Rev. John Dear, S.J. is a Jesuit priest, pastor, peace activist, organizer, lecturer, retreat leader, and the author/editor of 25 books on peace and justice, including Living Peace, published by Doubleday in 2001, Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings, published by Orbis Books in 2002, Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace published by Ave Maria Press in 2003, "The Questions of Jesus" published by Doubleday in 2004, "You Will Be My Witnesses," published by Orbis Books in 2006, and most recently, "Transfiguration," published by Doubleday in 2007. In 2006, he became a weekly columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, at www.ncrcafe.org.

From 1998 until December 2000, he served as the ex cutive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization in the United States.From 2002-2004, he served as pastor of several parishes in northeastern New Mexico. Currently, he coordinates Pax Christi New Mexico, and lectures to tens of thousands of people each year in churches and schools across the country.

After the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, John Dear began volunteering as a Red Cross Chaplain, and became one of the coordinators of the whole chaplain program. He worked with some 1,500 family members who lost loved ones, as well as hundreds of firefighters and police officers, while at the same time, he spoke out against the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

A longtime practitioner and teacher of nonviolence, John Dear has written hundreds of articles and given hundreds of talks on nonviolence. Some of his other books include: Jesus the Rebel; Peace Behind Bars: A Journal from Jail; The God of Peace: Toward a Theology of Nonviolence; Disarming the Heart: Toward a Vow of Nonviolence; The Sound of Listening; The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience; Seeds of Nonviolence; Our God Is Nonviolent: Witnesses in the Struggle for Peace and Justice; and Oscar Romero and the Nonviolent Struggle for Justice.

He has edited: The Road to Peace: Writings on Peace and Justice by Henri Nouwen; And the Risen Bread: The Selected Poems of Daniel Berrigan, 1957-1997; and The Vision of Peace: Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland: The Writings of Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire.

Fr. John Dear's work for peace has taken him to El Salvador, where he lived and worked in a refugee camp in 1985; to Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Middle East, and the Philipines; to Northern Ireland where he lived and worked at a human rights center for a year; and to Iraq, where he led a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize winners to witness the effects of the deadly sanctions on Iraqi children. He has run a shelter for the homeless in Washington, DC; and served as Executive Director of the Sacred Heart Center, a community center for disenfranchized women and children in Richmond, Virginia.

A native of North Carolina, John Dear was arrested on December 7, 1993 at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina for hammering on an F15 nuclear fighter bomber in an effort to "beat swords in plowshares," according to the biblical vision of the prophet Isaiah. Along with activist Philip Berrigan, he spent eight months in North Carolina county jails. Dear has been arrested over seventy-five times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience for peace, and has organized hundreds of demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons at military bases across the country, as well as worked with Mother Theresa and others to stop the death penalty.

He has two masters degrees in theology from the Graduate Theological Union in California. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.