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It's the start of June, which not only means that summer is around the corner, but in Fellowship of Reconciliation terminology means that the annual FOR Pacific Northwest conference is coming up. This year's Seabeck conference (named after the conference center 90 minutes west of Seattle, where the gathering is held each year) will be the 50th annual!

I'm delighted to be one of the guest speakers at the July 3-6 conference, "Persevering for Justice and Peace," one of two representing FOR's national staff. My friend and colleague Maryrose Dolezal, co-director of FOR's Youth & Militarism program, will also be traveling to Seabeck from her base in Minnesota to speak and lead workshop's on organizing young people for social change (including information about the Nonviolent Youth Collective).

A small group of FOR members in Charlottesville, Virginia, are active in a variety of areas from interfaith dialogue to issues advocacy. Judy Sayed has helped convene a dialogue group of Christian and Moslem women who have been meeting for more than a year. Bill Anderson, a long-time National Council member, stays involved through the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice that will celebrate its 25th anniversary this June. Their annual report is three pages of small type, single spaced recounting of activities over the past year: lectures, films, salons, vigils and demonstrations, picnics and art’s festivals, newsletter and website, tabling and simple community presence.

Congratulations on 25 years of Presence for Peace.

Hello blog readers, and thank you for visiting us on this very special holiday. Martin Luther King Day is more than a day off, and it's more than a day on, too! This is a day for every resident of the United States to contemplate how much this man and this movement did to save our souls (either spiritually or metaphorically, as you prefer) and how we can work to continue their campaign for justice through nonviolence.

You might not know that Dr King was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I am going to write more later today about how FOR staffers Bayard Rustin and Glen Smiley helped King to create the foundation of his strategies on nonviolent resistance and how FOR's work with Thich Nhat Hanh later informed King's views on Vietnam. For now I give you this, Dr. King's 1958 membership application to FOR:

FOR has just published our semi-annual membership newsletter. If you have donated in the past year, you should find it your mailbox shortly. But now you don't have to wait! Download a PDF (762 kB) of the Winter 2007 Witness right now, and get the latest from FOR's staff and National Council.

"Kentucky at War," proclaims this week's issue of The Nation, the standard-bearer of the U.S. socialist-bending progressive community. The Nation has been publishing a series of articles looking at the political debates in so-called "red" states as the presidential campaign heats up.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation will be hosting the third annual Festival of Peace on Sunday, September 16th at our national headquarters in Upper Nyack, New York. The popular event, which has attracted 400 residents of the lower Hudson Valley in each of the past two years, will this year crown a four-day stretch of peace-centered activities being coordinated by FOR with other community groups in the region.

For more info, read on or see this press release.

A Festival of Peace by the Hudson
A Weekend of Festivities
September 13-16, 2007

Last week I was given over 300 pictures of our office ("Shadowcliff") after the July 6 flood. I've narrowed them down to 50 and posted them on my favorite photo sharing site, Flickr. You can watch the slideshow here.

If you are not on our mailaing list you may not have heard about the major disaster that befell the FOR office a few weeks ago. This article in the (Nyack) Journal News tells the story:

Last month FOR's executive director was at the national conference of United for Peace and Justice and sat down for a quick interview. You can watch the 10 minute video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAiTg7La-M