Don’t Kill in Our NamesDon’t Kill in Our NamesDon’t Kill In Our Names:
Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against
the Death Penalty
by Rachel King
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, N.J., 2003
304 pp. $27
If people whose family members have been murdered oppose the death penalty, then how much moral ground is left to stand on for those who support it?
That question is one of the most intriguing in the U.S. debate about capital punishment. It fascinates because it raises the issue of the role of morality in the death penalty debate. Most Americans who question the practice are not doubtful because of its moral status.They are disturbed by the prospect of executing innocent people. (Indeed, since 1973 at least 108 people on death row have been exonerated because they were wrongly convicted.) Those who categorically oppose capital punishment for religious or moral reasons are fewer. Yet, most movements for social justice have had at their core devout religious people who recognize and act against injustice, even when they face overwhelming odds.
Don’t Kill In Our Names may become a crucial resource for the religious movement against the death penalty, much like Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. It offers the stories of people who oppose the execution of killers of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. But more provocative is the fact that almost all of these family members underwent what in Christian terms is called a conversion. They not only oppose capital punishment. Most of them met the killer of their loved one and offered forgiveness. In almost each case presented by author Rachel King, these people have been converted to forgiveness as a way of life.
Maria Hines’ brother Jerry was a Virginia state trooper who was murdered on a roadside. Hines, a Catholic, eventually contacted David Eaton, who was convicted of the murder. She befriended and forgave Eaton, helping him with his ultimately unsuccessful requests for clemency. "For when we have forgiven, we truly have no need to kill."
In December 1986, SueZann Bosler and her father Billy Bosler, a pastor, were attacked by James Campbell in their Church of the Brethren parsonage. Her father died and SueZann was stabbed repeatedly. Her recovery required months of rehabilitation, but she forgave Campbell and pleaded for his life.
In November 1986, Cathy O’Daniel was abducted and murdered by two boys who asked her to give them a ride. Cathy’s mother, Linda White, gradually decided to work on prison reform and restorative justice, and she became a volunteer mediator. But 13 years passed before she and Cathy’s daughter, Ami, visited Gary Brown, one of the murderers, in jail. When they did, they were able to offer forgiveness to a man whose life, Linda said, "was just a train wreck."
Few books can be both as despairing and inspiring as King’s. The murders that are described are occasions of devastating trauma, sundering families and leaving pockets of emptiness in those caught in its wake. And the spiritual journeys of Hines, Bosler, White and the others in King’s collection are long, torturous and wrenching.
Don’t Kill In Our Names has enormous potential to advance the movement against the death penalty for several reasons. These testimonies shatter the illusion that families of murder victims all seek retribution. They also contradict the notion that family members have a right to retribution, a concept that distorts our justice system away from justice and toward revenge.
In America’s religious communities, however, these stories will challenge believers to live out the ethics that they claim to hold. If American Christianity takes Jesus’ message of peacemaking and loving the enemy only partly to heart, it is even more reluctant to obey his call to forgive.
Hines, Bosler, White and most of the others in King’s book take Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness seriously. SueZann Bosler said at James Campbell’s third sentencing trial, "I forgive James Bernard Campbell for what he has done. I respect his life and value it here on earth. I believe in life. I’ve tried for ten and a half years to bring some good out of this. I’m doing it the best way I know how. I’m at peace with myself."
King’s book, by focusing on conversion stories of people who offer forgiveness as a way to redeem adversity, can drive a wedge between a believer’s notion that retribution is fair and his or her faith in a God who wants to redeem sinners. Don’t Kill In Our Names should be used in church book-reading groups nationwide, where it is sure to anger, horrify, provoke, inspire and maybe even convert Christians into being followers of Jesus.
Questioning Faith:
Confessions of a Seminarian
A documentary by Macky Alston
www.riverfilms.net
Distributed by Frameline www.frameline.org/distribution
56 minutes, $54 nonprofit
rate
Vibrant personalities stand out in filmmaker Macky Alston’s searching documentary about his own anguish in the aftermath of a friend’s death. Alston, an ordination-track student at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York, articulates the emotionally charged journey that he embarked upon as he grappled with God’s presence in the midst of suffering.
When Alston’s friend Alan dies from AIDS, Alston begins to ask questions of the people around him about their experience of God, particularly in times of grief, fear and anger. The film begins with a journey to the U.S. South to visit Alan’s family and an attempt to understand how they explained Alan’s death. As he touches upon the context in which Alan – like Alston, a white, gay man – was raised, Alston becomes even more curious about his deceased friend’s life, and spends a great deal of time in conversation with Alan’s past lover.
Alston’s questions about Alan’s faith as he entered the last stages of grappling with AIDS spur him to contemplate the magnitude of suffering and the depth of relationship that suffering individuals are able to have with God. His questions lead him to develop friendships with four women whose spiritual lives deepen in the face of overwhelming uncertainty and pain.
These four women are the heart of the story as they share their experiences with God in the contexts of their Muslim, Buddhist and Christian faiths. They are a mother and her teenage daughter, both of whom experience deep fear and deep faith; a college student whose father was suddenly killed; and a seminary pastor grappling with cancer. Alston spends time in their homes, takes long walks with them and visits them as they are confronted with illness, operations and death.
The film is inherently personal and relentless in its pursuit of experiences of faith. As a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, I was able to enter the film on a number of different levels. Having asked many of the same questions, having been challenged by the same powerful personalities at Union, and, like Alston, having been a hospital chaplain, I was struck by a sense of a parallel inner journey as I watched the documentary. Yet I also felt a great distance from the film in that many nuances that seem important to me were not explored. Most obviously, all of the women profiled by Alston were African-American or Asian, but this is never explicitly part of Alston’s musings about their way of experiencing the world. And while the film begins with Alston’s questions about how, as an ordained minister, he would maintain faith and shepherd his congregation in their painful experiences, the film never returns to this, and instead continues on its deeply personal path and shies away from the focus on vocation. Lastly, I felt disturbed by some of the cinematography, especially parts that focused on portraying the interviewed women at unattractive angles.
Thus, while I was able to identify with much of Alston’s journey, I couldn’t help but wonder how he grappled with the inherent privilege with which he moved in the world as a white, well-educated man. I had no sense that he was conscious of his social location. The film would have been much stronger had he articulated a self-awareness and a sensitivity to race, class and gender dynamics as he explored his inner life.
Reviewed by Winnie VargheseWar Talk
by Arundhati Roy
Cambridge: South End Press, 2003
"The only thing worth globalizing is dissent."
– Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy’s War Talk is a collection of essays and public talks from 2002 and 2003 on the topics of nationalisms and state-sponsored violence. Roy is the consummate public voice from the developing world to the west on the human impact of globalization. She continues her scathing critique of the politics of identity and fundamentalisms, while upholding the right of all people to access to the basic building blocks of life. Her topics range from the government of India’s nuclear program to the "war on terror" response to September 11.
In contrast with our most famous social critics – people like Paul Moore and Howard Zinn, who claimed combat experience in World War II or a comparable imperial war project as their starting point in critiquing the Vietnam War and American foreign policy – Roy represents the voices of the many who have been impoverished and brutalized by the myth of American goodness.
Wars, she argues, "are never fought for altruistic reasons. They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business."
In defense of our progressive patriotism we are inclined in this country to say, like Martin Luther King, Jr., that the founding ideals of this country are noble; we are patriots because we believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – even if our foundational stories are of slavery and genocide. Roy reminds us of Gandhi’s famous "wooden loaf," the non-violent Indian Independence Movement followed by the violence of partition, to argue that as long as we restrict ourselves to national identities we will not see and resist the brutality and violence done in our names.
Do even we believe that we are more generous abroad than we are at home? As we watch the pillaging of the cultural institutions of Iraq explained to us as the misguided but honest energies of freedom, Roy asks us if our government would be as generous if the poor of Harlem looted the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is absurd and provocative, and we are being asked to believe absurd truths because they are printed or pronounced in legitimate venues.
"Yours is not a great nation, but you can be a great people" was the shocker of a lead Roy used in response to Howard Zinn’s defense of the ideals of American democracy at her May 13 talk at Riverside Church.
The message in our "free" media today – and there are not enough voices countering the fundamental flaw in the argument – is that we as Americans have more value than other human beings. Arundhati Roy, like Vandana Shiva and other writers from developing countries, reminds us of the human cost of our rhetoric. The wars we are fighting strengthen global capitalism, which by definition compromises democracy. Hundreds of thousands die at the hands of our corporations, our embargoes, our quest for stabilization. We are callous to the human cost of economic stability, which slightly improves our quality of life and massively increases profit for the largest transnational corporations.
As people of faith we are peculiarly positioned to understand the centrality of the value and dignity of all human beings. It is the essence of our faith. We are all, all of us, created in the image of God.
Many of us have joked in the last year and a half of peace protests that as much as we love "We Shall Overcome," particularly our parents’ voices singing it, we need some new protest songs. I need some new language of justice. If you have been looking for new words of truth in these difficult times, language specific to 2003 that deals with the anti-globalization movements and responds to the nationalisms and identity-based language of justice of the last 30 years, please read War Talk.
Produced by the Regeneration Project
www.theregenerationproject.org
and GraceCom
www.gracecathedral.org
20 min., $15
Our role in global warming is a topic many people don’t understand and would probably prefer to ignore. So how do you get the average churchgoer to pay attention to climate change? How about the Confession of Sin! A new video from the Regeneration Project, a Christian environmental organization, makes the unlikely choice of beginning with this short penitential prayer – words that many Episcopalians know by heart but may hardly ever consider. Over a backdrop of dark images of smoking power plants and polluting cars, voices acknowledge our complicity in hurting God’s Creation.
In Wizard of Oz-like style, the video then dramatically changes from its somber, black-and-white start. Kids’ faces and the beauty of the natural environment jump out in vibrant color, and narrator Sally Bingham – an Episcopal priest who works on ecological justice issues – turns into a humorous, Mr. Rogers-like "Come with me!" host. Driving her hybrid, energy-efficient car around northern California, Bingham points out environmental challenges and describes simple ways that we can make a difference. Although decreasing our energy use can provide financial savings, "the church has led social movements," she says, reminding us that foremost we have a moral obligation to work to save the Creation.
While SUV drivers may be turned off, this accessible resource has several strengths. We see this is a social justice issue, as Pacific Islands are in danger of disappearing and poor communities in the U.S. suffer disproportionate environmental degradation. Images remind us how the consumptive practices of the 1950s and ’80s have led to energy crises in the ’70s and modern era. Most of all, we see that we can actually do something, individually and through our collective religious voice.
Women of the TableProduced by the Episcopal Church Women
22 min., $10
"Engage God’s Mission" is the theme of the 2003 General Convention. For countless years, women in the Episcopal Church having been doing just that, and a new video provides a myriad of examples of these powerful ministries.
Produced by the Episcopal Church Women (ECW) and narrated by the legendary Barbara Harris, the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion, one might expect this to be a political tool promoting the ordination of women. On the contrary, the resource profiles women from three very different dioceses: Lexington, Los Angeles and Fort Worth. Church observers know full well that the latter diocese still does not permit the ordination of women. Rather than challenging this situation, the video lets the stories of no less than a dozen inspiring women speak for themselves. "For both ordained and lay women, ministry is to other work as gardening is to yard work: What defines it is the motive behind it," Harris comments.
The video’s strength is its diversity of faces and voices, and the captivating manner in which they are interspersed. Stories of ministry in central Los Angeles run seamlessly with work in West Africa; work with children in a camp setting flows with hospital chaplaincy, the Altar Guild, labor organizing and work in the LGBT community. "Every single day at every single level there is something you can do," offers Alice Callahan of L.A. This new resource will be motivation for people throughout the church – both women and men – to take up that challenge.
Directed by Rory Kennedy; Produced by Moxie Firecracker Films
www.pandemicfacingaids.org
42 min.
The rapid growth of HIV/AIDS around the world is finally getting people’s attention – but some fear it may be too late. If current infection rates continue, in three years the country of India alone will have 37 million people living with HIV/AIDS. The swift spread of the pandemic in Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa combined with the ongoing stigma attached to the disease around the world creates a tragic scenario.
All is not lost. In the Episcopal Church, a new coalition of congregations and Episcopal Relief and Development (www.er-d.org) are developing a strategic plan to address AIDS in Africa in partnership with Anglicans on that hard-hit continent. New resources are being produced to educate people about creative initiatives like the Alliance of Episcopal Parishes/ERD campaign. One example is State of Denial (www.stateofdenial.org), a PBS/POV film on the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on South Africa.
HBO, similarly, is sponsoring "Pandemic: Facing AIDS," a collection of five compelling stories from different parts of the world: India, Uganda, Russia, Brazil and Thailand. The film is also being distributed with a large educational package of curricula to congregations and communities nationwide. Narrated by musician Elton John, the stories address sensitive topics – sex workers, drug addicts, AIDS orphans and how people with HIV are being ostracized from their families and communities.
Despite the immense problems, the film still manages to find hope: young people leading educational campaigns among their peers; families who move from brokenness toward reconciliation; and the prospect of distributing inexpensive drugs that can help people combat the virus. With a worldwide church suffering from the pandemic (see Jan/Feb 2003 issue of TW), this is a valuable resource to help raise consciousness and provoke our churches to needed action.