PeaceWeavers

Be sure to check back each month for another PeaceWeaver article from Dr. Karen Bullock.
Dirk Willems: Loving His Enemy to Death
February 23rd, 2024
Dirk Willems was born in a small village called Asperen, Netherlands, about 1540. He was an Anabaptist, believing in salvation through Jesus Christ and a public declaration of His Lordship through believer's baptism.He believed that the true church was composed of born-again believers, that membership was voluntary, that discipleship was their goal, and that the government had no right to dictate ...
Jan Comenius and the Unity of the Brethren
January 27th, 2024
One of the most brilliant sons of the Church is a man almost nobody remembers today, although he belongs indisputably to the whole Christian church.His name is Jan Amos Comenius, a follower of Jan Hus of Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), the martyr burned at the stake in 1415 for his preaching. Hus taught that God's Word should be read in the language of the people, instead of Latin. He also preached ...
Greg Boyle and the Homeboys
November 2nd, 2023
We live in a war-torn world. We are eyewitnesses to war within countries, war within regions, war within communities and families, and war within human hearts. This month, we spotlight a contemporary PeaceWeaver, who has spent his life addressing the causes, preventing, and halting war. For two decades, Greg Boyle has rescued young men and women from the ravages of soul-deep conflict. He is the Fo...
Madame Guyon: Woman of Prayer at the French Court
October 18th, 2023
“Surrender yourselves then to be ledand disposed of just as God pleases,with respect both to your outwardand inward state.”* Most historians date the close of the Reformation to the year 1648. Luther in Germany, Zwingli and Calvin in Switzerland, Latimer and Ridley in England, and the Anabaptists in many parts of Europe, all had addressed errors they found in the Catholic tradition. Protests also...
Florence Kelley: Guardian of the Children
September 15th, 2023
In early America, during the 17th and first half of the 18th century, most children led rather predictable and routine lives. They lived at home in rural homesteads and farms, working with their families in self-sufficient units. They raised gardens and crops and livestock, and made their living from their land. Every child grew up with family chores and responsibilities.Between the Revolution and...
The "Five Generations Rule": Lessons from a Christian Family
July 2nd, 2023
Every once in a while, a whole family will come to the notice of the general public for its distinguished and extraordinary service. The Edwards are such a tribe in the Christian story. We present this group of parents and siblings as fine examples of child-rearing through troublesome circumstances. Timothy and Esther, who were Congregationalists, produced devout followers of Christ through the fi...
The “Harvard Computers”: Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s Expanding Universe
May 20th, 2023
The "Harvard Computers," as they were called, were a team of brilliant women who observed, charted, and processed astronomical data at the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, between 1877 and 1919. Edward Charles Pickering directed this hand-selected team until his death in 1919, and then Annie Jump Cannon became its director. From the beginning, the women were challenged to make sens...
Edgar James Helms: The Man of Goodwill
May 3rd, 2023
Just nineteen days after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved individuals during the Civil War, a child was born in a small, rugged, logging camp to William and Lerona Sherwin Helms, near Malone, upstate New York, not far from the Canadian and Vermont borders. Remarkably, that tiny son’s life was set upon a trajectory that would help millions of people to be freed f...
The Church of the Savior
April 10th, 2023
Marjory Bankson wrote a compelling history of a small and innovative ministry that began in 1946 in Washington D. C. Engaging its community for almost eighty years, it is still strongly rooted in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and bears fruit in the people He came to redeem. On Sunday, 5 October 1946, Gordon and Mary Cosby met with seven others to begin Church of the Savior (CoS) as "a local expressi...
Clara Barton Stone: The Red Cross's Angel of Peace
February 26th, 2023
The Christmas baby, given the grown-up name of Clarissa (Clara) Harlowe Barton, was born December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, more than two hundred years ago. Her father was Captain Stephen Barton, an Indian Wars veteran, leader of his town, and owner of a farm. Her father inspired in his daughter both a strong patriotism and a broad interest in helping others. Her mother, Sarah Ston...
The Grenfell Legacy of Courageous Service
January 30th, 2023
Wilfred Thomason Grenfell was born on February 1865, at Parkgate, Cheshire, England to his parents - Algernon Sydney Grenfell, an educator and hospital chaplain, and Jane (Hutchinson) Grenfell. Grenfell grew up in the English countryside, swimming and fishing in the River Dee and hunting local birds along the river's banks.At fourteen, Wilfred attended the Marlborough College in Wiltshire, a board...
C. S. Lewis: In the Solitude . . . God
November 26th, 2022
Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was born in Belfast, in Ulster, Ireland, the second son of Albert James and Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis. His mother was the daughter and great-granddaughter of priests, and his elder brother Warren, or Warnie, was his best chum. As a babe, he was baptized by his mother's father in St. Mark's Church, Dundela. He named himself when he was...
Hilda of Whitby
November 12th, 2022
Early Church Father Ambrose reports that Easter in 387 was observed in Gaul (France) on 21 March, in Italy on 18 April, and in Alexandria, Egypt, on 25 April. From the 4th century onward, factions of the Church debated the proper dating of Easter. It took a great deal of diplomacy to handle these matters. Hilda of Whitby, a princess and Abbess of a famous monastery, negotiated this very question i...
John and Mary Williams: Polynesia's Messengers of Peace
September 9th, 2022
If one takes the A10 road north from London, and drives through Stoke Newington, Stamford Hall, and Seven Sisters, one will come next to Tottenham, which was a tiny village in the late 18th century and home to the Williams family. John was born in June of 1796 to parents devoted to God. He was a good student in grade-school and, in 1810 at fourteen years old, was apprenticed for seven years to Eno...
“Sir Great Heart” of Texas Baptists
September 9th, 2022
The wagon creaked slowly, trundling its way through an East Texas pine forest in the summer of 1859. Overhead, the towering trees swayed in the light breeze and provided dappling shade from the oppressive sun. The twenty- six year-old, Tennessee-born-pastor, Robert Cooke Buckner (1833-1919), did not mind the heat. He and his soul-mate wife, Vienna, and their two little girls, were headed west in s...
The “Famine Pots” of Ireland
May 25th, 2022
In 1845, the population of Ireland numbered almost eight million. The Irish were an industrious, hardy people, exporting to England their livestock, peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey and even potatoes. However, when the Irish potato crop failed that year and the next, large parts of the population, particularly in the west of Ireland, were left destitute. Irish Qu...
Elisabeth Schmitz of Berlin: Conscience of the Church
May 25th, 2022
On 9-10 November 1938, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses, and killed almost 100 Jews. In the aftermath of what was called Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. German Jews had been subjected to repressive policies since 1933, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (18...
James Henry Rushbrooke: Baptist Champion of Peace
May 25th, 2022
“Peace” seemed to be the middle name of the babe born that sunny day in Bethnal Green, east London, on 29 July 1870. Son of devout Anglican parents, James Henry Rushbrooke was brilliant, thoughtful, and became known as a careful reconciler of differences, even as a child. When James was fifteen years old, he began attending Westbourne Park Chapel with his aunt each Sunday and soon made a professio...
George W. Carver: “African American Leonardo”
May 25th, 2022
In the year 1864, on a 240 acre farm near Diamond Grove, Missouri, George was born to his mother Mary and father Giles. He had a sister and a younger brother too, and they were all enslaved by Moses and Susan Carver. When George was an infant, his father died. He and his mother were then kidnapped by rustlers and resold in a neighboring state. Mary was never seen again, but George, small and frail...
Mickey Leland: Flying into the Storm to Help
May 25th, 2022
It is generally held that Mickey Leland was one of the most effective spokespersons for hungry people in the 20th century. How did this young man, born and raised in obscurity, become such a globally-recognized figure for this cause?Born to George Thomas and Alice Rains Leland II in Lubbock, Texas in November of 1944, “Mickey,” as his maternal grandfather called him, was a third generation namesak...