My activity as a writer began in New Jersey at age five, in 1946, when I produced a handwritten family newspaper using an alphabet of my own design. It was an excellent publication whose one major shortcoming was that only I could read it.

A few years after achieving literacy, I was often found hanging around the office of The Red Bank Register, the town newspaper, watching linotypers set type from molten zinc, a form of typesetting now associated with Age of Gutenberg. Before long I was delivering newspapers door-to-door while also starting my own mimeographed publication, now using an alphabet accessible to others.

My engagement in Christianity began about the same time that I was selling newspapers. At age ten I was baptized in an Episcopal parish in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, though it wasn’t until I was in the U.S. Navy that I began to see my vocation in religious terms. In 1960, while working at the U.S. Weather Service headquarters near Washington as part of a Navy meteorological unit, I joined the Catholic Church. In 1961, after obtaining an early discharge from the Navy on grounds of conscientious objection, I joined the Catholic Worker community, led by Dorothy Day, in New York City; during that period I became managing editor of The Catholic Worker. Later I was a reporter for a New York City daily newspaper, The Staten Island Advance, and worked for Religious News Service, a press bureau.

Wars and attempts to prevent or help end them have played a major role in my life. In 1965, I co-founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, a group whose work in making known the option of conscientious objection was a factor in the remarkable fact that no religious community produced so many conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War as the Catholic Church. In the late sixties, I was responsible for Vietnam program activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. One aspect of my work was to travel with and assist Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet. In 1969-70, I was imprisoned for thirteen months as a consequence of involvement in the “Milwaukee Fourteen,” a group of priests and lay people who burned draft records. After leaving prison, I became a member of the Emmaus Community in East Harlem, New York. In 1973, I was appointed editor of Fellowship, the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In 1977, I moved to Holland to head the staff of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. I was General Secretary for twelve years.

In connection with work on two books about Russian religious life ("Pilgrim to the Russian Church" and "Religion in the New Russia"), in the 1980s I traveled widely throughout the former Soviet Union and was a witness to the final days of the USSR. My experiences in Russia were a factor in my becoming, in 1988, an Orthodox Christian. I am international secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and, for 21 years, edited its quarterly journal, In Communion.

An influential factor in my life was my relationship with Thomas Merton. For more about that friendship see "The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton's Advice to Peacemakers".

After several years of being treated for kidney illness, in October 2007 I received a life-saving transplanted kidney donated by my wife, Nancy.

I’m the father of six children and grandfather of ten. Since 1977 my home has been in Alkmaar, Holland, a city northwest of Amsterdam.