As the global community is bombarded with images of war, a new anthology turns toward peace.

“Making Peace: Healing a Violent World,” a book of essays drawn from the pages of award-winning quarterly magazine “YES! A Journal of Positive Futures,” describes people actively engaged in ending conflicts.

Neither academicians nor theorists, the subjects are ordinary people whose support of peace is grounded in hard experience.

“If you ask people, ‘Do you prefer peace?’ they say, ‘Yes, but it’s not realistic,’” said Sarah Ruth van Gelder, the book’s co-editor.

“So this shows at every level what it’s like to get along with people you might vilify.”

In “Making Peace,” a mother finds a way to forgive her daughter’s murderer; in another prison-based essay, a “lifer” chronicles with unsparing precision decades of personal evolution that have enabled him to empathize with former enemies.

“Making Peace,” like YES, juxtaposes individual examples and global perspective.

An essay by a divorced American couple who agree to co-parent is followed by the story of Macedonians who breached the walls dividing ethnic groups by placing inserts in the traditionally separate newspapers published by each group.

“In a sense, this book makes the case that we as a species have outgrown war and violence as a means to settle disputes,” van Gelder said. “Now that, as the New York Times suggests, there are two new superpowers – the U.S., and world public opinion – that new superpower of people is demanding peace in all the imperfect ways that people do that, seeking to create peace in their lives and in their communities and in world affairs.”

The approach mirrors the mission of YES, a publication that grounds theory in practice by telling the stories of individuals promoting justice, compassion and sustainable use of resources.

The magazine is published by the Positive Futures Network, founded in 1996 by a group of practical visionaries including author David Korten and van Gelder.

The book was conceived last fall, when the Iraq conflict was just on the horizon. Now that it is a reality, the summer 2003 issue of YES will address the fear that creates a political context that “allows the Bush administration’s war policies to seem reasonable along with the clamp-down on civil liberties.”

“We wanted to understand why the most powerful country in the world is the one so saturated in fear,” she said.

Van Gelder and staff sought examples of people who had not succumbed to fear, like Chinese intellectuals she met who stood up to government intimidation.

“I was in China for two and a half years, (and) left just before Tiennamen Square,” she said. “My Chinese colleagues, who had spoken out, protected each other. They chose not to turn each other in, as per the Cultural Revolution.”

Editors also continue to focus on forming local and global relationships on a more secure basis.

“I think we’re being challenged to understand the interconnectedness between a lot of the dilemmas we are facing,” van Gelder said, “like the dependence on oil that requires a massive military presence abroad and contributes to climate change…

“Or our relationship to nations gathered into the U.N. by visionary predecessors, and the whole question of whether one thinks that we can have a world in which everyone has an opportunity to win.”

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The Positive Futures Network’s “Making Peace: Healing a Violent World,” an anthology of stories from YES magazine edited by Carolyn McConnell and Sarah Ruth van Gelder, is available online at www.yesmagazine.com, or call (800) 937-4451.