The culmination of a six-year listening project, Sharing the Burden of Repair: Reentry After Mass Incarceration, is alternately heartbreaking and inspiring, infuriating and hopeful — and a necessary read for anyone who suspects our current model of “criminal justice” is misconceived. Authors Heather Tosteson and Charles D. Brockett interviewed more than 200 participants — offenders, administrators, stakeholders...
President Obama sent us an email a few days ago, and this time it wasn’t to ask for monetary support of his healthcare reform boondoggle. He was asking us (and the millions of others on his OFA database) to help Haitians. He wrote: “Despite the fact that we are experiencing tough times here at home,...
Despite what proponents of the so-called “prosperity gospel” preach; despite the tithing that power-hungry pastors collect from their entranced flock; despite the malicious claims allegedly found in the Bible that gays, Hindus, and connoisseurs of erotica are destined for eternal purgatory — despite all the hateful crap that religion teaches us — we believe there’s still...
An Open Letter to Councilmember Hugo Soto-MartinezDear Councilmember Soto-Martinez,
The man you replaced, Mitch O’Farrell, was perceived by many as a cynical politician who placed the desires of wealthy real-estate developers over the concerns of the people he was supposed to represent. Sensitive to any perception of impropriety, you’ve made it a point to not accept…
For more than forty years one of our favorite writers, Detroit-based Peter Werbe, has been publishing provocative essays about capitalism, technology, religion, politics, and popular culture in the anarchist journal The Fifth Estate, where he’s long been an indispensable member of the editorial collective. Some of his best work is now organized in a compulsively readable...
