Health through peace

Frank Boulton writes about the background to the Medact conference being held at Friends House this weekend

'…a "healthy planet" relies on peacetime to develop those global collaborations in health and development that wars deny.' | Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight / flickr CC.

Quakers’ unique contribution to the development of Peace Studies goes right back to George Fox who, in 1651 (at the age of twenty-six), wrote to the Commonwealth Commissioners about the ‘power that took away the occasion of all wars’ and nine years later, in a letter to Charles II, the restored monarch, developed the well-known statement at the heart of Quakers’ current Peace Testimony:

‘All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons.’

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