The peace activist Jim Forest died on 13 January in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, where he lived. “I was with him in the hospital when he died. All our children and grandchildren were able to visit him, because the doctors didn’t expect him to last much longer. It was a beautiful day,” his wife Nancy wrote to their many friends. Jim had turned 80 last November.

Forest became a Catholic while he was serving in the US Navy. He went on to join the staff of the Catholic Worker community in New York, and briefly served as managing editor of The Catholic Worker. In 1988, he was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. “He knew and worked with Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh and wrote marvellous books about them all,” his friend Danny Sullivan, a former chairman of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, told us.