“This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion” Vladimir Nabokov said, giving a lecture on Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Even the most pathetic passages of the prison conditions were not emancipatory ethical tracts or polemical dirges eliciting an "participative emotion," pity. But shown as real texture, evocative features.    In case of arrest in DC as part of the Poor People's Campaign, I summon a temperature of support for childcare from friends during an after school playdate. Immediately I'm asked, admiringly, justifying "the lack of effect?" Prison is relaxing, presuming the subjectivity of becoming, the unfolding-self that becomes a self in relation with prisoners of conscience who have walked before you, a relation in Kierkegaard's  Sickness Unto Death  that ultimately refers to God. Yes, the Dakota Access Pipeline now chug-lops through sacred lands while Water Protector Jessica Reznicek  writes of "battling depression" an...

A caption of a photograph I saw today said, "The Catholic Chapel was among the buildings severely damaged by rioting inmates." It struck me as an expression of moral outrage on the part of the captives, seeking to shock the moral compass, calling out against the complicity of the Church in the punishment paradigm. I was reading in response to my pastor's column about why he had signed The National Catholic Pledge to End the Death Penalty. It includes the following: "I will educate myself and my community about the injustices of the death penalty, including the ways it risks innocent life, fails victims' families, and contradicts the Catholic Church's pro-life teaching."  The most extreme form of corporal punishment, the death penalty has gone by other names. Charles Justice is one of them. The authors of Inside the Ohio Penitentiary account for the attribution of the invention of the modern electric chair to Charles Justice. He had been in and out ...