The Mennonite has published a thought provoking reflection on President Obama's Nobel peace Prize Award speech. Author Harold A. Penner quotes King when he writes that, "'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones."' So spoke Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech."

Although Obama considers himself a beneficiary of King's legacy, Penner asserts that Obama nonetheless dismisses non-violent peace builders like King and Gandhi as "ineffectual and naive."