Lombard, IL: Liberating Civil Society: Nonviolence in Service to Justice

The West Suburban Faith-Based Peace Coalition presents its Ninth Annual Gathering — free and open to the public!

This year’s keynote speaker, Mark Johnson, has visited and talked with individuals involved in Occupy events in New York, Washington D.C., Nashville, Memphis, Oakland, San Francisco, and Chicago. He has just returned from a visit to Cairo and Jerusalem, and he is working to support local organizing around the NATO/G8 meetings in Chicago in May. He will be speaking to the broadest issues of “occupying” or “liberating” civil society and citizenship.

Mark C. Johnson, Ph.D., became the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation/USA on March 1, 2007. FOR has 18,000 members and addresses 100,000 friends and allies in 45 chapters and 65 affiliates nationally. Mark did his alternative service as a conscientious objector in Lebanon, living and teaching in Beirut from 1967-1974. On behalf of FOR’s international work he travels regularly to Colombia and Iran and throughout the Middle East. www.forusa.org.

WSFPC is an initiative of faith-based peacemakers from across Chicago’s western suburbs. WSFPC includes clergy, congregations, church staff, lay persons, faith-based peace organizations, peace and justice committees, religious communities, and more, spanning from Oak Park to Elgin to Joliet. WSFPC is committed to sustaining work of peace through activities such as prayer vigils, public witness, peace education, lobbying/legislative initiatives, and interfaith dialogue.