A study of The Risk of the Cross prepares a group of us to witness against the U.S. refusal to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Like in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, through a series of exercises we immerse ourselves in the biblical narrative. We access the dangerous memory of the nonviolent campaign of Jesus as a source of mission and ministry. The principal and foundation is our awareness of the profound yes we make to God. The graces of this contemplative period in focus on the principal and foundation is a matter of further accepting our baptismal assent to God and a designation of ourselves in the purpose of God's providence. The purpose of our acting in nonviolence, as the tip of the spear, is a further conclusion reaching to grasp this insight of our Creator's grace filled act of creation.  It is knowing ourselves in this way that we are ready for the first week. In this period of contemplating the structural sin, of course it is a medi...

The U.S. spent $69.2 billion on nuclear weapons in 2025 alone. That's $3,768 per second--I planted a tree in our backyard yesterday provided through a state reforesting project. How many trees could the US plant instead? 14,629 trees/sec. The figure is as shocking as it is banal. When President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize  some said it was for pledging a commitment to verifiable disarmament, but in exchange for the Senate ratification of New START he consented to "modernize" with "life extension-programs" for the B-61 gravity bomb and the entire nuclear weapon triad.  The B-61 bomb renovation is now complete, and the W-93 nuclear weapons program is well underway, according to Sarah Scoles, author of Count Down,  o  a clear violation of the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty, the "bedrock" of nuclear disarmament infrastructure to which the U.S. is signatory.   [from Bruce G. Blair and Matthew A. Brown, "World Spending on Nuclear Weapons Surpasse...

“I, prisoner for the Lord” writes Paul (Eph 4)  Now that it’s Prison Banned Book Week, I think back to a scene October 2 nd .  “ Meals for 150 inmates,” the Booking officer said describing kitchen operations. I was alone in the booking section of the jail, Two Bridges Regional, in Maine, when a single male inmate passed through from the kitchen to general population.  It was UN Day of Nonviolence and I had been arrested protesting at Bath Iron Works which manufacturers the Aegis Class Destroyers during “ Keep Space for Peace Week .” (Sign the petition to say no to NASA's reckless nuclear reactor on the moon)     I substitute today for an art class because I’m released on an unsecured $200 bond to report for arraignment November 3 rd , election day. But I voted, not only with my feet for peace. It was a pleasure to vote early for prison reform in Massachusetts. S.2371 established “a review of whether the methods of data collection are appropriately screenin...

Leonard Rifas knows his line--an activist documentary comic tradition he pioneered 50 years ago when he used a frog as the voice of authority in All-Atomic Comics . In 1982 he published the first English version of I Saw It,  a manga comic by Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa.  In Ground Zero Comics, narrators "Earl Crow" and "Mo Squirrel" treat a wide spectrum of interlocutors, e.g. military historicists, with that would play well at West Point, and fission imaging to satisfy the nuclear scientists at MIT. A graph revised for more clarity in the second printing (Aug. 2024) incorporated feedback from Alan Robock, co-author of a 2022 paper that according to Forbes "so important to the worldwide discourse on the fate of the Earth following a massive nuclear war" it has been viewed more than 200,000 times.  Portraits of suffering that elicit care, interpret statistical compassion and expose the war crime must test a mature hand. Rifas and his collaborators ha...

    Front Left Ben of Ben & Jerry's Icecream arrested at Lockheed Martin, King of Prussia, PA Good Friday, April 2026 (Courtesy Paul Sheldon) Paul Sheldon is a Quaker pacifist, war-tax resister, member of faculty at Villanova as Psychology Professor, who in addition to fifty years of research in the field studying tactile perception, speaks about having what Quakers call "clearness." It takes time and the trusted company of a "Clearness Committee" to come to a specific intention, as he has done six times, including taking on a "leaning" to perform civil disobedience and having a sense of rightness in doing so. Over his many years of peace activism he has placed the role of fact-guy, discussing the development of missile technology in relation to treaty obligations, but in addition to the in and out of multiple-re-entry vehicle guided warheads, he can put it all bluntly and symbolically. In as much as he wants to deliver a message to w...

    With Bernard Herberholt (left)  The impulse to action quickens my blood all of July. I wake up at night to begin all over again a vision of civil resistance: the road unspools, forking, passing bunkers, my adrenaline surges re-entering a distant memory of trespass onto the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base where trident submarines dock and 2,000 nuclear warheads are stored 17.26 miles from Seattle. In three days, skipping out on swimming at the pool with family, I finish Ben Austen's book Corrections: Prison, Parole, and the Possibility of Change (Flatiron 2023) . I determine this priming for direct action that would lead to months in jail is false light.    False light, in the parlance of Ignatian spirituality I share with my wife Emily, refers to the pattern of deception in prayer that takes on the appearance of the good and just and true, while sapping strength. False consolation absorbed Inigo of Loyola while experimenting intensely in prayer while pursuing...

  A deck of cards, the articles of UN Declaration of Human Rights. The ingenuous thought leader, entrepreneur, and I were attending the Review Conference for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The cards have helped me stay intentional as a member of the Somerville Human Rights Commission.  Saint Paul VI addressed the United Nations encouraging delegates to be "...pupils and teachers of the art of peace. Asserting that they had the human capacity to build peace, to live up to the trust of a young generation believing that peaceable mankind is possible. "...Peace is built with the mind." Diane Perlman's website www.consciouspolitics.org offers the resource. Explaining the need for resourceful thinking in our perspective nuclear weapons, Perlman suggests a paradigm of transformation is necessary by way of a metaphor: the nine-dot problem.    Connect all nine dots, drawing only four straight lines and without lifting pen from the paper.     To begin ...

 This will be a multi-part account of conscience or movement of praying with the Church for Nuclear Abolition. Hiroshima Day, I had already been escorted from the premises of Lockheed Martin in King of Prussia, PA. Two hours later I walked into a cool library where seven boxes of archival materials awaited my attention, thanks to some generous and committed staff willing to take my same-day appointment. 3:46pm, August 6, 2026 I opened the files showing me that Craig Simpson had joined an early 1980s delegation to Japan. Though I had been working with him on his memoir, I didn't know this yet. I felt something of spiritual communion with Craig then.  On my tenth wedding anniversary, here I was more than 350 miles away from Emily, absorbed in the peace collection of an Boston activist who has shared memoir writings with me. These were archival scriptures of the companionship of peace makers. “Male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). "Their companionship produces the primar...