UPDATE: Hear the presentations from the Memorial for David McReynolds at https://vimeo.com/305110298/686dc0eef2.
The memorial was held on Saturday, December 1 at 12 PM – 3 PM at Judson Memorial Church in New York.
On August 17th, lifetime War Resisters League member David McReynolds - committed pacifist + socialist - passed peacefully at the age of 88. David was on WRL staff for a large part of his life and remained within community long, long after.
Dorelen (Dorie) Feise Bunting passed away August 24, 2023, at 101 years old. From her teenage years until well into her 90s, Dorie was present and active in the peace and justice movement. She touched the lives of many people in New Mexico and around the world. She was my mentor and friend and lived as a model of a nonviolent life.
WRL shares greetings and wants to send you some news. These have been challenging times filled with much transition, loss and grief, and hope for the future. We share some of this below.
War Resisters League is saddened to learn of the passing of our long-time member, Dr. Linnea Capps, MD, MPH. She will be dearly missed. We will be sharing reflections about her, starting with this one from Matt Meyer:
It is with deep sadness (and some relief that she went without pain and is done with her worldly ordeals) that I have to report on the passing of Linnea Capps, an extraordinary spirit—a quiet and unassuming, humble yet persistent, absolute world-changing force. Linnea was a friend for forty years, and I write this now, with some photos collected through the years, to heal myself by reflecting on her beauty and strength and list some of the many accomplishments she was involved in. Thus, this is a personal as well as political remembrance to one of the most committed and true healers I have ever know, who also happened to be a medical doctor.
We are filled with gratitude for the wisdom and leadership of Rep. John Lewis and Rev. CT Vivian, two people who dedicated their lives to racial justice in the United States and made incredible contributions towards collective freedom, nonviolent struggle, and Black liberation.
History professor, pacifist and WRL member (since 1940) jailed during World War II, prison abolitionist, jazz aficionado, birder, vegetarian. Gara died at age 97 on November 23, 2019, in his hometown of Wilmington, Ohio. He was a professor of history at Wilmington College from 1962 to 2002, when he retired from teaching.
Fr. G. Simon Harak SJ, the exuberantly pacifist Jesuit priest and onetime WRL Disarmament Coordinator, died November 3 in Campion Health Center, Weston, Mass. He was 71 and had dealt for some six years with frontotemporal degeneration (also called frontotemporal dementia).
Simon was the kind of pacifist who sees peace and justice as inextricably bound together; he once defined nonviolence as “a commitment to work for justice so that violence is no longer necessary.” He was a co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness (now Voices for Creative Nonviolence), the U.S. campaign that defied the sanctions against Iraq; Simon led delegations to that country, delivering medicines and other necessities. He was the founding Director of Marquette University's Center for Peacemaking, dedicated to “exploring the power of nonviolence.”