In a Christmas day column, John Bohrer quotes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last Christmas Eve sermon. It was 1967, as the Vietnam war was raging and about to be escalated again. King said:

"W]e will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

... Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? [He is] talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means."

This is a central premise of this site: that peace is a process that requires commitment, attention, knowledge and skills. Those skills of peace are complex but they are crucial, and there is no waiting for a better time to learn and use them. This is always that time.

The skills of peace are skills operating in the shared world, in each of us internally, and in how we communicate. Eventually this site will talk about them in these rough categories of Outer, Inner and Interface.

But it's going to take awhile for this site to develop. I'm doing it with other demands on my time and attention. So please be patient, but I hope that it will soon be a resource and perhaps even a place for discussion and exchange as well as information and suggestions.

This site will be under construction for awhile. Early in 2007 I hope to have enough completed to make it functional. But one especially important function will be the links, and I'll probably be starting there.