Rev. David Smith, Catholic Priest and retired professor of theology, was founding director of the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas. In that position, he has traveled extensively through Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America to study poverty, justice, and peace, with special attention to liberation theologies and active nonviolence for social change. He first visited Israel in 1968 when he was a graduate student in Rome, and studied in Jerusalem at the Ecole Biblique for two years in the mid 1970s. He visited again in 1990, at the height of the first intifada, with a group of peace studies academics. He was a member of a Michigan Peace Team of third-party nonviolent peacemakers in Gaza in the summer of 2005 and in the West Bank for three months in the fall of 2007. He is co-author of the book Understanding World Religions: A Road Map for Justice and Peace (2nd ed.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) which studies the ways various world religions interact to support or interfere with justice and peace, with Israel-Palestine as a case study. Currently, he is promoting boycott, divestment, and sanctions to pressure Israel to deal fairly with Palestinians, and is a board member of the Iraqi American Reconciliation Project.