From the Publisher’s Desk

Publisher’s Letter For February 2012

By Robert Ellsberg, Publisher

Dear Friends,

So many of our best books recount the courage and faithful witness of great souls. Several such books were published this month.

James W. Douglass is the author of the critically-acclaimed and best-selling JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (now also available in a Kindle edition from Amazon). While working on his next work on the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Douglass became engrossed in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, one of King's major influences. The result of being sidetracked is his new book: Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth.

Gandhi, the father of Indian independence and beloved prophet of nonviolence, was assassinated in 1948 by Hindu nationalists during a prayer meeting in New Delhi. Ostensibly, the conspirators were enraged by Gandhi's efforts to promote reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims. But Douglass presents a chilling examination of the role of Indian security forces in abetting the assassination. Following the theme of his study of JFK, Douglass shows how those who conspired to kill Gandhi hoped to destroy a compelling vision of peace, nonviolence, and reconciliation. In tracing the story of Gandhi's early "experiments with truth" in South Africa, Douglass shows how Gandhi had early on confronted and overcome the fear of death. And, as with the case of JFK's death, he shows why this story matters now: what we can learn from Gandhi's truth and his message for our world today.

In Ultimate Price: Testimonies of Christians who Resisted the Third Reich, Annemarie Kidder highights the witness of seven men and women who felt compelled by their Christian faith to resist the idolatrous Nazi regime.

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In the News

From the US Catholic - Online Edition

The editors interview Jim Forest, biographer and friend of Dorothy Day—and a former Catholic Worker himself, about Dorothy Day's abortion, conversion to Catholicism, and what she might think about women's ordination.

How did Dorothy Day become Catholic?

One of the events in the background was that Dorothy had had an abortion when she was a young woman. Her partner, a journalist with whom she was passionately in love, enjoyed having his sex life with her but wasn’t at all interested in having children or being married. Desperately trying to save her relationship with the man, very reluctantly Dorothy decided to have an abortion. It seemed the only solution, but he left her anyway. Soon after, she attempted suicide.

Dorothy thought she had been made sterile by the abortion and, several years later, was amazed when, having fallen in love a second time, she became pregnant by the man she was living with. This seemed to her a miracle. This time she was determined that she would not have an abortion, despite the fact that her partner wanted her to.

That was really the beginning of her conversion, though for years she had been inching her way little by little to the Catholic Church in a mysterious way. She just felt comfortable in Catholic churches and would go and sit in the back and enjoy being in a place where the warmth of prayer was occurring, where the Blessed Sacrament was reserved. She wasn’t especially interested in the catechism or in Catholic teaching at that point in her life, but there was something like the smell that pulls you into the bakery shop that drew her.

When she discovered that she was pregnant -- for her a capital-M Miracle -- she realized the one thing that she wanted most of all for her daughter was to have the faith that she longed for herself.

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