B-PEACE for Jorge is the anti-violence campaign of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. B-PEACE was started as a way to turn our pain into action after the senseless murder of Jorge Fuentes, a lifelong member of the Episcopal church and youth programs, on September 10, 2012.  We began under the late Bishop M. Thomas Shaw's leadership in 2012, and with leadership from Bishop Alan Gates, we continue to unite Episcopalians from across the state with their communities to address the root causes of violence.  We find our stength in supporting existing organizations who have been doing this work in the community for years and are proud to be a part of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute's Mother's Day Walk for Peace for the second year.

For more information on B-PEACE, please visit our website at www.bpeaceforjorge.net or the Episcopal Diocese's website at www.diomass.org/b-peace.

We encourage local EPFers to join the walk.  We hope others will contribute generously.  Check out the Walk Website for more info: 

               www.mothersdaywalk4peace.org 

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The chair of the Pensacola Area EPF Chapter - Bill Sloan - offers this insert he created for churches to use in their Mother's Day bulletins:

A Mother's Day Proclamation

Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and mother of five, was a strident activist against slavery and for the rights of women, battling alongside Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the right to vote. Her Appeal to womanhood throughout the world, 1870, later called her Mother's Day Proclamation, was her reaction to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. If we take Howe's vision into account, we are more likely to read the Battle Hymn as a manifesto to reject violence than to crush the South - to see that God is trampling out the grapes of anger and vengeance before they can ferment into something intoxicating. If you have been aroused by the Battle Hymn - who hasn't? -- you have to take her Appeal to Womanhood seriously indeed.

   Appeal to womanhood throughout the world

"In the sight of the Christian world, great nations have exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons.

Arise then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

On Mother's Day 2015 let us give thanks and praise God for the life of Julia Ward Howe.