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Nate Beeler | Believing Obama Is Muslim / CagleCartoons.com

Tue, 02/08/2011 - 16:14 — Dave Culver

Section(s): 
Religion & Spirituality

Hilary Swank and inmate-outreach group lobby for reform

Tue, 02/08/2011 - 13:27 — Dave Culver

  • Jesus left his followers with precious few commands: Love thy neighbor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoner among them. So why do so many churches have such a hard time with that last one?
  • Why We Need Criminal Justice Reform

Rebecca Cusey, Religion News Service

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Hilary Swank stars as Betty Anne Waters opposite Sam Rockwell as wrongly convicted convict Kenneth Waters in Conviction.

Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank, for one, is waiting for a good answer.

In her recent film, Conviction, Swank plays Betty Anne Waters, a real-life high school dropout whose 18-year quest to free her brother from a wrongful murder conviction led her from GED to the bar exam.

"As we're sitting here speaking right now, someone is in prison for a crime they didn't commit," Swank said at a recent screening of the film at a historic black church in Alexandria, Va., "and that's not OK."

Waters' brother, Kenny Waters, was the 83rd prisoner exonerated and freed as a result of DNA testing, forced by the persistence of the New York-based Innocence Project. To date, 261 prisoners have seen their wrongful convictions overturned.

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Why We Need Criminal Justice Reform, Bill Mefford, Sojourners

  • Even just a glance at the U.S. criminal justice system shows extreme brokenness.
  • How do we begin to address the connections between astronomical rates of incarceration, disintegration of black families, and the war on drugs?
  • The New Jim Crow


Section(s): 
Religion & Spirituality

Why We Need Criminal Justice Reform

Tue, 02/08/2011 - 13:02 — Dave Culver

  • Even just a glance at the U.S. criminal justice system shows extreme brokenness.
  • How do we begin to address the connections between astronomical rates of incarceration, disintegration of black families, and the war on drugs?
  • The New Jim Crow

Bill Mefford, Sojourners

This article is made possible with the contributions of readers like you. Thank you!

The nearly 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails accounts for 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated, and, as Michelle Alexander points out in her book, The New Jim Crow, the rapid growth of the prison population in the last 30 years is largely due to the failed war on drugs. Locking up minor drug offenders for long prison terms is not only ineffective — it is inhumane. Though Congress finally acted in 2010 (in a bipartisan fashion thanks to Senator Durbin and senator sessions) by limiting the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, the criminal justice system in the United States remains far from just.

The mass incarceration of mostly poor and African American people reflects the sins of God’s people in scripture. Throughout scripture, God continually rebukes the wealthy and the powerful for withholding justice from the vulnerable. Biblical justice is achieved through legally restoring those wrongfully accused and inclusively creating the opportunity for equal justice for those marginalized. Rather than a means of harsh punishment, God intends justice to be a healing balm to all of society (Exodus 23:6-8; Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:17 and 16:19-20). The prophets Amos and Isaiah specifically point out that in utilizing the judicial system as a means to secure power only for the affluent and to keep the poor and marginalized trapped in a perpetual underclass, the powerful are in direct opposition to God’s intentions for justice (Isaiah 1:21-23; 5:20-23; Amos 2:6-8; 5:7, 10-13).

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Dr. Martin Luther King's Birthday: Is the Drug War the Next Big Civil Rights Issue? Anthony Papa and Yolande Cadore, AlterNet

  • How do we begin to address the connections between astronomical rates of incarceration, disintegration of black families, and the war on drugs?
  • The New Jim Crow

Section(s): 
Religion & Spirituality

Sex Abuse in the Catholic Church: When Adults are Victims

Fri, 02/04/2011 - 13:21 — Dave Culver

Demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse within the Catholic Church. The story of Katia Birge is a case in point.

Kathryn Joyce, Religion Dispatches

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Room at the Centro San Juan Diego, the Hispanic Institute for Family and Pastoral Care for the Archdiocese of Denver

This week an Irish broadcaster revealed a Vatican letter from 1997 that appears to advise bishops to withhold priest sex abuse allegations from the police. The letter, written in response to Irish bishops’ policy of “mandatory reporting” and leaked by an Irish bishop, has been hailed by victim advocacy groups who hope this smoking gun will lead to definitive proof of the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to impede prosecution of abusive priests.


As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church, where demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse.  

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Section(s): 
Religion & Spirituality

Tim Eagan | not- so-intelligent design / CagleCartoons.com

Thu, 01/27/2011 - 13:04 — Dave Culver

Section(s): 
Religion & Spirituality

The State of the Spirit, 2011

Thu, 01/27/2011 - 12:54 — Dave Culver

  • Most liberals and progressives will likely spend the next twenty years either supporting political parties that don't even begin to address these issues in a holistic way (and justifying that by pointing out that candidate x is really much less bad than candidate y)
  • Duty to Warn:  Approaching Spiritual Death
  • Hogwash, Mr. President

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Network of Spiritual Progressives

The bad news is that global warming will soon be irreversible and, by the end of the twenty-first century, large parts of the earth will be under water. China is emerging as the world's greatest superpower while continuing to regiment its people and repress democratic civil liberties and human rights. Just as today the West spends its energies fighting an elusive "war on terror" generated by its fantasy that its survival depends on dominating other countries to gain their fossil fuels, in the future Western elites of wealth and power may seek to create medieval-style enclaves surrounded by private Blackwater-style armies to prevent ordinary citizens from getting at their dwindling supplies of food and other goods. Most people will be encouraged to blame each other and fight each other for the decreasing sustenance left to the majority of the planet's residents.

All this is likely to happen gradually, as American power slips away and, with it, the particular opportunities that the citizens of this partial democracy fought to win in the past. Increasingly, we in the West may be taught to believe the "common sense" that people only care about themselves and that nations will always seek to dominate others to advance the interests of their own elites -- and that therefore domination, militarism, and cruelty are necessary for "us" to survive (though in fact, that "us" will be a smaller and smaller part of the entire population). And meanwhile, the pathetically inadequate safety net won through decades of citizen and labor union activism may be cut back in the name of economic frugality and keeping taxes low, at least for the wealthy who might otherwise cut back on investments and thus provide fewer and fewer jobs for the rest of us.

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Related:

Hogwash, Mr. President, Robert Scheer, Truthdig

  • The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment, and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole.
  • The President Ignored the Elephant in the Room
  • The State of the Spirit, 2011

Duty to Warn:  Approaching Spiritual Death, Gary Kohls, Evergreene Digest

  • Is it Too Late to Mend America’s Dying Soul?
  • Duty to Warn: Another MLK Day is Safely Past


Section(s): 
Religion & Spirituality

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