Colman McCarthy

Colman McCarthy is a journalist, teacher, and pacifist who has spent more than five decades arguing — in newsprint, in classrooms, and in person — that peace is not a dream but a discipline, and that it can be taught.

Born in Glen Head, New York, the youngest of four brothers, McCarthy attended Spring Hill College in Alabama before entering the Holy Spirit Trappist monastery in rural Rockdale County, Georgia. He intended to stay a few weeks. He stayed five years. He would later call those years the most important of his life.

After leaving the monastery, McCarthy began a career in journalism that would span nearly three decades at The Washington Post, where he wrote a nationally syndicated column from 1969 to 1997. Washingtonian magazine called him ‘the liberal conscience of The Washington Post.’ His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Progressive, The Atlantic, Reader’s Digest, and the National Catholic Reporter, where he contributed regular columns from 1999 to 2021. From the start, he made a choice that would define his career: he would be a peace correspondent, not a war correspondent. He went to the front lines of peacemaking instead — bringing to his readers and later his classrooms such figures as Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Muhammad Yunus, and Mairead Corrigan, along with Sargent Shriver, Joan Baez, Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, and Howard Zinn.

In 1982, while still writing for the Post, McCarthy walked into School Without Walls, a public high school in Washington, D.C., and asked the principal if he could volunteer to teach a course on alternatives to violence. She said to give it a try. That course — discussion-based, with no tests, no exams, and no homework — became the foundation for everything that followed. He added schools: a daily 7:25 a.m. class at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School, a weekly seminar at Wilson High, and courses at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, the University of Maryland, and the Washington Center for Internships. He never asked to be paid.

Over the course of his teaching career, McCarthy has taught more than 10,000 students across eight schools. He opens every semester with a $100 bill quiz — name six historical figures, three of war and three of peace — and no student has ever won the money. The point is always the same: American education excels at teaching the history of those who break the peace and fails almost entirely at teaching those who make it.

In 1985, McCarthy and his wife Mavourneen founded the Center for Teaching Peace, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that works with schools at all levels to create and expand peace studies programs. The Center has become the institutional backbone of his life’s work: assisting teachers, developing curricula, and advocating for peace education as a discipline as rigorous as any in the catalog.

McCarthy is the author of seven books, including I’d Rather Teach Peace, All of One Peace, Inner Companions, Involvements: One Journalist’s Place in the World, and At Rest with the Animals. He is also the editor of two widely used anthologies — Solutions to Violence and Strength Through Peace — that have been adopted by peace studies programs at colleges and high schools across the country.

His work has earned him the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, the El–Hibri Peace Education Prize (2010), the Pope Paul VI Teacher of Peace Award from Pax Christi USA (1993), and an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship for journalism.

An ethical vegetarian, a self–described anarchist, and an unwavering pacifist, McCarthy has three sons, all drawn to work that serves others. His conviction has never wavered: unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.