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| Lewis M.
Randa Founder/Director of The Peace Abbey 
Lewis Randa is a Quaker, pacifist, vegan, educator and social change
activist.
Lewis is the founder and director of: The Life Experience School for children with disabilities (1972); The Peace Abbey, an Interfaith Center for the study and practice of Nonviolence and Pacifism (1988); The Special Peace Corps., an organization that provides community service programs for adults with mental challenges (1990); The Courage of Conscience Award, an international peace award for nonviolent contributions to peace and justice (1991); The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a register for people of all ages to publicly state their refusal to participate in armed conflict (1992); The Pacifist Memorial, a national Monument honoring pacifists throughout history (1994); The Veganpeace Animal Sanctuary, a safe haven for animals that have escaped from slaughterhouses following the rescue of Emily the Cow (1995); Stonewalk, a global peace walk that involves physically pulling a two-ton memorial stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War (Documentary shown on PBS) (1999 - 2005); Citycare, an empowerment program for the homeless (2000); R.A.T.C., the college-based Reserve Activist Training Corps; and The Lavender House, a Group Home for adults with disabilities (2002). Since his discharge from the Army as a conscientious objector in 1971, Lewis has devoted his life to creating innovative models for social change through programs that change the way meaning is produced in society. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, he received a B.S. from the University of Iowa in 1969, where he helped to coordinate the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He received an M.A. in Social Change from Goddard College in 1971 with a specialization in Alternative Education for the Disabled. Before establishing The Life Experience School at the age of 24, Lewis directed the Therapeutic Activities Department at the Kennedy Memorial Childrens Hospital in Boston (69-70). He was hired as a house parent at one of the first group homes for adults with a diagnosis of mental retardation in Massachusetts as part of the state de-institutionalization mandate (1971) while maintaining a teaching position in a special education classroom at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Dorchester, MA (1970-71). He also served on the faculty at Lincoln College of Northeastern University (1972-77). Lewis has traveled extensively on peace-related projects in Central America (El Salvador, Nicaragua & Guatemala), in Europe (Northern Ireland, England, Italy), in India, and in the former Yugoslavia. He maintains an affiliation with the UN University of Peace in Costa Rica, the Department of Religious Life at Wellesley College and supervises graduate interns at The Peace Abbey from Harvard Divinity School, Boston University and Andover-Newton Theological School. Lewis is also the founding Peace Chaplain, an interfaith pastoral role within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, headquartered at The Peace Abbey. Lewis has written and spoken on a broad range of issues in the fields of education, peace and social justice, nonviolence and pacifism, interfaith dialogue and disability rights. He was honored with a Resolution from the Senate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the 20th anniversary of The Life Experience School, received the Person of Peace Award (with Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop) in 2001 at the 16th International Peace Day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was recognized with the Massachusetts Doctors Group Humanitarian Award that same year. In addition to consulting on numerous boards of non-profit organizations, he is a Commonwealth Justice of the Peace. Lewis lives in Sherborn, Massachusetts with his wife Meg (with whom he operates the educational programs of the Life Experience School) They have three grown children: Christopher, Michael and Abbey. CONTROVERSIAL BLOG TALK Monday, August 19, 2002 Sherborn's Sisyphus The Peace Abbey's eccentric vegan Quaker founder, Lewis Randa, has received coverage for manually hauling a one-ton slab of granite commemorating civilian casualties of war through parts of the United States, Ireland and England. He wears his politics on his sleeve, or rather, on his head, to judge from this report carried by the Indian Communist Party's house organ two weeks after 9/11: In the wake of recent racially motivated assaults against Arab- and Muslim-Americans, Lewis Randa - the Peace Abbey founder, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War - wears a muslim skull cap "to know what it’s like to be viewed as a threat to society." "It’s a despicable thing for Bush to say we will punish those who host terrorists. We hosted Tim McVeigh. Did we bomb his home state?" he questioned. Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker caught up with Randa at a peace demonstration at the abbey last October: After the peace signs had been put away for the afternoon, Lewis Randa, the leader of the protest, talked about the frustrations of being a peacenik, post-Sept. 11. Randa was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, discharged from the Army after a 16-day fast. Though he had enlisted, he quickly became a pacifist. But that was a different antiwar movement, in a different America. That was before the World Trade Center towers were attacked, before a section of the Pentagon was obliterated, and before the outrageous televised specter of Osama bin Laden declaring "holy" war against the United States. Where protesters eventually carried the day in opposition to Vietnam, today's peace people are simply out of touch. After we stop the bombing, then what? Would that mean no more terrorist attacks? No more mailed anthrax? To the peaceniks, this thinking could not be farther from the point. Randa suggested that perhaps the terrorist attacks should instead have been labeled terrorist "responses" - responses, he said, to unfeeling capitalist treatment of the Third World, as well as its blind support of Israel at the expense of Palestinian suffering. He said Gandhi had opposed fighting Hitler, suggesting that it might have been better to allow the Nazis to take over Europe, then bombarding them with the message of love. I pointed out that, in the overwhelming view of history, Gandhi and his fellow World War II pacifists couldn't have been more wrong. This is what I got in response: "Fifty-three million people died in that war. Is that your idea of a victory?" That their founder is a doctrinaire leftist inspired to no small degree by anti-American animus would seem readily apparent. Yet the Peace Abbots' billing of themselves as conscientious seekers of peace and justice is so readily accepted at face value that local schoolchildren are dispatched to the Abbey for indoctrination. Can one imagine, say, the John Birch Society being given similar access to the public schools? |