H/T to Grits for Breakfast
- Percentage of American adults held in either prisons or mental institutions
in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68- Percentage ofthese adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75
- Percentage today who are in prisons: 97
I thought I was kidding yesterday when I speculated that the anti-Islamic tracts handed out at the Rockland County Jail might be some of Jack Chick's minor masterpieces. Today it turns out that Teresa Darden Clapp was suspended from her long time job as jail chaplain for handing out Chick tracts. And just to make sure it was clear where they were coming from, they were stamped with the name and address of the church that she pastors.
It makes me want to slam my head into the wall a few times, just to deaden the pain.
Chick tracts have been notorious for decades as some of the most bigoted, extremely fundamentalist, anti-Catholic publications around, and they may well be available in packs of 25 at your local Bible bookshop. Maybe there is out there a competent jail or prison chaplain that would use them, but I don't know of any.
Just to restate the obvious, if you are a paid jail or prison chaplain, you are a government employee, which mandates certain limitations on your activities. The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits the federal government from establishing one religion over another (and the Fourteenth applies this to the states) which means you if you are taking a government paycheck. Under well established statute and case law free exercise of religion is the inmates right, allowing it the facility's duty, and supporting it your responsibility as a chaplain. You are being paid to protect their rights, not exercise your own.
There is a good example of that in the article cited above. Jail Chief William Clark was asked about Islamic religious activities at the jail:
"I didn't have the funds to hire a Muslim cleric," Clark said, noting that those inmates pray on their own. "It could be possible next year in the budget."If there wasn't a Muslim chaplain, it was Clapp's professional responsibility to help these men find an alternative, and to champion their rights within that facility. Clark seems to be trying to do the right thing, but it was Clapp's responsibility to see that something like this did not happen, not Clark's
Kidd also said the Muslim inmates were not afforded halal, or religiously permissible, meals. Clark said the jail used to have halal meals, but the company that provided them went out of business. Any Muslim inmate who wants a special meal is given a kosher meal, which is an acceptable substitution according to the state's correctional authorities, Clark said.
This story just went up over on Detention Ministry News and I am still shaking my head over it. It seems that Teresa Darden-Clapp has been the chaplain to the Rockland County Jail in New York since 1994. It also seems like she might not hold that office much longer -- she has been suspended while the jail investigates whether she was distributing tracts offensive to Muslim prisoners. Oh dear, here we go again.
If you want, hit the link and see just what kind of drivel was being handed out -- these sound a bit more moderate than Jack Chick, but they may have left the worst out. (It would not be unusual.) I have basically two reactions to this, one general, and one specific.
In general, this only points out once more the colossal ignorance in America of Islam, and the many cultures that make up the Islamic world. We have had leaders making decisions about war and reconstruction in Iraq that apparently did not know the difference between Sunni and Shia -- and that is the simplest (well simple may not be the best word . . .) and basic distinction one could make. For example, some conflate Shia groups in Iraq with the government or other groups in Iran. The difference between the two is much greater than just a shift in the last letter of the name.
Specifically, it indicates the difficulties some people have in distinguishing the role of chaplain from that of minister or evangelist. In chaplaincy, especially in prisons, you are often a government employee, and if a volunteer, given institutional access, status, and resources. Your primary job is to see to the spiritual care of the members of your faith community in that facility, but you also have a responsiblility to all the inmates, and for that matter, all working in that detention facility. If the members of some other faith come to you for assistance, especially if there is no chaplain from that faith, you are expected to help not only that person, but that faith community to get what they need, within the limitations of that facility and its rules.
In the facility that I visit, I have often met in the Catholic chapel (one of my favorite places on Earth -- heaven with concrete block walls) with a group of Catholic inmates, only to discover that it was time for the Native American, or Latter Day Saints community to use that space for a meeting. We picked ourselves up with a smile, moved our stuff somewhere else, and willingly helped that other group set up. That's part of the deal -- we get to have a space designed and decorated for our needs (which is rather rare in prison) but in turn, we have to be cooperative and hospitable. After all, we don't own the space, the state does.
This kind of cooperation is not some kind of high minded, fluffy, ecumenical idealism. It is a hard ecumenical reality. The only religious groups that can persist inside a secure government owned environment like a prison are groups that can retain their own identity, while supporting the other groups. It's hard enough to be religious inside a prison or jail. You don't need to add sheep-stealing and junior-high school squabbling to the mix. Maybe this chaplain will learn that. I hope so, both for her, and for those inside Rockland County Jail.
(Spelling note: I have added the hyphen to her name, as the only other cite that I could find for her on Google is the agenda for a local government meeting where she supplied the invocation. Apparently either the newspaper or the jail left it off. O maybe the agenda has it wrong. Who knows . . .)
You're right, I haven't been around here much lately, but I do have a good excuse. I haven't given up blogging, I'm expanding. A little over a week ago I started to implement an idea that has been batting around inside my head. I work in detention ministry, currently as a volunteer. However, I have not been able to find a lot online, at least in an easy to find place, on this kind of ministry, or what is happening with it. So, as the classic story goes, it did not exist so I am trying to build it myself.
Hence: Detention Ministry News
It is a Blogger 2.0 site, using a standard template that I am steadily making non-standard with various hacks. The basic idea is one site that tracks news about those who minister to everyone in the justice and detention systems, including prisoners, families, victims, corrections officers -- everyone. I am continually working on some queries into Google's News and Blog Search systems. The items that directly pertain to ministry in some way get briefly excerpted, other news of note about the jail and prison systems are posted in daily sets of headlines. I must say, in getting DMN started, I have managed to learn a great deal about what is going on (much of which worries me) but also notice the stuff that I am not finding. Lots of work yet to make this the kind of site that is needed.
One difference between the two sites is that over at DMN, I am "The Editor" -- the whole point is that the stories should speak for themselves. I am attempting to show what is going on across geography and faith community without favor. However, on this blog, I am, in a sense, myself, writing with my own personal, and rather Catholic, point of view. It will be interesting to see how things interact.
We all have a hunger for certitude, and the problem is that the Gospel is not about certitude, it's about fidelity. So what we all want to do if we can is immediately transpose fidelity into certitude, because fidelity is a relational category and certitude is flat, mechanical category. So we have to acknowledge our thirst for certitude and then recognize that if you had all the certitudes in the world it would not make the quality of your life any better because what we must have is fidelity.
Continuing with comments and reflections on part of a paper by Vatican Observatory astrophysicist Fr. Bill Stoeger SJ, one gets to the question implied at the end of the previous post: if we have to understand the dynamic nature of creation, including evolution, to better understand ourselves and God, then just what can we learn? Fr. Stoeger points us to our need to learn to look at nature as Christians:
Secondly, evolution forces us, therefore, to take the immanence of God in Nature, in creation, in our lives very seriously. God is present and active – in many different and wonderful ways – in all that is going on. Sometimes we tend to think of God’s creative action only in special events of intervention – miracles. But this is a very distorted and constricted view of God’s action. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his “Contemplation for Obtaining Divine Love,” at the end of his Spiritual Exercises, asks us to consider how all the wonderful things around us – including ourselves – the gifts of creation and the gifts of redemption – are expressions of God’s great love for us. After asking us to express our love for God in return in complete commitment, Ignatius goes on to ask us to consider that God is present in all his gifts – not only does God give us gifts as signs of God’s care and love, but God give us God’s self in the gifts. Next, Ignatius goes even further, asking us to reflect on the fact that God is not only present in all that God has created and bestowed but that God is working and struggling for us out of love in all things. It is clear that the first stage of the “Contemplatio” refers to creation, the second stage reflects the profound impact of the Incarnation on all reality, and the third stage sees the immanence of God in terms of vulnerability, struggle and suffering of Christ – of God – in creation. This is the deeply Christian perspective the natural sciences and all the processes they reveal to us reinforce.My rather beat up copy of God in the Dock is not handy -- I had it at work and it got packed up with all my professional books -- but I remember one essay by C. S. Lewis from that collection on the nature of miracles. He pointed out that God has a particular style, that most of what we term miracles are God doing quickly and obviously in one place, as a sign, just what he is doing less obviously throughout His creation. When at Cana, Jesus turned water into wine, He was only doing in an instant what grape vines and yeast will do over months if given the chance. It was a sign pointing to just who was behind the natural process of growth and fermentation, and that it was a gift from God to us.
The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.
I have developed a major dislike of one feature of the new version of Blogger, one that may force me to edit offline, which is simply not all that convenient. This morning was the third time in a week that I got an error message involving a security token issue when trying to save or publish a post, each time losing some hard work. When I tried to return to the previous screen, which before would often take me right back to the work I was editing, it now goes back to an earlier draft, losing any later work. Some people find it easy to write -- I do not. It is often a fight and having to fight the software as well makes it worse.
I'm a software person, and this is a serious usability bitch on my part. Google now owns Blogger, and one part of this change was to move to Google's servers. Google's own AJAX based applications have easier save and autosave features that work much better than this. While they were doing everything else, why not include some of those features. Text editing is text editing -- I have a hard time believing that this is something that Gmail can handle neatly while Blogger cannot.
Well, I managed to set up the format while dropping the Creative Commons license, which has now been fixed. I managed to briefly meet Larry Lessig a couple of years ago at Bloggercon, and think that the CC scheme one of the most useful and innovative efforts in the past decade and a key part of keeping the web open and accessible. It is good stuff indeed.
I've been reflecting a lot lately on how our understanding of the natural world as Christians affects how we see many things, including issues such as global climate change. I recently ran across the text of a talk given in Australia in 2005, Our Intimate Links with the Universe and Nature: The View from Cosmology and Astrobiology by Fr. Bill Stoeger SJ of the Vatican Observatory. I would like to post some substantial chunks of section 6: "Key Features of the Universe – Connections with Christ and with Us" with some surrounding comments and own reflections on this.
The bulk of Fr. Stoeger's talk reviewed the history of Creation, from the big bang, through the evolution of the physical universe, to chemical and biological evolution on Earth. Starting with a discussion of the close links between science, ethics, faith and praxis, he then tells the long story of creation, pointing out not only the deep interconnectedness of all created things, but also the characteristics of nature and the cosmos that reflect God's own priorities for his creation.
In reflecting on the connections between God, his creation and us, Fr. Stoeger starts off by looking at just how God meant nature to operate:
First, and perhaps foremost, theological reflection on the details and intricacies of cosmic and biological evolution drives us to a much more profound appreciation for what Howard Van Till refers to as the functional and formational integrity of creation, and for God’s reverent, pervasive but subtle relationship with God’s creatures and with the universe itself. God has gifted Nature and the universe with inner dynamisms and capacities which enable it not only to function with relative autonomy but also to develop and give birth to new or more complex entities and organisms as time passes, and as the universe cools and expands. There is evidently no need for God to step in and effect key transitions directly. Nature itself has been given the capabilities of doing that! This, of course, does not mean that God is uninvolved, or distant from what happens. God is present and active through all the regularities, processes and relationships which function. God is their source and origin and holds them in existence, continuing to create through them. God did not create the universe with deficiencies, or with impairments, which would necessitate God’s special direct intervention in the creative process.This is pretty straightforward theologically -- see paragraphs 299-302 of the Catechism.
. . . I'm not interested in reading the bible as if it were a text book or an instruction manual. Let's stop pretending we all know how to read the bible. The bible is not a book to be studied. The bible is not a book that can be mastered. The great tragedy of the bible study is it has made the bible dull and boring. The great worry of the bible study is we've turned the bible into a weapon against those who interpret it differently. The bible study has created as many infallible popes as there are Christians, all who believe that they are right because their bible says this or that. The bible is a book to be wrestled with. The bible is a dangerous, world-changing, life-altering text that is out to transform the reader. The bible wants to shape our imagination to the tune of Christ. We might set out to read the bible but it ends up reading us. We need to create regular space for the bible to breathe, for it to live among us, before us, within us. The bible story is not a story to study but to indwell. When reading the bible we need to open ears and close mouths. The bible is always fresh and never stale. The bible does not put God or truth into neat statements. The bible is not God's prison. The bible is God's Word always breaking into our world. The bible is God's gift to the church; not to the individual Christian.
from Baptist youth pastor Andy Goodliff's blog post on bible study and scripture reading
Well, as all two of my regular readers may notice, the appearance of the blog here has changed. I just managed to convert this site to the new Blogger version, with a modified template that fully supports all the new features.
Things that did not make the move included the blockquote formatting and the special print formatting. Both are on my primary list to fix here along with generall formatting changes. Also, look for the blogroll on the right to change a bit -- perhaps even largely disappear. I will also change the widgets for site history and site links a bit.
Just a bit more gardening to do.
Update: Blockquote formatting done.
Optimism
It is wiser to be pessimistic; it is a way of avoiding dissappointment and ridicule, and so wise people condemn optimism. The essence of optimism is not its view of the present, but the fact that it is the inspiration of life, and hope when others give in; it enables a man to hold his head high when everything seems to be going wrong; it gives him strength to sustain reverses and yet to claim the future for himself instead of abandoning it to his opponent. It is true that there is a silly, cowardly kind of optimism, which we must condemn. But the optimism that is will for the future should never be despised, even if it is proved wrong a hundred times; it is health and vitality, and the sick man has no business to impugn it. There are people who regard it as frivolous, and some Christians think it impious for anyone to hope and prepare for a better earthly future. they think that the meaning of present events is chaos, disorder, and catastrophe; and in resignation or pious escapism they surrender all responsibility for reconstruction and for future generations. It may be that the day of judgement will dawn tomorrow; and in that case, though not before, we shall gladly stop working for a better future.
Letters and Papers from Prison
Various people are reacting to the release today of Sacramentum Caritatis but I have noted a little love note to those of us who hang out around prisons and jails.
Care for prisonersThere are some basics to detention ministry -- the foundation being simple presence. But once you have managed to establish regular access, the priority is always to insure that prisoners can have as normal a sacramental life as practical under the circumstances. Security concerns can mandate all sorts of limitations and modifications, but just about any Cathlolic prisoner should have access to the Sacrament. You don't have to persuade prisoners of the importance of the Eucharist in their lives, they will tell you how important it is.
59. The Church's spiritual tradition, basing itself on Christ's own words (cf. Mt 25:36), has designated the visiting of prisoners as one of the corporal works of mercy. Prisoners have a particular need to be visited personally by the Lord in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Experiencing the closeness of the ecclesial community, sharing in the Eucharist and receiving holy communion at this difficult and painful time can surely contribute to the quality of a prisoner's faith journey and to full social rehabilitation. Taking up the recommendation of the Synod, I ask Dioceses to do whatever is possible to ensure that sufficient pastoral resources are invested in the spiritual care of prisoners.
Well, as promised, I will be posting summaries of some of the sessions I attended at the RE Congress this year, with some reflections of my own. I will be taking them in no particular order, and it may take some days to get through them all.
My Saturday morning session was Reading Them Again for the First Time: The Documents of Vatican II Today with Dr. Edward Hahnenberg from Xavier University in Cincinnati. He got a laugh from the hundred or so people there by pointing out that the title of the session might be more accurate if you left one word out -- again. Our task is to reclaim these documents for ourselves, documents that are largely unread by many Catholics, including people in ministry. We all tend to have read some particular passages, usually because they support some position we already hold. These are the most important texts produced by the Catholic Church in the past four centuries or so, and we need to know them as they really are.
Hahnenberg's basic point is "the spirit is in the letter", meaning that we have to learn how to read and understand the documents fully -- we need what is known as a hermeneutic -- a systematic approach to interpreting and understanding the work of the Council through these texts.
In constructing a hermeneutic of the Vatican II documents, Hahnenberg cited a favorite book of mine, Ormond Rush's Still Interpreting Vatican II: Some Hermeneutical Principles, defining three complementary approaches for interpretation:
I've fallen into a new habit lately -- searching through YouTube for music. Like everyone else, I've followed links to watch people putting Mentos into Diet Coke. It has just been over the past couple of weeks, though, that I have been creating my own favorites and playlists of music, that is often running in the background as I work online. There are some unique clips of both sacred and secular music out there and I just got the urge to start sharing some. Here's video of the Pat Metheny Group playing Last Train Home:
I did get back to my room much earlier last night -- I came back after Mass around 7 and just kicked back with a movie then got to bed relatively early (at least compared to the night before). I'm heading home up I-5 later today, and with any luck across LA I should be able to beat the 7 hours it took to get down here Thursday.
I have lots to post about, but little time at this point. Good sessions on the Vatican II documents and adult faith formation, both of which will get their own posts. One note now on the Mass last night. As has become my custom, I attended the contemplative Mass at the Hilton last night, with Fr. Liam Lawton celebrating and Fr. Cyprian Consiglio leading the music. It was sublime, one of the better worship experiences I have ever had. The best sign of that (that can be posted) is simple: There were easily 2,500 there (maybe more) and not one person left early.
To give you perspective, Congress is so large that it can be difficult to find a place to have dinner after Mass, especially on Saturday night. If you have a reservation, you make sure you get there on time, or go hungry. At that Mass last night, nobody cared about dinner or their schedules. This included the ten minutes of silent meditation after communion -- a room that large with that many people holding complete silence has its own sound.
Sorry about this brief post, but it was a late night last night, and I need to get to Congress early this morning. Good sessions yesterday, especially from Juan Melendez, who spent 17 years on Florida's death row before being exonerated, and an excellent presentation on the US Catholic Catechism for Adults from Dr. Tom Beaudoin of Santa Clara. I'll be posting some links and a summary of the session on the USCCA later. The African-American Mass last night was excellent, as usual, with Fr. J-Glenn Murray celbrating. The Taize prayer session was OK, but I really could have used the extra sleep. I may skip the night prayer session tonight.
Otherwise, no big happenings or news so far -- the bankruptcy filing for the Diocese of San Diego is still the big story around here. Today the schedule includes a review of the documents of Vatican II, adult spirituality, and praying the hours. More later.
