J. R. Woodgates
Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:2, The Message)
Energy and ambition go a long way in making money, acquiring academic degrees, climbing Mt. Everest, and hitting home runs. This is indisputable. But such goals, all of them much lauded by our culture, have very little to do in themselves with growing up in the land of resurrection—with living a mature life.
Competitive ambition can be pursued without conscience, without love, without compassion, without humility, without generosity, without righteousness, without holiness. Which is to say, quite apart from maturity.
Immature millionaires routinely walk out on their families. Immature scholars and scientists who collect Nobel Prizes make do with estranged and godless lives. Immature star athletes regularly embarrass their fans by infantile and adolescent, sometimes criminal, behavior.
These are the men and women who set the standards for getting to the top, making a name for themselves, beating out the competition. These are the men and women who provide the examples of what it means to be standout human beings.
—Eugene Peterson in Practice Resurrection
In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning…
The clear reality is that the death penalty is an anathema to any society that purports to call itself civilized. It is an abomination that continues to scar the fibers of this society and it will continue to do so until this barbaric penalty is outlawed. Until then, we will live in a land that condones state assisted revenge and that is not justice in any form or fashion.
After unnecessarily languishing for three decades on Louisiana’s Death Row, Glenn Ford has at last been exonerated as an innocent man.
Now, former state prosecutor A.M. Stroud III says Ford deserves to be compensated for what he suffered because of Stroud’s refusal 30 years ago to even consider that Ford might have been innocent of murder.
This is his personal letter to The Shreveport Times:
America’s burgeoning prison population is not being fed just by the “overcriminalization” of our society, with its growing list of felony crimes.
The increasing problem of single-parent households is also creating generations of young men without a strong fatherly influence.
Growing up in a fatherless home is a major predictor of truancy, delinquency and eventual incarceration.
Once thought of mainly as “a black problem,” illegitimate births are now common in all three American racial groups: more than one third of all white babies, more than half of all hispanic babies and nearly three-quarters of all black babies.
Conservative pundit George Will reminds us of the prescient warning given to us a half century ago by the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan:
The wounds of PTSD are similar but different from those caused by moral injury. Both bring a sense of dis-ease and an unsettled psyche. But moral injury results from damage to a person’s moral foundation, caused by willfully immoral behavior – say, shooting a child or raping a fellow inmate.
Long after a return to “normal” life, moral injuries can haunt the conscience and undermine one’s sense of being forgiven. Unless moral injury is recognized and ministered to, it can sabotage a man’s peace of mind.
This article is about moral injury among combat vets. As you read it, consider the same phenomenon as it torments men who have done despicable deeds behind bars and are carrying the guilt of it still:
MORAL INJURY AND THE MAN OF WAR