Peace Probe: Blog

This blog was an effort to reflect on 45 years of experience in peacemaking and stimulate more critical discussion and engaged peacemaking world wide.

Gene Stoltzfus came to this work first as a civilian volunteer and conscientious objector in Viet Nam where he served beginning in 1963. Since then the great tree of peace initiatives has developed many branches, some of which rarely talk to each other. Gene was for 16 years the director of Christian Peacemaker Teams. After his retirement, he continued to travel in various countries as a promoter of Christian peacemaking and as a witness to the effects of violence.

Gene believed that our world desperately needs unarmed peacemakers and that in order to do sacrificial nonviolent engagement we need a confident spiritual core that is informed by critical thinking. All such work will affect the body politic, and will lead through periods of resistance to change. At root all of us in this world have the potential to share the power of love, a force that reaches far beyond sentimentality.

An American, Gene lived with his Canadian wife, Dorothy Friesen, near Fort Frances, a little known city of 8500 people that borders Minnesota in Northwest Ontario. The area is dominated by the economics of a pulp mills. About a quarter of his neighbors in the Rainy River District are Ojibway people who have lived here for centuries.

Besides peacemaking, Gene was learning to make simple furniture from willow twigs and natural bushes and trees from the forests.

Living Memorial Post (April 8, 2010)