefings are performative, replete with hubris, strutting, and cockiness. He displays a prickliness and defensiveness we’ve come to expect, along with resentment toward the press and the Democrats. But his celebration of merciless death, of destruction raining down from the skies, his glee in restoring to his Department of War a manosphere-infused “warrior ethos,” is what we find most discomforting. As lifelong pacifists, our commitment to nonviolence is not naïve; it’s intentional. It shapes how we move through the world and how we understand the moral weight of force. With great power comes great responsibility. Hearing Hegseth treat lethal action as a punchline or a point of pride prompted us to revisit and reflect upon our fundamental principles.

We recalled the seamless‑garment ethic that we first learned about in the seminary. A biblical phrase referring to the seamless robe Jesus wore before his crucifixion, the “term “seamless garment” is a term attributed to Catholic activist Eileen Egan, who said, “The protection of life is a seamless garment. You can’t protect some life and not others.” The seamless garment perspective is perhaps most closely associated with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and his “consistent ethic of life,” which called for not only opposition to abortion, the death penalty, and unjust wars of aggression, but also support for anti-poverty programs, immigrant rights, and care for the elderly.

Saturday morning arrived gently. We slipped into our familiar camp routines: reading The New York Times, conducting ancestry research, and watching CBS Saturday Morning. These rituals help ground us, regardless of what’s driving our conversations. In the afternoon we hopped onto our scooters and headed to Loop A for chili‑judging duties. The ride was fun, but the real joy came from reconnecting with familiar faces and meeting new friends, a reminder that community is built in small, unhurried moments.

That evening, as we settled around the campfire, our conversation turned to the maximalist gun culture in Texas and how it shapes what people are increasingly willing to accept. We’ve become so immersed in this culture that we’ve lost our respect for human life.

The thing about the seamless-garment ethic is that doesn’t insist that every moral issue has the same weight. Nor does it ask us to champion a cause so single‑mindedly that we ignore all the others. Instead, it holds two truths at once: some harms, like deliberately targeting the innocent, are uniquely grave, and yet honoring life must also include the everyday conditions that allow people to flourish: safety, shelter, health, meaningful work, and a social fabric that doesn’t discard the inconvenient or unseen.

For us, that ethic anchors our dedication to nonviolence, especially in this moment when aggressive masculinity like Hegseth’s makes cruelty feel casual and bloodlust seem insatiable. It urges us to check our tone even toward those we consider adversaries. It pushes back against the habit of sorting lives into “us” and “them,” of reducing moral dilemmas to good versus evil, of blithely believing there are no innocent or undecided people in between. It reminds us that compassion is not a scarce commodity to be rationed by the powerful but to be distributed generously by all people of good will. And it challenges us to align our own private conduct with our public convictions. That is precisely why Hegseth’s remarks troubled us: A consistent ethic of life cannot coexist with rhetoric that delights in death or treats civilian lives as necessary collateral damage. We can disagree about policy with clarity and conviction without surrendering to such dehumanizing speech.

By the time the fire dwindled to embers and we turned in for the night, our convictions felt a little deeper and our path a little clearer. Camping isn’t just an escape for us; it’s a return. A step away from the noise so we can remember who we want to be. This weekend at Loyd Park reminded us why we hold fast to nonviolence, why the seamless‑garment ethic still matters, and why we want our lives to reflect the truth that every person matters.