Category: mercy

Ira Glass exposes the drug war in a small Georgia town

April 1, 2011April 4, 2011 · 3 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

If you’re like me, Ira Glass is the seductive, soft-spoken storyteller you occasionally encounter while working in the garage on a Saturday afternoon. This America Life is captivating radio. Ira Glass pulls us into a story with unadorned language. He speaks without exclamation points or rhetorical flourishes, but you can’t stop listening. The other day I was painting some lawn furniture I had rescued from a neighbor’s lawn (he was throwing it out, I promise!) when This America Life came on. I was disappointed to learn that Ira Glass had ceded his microphone to a guest storyteller and pictured the unassuming Ira catching a few rays in the Bahamas. But I was wrong. Ira was down in Georgia, putting the finishing touches to an hour-long expose of Amanda Williams, a Superior Court judge who suffers from a peculiarly American form of madness.

Here’s a summary of the Part 1: (more…)

Feeding the market for American mythology

March 31, 2011April 12, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

Two articles grabbed my attention this morning. The first deals with fairy tales about the Christian origins of America; the second addresses civil war fairy tales (hint: it had nothing to do with slavery).

Every trained historian, regardless of personal ideology, knows that America was founded by Deists and high church Protestants who were desperate to save their fledgling nation from European-style religious wars. Hence the separation of church and state.

Similarly, you would be hard pressed to find a single person who has studied American history at the graduate level who would argue that Southern slavery was irrelevant to the civil war. Unfortunately, the sentimental attachment to Christian-America and the confederate Lost Cause is so passionate that elaborate mythologies arise unbidden to satisfy the demand.

Over at Talk to Action, Chris Rodda begins a jaw-dropping post thusly: (more…)

Tulia and the spell of mass incarceration

March 29, 2011April 12, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

Gary Gardner, moments before heading down to a protest at the state capital with Friends of Justice and a bus full of Tulia residents, September 2000

By Alan Bean

This is the text of a speech delivered at a Friends Committee on Legislation of California banquet in Whittier, California, March 26, 2011.

When I arrived in Tulia in the summer of 1998, I didn’t know very much about mass incarceration and the war on drugs. I had no idea that Texas, the state we had just moved to, had almost quadrupled its prison population between 1988 and 1998, or that the number of prisons had grown from 16 in 1980 to 108 in 2000.

Nor did I realize that the average family income of America’s poorest 20 percent increased 116% between 1947 and 1979 and had given back half of those gains between 1983 and 1998.

I didn’t realize that the American incarceration rate once mirrored western democracies like Canada, Great Britain and Germany, but had recently grown to six times the size of other nations.

For twenty years our family had been shuffling around the United States and Canada, and Nancy wanted our children to experience the love and support of family. Everything was going according to plan until we saw the headline in the local newspaper, “Tulia streets cleared of garbage.” (more…)

Quinn signs Illinois death penalty ban

March 9, 2011March 12, 2011 · 1 Comment ·

Pat Quinn did it! The death penalty is dead in Illinois! (If you would like to congratulate the Illinois governor, Amnesty International has a nifty little form to fill out.)

Illinois becomes the fourth state to abolish the death penalty–the others are New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.

This was a tough call for a governor who has been aggressively lobbied by folks on both sides of the death penalty debate. The tipping point appears to have been the 20 innocent defendants convicted in the state of Illinois. “To have a consistent, perfect death penalty system … that’s impossible in our state,” Quinn explained. “I think it’s the right and just thing to abolish the death penalty and punish those who commit heinous crimes — evil people — with life in prison without parole and no chance of release.” (more…)

NPR and the American Mainstream

March 9, 2011March 9, 2011 · 1 Comment ·

National Public Radio CEO, Vivian Schiller, has resigned after two high-profile NPR executives were caught on tape saying that the Republican Party had been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that the Tea Party was essentially a white-only organization dominated by gun-toting zealots on the racist fringes of American society.

Ms. Schiller had been criticized last October for what many considered her ungracious and impolitic response to the Juan Williams fiasco.

Most of the controversial remarks caught on video were nade by Ronald Schiller (no relation to Ms. Schiller). Mr. Schiller had been invited to a fancy luncheon by two Republican provocateurs posing as deep-pocket Muslim activists representing a mythical Muslim group that was supposedly planning to give NPR a $5 million gift.

The timing of this latest fiasco couldn’t be worse. Leading Republicans have been arguing that NPR was far too left-of-center to receive federal support. According to this argument, it’s okay for FOX News to slant its reporting to the right because it is a private agency. The liberal bias of NPR is a more serious matter, critics contend, because the organization is feeding at the federal teat. (more…)

McLaren: Is God Violent?

February 18, 2011February 18, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

This succinct article summarizes a chapter in Brian McLaren’s excellent book, A New Kind of Christianity. This piece was originally published in Sojourners and has also appeared in Christian Ethics Today. How should Christians think and feel about the criminal justice system, in general, and the death penalty, in particular? Everything hinges on the nature of God. Alan Bean

Is God Violent?

By Brian McLaren

I recently received a note from a pastor and missionary we’ll call Pete. It went like this: ”I have read most of what you have written, including A New Kind of Christianity…I would say I am in agreement with [much of what you write], but I do think you bring disservice to this argument in the evangelical world when you shun the ‘violence’ of God and the subsequent need for the cross’ justification, which was also quite violent.” (more…)

Isaiah 58:1-12: a word to the righteous

February 8, 2011February 8, 2011 · 8 Comments ·

"Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

A new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration must flow from narratives of faith. Isaiah 58 is a natural starting place.

The setting for this prophecy is the hard years following the return from Babylonian captivity, approximately 500 BCE. The people who made the trek back to Jerusalem quickly became disillusioned. The walls of holy city were still broken down. Solomon’s glorious temple lay in ruins. Work began on a new temple, a modest structure a fraction the size of the building it replaced, but progress was slow.

The people had expected more. Much more. They couldn’t understand why God was letting them down. Their commitment to Torah had strengthened considerably during the hard years of exile. Worship attendance, sabbath keeping and tithing were all way up.

Still the people struggled. They couldn’t understand why such bad things were happening to such good people.

Isaiah’s response speaks for itself. (more…)