As Isaac Newton observed long ago, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. A corollary might be that what’s true of physical bodies is also on the Internet. And so it’s taken me longer than I originally intended to wind down this blog.
At the end of February this year, I expressed my intention do so. After 3 1/2 years, I felt the sense of a blog’s ending. Now, at year’s end, I’m making one last post before putting Piercing the Panopticon on the shelf.
The goals I set for myself have largely been achieved. In September 2010, I summarized them in a post titled simply “Why I blog.”
The foremost goal was to seek ways to resolve social conflict that point beyond the prison paradigm. Consequently, one of the recurring themes of the blog has been alternatives to incarceration. I will be seeking other platforms to pursue this further.
My other goals for the blog were much more directly achievable.
One goal was to showcase my subject matter knowledge of criminal justice by writing about topics such as mens rea, mandatory minimum sentences, and juvenile vs. adult crime. I gained this knowledge first as a law student, then later as a legislative counsel and program specialist in state government. And I intend to use it by teaching in a criminal justice program at a college or university.
I also sought to give voice to the value of prison ministry in keeping hope alive for people in prison. My active role as a board member in Prison Congregations of America continues and is also directed toward this goal. I’m seeking to engage more fully with the person of Jesus Christ — and empower others to do so as well.
Finally, I tried to have fun by enjoying writing for its own sake about topics I’m passionate about. That is why, for example, I tried to close with a flourish with a month of Harry Potter-influenced posts on criminal justice subjects. To be sure, this made for some highly idiosyncratic writing. Harry Potter and Alexis de Tocqueville are admittedly an unlikely duo.
Yet people seemed to find this blog through Web searches nonetheless. From December 15, 2008 through tonight, I wrote 346 posts and was the recipient of two guest posts from friends. For those 348 posts, there have been over 10,425 page views.
When I have identified another blog platform, I shall post a link on this one. For now, I would simply refer interested readers to my Twitter account, @areteave.
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Monday, December 31, 2012
Monday, April 30, 2012
A Sweet Sentence?
Outside of the realm of grammar, the word “sentence” has, to American ears, become virtually synonymous with sending someone to jail or prison. It could scarcely be otherwise, in a culture that puts as many people behind bars as ours.
Black’s Law Dictionary summarizes this meaning adequately enough. A sentence, according to Black’s, is “[the judgment formally pronounced by the court or judge upon the defendant after his conviction in a criminal prosecution, imposing the punishment to be inflicted.”
To be sure, the punishment doesn’t inevitably have to incarceration. It could, for example, be to a period of supervision or monitoring with conditions known as probation. We certainly impose plenty of that in our criminal justice culture as well.
But whether a criminal sentence involves prison, probation, fines or a mandated treatment program, its essence includes elements of punishment and pain.
How odd, then, are the lyrics of the first line of the venerable Christian hymn "I Know That My Redeemer Lives."
I know that my Redeemer lives!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives!
What a surprising sentence, to all those convicted of sin! Which is all of us.
Black’s Law Dictionary summarizes this meaning adequately enough. A sentence, according to Black’s, is “[the judgment formally pronounced by the court or judge upon the defendant after his conviction in a criminal prosecution, imposing the punishment to be inflicted.”
To be sure, the punishment doesn’t inevitably have to incarceration. It could, for example, be to a period of supervision or monitoring with conditions known as probation. We certainly impose plenty of that in our criminal justice culture as well.
But whether a criminal sentence involves prison, probation, fines or a mandated treatment program, its essence includes elements of punishment and pain.
How odd, then, are the lyrics of the first line of the venerable Christian hymn "I Know That My Redeemer Lives."
I know that my Redeemer lives!
What comfort this sweet sentence gives!
What a surprising sentence, to all those convicted of sin! Which is all of us.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
CSI: The Cross
On Tuesday in Holy Week, my son Micah and I attended a one-hour class on first communion. Shepherd of the Valley, an ELCA Lutheran congregation in Apple Valley, Minn., aims this class at fifth graders. Others are welcome, however, including children younger than fifth grade who seem ready to receive the Lord’s Supper and have parental permission to do so.
The kids were full of questions about many different aspects of the Eucharist, from the grand-theological (Why did Jesus die?) to the nuts and bolts practical (Where do you get the bread?). After the questions were duly noted on a whiteboard, Pastor Randy Brandt ran through short answers to each one.
I’m titling this post “CSI: The Cross” because one question the children asked was, “How did the Cross cause death?” Pastor Randy’s answer was that, with the arms nailed to the cross-beam, it becomes increasingly impossible to breath. It is a slow death by asphyxiation — a form of torture that the Romans intended as a brutal deterrent to any rebellion against their occupying rule.
Palestine, under Roman rule, had no prohibtion against cruel and unusual punishment.
The kids were full of questions about many different aspects of the Eucharist, from the grand-theological (Why did Jesus die?) to the nuts and bolts practical (Where do you get the bread?). After the questions were duly noted on a whiteboard, Pastor Randy Brandt ran through short answers to each one.
I’m titling this post “CSI: The Cross” because one question the children asked was, “How did the Cross cause death?” Pastor Randy’s answer was that, with the arms nailed to the cross-beam, it becomes increasingly impossible to breath. It is a slow death by asphyxiation — a form of torture that the Romans intended as a brutal deterrent to any rebellion against their occupying rule.
Palestine, under Roman rule, had no prohibtion against cruel and unusual punishment.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Beyond Foucault's "Detestable Solution"
When will there by something new under the sun in the theoretical underpinnings of criminal sentencing?
Michel Foucault wrote Discipline and Punish 35 years ago. The book probes the emergence of the modern prison at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault links this emergence with the exercise of a new type of class domination that also extended outside prison walls, to institutions such as factories.
Prisons themselves were not new; they had existed for centuries. But around 1800 in the West, Foucault argues, they became mechanisms of a new form of class power. Detention colonized the field of correctional options and became the "penalty par excellence." In doing so, it "banished into oblivion all the other punishments that the eighteenth-century reformers had imagined."
Rereading Foucault's account of this, I was struck by his use of the rhetoric of banishment to describe the ascendancy of the prison as a way for society to respond to social conflict. No one ever imagined how ascendant the prison would become in the United States. Indeed, one suspects that even Foucault himself would be surprised by how common going to prison has become among people at the bottom of the social ladder. He died in 1984, before the American prison boom had really taken off.
Even when prison emerged two centuries ago as the dominant correctional paradigm, it seemed to do so almost by intellectual default. "It seemed to have no alternative," Foucault wrote in the mid-1970s, "as if carried along by the very movement of history."
Why do we continue to rely so heavily on prison as a response to crime? Foucault called it dangerous and useless; today, in America, one would have to add expensive. Yet we have lacked the vision to create a system to replace it Instead, prison remains, as Foucault said, "the detestable solution," which we have been unwilling or unable to give up.
I'm hoping that the Christian gospel can open our eyes to alternatives to the prison paradigm. After all, Jesus Christ boldly promised to make all things new. And unliked Foucault, Jesus did more than merely write about the powers that be. He confronted them, even when it meant a criminal's death.
Michel Foucault wrote Discipline and Punish 35 years ago. The book probes the emergence of the modern prison at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault links this emergence with the exercise of a new type of class domination that also extended outside prison walls, to institutions such as factories.
Prisons themselves were not new; they had existed for centuries. But around 1800 in the West, Foucault argues, they became mechanisms of a new form of class power. Detention colonized the field of correctional options and became the "penalty par excellence." In doing so, it "banished into oblivion all the other punishments that the eighteenth-century reformers had imagined."
Rereading Foucault's account of this, I was struck by his use of the rhetoric of banishment to describe the ascendancy of the prison as a way for society to respond to social conflict. No one ever imagined how ascendant the prison would become in the United States. Indeed, one suspects that even Foucault himself would be surprised by how common going to prison has become among people at the bottom of the social ladder. He died in 1984, before the American prison boom had really taken off.
Even when prison emerged two centuries ago as the dominant correctional paradigm, it seemed to do so almost by intellectual default. "It seemed to have no alternative," Foucault wrote in the mid-1970s, "as if carried along by the very movement of history."
Why do we continue to rely so heavily on prison as a response to crime? Foucault called it dangerous and useless; today, in America, one would have to add expensive. Yet we have lacked the vision to create a system to replace it Instead, prison remains, as Foucault said, "the detestable solution," which we have been unwilling or unable to give up.
I'm hoping that the Christian gospel can open our eyes to alternatives to the prison paradigm. After all, Jesus Christ boldly promised to make all things new. And unliked Foucault, Jesus did more than merely write about the powers that be. He confronted them, even when it meant a criminal's death.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
The Misfit on Crime and Punishment
How do you respond when confronted with unredeemed evil? And where does evil come from?
In Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a previously talkative grandmother can muster only one word when she finds herself alone with an escaped convict known as The Misfit. The word is Jesus, and she says it twice - intending it as an invocation of sorts, a call to prayer, but sounding, in practice, more like cursing.
The mention of Jesus' name immediately elicits a revealing reply from her abducter. "Yes'm," he says, "Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same with him as with me except he hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me."
The Misfit does not see himself as blameless. Yet he feels a kinship with Jesus, who knew what it was like to have the full force of the law arrayed against him.
For the Misfit, however, a lengthy prison sentence was not redemptive like Jesus' death. Rather, he becomes consumed by a sense of grievance that the punishment did not fit the crime. "I call myself The Misfit," he tells the grandmother, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
When Flannery O'Connor published this story in 1955, the U.S. prison population was a fraction of what it is today, and a character like The Misfit seemed like an outlier.
Today, brutal killings have become so common, and the media to report them so ubiquitous, that the shock value they had a half century ago is largely gone.
My question is this: To what extent have the heavy-handed sentencing policies of recent decades contributed to the creation of a multitude of misfits?
In Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a previously talkative grandmother can muster only one word when she finds herself alone with an escaped convict known as The Misfit. The word is Jesus, and she says it twice - intending it as an invocation of sorts, a call to prayer, but sounding, in practice, more like cursing.
The mention of Jesus' name immediately elicits a revealing reply from her abducter. "Yes'm," he says, "Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same with him as with me except he hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me."
The Misfit does not see himself as blameless. Yet he feels a kinship with Jesus, who knew what it was like to have the full force of the law arrayed against him.
For the Misfit, however, a lengthy prison sentence was not redemptive like Jesus' death. Rather, he becomes consumed by a sense of grievance that the punishment did not fit the crime. "I call myself The Misfit," he tells the grandmother, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
When Flannery O'Connor published this story in 1955, the U.S. prison population was a fraction of what it is today, and a character like The Misfit seemed like an outlier.
Today, brutal killings have become so common, and the media to report them so ubiquitous, that the shock value they had a half century ago is largely gone.
My question is this: To what extent have the heavy-handed sentencing policies of recent decades contributed to the creation of a multitude of misfits?
Saturday, January 9, 2010
"Unfriending" and Betrayal
The New Oxford American Dictionary garnered plenty of press attention when it chose “unfriend” as its Word of the Year for 2009. With one computer click, someone is no longer in your Facebook network − and possibly no longer in your life at all.
Don’t worry, this post will not be a diatribe about what Facebook may or may not be doing to civility in our culture. Rather, I’d like to take a cue from James Hillman, the brilliant Jungian psychologist, and point to the primal, mythic implications of “unfriending.”
What is unfriending, after all, but a form of betrayal? Maybe the breach of trust (either real or imagined) was on the part of the person being unfriended, maybe it was by the person doing the unfriending. Or it could have been on both sides. In any case, the act of unfriending in Facebook may be ratifying a betrayal that has already occurred.
As Hillman suggests in “Betrayal,” an essay included in the collection Loose Ends (1975), the central myth of Western culture is the betrayal of Jesus. The kiss Judas gave Jesus in the Garden, as the soldiers closed in, was the ultimate in “unfriending.” A close second was Simon Peter, disavowing Jesus for the third time as the cock crowed.
Judas and Peter were not just Jesus’ disciples; they were his friends, for that is what Jesus offers to those who follow Him. We are no longer strangers, but friends (John 15:15; Ephesians 2:19). And you don’t need to know the words of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by heart to know that He will never unfriend you.
Don’t worry, this post will not be a diatribe about what Facebook may or may not be doing to civility in our culture. Rather, I’d like to take a cue from James Hillman, the brilliant Jungian psychologist, and point to the primal, mythic implications of “unfriending.”
What is unfriending, after all, but a form of betrayal? Maybe the breach of trust (either real or imagined) was on the part of the person being unfriended, maybe it was by the person doing the unfriending. Or it could have been on both sides. In any case, the act of unfriending in Facebook may be ratifying a betrayal that has already occurred.
As Hillman suggests in “Betrayal,” an essay included in the collection Loose Ends (1975), the central myth of Western culture is the betrayal of Jesus. The kiss Judas gave Jesus in the Garden, as the soldiers closed in, was the ultimate in “unfriending.” A close second was Simon Peter, disavowing Jesus for the third time as the cock crowed.
Judas and Peter were not just Jesus’ disciples; they were his friends, for that is what Jesus offers to those who follow Him. We are no longer strangers, but friends (John 15:15; Ephesians 2:19). And you don’t need to know the words of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by heart to know that He will never unfriend you.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Jesus was an OutLaw
My family and I spent last week at Outlaw Ranch, a camp in the Black Hills operated by the nonprofit organization Lutherans Outdoors. It’s a marvelous place, with spirit-filled worship (often around a campfire), enthusiastic college-age counselors who take care of your kids for extended periods of time, a musical artist-in-residence, and adult learning sessions on timely issues facing the faithful. The outdoor element is also there for the experiencing, in activities such as horseback riding, canoeing, and hiking.
On the second or third night, the staff put on a peripatetic passion play. Making full use of Outlaw’s spectacular natural setting, we reenacted key moments in the life of Christ, beginning with his humble birth, continuing with baptism in the Jordan River, and on through ministry, arrest, crucifixion − and ultimate resurrection. The play was full of memorable moments, such as standing in a crowd yelling “Crucify him!” as I craned my neck upward to see Pontius Pilate on the deck above us. He washed his hands of the matter, then dumped the water in his bowl down toward us.
At one point in the play, the narrator makes the assertion “Jesus was an outlaw.” Immediately upon hearing this, my mental wheels started turning at swifter speed. Aha, I thought, now I’m starting to see why the camp is called Outlaw Ranch. It’s not just the location in the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Sioux that later became associated with white land grabs and colorful Old West characters like Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. It’s the fact − still scandalous after two thousand years − that the founder of the Christian faith, the author (many of us believe) of our salvation, was condemned as a criminal and put to death on a cross, the most shameful death the Roman world could devise.
As a result of the crucifixion, and the resurrection that followed, humans have been set free in a way that gives the word “outlaw” yet another level of meaning. In a sense, Jesus came to perfect the law, but even more fundamentally, one who is in Christ is set free from the law to be a new creation (Galatians 3: 19-25; Romans 8: 1-4). In other words, Jesus was an outlaw in more ways than one.
On the second or third night, the staff put on a peripatetic passion play. Making full use of Outlaw’s spectacular natural setting, we reenacted key moments in the life of Christ, beginning with his humble birth, continuing with baptism in the Jordan River, and on through ministry, arrest, crucifixion − and ultimate resurrection. The play was full of memorable moments, such as standing in a crowd yelling “Crucify him!” as I craned my neck upward to see Pontius Pilate on the deck above us. He washed his hands of the matter, then dumped the water in his bowl down toward us.
At one point in the play, the narrator makes the assertion “Jesus was an outlaw.” Immediately upon hearing this, my mental wheels started turning at swifter speed. Aha, I thought, now I’m starting to see why the camp is called Outlaw Ranch. It’s not just the location in the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Sioux that later became associated with white land grabs and colorful Old West characters like Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. It’s the fact − still scandalous after two thousand years − that the founder of the Christian faith, the author (many of us believe) of our salvation, was condemned as a criminal and put to death on a cross, the most shameful death the Roman world could devise.
As a result of the crucifixion, and the resurrection that followed, humans have been set free in a way that gives the word “outlaw” yet another level of meaning. In a sense, Jesus came to perfect the law, but even more fundamentally, one who is in Christ is set free from the law to be a new creation (Galatians 3: 19-25; Romans 8: 1-4). In other words, Jesus was an outlaw in more ways than one.
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