Crucify Him!

The more I read about the so-called justice system in the United States (the influence of which is spreading around the world in unhelpful ways), the more the problems become evident--problems whose seriousness is only magnified incalculably when the death penalty is on the table. What are Christians of all traditions doing to challenge the state and reform its penal processes in a humane way? Friends who have been involved in prison chaplaincy tell me that the Christian presence in too many penitentiaries in this country is virtually non-existent, which is a great shame on the Church.

Too often it seems we lock people away and forget about them, entrusting them to the tender mercies of the nation-state. That Christians today are willing to give obeisance to an all-powerful state and its organs is a shocking form of borderline idolatry, as William Cavanaugh, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre and others have been arguing for thirty years. A book coming out in November challenges Christian anew in this regard: Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2015), 320pp.

About this updated version the publisher tells us:

The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylor's award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of "Lockdown America" and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a "theatrics of state terror," Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments—mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment—through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the US a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism. Against this, The Executed God proposes a "counter-theatrics to state terror," a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples' movements. These are all intrinsic to a Christian politics of remembrance of the Jesus executed by empire. Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms "a liberating material spirituality" to unseat the state that kills.

Visiting Prisoners

In the ante-Lenten period of preparation we have now begun, Byzantine Christians will presently hear the chilling passage from Matthew's gospel on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, sometimes popularly called Meatfare Sunday, which this year is February 23. There Christ poses a series of questions to disturb us all, asking, inter alia, when we visited Him by visiting those in prison. From priestly friends in pastoral ministry, I have several times heard how the number of Christian, especially Catholic and Orthodox, chaplains in full-time prison ministry in this country is abysmally low. And we have repeatedly heard recently about the outrageously high rates at which people are clapped into gaol in this country, at far higher rates than any other major country in the world. Clearly there is much brokenness here on many levels.

A new book by Amy Levad, then, is very welcome in reflecting theologically on these problems: Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration (Fortress Press, 2014), 192pp.

About this book we are told:

The United States criminal justice system is in a state of crisis, from unprecedented rates of imprisonment and recidivism to the privatization of the prison system and the disproportionate representation of particular racial, ethnic, social, and economic groups, all of which is within a larger social justice context. Catholics and Protestants have largely failed to offer vital theological responses. Amy Levad offers a Catholic perspective that directly addresses the concrete issues from a strongly interdisciplinary approach and utilizes the rich liturgical and sacramental resources of penance and Eucharist to offer a theological vision of reform.