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...