Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everybody and welcome to another installment of Unraveling Religion. I'm here with Chris Barbera, who has.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Co authored or conceived and edited and.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Written, conceived, edited and written a book entitled Prison Theology.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Yes, it's born out of the work that we do with people in prison.
This organization, a small nonprofit, Jesus the Liberator. We offer free theological education to people in prison.
And from that we codified some of our knowledge and experience into this book form.
And the last question of the preface ends, can the criminal on the cross be the incarcerated executed Godhead?
We looked at the Christian religion and Christians worship a God, a human God, who was criminal and who was executed by the powers that be. And so we wondered why 21st century Christians were not more responsive to people in prison and more responsive to addressing the massive prison industrial complex if the God they worship was a criminal.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: From a Christian perspective, obviously the meaning that we derive from the teachings of Jesus are personal and what we are called to do is different for everybody. And can you tell me a little bit about how you were called to this work?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: My instinct is towards humanitarian social justice activity. And so I had met the founder of this organization several years ago and he invited me in and step by step I got more involved. And when he stepped down a couple years ago, I inherited the organization. Hugh Pratt, Reverend Hugh Pratt studied at an all black theological seminary in the South. And I mean he grew up in a pre civil rights southern town in South Carolina, so a heavily racist segregated community.
Well, he's a white man, but his heart is with people and with poor black people. And he's still alive. But he established this particular effort to offer free education, originally offering free education for poor people, a lot of homeless people, a lot of people with drug addiction, a lot of people with things that were considered mental illness, a lot of people that were coming out of prison.
So really like the dispossessed of society, the oppressed of society, who don't really have access to traditional education, were offered free education. So a core of professors from Canisius and UB and Daemon, you know, local universities here, as well as some ministers, inner city ministers got together and set up classes. And then from then, over time we, the focus shifted from that to offering this education to people in prison. We had a national correspondence and then from the national correspondence, a couple students in New York State actually took courses and wanted to establish a class inside prison. So we helped them do that at Groveland Correctional Facility. So that example of Groveland, which is in about south of Rochester in Letchworth park area, as most prisons are in the rural areas, you know, in primarily Republican districts. But that's another topic, just as a side note, I mean, that prisoners are counted as constituents, but they're not allowed to vote. So that's a very, you know, political game that they play. So we established this class at Groveland through a couple people. Ken Lashway was an inmate and he writes about that a little bit in this book and some other Ernie and the chaplain there was Dr. Juan Carmona, the chaplain. And the inmates and members of our organization all came together and established this theological education within prison that was co taught by inmates and people on the outside or the chaplain on the inside. So it was a really collaborative effort, a co creation by inmates and people outside.
And so we look at that because some universities and other organizations go into prison with traditional religion, traditional spirituality, and then offer it to the people inside. And what we do is we have the inmates give equal weight like that their experience and their knowledge is held in equal weight to a PhD.
So we honor and respect both forms.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Of knowledge, honoring the innate wisdom, the innate wisdom that is in each human being and each being.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yes, yes. And experiential knowledge as well as academic knowledge that religion or spirituality is not just a cerebral exercise. There's also, we look at character based education and also things like devotion, you know, the depth of concern or love somebody may have is as valid, if not more valid than words on a page or rational academic knowledge. So we just kind of synthesize, we try to synthesize all these different forms of knowledge to create a blueprint for how theology can be within prison, both coming out of prison or going into prison. And another example from Christianity is that the writer Paul the Greek, who was helped to establish, was the main evangelical person of early Christianity. He wrote four letters from prison.
So four of the epistles were written while he was in prison to people on the outside.
So even not only was the original founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ an inmate criminal, but also Paul, the main proponent of Christianity was also a criminal. My understanding of the Pharisees and the scribes, the Sanhedrin and the very educated intellectual Hebrew, well, intelligentsia was the Jewish religion was trying to survive within the Roman Empire.
And so they created a culture within the empire. And Jesus was of that culture.
But then he would say, well, let's go one step further and extend it to the parable of the Samaritan or the non Jewish people, the Gentiles, but also poor people, that there were certain Levitical laws about cleanliness or purity. And there was good reason for these laws. But he would say that it's more important what comes out of your mouth than what goes in your mouth, for instance. So he did try to synthesize or bring together the intelligentsia, the ministers, the high priests of that culture with the people that were excluded from.
So he identified, people would ask him, well, why are you eating with sinners?
Meaning, you know, it could be seen as like poor people or oppressed people. And it's kind of what Mahatma Gandhi did in India when he brought together the untouchables with the Brahmins, that the very Fenoba Bhave was an example of a disciple of Gandhi, who was the first one to oversee the entering of the Herogen, which is the children of God, which is the lowest order of society, into the temples in India.
So the temples were reserved for the very highly respected, intelligent, healthy, complete people. But the integration of untouchables and breaking down that stigma of poverty, or what is considered unto untouchable, this all synthesizes.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Kind of nicely, right? I mean, in some ways, I think so.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: So we looked at the 21st century American prison industrial complex, which is the largest in the world, even larger than China, which is the most populous country in the world.
So we incarcerate more people as a percentage of the population as well as in sheer numbers of the population. And then you include with that things like parole or supervision or work camps, etc. Etc. Then the numbers are just astounding that we have an incarcerated nation.
And why is it that the wealthiest nation in the world also incarcerates the most people in the world?
So then you have to look at the class dimension, that most people in prison are poor. And you also have to look at the racial component, that most people in prison are people of color.
So we look at race and class and mental. Rather than treating people as a health issue, rather than treating people that are considered mentally ill with health, they're just thrown into prison oftentimes and demonized and criminalized in that way.
So yes, we tried to. So those are the situation. And what we try to do is offer solutions, both, you know, personal testimony. Some of the essays were written by people in prison and talked about how they survive emotionally or spiritually or intellectually within this confinement, within this very harsh, aggressive, you know, violent and judgmental environment.
What kind of tools, spiritual tools, can a person use to survive in that? So some of the literature we look at Jewish Holocaust literature alongside of black nationalism.
So there's A lot of black nationalist literature, you know, like Malcolm X and George Jackson, Angela Davis, and more recently, Mumia Abu Jamal and Michelle Alexander wrote about the new Jim Crow. So that's all from the African American experience.
And then there's a host of survival, Jewish survival literature that we looked at as well. And then we looked at some Buddhist methods of detachment, methods of meditation.
There was a man, Bo Lozof, who wrote We're All Doing Time.
And in the early 70s, he created the Prison Ashram Project with Ram Dass, where he conceived of the prison as an ashram that is conceived of the prison as a house of God.
So it kind of breaks the stigma and helps people on the inside, which.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Is fundamentally what it is. It's just. We don't see it that way. Right. I mean, it is there, if you want to take it from a Buddhist perspective, that there are the six realms that we cycle through. The earth is the field of the Lord. Whether it's perceived by people as what it is does not lessen what it is.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Okay, I can. Yeah, we can think about that for a moment.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Well, I'm just. I'm just saying in relation to your statement, you know what I mean, that I can understand why it was said that way.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Okay. Yes.
Kind of the two approaches that we looked at, that there are some people that look at just the political liberation of people, and then some people look at, like, just the spiritual liberation of people.
In some ways, we look at.
We see relevance of both approaches, and we try to find that gray area or that. That intersection of those two areas.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: The synthesis.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah, the synthesis of how, in short, you know, short of words, how politics and religion kind of intersect or how genuine spirituality is a physical thing and should not be some abstracted principle.
The incarnation within a world of suffering. This is one of the teachings of Buddhism, the first noble truth of that all life is suffering. And that's not a nihilistic perspective. That's just a very acknowledgement of the condition we're in. And I think that from the Christian tradition as well, the incarnation of the Godhead into this world of suffering, and that the incarnated God takes on the suffering of the world, even to the death on the cross, even to being imprisoned within the world of suffering. So in a sense, there is that. That metaphor and also that reality.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: The metaphor and the reality, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: And we talk about incarnate, that ethics is an incarnation, that law. The law is an incarnation of ethics.
So that law should not be used to punish people, but it should be Used to liberate people. And so law, and religious law, religious justice, is a restorative, is a liberatory practice, and we believe should be viewed in that way rather than as a form of bondage, a form of. People in prison often talk to us about that. We don't want to just be imprisoned. Like, we want freedom of thought.
So we respect, you know, freedom of thought, just like I would with you, that you have your own conscience and you have the freedom of your conscience, and that there is freedom of thought. So we don't want to go into prison and impose a doctrine or a dogma upon people.
We want to honor their freedom because in many ways that's the only freedom they have, that their physical freedom has been taken away.
And so what they have left is their mental or their spiritual emotional freedom.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: And so the imagination, we don't want.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: In part, so there is moral imagination that we want to. William Blake, the poet, often talked about the.
The moral imagination. So that the imagination is not like, tied into, you know, oftentimes sex or violence or something like in the reptilian mind.
But imagination is tied into this higher conception of potential reality, you know, that we envision a world. And so we want to tap into that kind of.
And we find that, you know, people that are in prison, even though that there's, you know, certain limitations and there's certainly not a hospitable environment, nonetheless, do have a lot of time on their hands.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: And so if there could be a way for them to creatively express themselves or to have, you know, to encourage people to engage in critical thinking, then the combination of critical thinking and creative expression is very powerful, especially with a person that has transformed themselves.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: So that's the kind of experience or message that's been coming out of people that we've been working with.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Wonderful, wonderful. Did you want to turn to the book itself? Any section that you wanted to point out or review?
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Eight different writers.
A few of the people were in prison. One person is still in. A couple people were just released.
And they talk about.
It's kind of a personal testimony. And some of them look at.
We encourage people to take some of the stories of the Bible and related to their experience. And so there are many examples of incarceration within the Bible, not just Jesus and Paul, who we talked about, but also early on, there is Joseph, the young, the younger son of Jacob, and he was sold into bondage by his brothers.
And while he was in the prison of the pharaoh, the king of Egypt, he experienced incredible visions and dreams. And interpreted dreams of the pharaoh. He was one of the earliest examples of, or maybe the first example of a character in the Bible who was incarcerated.
And this woman, Michelle, she wrote about journey and reconciliation, and she looked at the story of Moses. And this woman, Laurie, she also looked at Moses as a journey through the wilderness. And so the story of Moses is also somebody who committed murder. He had killed an Egyptian, and then he fled into the desert, and it was his time of.
In exile on Mount Sinai.
So he.
That's an example of.
She looked at, like the journey through the wilderness, taking that story of Moses and equating it to the 21st century prison experience in America, that. That her experience in prison was her time of a journey through the wilderness.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Sure, sure.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: So taking those stories and making it relevant to their own experience, which is a more relevant way of looking at theology rather than some eternal truth, some untouchable prince, some absolute truth that is absolute through every generation, every generation, and never changes, but it's taking these eternal truths and making it relevant for every generation or each person, each person, and each person, and also each circumstance. Because society changes and the circumstances of our society change, but the truth don't change. So it's just finding a way to apply these universal, perennial truths to the context that we find ourselves in or the personal experience we find ourselves in. So we were doing that through theology, and we're not exclusive to just a religious. We look at psychology, we look at sociology and literature.
So we look at all these realms. A lot of memoirs, a lot of, you know, we have a spiritual autobiography where people speak about their personal experience.
And then from their personal experience, we apply a.
An educational approach.
So it's very personal, a personalized education.
And also through facilitation, that you are.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Creating community through two people or a group of people, a community coming together in communion in a kind of a unified way that is really developing and benefiting both parties or all parties. And thus you would take it up. It wouldn't happen.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: And community is. Yeah, thank you. And that is true. That community benefits both people and both parties involved. And it's. And community is not something that we choose, like a Facebook where you like only who you like. You know, you choose who you like or you choose who you want to associate with.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: But it's. You. You have community, you have communion with the people that you find yourself struggling with, that. That it is a struggle and that this is a community born out of struggle.
So in a lot of ways, that this prison theology is It's a part.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Of each one of us, whether we want to recognize it or not, whether we.
It may not come to bear directly in our lives, but it could.
And the underlying truth is that it is. This is all we are intimate with. All this in a communal sense, in a community sense, that my dark aspects can affect things if left unrecognized and put me in harm's way and in jeopardy.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: You know, yeah, that is the universal kind of democratic appeal to what you're saying.
But I would also include with that a stream of thought, which is liberation theology, which was born out of Latin America in the Vatican ii era, the 1960s, that was very. From the grassroots. A lot of poor people, a lot of.
And also in the. In the. What is called the secular realm, you know, people like Paulo Freire wrote a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
So pedagogy is a teaching method.
So that the teaching the pedagogy of the oppressed people. And this is a revolutionary notion because a lot of people believe that unless you go to Harvard or Yale, unless you have the pedagogy of the oppressor, then it's not relevant.
Not that necessarily people that go to Ivy League schools are oppressors, but I think it does in some ways reflect the mainstream values of society that it does represent.
So we're trying to integrate both perspectives of oppressed and oppressor, that the intimate link between the oppressed and oppressor needs to be either found. You either have to find communion between these different groups, or you have to break that bondage which. Dissolve it, dissolve it. Which keeps that dichotomous way of living, the separation between oppressed and oppressor. As we read through our spiritual traditions, I think in Buddhism, that was a revelation, a revolution at that time, too, that kind of break the static quality of the Brahmins in northern India.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: At that time, you were bringing up Buddhism just as I was thinking about this notion of the Bodhisattva, the being who responds to.
Hears the cries of the world and responds to them. And Jesus is a Bodhisattva.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yes.
So, and who Jesus is, who is considered Jesus? And that's what we are saying, that the racism and the classism, that one of the prevailing notions that is, if you're poor, you must be lazy and you must be immoral and you must be stupid. And so that, like, somehow intelligence and morality, personal character got tied into, like, the amount of wealth that you possess.
And we're trying to break free of that notion by saying by shining a light upon people in prison that are brilliant people, that are articulate people, that are moral people, in order for the person to grow through that, that there has to be some space given, some restorative space, some love given to that person, some opportunity for that person.
Of course, you still. But within. Implicit within that is an accountability.
So it's not one or the other. We see it as the same thing.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: What do you mean by that?
[00:22:57] Speaker B: That a person is freed through working through their trials and tribulations, you know, that they're. And the other thing is that there is a. We do want to look at what is considered a crime and what is actually criminalized.
So that there's, you know, generally poor people are criminalized and rich people are rewarded.
So that's making that distinction, how these things are assessed. Like why this woman was.
Now will spend the rest of her life in jail, whereas the man who was abusing her never.
So I mean, we look at those things and equality of the law, again, it doesn't condone or say that what was done was proper, but we try to be realistic about it from our assessment. That's why we look at it from a spiritual perspective, that the entire prison system in some ways is built upon these edifices of judge. To judge and to punish.
I judge you and then I punish you.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: And this is, you know.
And of course, you know, Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, you know, that there is a punishment for the crime.
And these kind of questions, you know, certainly, I mean, they're very valid questions and perennial questions. But what is judgment and why is it in this system, vicarious pleasure that people get through witnessing horror or torture? Carl Jung talked about the archetypes and the dark side and such like that. So psychologically there is truth to that. And within the prison system, and that's the most obvious manifestation of this dark violence in our society.
So we're just trying to reconceptualize how society can deal with infractions upon the laws that it creates. Or if somebody in society causes harm to others in society. We believe there's a better way to address it than the current system. The current prison industrial complex. Well, it is like the military industrial complex. It's become like a business. It's become like this own.
So that's. When we look at. That's the essence of it. We look at society, the society that incarcerates as well as the individual who is incarcerated.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: It goes back. I was just looking at the book and can the criminal on the cross be the incarcerated, executed godhead of these.
Of the writings here? Chris?
Jesus and reconciliation.
And the whole notion of reconciliation is a very powerful one. Right. I mean, if you. To reconcile. To reconcile seems to bring a whole host of things to a point, a crux.
It's like bringing the sin or the. The incident and the rehabilitation all into. It's a reconciliation. It is a. It's reconciling the moment. It is re. Re.
Refiguring it. Right.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And that was a woman in Virginia who wrote that, Michelle.
And she looked at the reconciliation of Moses, the reconciliation of Jesus, but reconciliation of people as well. People on the outside with people on the inside, and also reconciling what's within oneself.
So there's reconciliation on many levels and also reconciling the victim with the offender. And this is a key insight of restorative justice, that the offender and the victim need to find reconciliation.
As the system set up now, there's no opportunity for reconciliation. It's within New York State, for instance, it would be John Doe versus New York State.
It would not be John Doe and Jane Doe reconciling what was the harm done, or not trying to amend the harm done, but rather it becomes an impersonalized thing. So there's no opportunity for the offender and the victim to come together. And studies and experience have shown that that's what needs to take place in order for genuine healing or rehabilitation to occur.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: And understanding.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: And understanding, yeah. So she would. And then taking it one step further, that the victim, if the victim, when the victim finds the internal strength to offer reconciliation to the offender.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: This is what Dr. King articulated within the civil rights struggle, that the African American community is the victim of the white racist system. And yet, even though that were true, it was the black community that reconciled itself to the white community.
So that's why he was such a profound figure of reconciliation, that as a victim, he reconciled with the offender.
And so in many ways, we are looking at the people in prison and reconciling, but it gets a little more complicated because many people in prison have been the offender. The majority of cases are, of course, I mean, but they are also victims. Oftentimes they are victims of poverty and victims of circumstance in life. So becoming a victim of it puts it in a context. So there's so many layers of victim and offender, and we just try to, again, suspend judgment and to come from a place of love.
And it's not sentimental love. I mean, love is very dirty and very real.
So it's not a pie in the sky kind of love, but it is a genuine, like a concern for another human being.
No matter what you have done, we still love you, we still forgive you, we still honor you.
You can't force people to heal. You can't force people to love. I mean, of course it has to be voluntary and we have to respect that. You know, people come about it at their own time. So, yeah, I mean, it's creating that environment, really.
And one of the answers we spoke about earlier to disconnect is to form a community.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: So we're in the process now of distributing this literature to different people in society. We sent copies to every prison in New York State, the chaplain's office, and some connections we have, as well as some connections we have in Ohio and Virginia and other places.
Systems, prison systems. So we're connecting with the inmates and the chaplains and the educational specialists in prison.
Then we focused on this book project and this writing project. So now we're back to reinvigorating the National Correspondence Program.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Sure, sure.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: So we, you know, trying to reinvigorate our previous connections.
So we're sending it back into the prisons and back to the inmates and back to the people that work with the inmates, basically the educational specialists or the chaplains.
And also on the outside, there are certain progressive churches like in Washington D.C.
a large black community in Washington, that there are certain social justice oriented church communities that we're sending it to. And also people, different churches that have supported our organization. So we try to encourage them to develop groups within their community that can assist people or address the prison industrial complex.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Sure, sure.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: And then also within some prison systems there are things like restorative justice programs within the prison and we want to connect with them.
And also through this literature to say, well, this is our offering. How can this synthesize with what you're doing and what kind of connections can we build with what you're doing? So we've been building a national kind of network of particularly theological, restorative, religious justice communities on the outside. And also there's some universities that we've been looking at. Of course, New York Theological Seminary years ago established a program at Sing Sing and Duke and Harvard and Cornell and different universities have prison programs. And we're going to, you know, try to connect with them, with the perspective that again, what we talked about earlier, that the connection between the well placed in society are not more valid than people in prison, that the knowledge or experience that comes from the most oppressed people should go hand in hand with the people that have had privilege, the privilege to have the best health care, the best education, which then produced better opportunities. And we don't want to discount that. I mean, there is a certain wisdom that comes out of good training, but there is also a wisdom that comes out of a sharing as well. And also like the from the bottom up kind of wisdom that comes out of suffering and knowledge that comes out of experience or intuition.
So we're really trying to, you know, create that network of, across the country of both of universities, churches, restorative justice centers, and inmates inside.
And that's the larger community that we're talking about.
And the thing that binds that community together would be this prison theology, this theological knowledge of how to put a language, a spiritual language upon this system we're trying to address.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: Do you have a vision for where this is all going?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Multitudes of people in prison in relationship with different communities on the outside, be they universities or churches, you know, synagogues or mosques, but any kind of religious community on the outside.
Academics and people of faith and people of knowledge or academics and spirituality, however you want to define those lines. But with people in prison. So that's our community is the church, the university and the inmate. And really seeing like that the church and the university is within the inmate is within all people, really. But when the church and the university are seen being born out of the prison system, then that's our way of, like, dissolving the harshness of the prison system. And it's a way of nourishing the individual in that situation, but also creating, like, a new paradigm.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Well, Chris, I just want to thank you so much for coming to speak about prison theology. The book, the inclusive nature of the teachings that you offer are a lesson for everyone. And I just want to say thank you so much for sharing with us this evening.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure.
