John D. Early is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Florida Atlantic University. His educational background includes a Bachelor and a Master of Arts degree in Social Philosophy from St. Louis University, a Master of Arts in Theology from Woodstock College (a Jesuit Seminary), a Master of Arts in Sociology from Fordham University, and a PhD in Anthropology-Sociology from Harvard University.
Dr. Early began his career as priest-anthropologist, although he resigned from the priesthood in 1969. As a member of the Harvard-Chiapas Research Project, he went to Mexico to study the Mayan worldview and its Catholic elements. Seeing the many Mayan infant and child deaths due ultimately to social injustice, his interest turned to demographic research. It was needed to alert the world to the situation and as a basis for planning the Mayan literacy, cooperative, and health programs that he worked with in Guatemala. This led to research on the evolution of human population dynamics, little understood by the developed world. Included were the hunting-gathering Agta in the Philippines, the tribal Yanomami in Brazil, and the Mayan peasants in Mexico and Guatemala. After publishing four books on population dynamics, he returned to his original interest in two later books—religious worldviews and their moral implications for the implementation of social justice. Three of his books have been translated into Spanish for wider international circulation.
