Enid Lynne Shivers, teacher, writer, and nonviolence backer, 73

Enid Lynne Shivers, 73, of Germantown, a college teacher, nonviolence trainer, and prolific writer, died Tuesday, Feb. 3, of a heart ailment at Wyndmoor Hills Health Care & Rehab Center.

Known informally as Lynne, Ms. Shivers was an idealist and lifelong Quaker who put her words and pacifist values to work as an instructor in nonviolent passive resistance.

While teaching English at Community College of Philadelphia, she led training sessions on nonviolent protest in various countries. She also was the author of numerous articles and several books on peaceful protest, according to the compendium Protest, Power, and Change: An Encyclopedia of Nonviolent Action from ACT-UP to Women's Suffrage.

Ms. Shivers knew how to put important, substantive material at the heart of her English classes, said Fay Beauchamp, professor of English and director of the college's Center for International Understanding.

Ms. Shivers also empowered those around her to put their own ideals into practice. "She had a rippling effect on people, and those people are doing things," Beauchamp said.

Born in Camden and reared in Woodbury, Ms. Shivers received a bachelor's degree from Albright College and a master's degree in social change in 1969 from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had learned nonviolence as a method of social reform two decades earlier.

Ms. Shivers worked for many years with the Quaker peace activists George and Lillian Willoughby, whose philosophy of civil disobedience came to life in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ms. Shivers became one of the founding members of the Philadelphia Life Center and the related Movement for a New Society in 1971.

Her peace activism took her to Northern Ireland and Iran, and her work in Japan led to her becoming director of the World Friendship Center at Hiroshima in 1986.

She worked with the American Friends Service Committee on Israeli-Palestinian peace issues, and was among the first Americans to meet with Iranian officials after the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

She cowrote More Than the Troubles: A Common Sense View of the Northern Ireland Conflict, and essays on the Iranian revolution, as well as the Nagasaki and Hiroshima peace movements. She also served as editor for Jottings in the Woods: Walt Whitman's Nature Prose and a Study of Old Pine Farm.

In 1979, Ms. Shivers began her career with CCP as an adjunct professor in the Learning Lab, which tutors students. She retired as an associate professor of English in 2005.

Ms. Shivers loved to teach American and English literature courses with an emphasis on the natural world. She was passionate about teaching and writing based on social issues.

Ms. Shivers regarded her friends and coworkers as family.

Two memorial services are planned. The first is to be at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, March 1, at Wesley Enhanced Living at Stapeley, 6300 Greene St., where Ms. Shivers lived. The second is planned for 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 8, at Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting, 20 E. Mermaid Lane. Burial was private.

Donations may be made to the American Friends Service Committee, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia 19102.