Colman McCarthy, the Washington Post journalist who made peace and nonviolence a regular subject of mainstream opinion journalism, died Feb. 27, 2026, in La Romana, Dominican Republic. He was 87. His son John said the cause was pneumonia. McCarthy had moved to the Dominican Republic in recent years to live with him.
McCarthy joined The Washington Post in 1969 as an editorial writer and went on to write a long-running, syndicated column on nonviolence, social justice and the moral questions that often sit behind public policy. The column ended in 1996, but over decades it gave sustained attention to peacemaking at a time when such arguments were frequently treated as a specialized cause rather than a civic priority.
Before the Post, he worked on the sports desk of United Press International and later freelanced for the National Catholic Reporter, reporting on the civil rights movement. After leaving the Post, he turned his focus to teaching, arguing that nonviolent conflict resolution could be studied, practiced and assessed like any other discipline.
He founded the nonprofit Center for Teaching Peace and brought his curriculum to a wide range of students, including at Georgetown University Law Center and at the Oak Hill juvenile detention center in Maryland. Earlier in life, he spent five years in a Trappist monastery in Georgia as a lay brother, an experience that informed his emphasis on discipline, service and daily habits.
In classrooms and workshops, McCarthy’s enduring legacy was his insistence that peace is not simply an ideal to admire but a set of skills to learn—and to carry into the institutions where conflicts are decided.