Highlighting Our Friends of PT
Peaceful Tomorrows members are extremely grateful to the Friends of PT Committee. To learn more about our current Friends, read on!
To join the Friends visit: https://www.peacefultomorrows.org/friendsofpeacefultomorrows
Dr. William V. Hudon, Chair of the Friends
I am a proud member of the Friends of Peaceful Tomorrows. When I joined in February 2025, it was due, in the main, to my good fortune as a faculty member at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. In 2014, the Department of History secretary, Rosemary Huber, assigned Elizabeth Miller to me as an advisee. Of course, she later became the Project Director of PT. The two of us, especially after she became a PT member, undertook several collaborative projects trying to promote discussion about controversial topics in history and contemporary politics. Among those projects was an initiative called Conversations for the Common Good, established in collaboration with the local PBS affiliate in northeast Pennsylvania, WVIA. We helped produce broadcasts and recordings that included a three-part discussion series about 9/11 and its aftermath, during the 20th anniversary year.
At about that same time, Elizabeth and I began discussing my interest in PT as an organization, and whether or not there could be a way for non-members to assist PT’s promotion of peace and empathetic understanding as alternatives to the violence—perpetrated both by terrorists and by state actors—that seemed to drive global politics so fully.Thus, as the Friends came into being, my enrollment made perfect sense. Upon reflection, I found the enrollment made sense in the context of my broader life experience.
As a younger person, I often hung at the edges of pacifist/pro-labor/anti-war/human rights activism, but never really committed. As a junior high student in a parochial school in Rochester, NY, I was influenced by a charismatic young teacher, Ken Sarkis. He not only helped us understand the consequences of U.S. involvement in civil war in Vietnam, but helped me and my classmates understand how seemingly insurmountable political, religious, and social barriers could be overcome in everyday life.Mr. Sarkis and other teachers I was lucky enough to study with encouraged us to see the complex human realities behind fraught political, economic, and social relations that many people saw simply in back-and-white terms. Little did I know the direction in which the experiences were leading me. The first protest I attended was in 1969, in support of the United Farm Workers grape boycott seeking fair wages and working conditions through collective bargaining. I attended with a junior high classmate whose mom—a notorious neighborhood liberal—accompanied us at the event, and whose dad was also there, but working: he was keeping an eye on things as the agent in charge at the local FBI office. Considerably later, when I was a novice in the Jesuit order, our superiors welcomed three Vietnamese refugees into the community to live with us and attend college.
Of course, they lived in the same house with us, a population of seminarians that included one highly decorated U.S. Army veteran of the very war they had fled. A few months after I had entered the order in 1976, a group of us soaked up the stories of surely one of the most famous—perhaps infamous—members of the Ney York Province of our order. We visited Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, a laicized priest, plus Philip’s wife, Elizabeth McAlister, at a gathering following the funeral for Daniel and Philip’s mom, Frieda Fromhart Berrigan. Later as a student of history in graduate school, and as a college professor, I committed myself to exploring and teaching about the complex human realities that reveal the messy truth—not black-and-white myths—in superficial accounts of the past. I remained enamored of the commitment of people like the Berrigans, Mr. Sarkis, and UFW leaders like Cesar Chavez, but circled only on the fringes of genuine pacifist, pro-labor, and anti-war activism. Elizabeth Miller—and the members of PT that I met through her—changed all of that. I am inspired by their witness to the need for non-violence, their witness motivated by empathy, compassion, and commitment to restorative justice through the rule of law. They have spurred me to action, and I am grateful.
I am lucky to be a member of the Friends of Peaceful Tomorrows. I honor the members of Peaceful Tomorrows for who they are, and for what they do, all in the face of the unspeakable loss they have endured. I hope others will join the Friends for the of Peaceful Tomorrows for the very same reason.
Jeremy Varon
I am a longtime activist, author, and professional historian drawn to struggles for peace and justice and the study of social movements seeking a better world. Since 2008, I have been a
Professor of History at the New School in New York City. I teach classes on 9/11 and its terrible aftermath. In 2025 I published my third book, Our Grief Is Not a Cry For War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror (University of Chicago Press). It is the first comprehensive history of protest in America of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the U.S. torture program. The book discusses the origins and evolution of September 11th
Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which played a vital role in the larger antiwar movement.
I first met members of Peaceful Tomorrows through my own activism with Witness Against Torture. Formed in 2005, it seeks to close the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and provide justice for the victims of U.S. torture. In 2015, I went to Cuba to vigil and fast outside the U.S. naval base. I deeply admire the ethics and energy of Peaceful Tomorrows members — whose voice is often ignored neglected in commemorations of 9/11 and portraits of the victims’ families — and enjoy working with them. They are really kind people, who have brightened many lives.
Saskia Hostetler Lippy MD
Trained as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I came to the friends of Peaceful Tomorrows through the families' work on the rule of law committee and their years of witness at Guantanamo Bay prison. A lifelong student, the pandemic prompted me to seek further education and certificates in public health and climate change, science and consciousness and finally career change and training in human rights and restorative justice. As an advocate, I reject the notion that torture could ever be justified. My activism focuses on building bridges and bigger networks through nonviolence, civil resistance, democracy protection and anti-war activism. The cycles of intergenerational trauma can and must be interrupted for us to achieve collective liberation. The maps of our hearts will show us the way. I hope you will join us in the steady work of reconciliation. This path can only be walked with others-together we are a force more powerful than hate.
Andrew Boston
I was six years old on September 11, 2001. Because I lived near the Strategic Air Command in Bellevue, Nebraska, my defining memory of that morning is watching the live news coverage and then stepping outside to see Air Force One flying directly over our house, followed by an anxious wait until 8:00 PM to finally learn that my father's plane had been directed to land safely in Kentucky.
Growing up in a world so profoundly shaped by the attacks, I developed a deep drive to understand the physical realities of that day, particularly the mechanics of the towers' evacuations. That pursuit ultimately guided my career path. Today, I work as an electrician specializing in commercial fire alarms, access control, and life safety systems for large facilities.
Outside of my professional work, I founded the 9/11 Media Preservation Group. This volunteer initiative works directly with survivors, witnesses, and their families to digitize and preserve original photos, videos, and personal testimonies. Through this painstaking work, we have assembled the largest known digital repository of historical documents from the original World Trade Center complex. I also created and manage the "9/11 Archive,” an online community dedicated to memorializing the day, which has given dozens of people a safe platform to share their firsthand stories for the very first time.
I was drawn to September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows through the "Friends of PT" initiative because I wanted my historical preservation work to have a deeper impact. By
supporting PT, I hope to use this work not just to remember the past, but to actively support the organization's enduring advocacy for peace and a better tomorrow.
Elizabeth Dowd
spent 46 years as a professional actor/director/teacher with the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble which she helped to found. Now retired, Elizabeth enjoys giving back to the community that made her artistic life possible by volunteering with community organizations and singing with community chorales. She is proud to support the important work of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
Jonathan Grybos
I am a father of three, husband, and high school history teacher, history club advisor, and soccer coach. My educational background includes a Bachelor of Arts in History, a Master of Science in Education, and a Master of Arts in History. I have taught for almost a decade now at the secondary level. My research during graduate school was, in part, how deficient Americans and our children have been on the social studies fields, such as history. 9/11 is no different in this regard.
I found out about Peaceful Tomorrows from a member and local history professor that reached out to me for information on teaching about 9/11, and I was happy he invited me to become more involved with the good work everyone does to make a better world.
Willard Nichols
A retired United Methodist pastor, I have served in young adult and campus ministry on Manhattan’s West Side, as a local church pastor on Staten Island, and then as a chaplain with Project Hospitality, an interfaith effort housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, and caring for people with HIV/AIDS. Project Hospitality provided emergency food and shelter for people displaced to Staten Island on September 11, and then provided ongoing community-oriented support for the many Staten Island families who lost loved ones that day, as well as offering daily breakfasts to recovery workers stationed on Staten Island while they worked on the Pile or at Fresh Kills. I was drawn to Peaceful Tomorrows in its early days because it offered a path toward bringing people together rather than responding with a hate and a vengeance that could only bring further destruction for all concerned.
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