“That’s what we would say on the reservation” my mother said, “all my relations.” She’s reading The Water Protectors to one daughter as the other runs back and forth from the kitchen giving her bandaged arm a kiss. I’ve just rolled up her sweater to see the wound from a skin cancer surgery this week she hasn’t told me about. “They glued it shut” she said, but it’s opened and my spouse finds a large bandaid to dress it. “It may not stick. I’ve had it since 2012” Emily said. "It's a Jubilee year," Emily tells me, referring to the act of biblical justice (Isaiah 61); every fifty years all the captives were released--I'm less intrigued about the custom in ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, than I am in the interpretation of God's time. Convinced that the lessons of Biblical truth about the time of Justice must inform our advocacy today. If God made us to know the meaning of the times, to anticipate the coming of God’s Kingdom of Justice from the same sense by which...

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of Guantánamo I want to take on three intertwining topics: The Ideal Victim, the Bystander, and Force Feeding.  The Ideal Victim Out of criminology--the concept of the 'ideal victim' is someone for whom people feel comfortable advocating. "So for instance people feel comfortable advocating against the Muslim Ban" Dr. Maha Hilal explains, "but not when it comes to the offshore Muslim prison Guantanamo." In exploring the use of "the ideal victim" to substantiate institutionalized Islamophobia, Dr. Hilal  pivots a counter-narrative about Guantanamo Bay.  What "the ideal victim" describes has important implications for advocates. Advocates, witnesses and active bystanders take actions whether or not they act up to intervene in situations. Thus,In part I believe because people of faith do not see Guantánamo--a circular logic we have to investigate. That blindness is a position reinforced by organized distraction b...

Draft resisters Fr. Tony Mullaney, Jim Forest and John Bach endured federal sentences savoring the victory of permanently effacing the War Department’s draft record, sparing lives. Forest would call his year in prison a sabbatical. When he received a NASA photograph of Earth through the prison mail, Forest contemplated it for hours. Bach, recalled his "draft bit" an ideal compared to the floating space station Metropolitan Correctional Center. The maximum security prison was “a Bicentennial metaphor,” he wrote to supporters, for how out of touch the country was, the best it could see to make off the poor while it waged fronts increasing the gap of the rich and poor, sustaining “a permanent war economy, a permanent national security, a permanent emergency.” Eleven stories up from “Park Row” in New York City, he felt so isolated the street might as well have been in Paris or Rome. By then  Forest was on a caper in Paris with a friend climbing the roof of the Chartres cathedral....

“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...

  From the practical to the political and prosaic, here are my top picks.  Home Improvement Heather J. Paper,  Built-Ins Idea Book .  The Taunton Press, 2017. (Minuteman Library Network records linked.)  Neighborhood  What's neat about that new manhole on Partridge street, or the graffiti under the bridge? Spike Carlsen's,   A Walk Around the Block : Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (And Know Nothing About)  New York: HarperCollins, 2020.  Ask, Listen, Empower: Grounding Your Library Work in Community Engagement. Eds. Mary Davis Fournier and Sarah Ostman. Chicago: ALA, 2021.  For kids  Jarrett Dapier and Eugenia Mello,  Jazz for Lunch .  Atheneum, 2021.  Mo Willems,  Knuffle Bunny Free .  New York: Balzer, 2010.  History/Biography (For Martin Luther King Jr. Day)  Audio CD available of this biography by Tufts Professor Kerri K. Greenid...

  The Mass will also be livestreamed at  http:// saintpatrickscathedral.org/ live Starting on Monday, November 29 (the anniversary of Dorothy Day's death), please join us in praying a  Novena in Gratitude  which will culminate on December 8. Each day's meditation will be posted on the Guild's website ( www.dorothydayguild.org ) and FB. 

  We're expecting to house refugees, people fleeing from Afghanistan. The roots of our effort is nourished in prayer as a community with these principle passages from Scripture:  “You shall treat the alien who resides among you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself, for you too were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (Lev. 19:5) “What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” (Matthew 25) “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” (Hebrews 13:2) In light of the Paulist Center Immigration Advocacy Group, and considering Pope Francis's invocation of a synod on the theme of synodality in the life of the Church, I've endeavored to compile sources of Catholic Social Teaching. It could be a working t heory of change, as I've written on this blog, in a time of listening . Overview: Sources of Catholic Social Teaching include but are not limited to Biblica...