I was born in Miami in 1943, when Miami was still fairly small. And I
was actually born— or grew up out in the edge of the everglades, so it
was actually fairly isolated. I was the first child of four, so I kind
of took on a lot of the first oldest child super responsibility, getting
everything done kind of roles. My father was from a poor farm family in
Georgia, and my mom was from a professional, semi-aristocratic family in
Miami. So there's real big cultural differences within my family, which
I think was important, because I sort of lived in a couple of different
worlds, depending on which grandparents and which cousins I was talking
to that day, because everybody was in Miami at that point. So that was a
big influence. In high school I got involved with the Methodists and the
Methodist Youth Fellowship and felt pretty highly motivated around
social issues. And I went to Florida Southern, which was a Methodist
school. Thought I might want to go into the ministry. This was the time
period of early '60s and civil rights, and that had a big impact on me.
There was also a black family in Miami who had a lot of influence on me
as I was
Page 4growing up. And I think the cultural
differences, the segregation, I was trying to sort all of that out. So I
got very involved in civil rights while I was in college, and took part
in sit-ins and voter registration, which a lot of people were doing, but
not so many southern White males. So I was kind of on what seemed to be
a separate track. When I finished Florida Southern I was debating what
to do, thinking about the Peace Corps, thinking about social work.
Decided to go to Boston University School of Theology, which had a
reputation of being the social ethics place to go. Martin Luther King
had gone there, and things like that. So I did that. And I married at
that point, my first wife, and we both went. While there, I decided that
the ministry wasn't really my track and was thinking about what else to
do. Finished there, became a Quaker in the process, was sort of my way
of dealing with my Methodist ambivalence. Taught for a year at a Quaker
kind of alternative school in New Hampshire. Moved to Hartford, worked
for the YMCA. Found a school called Hartford Seminary Foundation that
had a Ph.D. program in human nature and religion, which was an
anthropology of religion program. I started in that, and finished that
program. I was thinking about doing my specialty on civil rights or the
kind of New Age youth movement. Ended up focusing on New Age youth, but
particularly the communal movement and New Age Eastern spirituality. So
I studied some spiritual groups in the States, made up of U.S. young
people.