Diana Lee Hirschi

DIANA LEE HIRSCHI holds a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Utah (1979). She is the immediate past clerk of Salt Lake Monthly Meeting Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a fervent activist for peace. An advocate of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to effect political change, she is a recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award from the Utah Gandhi Peace Alliance. An earlier draft of this essay was delivered as a speech to the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City on July 2 7, 2003, as part of its 2003 Sunday Summer Forum. She has been married for forty years to J. Rand Hirschi, who helped her prepare that presentation.

Two Friends for Peace: A Conversation with Diana Lee Hirschi

Articles/Essays – Volume 37, No. 2

My “interview” with Diana Hirschi was not so much an interview as a wonderfully civilized conversation over dinner at the Singing Cricket in Salt Lake City. I had never met Diana before, but Karen Moloney…

The Quaker Peace Testimony

Articles/Essays – Volume 37, No. 2

Quakers, often called Friends, have several core “testimonies” that can be remembered by the mnemonic “SPICE”—Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, and Equality. Each of these interrelated testimonies is essential to our identity as Friends, but we are clearly best known for one of them. As H. Larry Ingle has pointed out, “[T]he Quaker peace testimony [is] the most remarked-on feature of the Religious Society of Friends. When the world’s people think of Friends, they think of our [fundamental disapproval] of war, and when Quakers want to distinguish themselves from other Christian groups, they identify themselves as one of the ‘historic peace churches.'”