What does it mean to be transformed? What events transform a political leader, a president? In his new book from Orbis Books, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters, James Douglass traces the “turning” of President John F. Kennedy from the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, right to the week of his death as he is transformed from a conventional Cold Warrior to someone determined to pull the world back from the edge of apocalypse. Douglass views Kennedy’s change from a contemplative perspective, particularly attuned to the grave moral and spiritual matters at stake. President Kennedy, as it turns out, saw his mission in similar terms. Those who plotted his death were determined to kill the vision. Only by unmasking these forces of the “Unspeakable,” Douglass argues, can we free ourselves and our country to pursue that vision of peace.
Jim Douglass (shown here with his wife Shelley) has written four books on the theology of nonviolence, served as a theological advisor, on questions of nuclear war and conscientious objection, to Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council in Rome, taught theology at Bellarmine College, the University of Hawaii, and in the Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence at the University of Notre Dame. He and his wife Shelley founded the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action near Seattle, Washington, and Jim served a year and a half in jail for acts of civil disobedience at the Trident submarine base there. He has made numerous peacemaking journeys to the Middle East, and five visits to Iraq. In 1993 the Douglass's founded a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham Alabama for homeless families.
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