"On War, Women and Witness" or "Do UU Know Your History, Part III," Rev. Josh Pawelek, March 15, 2026

From "Brave Clara Barton" by Jack Murphy with illustrations by Sarah Green

Sometime in the early morning hours of February 28^th, US and Israeli airstrikes began decimating targets in Iran in a military campaign named “Operation Epic Fury.” The bombing has continued, with administration officials issuing ominous warnings, like “today will be the most intense day of strikes yet,” and “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” There’s an almost meaningless debate over whether Operation Epic Fury is a war. One can argue it isn’t a war because Congress has the Constitutional authority to declare war, and Congress hasn’t done that. Indeed, the Administration made no effort to get Congress’ approval, let alone build public support. Some officials refer to it as a war on occasion. Others say it’s not a war. This week the President referred to it as an excursion. Officials are using all sorts of euphemisms, mindful, I assume, that if they call it a war, it’s blatantly unconstitutional and illegal.

            I call it a war. Given the scale of the attacks, the cost, the impact on energy prices and global commerce, the impacts on food distribution in the region, the long-term environmental consequences, and the sheer human suffering, I don’t have any other word for it. It’s a war. But let’s let the lawyers work on the legal questions which I’m sure will be with us long after the bombs stop falling. I want to speak to our moral and spiritual assessments of this war. To frame my thoughts, three things jump out at me.

            First, I’m concerned about the tone with which our leaders talk about the war, and what that tone suggests about their regard for the legal guardrails that protect civilians. Most notably, in his March 4^th press conference, Secretary Hegseth said “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be.”[1] Our rules are designed to “unleash,” not “shackle.” This is highly loaded language from Secretary Hegseth who famously told troops under his command in Iraq to ignore guidance from military lawyers regarding how to uphold the Geneva Conventions on the battlefield. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth wrote “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think?”[2]

            Second, while it is difficult to get accurate information from the midst of a war zone, by many accounts, Operation Epic Fury is not limited to military targets. On Monday, according to Al Jazeera, “Iranian Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian [said] United States-Israeli attacks across his country have killed and wounded mostly civilians and the bombardments on oil facilities have caused toxic smoke to spread across the capital, Tehran…. Jafarian said at least 1,255 people have been killed in Iran, including 200 children and 11 healthcare workers. Their ages ranged from eight months to 88.”[3] On Wednesday, Al Jazeera reported that nearly 10,000 civilian cites has been bombed and that the civilian death toll was over 1300.”[4]

            Third, allegations that the US, Israel and Iran are violating international law are mounting. On March 4^th, for example, a group of United Nations legal experts “condemned military attacks launched by the United States of America and Israel against Iran” as unlawful. “Unprovoked attacks by the US and Israel — launched amid diplomatic negotiations and without authorization from the Security Council — violate the fundamental prohibition on the use of force, sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and the duty to peacefully settle disputes under Article 2 of the UN Charter. They also violate the right to life.”[5] The statement says “Civilians are bearing the brunt of this war with their lives, their safety, their environment and their health. In a country that has already lost thousands to violent repression following the nationwide protests that began on 28 December 2025, these attacks deepen an already profound human tragedy.”[6]

            This war has very little support in the United States. People across the political spectrum reject it for a wide variety of reasons. Unitarian Universalists, especially since the Vietnam era, have generally opposed US war-making, especially in the Middle East; this war is no exception. There’s something deep in our spiritual DNA that leads us to oppose war in general and this war in particular. Part of our opposition stems from our left-leaning or progressive analyses and critiques of American abuses of power on the world stage, American imperial aspirations, American corporate domination, American hubris. That’s the intellectual part. But there’s a more fundamental source of our opposition, which is Unitarian Universalism’s basic concern, care and compassion for people and the planet. Our opposition is not just analytical. It’s something we feel. It’s in our bodies. It’s spiritual for us. We express it in our first principle, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” We express it in our sixth principle, “the goal of world community, with peace, liberty and justice for all.” We express it when we say “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values.” Human dignity, world community and love--that's who we are. Not war, not violence, and certainly not “punching them while their down.”

            I have a theory that Unitarian Universalism inherits this emotional, physical, spiritual opposition to war—at least in part—from a cadre of 19^th-century Unitarian and Universalist women leaders, and likely thousands more women who engaged in similar activities but weren’t as well-known. I’ve been reflecting on this for a while and decided to share it with you this morning after reading a March 7^th New York Times interview with the writer Rebecca Solnit. She said “Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.”[7] 

Her statement made me think of these women. They are: the Unitarian and Transcendentalist writer, Louisa May Alcott, most famous as the author of Little Women; the Unitarian abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who I spoke about in January, most famous as the composer of the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic;” the less well-known Universalist Mary Livermore, a committed pre-war abolitionist and a post-war leader with both the temperance and the women’s suffrage movements; and the Universalist, Clara Barton, the “angel of the battlefield,” founder of the American Red Cross, and early innovator in the field of disaster response. All four served as battlefield nurses during the American Civil War. All four witnessed directly the horrors of war—the carnage, the suffering, the death. Their witness shaped their post-war lives: their writing, their lecturing, their ongoing activism. When I say there’s something deep in our Unitarian Universalist spiritual DNA that leads us to oppose war today, I think it originates, at least in part, from the witness of these spiritual ancestors. 

            Regarding Alcott, an article on a Civil War photography website says, “Her letters from this period reveal a sobering view of war. Alcott, like other nurses, had no formal medical training. She worked twelve-hour shifts tending to wounds, bathing patients, writing letters for them, and offering comfort as many succumbed to infection or trauma. The war brought no nobility or glory—only bloodshed, cruelty, and exhaustion. In a letter home, she wrote: “A more perfect pestilence-box than this house I never saw… wounded men, dying men, and decomposing flesh made the air oppressive….” Though her nursing career ended abruptly [due to illness,] it gave Alcott the raw material for one of her earliest successful works: Hospital Sketches…. The sketches blended humor, realism, and sorrow in a way that captured the public’s imagination and revealed the emotional cost of war—especially through a woman’s perspective…. Alcott’s vivid descriptions of the wounded, her observations of military doctors, and her reflections on grief and human endurance offered a rare look into the Civil War hospital system.”[8]

            Regarding Howe, an article on the website of The Peace Alliance says she “nursed and tended the wounded during the Civil War, and worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, realizing that the effects of the war go far beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. The devastation she witnessed … inspired her to call [on] women to ‘rise up through the ashes and devastation,’ urging a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace.”[9] She issued her Mother’s Day Proclamation of Peace in Boston in 1870. We’ve offered Sunday services on this in the past. This was the original Mother’s Day. The text of the proclamation is in our hymnal, #573. It begins with these words: “Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with 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 of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”[10]

Mary Livermore served as a leader in the northwestern office of the United States Sanitary Commission, a private relief agency created by federal legislation at the outset of the war to support sick and wounded soldiers.[11] Livermore’s 1887 book, My Story of the War, detailed the sheer agony of the conflict, described the horrors of hospital life, and documented the various ways women sacrificed to help achieve the Union victory.[12]  I love a very simple quote from her book: “It is better to heal a wound than to make one.”

            Finally, Clara Barton, the angel of the battlefield. She really needs a full sermon. The children’s story I read earlier[13] just scratches the surface of her achievements, really her ministry not only to wounded and dying soldiers in the Civil War and later on European battlefields, not only to the families of more than 20,000 missing American soldiers whose remains she helped identify after the Civil War, but to all the people of the United States with the founding of the American Red Cross and her later work responding to disasters. One article mentions that throughout her life she traveled to many disaster and war scenes to bring and administer aid, including the Johnstown flood, the Galveston tidal wave, the Cincinnati flood, the Florida yellow fever epidemic, the Spanish-American War, and the Armenian massacre in Turkey.[14] 

            If you find Secretary Hegseth’s disregard for the international rules of war and the Geneva Conventions morally objectionable, there’s an important piece of our history you need to know. Most of these international conventions, including the current Geneva Conventions, were written and adopted following World War II. However, the original Geneva Conventions treaty was written and adopted by 12 European nations in 1863. The treaty declared medical personnel neutral and … that sick and wounded soldiers would be cared for regardless of their nationality. The treaty also established the symbol of the red cross on a white background as a sign used by medical personnel to indicate their neutrality when aiding the wounded in war zones.”[15] The United States did not sign onto the Geneva Conventions until 1882. The primary advocate for the United States to sign this treaty? Our spiritual ancestor, the Universalist Clara Barton.

            When I say there’s something deep in our Unitarian Universalist spiritual DNA that leads us to oppose war today, I think I’m on solid ground when I say it originates, at least in part, from the witness of these spiritual ancestors. And what is the heart of that legacy? In the words of Rebecca Solnit, changing the world looks more like caregiving, than it looks like war.

            Amen and blessed be.

[1] Hegseth, Pete, Transcript, “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine Hold a Press Briefing,” US Department of War, March 4^th, 2026. see: https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4421037/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-and-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-of-staff-gen-dan/.

[2] Quoted in Wilson, Jason, “Pete Hegseth told US soldiers in Iraq to ignore legal advice on rules of engagement,” The Guardian, December 2, 2025. See: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/02/hegseth-us-soldiers-iraq-rules-engagement.

[3] Aljazeera staff, “Iran says 1,255 people killed in US-Israeli attacks, mostly civilians,” Al Jazeera, March 9, 2026. See: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/iran-says-1255-killed-in-us-israeli-attacks-mostly-civilians#

[4]  Melimopoulos, Elizabeth, “Iran war: What is happening on day 12 of US-Israel attacks?” Al Jazeera, March 11, 2026. See: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/11/iran-war-what-is-happening-on-day-12-of-us-israel-attacks.

[5] Statement from the United Nations office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Iran: UN experts call for de-escalation and accountability,” March 4, 2026. See: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/03/iran-un-experts-call-de-escalation-and-accountability#.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Marchese, David, “The Interview: Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here,” New York Times, March 7, 2026. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/magazine/rebecca-solnit-interview.html?.

[8] Winn, Melissa A., “I Set Forth in the December Twilight” Military Images Digital, September 11, 2025. See: https://www.militaryimagesmagazine-digital.com/2025/09/11/i-set-forth-in-the-december-twilight/. 

[9] “History of Mother’s Day as a Day of Peace: Julia Ward Howe,” The Peace Alliance, May 8, 2015. See:

https://peacealliance.org/history-of-mothers-day-as-a-day-of-peace-julia-ward-howe/        .

[10] Howe, Julia Ward, “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the UUA, 1993) #573.

[11] The US Sanitary Commission was founded by the Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows, though it had its origins with an organization called the Woman’s Central Association of Relief. Ullman, Douglas, Jr., The United States Sanitary Commission, American Battlefield Trust, February 26, 2026. See: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/united-states-sanitary-commission.

[12] Read and excerpt from Livermore’s My Story of the War at https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod/9780415896009/Document3-4.pdf.

[13] Murphy, Frank (author) and Green, Sarah (illustrator), Brave Clara Barton (New York: Random House, 2018).

[14] Lewis, Jone Johnson, “Clara Barton: Civil War Nurse, Humanitarian, Founder of the American Red Cross,” ThoughtCo, Feb 4, 2019. See: https://www.thoughtco.com/clara-barton-biography-3528482.

[15] Friedman, Sarah, “Clara Barton and the Geneva Conventions” Library of Congress Blogs, December 22, 2023. See: https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2023/12/clara-barton-and-the-geneva-convention/