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Last night, I had the chance to sit down for an hour with one of the world’s best theologians of nonviolence, James W. Douglass. A great gift of my life is that Jim has been my spiritual director since I was 22 years old. We met in 2003, on the way to Baghdad with a delegation of peacemakers who tried to interrupt the violence of “shock and awe” with an embodied witness of nonviolence. Jim was mentored by Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and the Berrigan brothers when he was being trained as a Catholic moral theologian. He joined Day to successfully lobby the bishops for the only prohibition of Vatican II - a refusal of total war. As a young theologian, Jim helped prepare the way for the peace witness that Pope Francis and Pope Leo have offered the world in recent years.
Jim is particularly attuned to the ways that the truth of nonviolence must be embodied. He helped start the Center for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence at Notre Dame in the 1960s, only to see it shut down when his students burned their draft cards in chapel. “It was a little too much practice for some folks,” Jim quipped. Then he leaned into the practice himself, finding ways to support and build nonviolent movements outside the academy.
Still, Jim never stopped being a scholar. From his study at the Catholic Worker, he became a historian, chronicling the way nonviolence is embodied in the real world. More than three decades ago, he relocated to Birmingham, Alabama, where he immersed himself in the Southern Freedom Movement and pledged to tell the stories of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy as gospel stories - that is, biographies that point to the nonviolent way of truth in the world. After more than two decades of work - and two books about JFK and Gandhi that he wrote along the way - Jim has published Martyrs to the Unspeakable [ [link removed] ]. I’m glad to share this recording of my conversation with him about the book at last night’s Red Letter Christians Book Club. Thanks to our friend Shane Claiborne for inviting us have this conversation.
Modern authoritarian movements know that the single greatest force of opposition they face is mass nonviolent protest. That’s why the Trump regime is doing everything it can to provoke violence on America’s streets. Jim’s unique telling of these well-known stories that shaped mid-20th century America highlights dozens of stories that very few people know - other witnesses who were faithful, even unto death, far away from the cameras. To know this history is to know that there is a place for each of us in a moral movement to reconstruct democracy in this country. I hope listening to this conversation - and reading Martyrs to the Unspeakable [ [link removed] ] - helps you find your place to embody truth-force in this moral moment.
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