Twenty-eight-year-old James Mawdsley spent much of the past four years in grim Burmese prisons. The Iron Road is his story, and the story of the regime that jailed him, the way it jails, tortures, and kills hundreds of Burmese each day.
Mawdsley was working in New Zealand when he learned about the struggle of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel laureate who is under house arrest. Outraged, he went to Burma, staged a one-man protest, and was jailed.
There his own amazing story begins. He is tortured, interrogated, released, jailed again. He turns his incarceration into a contest of wits — going on a hunger strike, toasting the year 2000 with a cigar and “prison champagne,” and requesting “1 packet of freedom, 1 bunch human rights, and 2 bottles of democracy.” At the same time, he asks himself: What leads those of us in peaceful democracies to ignore others’ suffering, just because it is happening “over there,” to “them”?
About the Author
Fr. Mawdsley
Born in 1973, James Mawdsley grew up in Lancashire, England. During 17 months of solitary confinement as a prisoner of conscience in Burma (in 1998 and 1999-2000), he received the Bible which helped turn his cell from “hell to heaven”, beginning a passion for studying Scripture. From 2003 to 2004 he served as Secretariat to the British-North Korean All-Party Parliamentary Group, sitting in on high-level political-military meetings in Pyongyang and London. Having met former prisoners and guards who had defected, Mawdsley’s priority in arranging these exchanges was to challenge the North Korean government for their gulag system. Slowly realising the futility of political attempts to overcome evil unless Jesus Christ is honoured as King of Kings, Mawdsley was surprised on 3rd September 2005 by a crystal-clear call to the priesthood. Fr Mawdsley was ordained a Catholic priest in 2016, celebrating the traditional Roman rite only. His New Old book series, a discovery of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament read in the light of the New, is offered both for spiritual nourishment and to address the problem of evil: personal (our own sin), global (look around!) and cosmic (satan). Christus vincit!