Murder in the blood

In what might be the oldest evidence of murder in the human line, scientists studying human remains in Sima de los Huesos (The Pit of Bones) in Spain have discovered a human skull in which are the marks of two lethal, pre-mortem attacks. The pit was apparently in use about 430,000 ago as a place to dispose of human bodies. The two marks are seemingly made by the same weapon--presumably a rock or stone tool--ruling out that the injury occurred when the body was thrown into the pit. As such, they suggest an act of deliberate aggression between human beings, or a precursor group like the Neanderthals.
8Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out in the field.” When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD asked Cain, Where is your brother Abel? He answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper" God then said: What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground!

Genesis 4:8-10

What interests me is the similarity between the biblical account and scientific discovery. But also the differences. Science and the Bible both confront us with the insight that violence between human beings is deeply rooted in our experience. Cain and Abel, after all, were first children born to the first parents, Adam and Eve. Fratricidal jealousy and hatred were experienced by the very first fratres, or brothers. Science shows us that human-on-human violence was part of our makeup - even before we could be said to be fully human.

But the difference in the two narratives is interesting also. Science will suggest that intra-tribal murder was programmed into us and is embedded deep into our DNA -- as deep as is the tool-making capacity that led to the creation of the murder weapon. Murderous propensities are a part of who we are, unfortunately. The Biblical writers, with no insight into paleontology, DNA or evolution, but stuck with the idea of a Deity who created a perfect world, suggested that the problem of violence was something that humans brought upon themselves. Violence seems part of the curse that came with the disobedience of Adam and Eve. They ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were sentenced to painful childbirth, the subjugation of women to men, the need to work for a living and finally, death. Evidently, the capacity of their kids to act with lethal vengeance upon one another was also part of God's judgment.

I don't buy the idea that God cursed humanity because of the seemingly innocuous sin of eating a fruit. But I am impressed with the insight of the minds that crafted Genesis, who reached out to discover God's plan with such clearheaded view of their race's own flaws. Only recently have scientists discovered the intra-species violence that occasionally occurs in nature: the lethal inter-troop murder sprees of chimpanzees, for instance. Sure, there is violence in  nature -- males battling males for territory and access to females, for instance. But to the ancient  mind, and even to our own, non-human animal violence pales by  comparison to the absurd lengths that human go to destroying each other. The Bible's writers and editors put that insight at the forefront of their story of the origins of humanity. And science has now confirmed that insight.

What to do?

In Genesis, God does not destroy murderous Cain. How could he? Murder was part and parcel of the Biblical writer's world. Obviously, God had allowed the first murderer to live. God does put his mark on Cain, but it is a protective mark that warns others not to kill him. In this way, God allows Cain to propagate his proclivity to violence to the entire human race. And with God's tacit permission.

Perhaps God realizes that a race that reasons for itself (because of the fruit it tasted) has inevitably lost its anchors in the pre-programmed behaviors and ritualized combat that mark so much of the rest of the natural world. Rams may butt heads until one combatant skulks away, defeated but alive. Deer may lock horns until one prevails. But humans, having the "gift" of reason, can plan, conspire, cajole, threaten their way to victory. Violence may be the inevitable companion of a mind freed of the restraints that keep other animals from destroying others of their own species. It is impressively wise that our biblical forebears encoded this same insight into the myths they wrote about our origins.

Ultimately, the wisdom of the Bible lies not in the biographical tidbits it provides about our earliest ancestors. The wisdom it provides is about ourselves -- our unique place in creation as the only animal that uses reason (the knowledge of good and evil) to carve out its own destiny. No alley cat, opossum, vole or amoeba can do much more than to follow the urgings of its DNA and cognitive programming. Human are cursed and blessed with the ability to follow other behavioral pathways, some to our detriment, like jealousy, anger and fratricidal murder, and others to our benefit, like love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

May we choose wisely!

Where freedom comes from

On some social media sites, there's an option to describe a relationship you're in. When it come to my relationship with Memorial Day, I have to say "It's complicated."

Memorial Day is when we don our national sad face to give honor to those who have given their lives in America's wars. "Freedom isn't free," we are told continually, and the price of that freedom is the blood of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who have gone to war on our behalf and made the ultimate sacrifice.

But for me, it's hard to separate the courage of our fighting forces from the idiotic uses to which they have been put. Take the Mexican-American War, fought from 1846 to 1848. This war was little more than an American land grab from a relatively weaker state to the south. The war started after manufactured outrage that "American blood had been spilled on American soil" by Mexican troops. Of course the American soil in question was contested land between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers in Texas, itself just recently annexed (read "stolen") from Mexico. All told, the war resulted in 13,000 Americans dead and about 16,000 Mexicans. But, we ended up with clear title to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,Nevada, Utah, California and bits of other states. Quite a haul for the price!

But even in 1846, this war was hugely controversial. Former president John Quincy Adams opposed it. Abe Lincoln, in prescient echoes of future wars based on lies, wanted to be shown the precise spot on which American blood had been shed. Northerner abolitionists feared that slavery would spread into the new territories, tipping Congress toward the slave owning states and moving the eradication of their blighted practice into the unforeseeable future.

So when I celebrate Memorial Day, do I celebrate the bravery of the fighting forces of the Mexican American War? Aside from a gain of land, the conflict they took part in only exacerbated the fractiousness of a jittery nation -- tensions that would explode into civil war 13 years later.

Do I celebrate the War of 1812, an attempt to grab Canadian land? That war killed 2260 Americans and 1600 Brits, not to mention the 13,000 Americans and 3300 Brits who died from disease and other causes.

How about the Spanish-American War, started over unsubstantiated claims that the perfidious Spanish had sunk the battleship Maine? We ended up with Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and Guantanamo. The war killed 345 American soldiers and sailors in battle and another 2500 from disease. More than 60,000 Spanish were killed from combat or disease. Our reneging on giving self-rule to the recently liberated Filipinos resulted in another 6000 American deaths, up to 20,000 Filipino military dead and 200,000 dead Filipino civilians.

We could move into the modern era by celebrating the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, the 38,000 dead in Korea, and the 6000 killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But what do we celebrate? The often stupid wars that put our soldiers into harm's way? The soldier's own bravery and noble willingness to fight and to die? The strength and riches that came even from from wars launched on lies? Do we celebrate only the good parts (D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, Midway) of the good wars while ignoring the ugly parts (Dresden, Hiroshima, Mai Lai)?

But as for freedom, it's hard to see which wars directly contributed to our freedom. The Revolutionary War? Sure, though you could make the argument that a little more civility by the British and a little less American paranoia might have achieved the same result with less bloodshed. The Civil War? Slaves received paper freedom, but would have to fight another 150 years -- up until and beyond the present day -- to gain a small portion of that promised equality. World War II? Finally, a war in which an insatiable world-dominating leader had to be pushed back. But we must conveniently forget the penalties assessed against Germany after World War I that set the stage for Hitler's rise.

Like I said, it's complicated.

Which leads me to thinking. Is it only soldiers who gave me my freedom? What about the many civilians who died to bring freedom to Americans? The freedom riders, preachers and agitators who faced angry mobs of their own people. How about William Lloyd Garrison, kicked out of his hometown of Newburyport for speaking against the locally-profitable slave trade? How about Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, who died in Mississippi to bring the vote the African Americans? How about James Meredith, who desegregated U Miss? Or the suffragists who made the first cracks in the glass ceiling that preventing capable women from expressing their natural talents? Or the strikers who agitated for fair wages, 8-hour work days and weekends off? Or the gay rights activists who stood up to millennia of abuse to demand that they be treated as equals? Or the progressive legislators and city organizers would fought for their constituents' dignity? Or the visionary politicians who saw that national parks, clean water and clean air were an indispensable part of the of the American birthright?

I honor those who stood up to their fears and chose to fight in our nation's wars. But they did not bring me freedom. In only one case did we have an enemy serious enough to seize our territory. Freedom has been fought over and fought for within our national  borders. We citizens are the ones who can grant or withhold freedom from one another. Our wars may gain territory and keep aggressors at bay. But freedom? That's something that you and I must fight for every day of our lives. And against our fellow citizens, whom we must meet on the battlefield of reason and civility and with weapons of wisdom, wit and patience.

Happy Memorial Day.

The Case for Death

The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes its position on the death penalty unequivocal:

2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

Yet, in my life's struggle to reason my way to the truth, I find this near-complete ban on the death penalty wanting.

My reasons, in the order that I came up with them.

1) That's what heaven is for
One of the rationales for sentencing criminals to life in prison rather than to execution is the possibility that they could be redeemed while incarcerated. Redemption is the reason that images of martyrs burned at the stake often show a lone monk holding a crucifix before the eyes of the condemned. Somehow, in their final torments, the image of Christ's suffering might cause a last-second conversion that would win them a reprieve from eternal damnation. Life imprisonment gives pious people a longer chance to win the same kind of conversion from condemned criminals. Abolishing death gives us a chance to win another soul for Christ.

But does this rationale really hold up anymore? It is currently being pounded into our heads (and I believe it) that God is merciful. Would a truly merciful God hold it against someone if they did not happen to be converted before their death -- even if conversion only meant a momentary deep and honest sorrow for the pain they had caused? If you take the most radical view of mercy, the answer would have to be no. God knows the limitations of human culture, pride, intelligence and empathy. You don't think that an all-powerful God can a way to keep working on sinners -- even after death?

Not to mention, who but the most spiteful of Christians sincerely and enthusiastically believes in hell anymore? What kind of a stone-cold deity "loves" his children into eternal punishment? If we don't really believe in hell, then why do we spend time trying to save people from it?

1) The bigger picture
As with abortion, the teaching about the death penalty works best if you severely limit the scope of your empathy. With abortion, as long as you draw your a moral circle around the fetus itself, it seems that tampering with its life is sacrilegious. But if you draw your circle around the fetus and the mother, or the fetus-mother and immediate family, the answer becomes less clear. It would be cruel to snuff out the life of a harmless fetus; but what if the fetus threatens the woman's physical health or the family's fiscal health? Does saving a fetus allow you to imperil the lives of the siblings? Families? Communities?

So it goes with the death penalty. If you draw your circle around a lonely, perhaps mad convict in a concrete cell, it seems heartless to back them into a corner and snatch away their life. But if you widen your vision a bit, things become more complex. What of the prison staff that must deal with the effects that life imprisonment has on a human being? Or do we expect our wardens and guards to become inhuman, having no fellow feeling for people sentenced to life in a box? What of the families of the victims, who must cope with the fact that their loved one's killer or maimer continues to live while their own loved one is dead, perhaps after suffering horribly, or struggles daily with injury, recovery and their own sense of lives brutally thrown of course?

The story of the Richard family in interesting. Their 8-year-old son Martin was killed by the bomb that Dzhokhar detonated. Yet they wanted to spare the killer the death penalty. But their reason was interesting. It wasn't because they opposed capital punishment. Or they did not say so publicly. They opposed death for Tsarnaev because they wanted the closure of knowing that they could move on with their own lives. They wanted Tsarnaev to disappear from the headlines and the courts. Anyone who argues for death has to account for the pain that families like the Richards will endure for the years or decades it takes to appeal the death sentence in the courts.

The bishops
Does anyone think that the church's bishops are to be believed when they say they oppose the death penalty? Until fairly recently, they were perfectly fine with it. In the Middle Ages, the Church happily sent heretics and other malefactors to the stake or the gallows.Our Church still sends priests to the battlefield. As recently as the Vietnam War in the 1960s, bishops like Cardinal Spellman were cheerleading for the war and the defeat of Communism, and collecting awards from the military for their efforts.

Far from being moral giants, the bishops seem more interested in echoing the Church's official positions than in speaking to the concerns of their consciences or their flocks. These same bishops can't figure out that the Church's teaching on contraception is ridiculous, or that its exclusion of women from the priesthood is vacuous and scripturally bankrupt. Both positions harm the Church's reputation for intellectual rigor and have been driving Catholics away from the Church for decades. The Church has just come off a years-long, pointless and punitive investigation of US nuns. There are more than a few stories of nuns being kicked out of their convents for questioning priestly prerogatives.

And yet we think these same prelates have the intellectual depth and consistency to take on an issues as complex and fraught as capital punishment? How many of these guys have ever visited a prison -- other than to bless the guards and their manacles? How many have ministered to a condemned inmate -- or spoken to anyone who has? No. The bishop's pronouncements against capital punishment have the same weight as their many others -- they speak out on topics that will earn the plaudits of their leaders, and ensure their own advancement through the ranks of the episcopacy.

Because...Jesus!
Seems to me that the Church's best argument against the death penalty is hanging in churches and school rooms all over the world: the image of the bloodied and crucified Christ. Christ was good, Christ was executed. Therefore, to prevent a repetition of his tragic death, we must abolish the death penalty. But is that what the crucifix tells us? At best, the image of the Crucified tells us that the state's power against the people can be misused. Powerful interests can conspire to torture, condemn and deprive people of life. But that's an argument against excessive and unchecked state power -- not against executions.

Because the Ten Commandments
For anyone who has read the Bible, the 5th Commandment -- though shalt not kill -- cannot apply to capital punishment. The Bible is replete with passages that apply death to various infractions: adultery, Sabbath breaking, cursing your parents, having sex with animals or being a witch.

Also, ask the Edomites, Ammonites and Jebusites whether the Bible condemned killing!

And ask the Lord himself, who reserved the right to kill those who molested widows or orphans.

Whatever the Fifth Commandment meant, it was not a proscription against capital punishment.

Clean Hands

I have yet to write about this at any great length, but I have been  nursing a thought about the secret rational behind some of the Church's strangest teachings, which often come with unconditional bans. Contraception, abortion, divorce, capital punishment, assisted suicide, cohabitation and gay sexuality come under this heading, which I call the Clean Hands theory. The theory is not complicated, but comes down to this: the Church never wants to be implicated in any complex moral situations, and so hones its teachings to be absolutely against any activity that might leave it with blame. When it comes to divorce, the Church can wash its hands of the messy marriages that its children find themselves in. No divorce, it proclaims! So if they do divorce, the Church can say it was not involved. Abortion? By ruling all abortions immoral, the Church can absolve itself of involvement in the real-world crises that occur to families and pregnant women. If you get an abortion, it's your own doing, no matter how damaged the fetus was or how threatened the mother was or how devastated financially the family would be.

Capital punishment falls under Clean Hands as well. Rather than trying to wrestle with the topic and whether it might be right in one circumstance and wrong in another, the Church plays Pilate, washes its hands of the matter, and moves on in imagined innocence.

Some might call that a highly developed moral sense. I call it an abdication of moral responsibility. I am far more impressed with the nun in a Catholic hospital in New Mexico than in a thousands bishops thumping the pulpit against abortion. Sister Margaret McBride sat on her hospital's ethics committee. When faced with a pregnancy whose continuation would kill the mother, she gave the OK for doctors to abort the fetus. Of course, the bishops came down on her like a ton of bricks. She was excommunicated. But I admire her ability to see nuance, and to make an informed and compassionate moral decision. Too bad that the consequences attendant on her decision will deter others from making the same call.  

So where does that leave us?

The best argument against the death penalty is that it is arbitrary and political. The poor and people of color are disproportionately subject to arrest and are sentenced to death at higher rates than are whites for the same crimes. Whites have better access to good legal representation and can count on the sympathy of the majority white jury pool. There is also the problem that prosecutors and judges can be beholden to their privileged communities in ways that affect their judgments, whether consciously or not. Any judge or prosecutor who has to run for his or her office, or who has ambitions for higher public office will think twice about showing compassion to a criminal. You gain far more votes than you lose by being tough on crime. And ultimately, the conditions that breed crime -- poverty, lack of social mobility, racism and corporate greed -- come back to decisions that were made by the very prosecutors and jurors who are willing to impose death upon a member of an unlucky class of people.

It's these disparities and scrambled judgments that make justice so difficult to apply fairly. And we'll probably never get away from the possibility that defense attorneys can be inadequate or prosecutors corrupt and unwilling to share exculpatory evidence. Maybe the best reason to keep the condemned alive is on the off chance that exonerating evidence will emerge 5, 10 or 30 years in the future. There should be no lethal "Oops!" in our legal system.

I have not made a final decision as to whether I would have, as a juror, chosen death for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I did not see the most lurid evidence. But what I did see -- mangled limbs, an unperturbed post-bombing purchase of milk, an attempt to steal of slain officer's gun, a bomb-throwing shootout in Watertown --makes me open to thinking that death should definitely have been on the table for him.Whether the law would have allowed me to consider my objections is another matter. Once the bobsled of death has started its run, there's little that can divert it from its appointed conclusion. But luckily for my moral equilibrium, I have been spared that choice.

For the moment, my hands are clean too.

Dead to rights

Now that Dhokhar Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death for his part in the Boston Marathon bombings, and we are bracing ourselves for years of appeals, it's time to take stock of the death penalty.

If you get the chance, listen to Finish Line, the podcast between David Boeri of WBUR and Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe. The two newsmen covered the Boston Bombing trial from jury selection in January to the sentencing last week, and provided nearly daily reactions to what they saw and heard. Today, they discussed how the death sentences surprised some folks. Partly, that's because the public was not exposed to the full impact of the testimony, which, in the absence of a live feed from the courtroom, was mediated through news articles and artists' sketches -- no one but the jury saw autopsy pictures or photos of the most gruesome wounds. But partly that's because the jury was not representative of the citizenry of Eastern Massachusetts, which mostly opposes the death penalty. Since this was a federal death penalty case that just happened to take place in anti-death penalty Massachusetts, any juror who was morally opposed to imposing the sentence of death--allowable by federal law--was instantly disqualified from serving on the jury. It's curious, then, that the jury system--which is supposed to try defendants before a jury of their peers--has been skewed so strikingly toward one variety of those peers.

It's been clear, from reading my posts, that I have no great love for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. His actions in placing the second bomb in front of a crowded restaurant and behind the Richard family (he stood behind them for four full minutes before detonating his device) were deliberate, reprehensible and heinous. His activities were filmed and videotaped. There is no question that he did the deed, and his defense didn't even contest his guilt. In her opening statements, defense attorney Judy Clarke famously said, "It was him." During the sentencing phase of the trial, the defense was feeble, unable to bring up any truly mitigating factors. Was he remorseful? No evidence was provided except by a a nun who is active against capital punishment. Was he deranged? Though his family had big issues, he was a regular dude, said his friends. He had been a nice boy when he was 8 years old, said his Russian family members. Nothing was introduced that explained how this nice boy turned into a flint-faced monster.

Dzhokhar's stony, impassive demeanor throughout the trial betrayed no sign that he felt bad about his actions or had been coerced by his older brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan. His political motivations were left unexplored. His mental health is solid. As far as anyone knows, he is unrepentant. If anyone deserved to be deprived of life, it is Dzokhar Tsarnaev.

Curiously, the defense put forth the argument that sentencing Dzkar to life in prison was a far worse punishment than death. Though it snows there only four days a year, they showed Siberia-like photos of the Super Max prison in Colorado where Tsarnaev would likely be held. He would live in a tiny cell for 23 hours of each day, being allowed out of his cell for one hour out of every 24. He would have few visitors - fewer than normal, since his family is in Russia. His mail would be severely limited. He would be granted no interviews with the media. He would, in effect, disappear. It's a fate that has driven some prisoners to madness and self-mutilation.

But I found the argument curious. If death was such a bad option -- partly because it amounts to little more than vengeance against the accused, then why sell life in prison as even more punishing than death? If it's morally wrong to get revenge on a murderer by killing him, why is it more palatable morally to get even more vengeance by keeping him alive? Aren't we sinning more in an attempt to avoid sinning?

I have to admit that the one time I felt empathy for Tsarnaev was in imagining a life deprived of human contact and intellectual stimulation. If anything would drive me mad, it would be he alternative of television 23 hours a day or dead silence. Even a life filled with nothing but reading books would hardly merit my attention. Why read books when I can't contribute to society or even discus them? Surely, the deepest parts of hell are co-located in the lonely cells of our "correctional" system.

I wonder whether depriving someone like Dzhokhar of life might be the merciful solution. BEfore you answer, take a look at the graphic for this story and imagine living alone in such a prison for the rest of your life. Then tell me that the death penalty is immoral.

Pride and prejudice

My large, old-school insurance company came out last week as a primary sponsor of the Boston Gay Pride parade. Mind you, this is the kind of place that eliminated its suits-and-ties dress requirement this year! My son and I were discussing the amazing strides that gays have made over the last half-century. Fifty years ago, gays were widely subject to physical, emotional and spiritual abuse as a matter of course. The Stonewall riots, the seminal event that kicked off refusal of gays to put up with police harassment, happened just 45 years ago. The AIDS epidemic stated not quite 35 years ago, bringing the plight of gays into the media forefront. Today, 34 states have extended the right to marry to homosexual couples -- whose weddings were attended by ecstatic family and friends - gay and straight.

My son and I were trying to understand why gay rights had come so far when civil rights for people of color had stagnated, if not retreated since the early 1960s.

Comes down to this: Every family has a gay kid. But not every family has a black kid.

Until every family understands the pain of those systematically oppressed by our culture's institutions, we aren't likely to move farther along in our struggle against racism. The realities of genetics finally took care of the entrenched homophobia. What will it take to root out racism?

Bare, ruined choirs

A ton of articles this week on a new Pew poll that shows a dramatic drop in the number of people self-identifying as Christian. From 78.4% to 70.6% between 2007 and 2014. Catholics have lost 3 million people since 2007, in spite of an influx of immigrants from Catholic countries.



But the drop in religious affiliation in the young is especially worrisome:

Younger adults have been particularly likely to join the unaffiliated in recent years. In 2007, 25 percent of 18-to-26-year-olds were unaffiliated; now 34 percent of the same cohort is unaffiliated.

One in three young people have joined the "nones" -- those who profess no religion.



As the dad of two young men, it's not hard to imagine why people would shun the church. It's a place that worships ugliness -- dismissal of women and exclusion of gays being high on the list. It is clueless about human sexuality, offering little more than ancient and bizarre nostrums that don't tally with the lived experience of young people -- or older ones, for that matter. To be against birth control, when the alternative is a house full of kids living in poverty, seems downright perverse. To continue issuing blanket condemnations of abortion -- even when women die as a result -- seems monstrous. To condemn entire nations and ethnic groups because of the God they believe in goes against the grain of tolerance and friendship that millennials have with people of different colors, beliefs, genders and sexualities.



Then again, the kids are following the church's teachings to their logical conclusions. If God is a loving Father, not a raging monster who throws his children into eternal flames, what's the need to placate him with worship and prayer? And then there is the ever-expanding reach and influence of science and technology. If it is the modern health care system -- with its stents, vaccines, transplants and bypasses -- that heals bodies and minds, what is the need for intercessory prayer to the saints? And what of Church as the primary teacher of morality? The kids might say "If even unreligious people are experienced as moral, what's the need for Sunday school and its blatherings about sin and the need for salvation?"



The Pew study should be another in a long series of wake-up calls. Religion, if it is to survive, needs to be more than about scaring people into goodness. This is the time for us to focus on the community, support and love that come from religious affiliation. Not on kicking people out of heaven.

Attention deficit

As a New Englander, I'm fascinated by the controversy swirling around whether Tom Brady and his team deliberately deflated footballs to make them easier to grasp and throw. After the recent Wells report claimed the Pats had cheated and Tom lied about it, the Patriots fan base came out swinging. There were close analyses of the science behind the allegations. When is the last time your heard a football fan discuss the Ideal Gas Law? And close scrutiny of whether the testimony (or lack of it) backed up the conclusions reached in the summary. Worthy of world class defense attorneys! Not to mention the unrelenting focus on whether the sanctions are in line with past decisions and are proportional to the offense. Laudable!

But as a Christian, I just had to wonder why the same level of fascination with a game -- albeit a very expensive and high-stakes game -- is not applied to other pressing problems? Can you imagine if we all paid this much attention to police violence? Or pervasive racism? Or poverty? Or wealth disparity? To tackle those problems, we create a subset of  special class of people -- scientists and lawyers. We subject them to every pressure imaginable -- we bully them as youth, ridicule them as adults, underfund them, place restrictions on their speech and mock them in the media. Those who survive this gauntlet -- such as innovative scientists and committed civil rights attorneys -- are the ones we send out to fight against the greatest evils humankind has ever known. Actually, we don't even send them; they send themselves.

The irony, as we  are seeing with Deflate-gate, is that ordinary football fans are perfectly capable of parsing the minutest details of complex problems. No fancy degrees or years of unrewarding toil required. But only, evidently, if the problems are in the form of a spheroid, the rules spelled out and the scope of action confined to a 100-yard patch of grass.

If only we could package racism and global poverty as a team sports...

Of monsters and virgins

When famed death penalty opponent Sister Helen Préjean testified at the Boston Marathon bombing trial yesterday, she revealed that she had met five times with Dhokhar Tsarnaev while he was imprisoned for his part in the bombing. She told jurors that Tsarnaev told her that "no one deserved to suffer" like the people he had killed, maimed and injured.

A few thoughts.

I found it curious that Sister Helen associated herself so much with this high profile case. Is she doing this purely out of a desire to minister to a despised criminal? Or is there a certain amount of self-interest -- furthering her "brand" -- by her association? I say this all the while admiring Sister Helen's literal application of Matthew 25's standard of "When I was in prison, you visited me." I might admire it more if she had kept her visits private, and didn't allow herself to use the case to further her own advocacy.

Second, I was curious about Tsarnaev's comment that his victims did not deserve tio suffer that way they did. After all, he did deliberately place a bomb in the middle of a busy, crowded sidewalk, intending that it harm as many people as possible. He has been eerily apathetic at the trial. Yet now we are to believe that he feels bad? I wonder whether he said more than what Sister Helen tells us he said. Was it all the lines of "These people didn't deserve to suffer, any more than my people deserve to suffer at the hands of the US government." That would at least fit better with his lack of affect during the trial and his jihadi sentiments written in the boat in Watertown.

I would hate to think that Sister Helen--a prophetic voice who (unlike our noble bishops) does more than just mouth the Church's teachings--would be marketing herself or would be trying to save Tsarnaev's life by lying (by omission) about important aspects of his thinking. But I don't credit her with perfection, in spite of her many good works. She has a product to sell, and what better way than to save the life of America's most hated man?

Shank a Nun

The Facebook posts are coming out for Thank a Nun Day on May 5th. Or make that May 9th for other posters. I'm not sure whether the day is some kind of book tie-in (note the shameless plug for "Five Year in Heaven, in the illustration) or a grassroots effort to show gratitude for all that the good Sisters have done for us.

But while I am in love with the new style of nun that has emerged over the last 30 years -- the kindly, feisty advocate for the poor and marginalized -- I have memories of a darker sort.

Growing up in the mill town of Manchester, NH, I was heir to a tradition that contained many mixed agendas. In grade school, we were taught by Les Soeurs de la Sainte Croix, the Holy Cross sisters, who were an outfit started in France and exported to Canada, where my ancestors lived. When masses of Canadians emigrated to the US around the turn of the 20th century, the sisters followed, setting up schools and teaching the immigrant kids. They also served as church sextons, washing linens, training altar boys (only boys in those days), swapping out burnt votive candles for new, and generally being the working arm of Catholic liturgical life. If there was a May Day procession to honor the Virgin Mary, the nuns who organized it. Getting the kids to wear white outfits on First Communion? Nuns. Giving piano lessons, putting on plays and playing the organ at Mass? Nuns, again.

The women were driven, ubiquitous and dedicated. They did so much work around church that there was precious little for priests to do but say Mass once a day and bask in their own self-importance. Which many did.

But the sisters' volcanic output of activity came at a price. As teachers of immigrants, they played a enormous role in maintaining the immigrant culture. Children were taught in French half the day, and English the other, a reluctant nod to the predominant English-speaking culture in the US. School included a large dose of Catholic teaching, naturally. The books were old, with black-and-white woodcuts of children walking through dark, overgrown forests, books that seemed ancient even by the standards of the 1960s. Kids sat at desks all day, in silence, with all activity directed by the nun. There was no place for discussion, only answering after being called -- often at random by being picked from a stack of cards with each kid's name on it. Science, when we had it, consisted of copying an outline from a nun who dictated from the front of the room: "I. Rocks. Indent and write a. Igneous. Next line, b. Sedimentary." What math there was culminated, in 8th grade, with the task of adding up long columns of long numbers -- a task more suited to the needs of 1920's shopkeepers than to the children of the Space Age. When one adventuresome (and maybe exasperated) young sister tried to introduce her 8th grade class to the concept of "X," we were totally flummoxed, having no previous clues about x, y or any other algebraic concept.

And the terror.

For me, it started early. One day, when I was 7, we were lined up outside of class to go outside -- whether for recess or to go home I don't recall. We first-graders were lined up in a vestibule -- a small area to hang our coats -- that adjoined the class. I guess I must have said something to my "girlfriend" Charlotte because suddenly, Sister Adrien glared, fished out a pair of scissors hung at her belt beneath her robes, and said sternly (in French) "Would you like me to cut off a piece of your tongue?" That got my attention, and I shut up. Other nuns were said to have struck kids so hard they flew across rooms. Others were humiliated for the most minor of "offenses" (like folding a handkerchief on your desk) by having to kneel in front of the class.

But the emotional terror was probably more scarring. Apart from buttressing our French Canadian heritage (we learned O Canada in French long before the Star Spangled Banner) the sisters were the main source for our religious teaching. But it wasn't all about memorizing the Baltimore Catechism and coloring out pictures of angels, though there was enough of that. By 5th grade, we were getting slide shows on the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to three shepherd children in Fatima. And no show about Fatima would be complete without dramatic images of the children's visions of Hell. Holy Week brought out lurid descriptions of the suffering of Christ, including claims that one of the thorns  that crowned Christ's head had gone through the back of his skull and come out his eye! That's a pretty unforgettable image for an 11-year-old, let me tell you.

So, thank a nun? Maybe some people had examples of kindly, dedicated sisters who encouraged them to strive and to grow. Mine were a passel of medieval harpies who scared the bejesus out of me while providing me with a third-rate education. I am thankful that Vatican II dragged the sisters out of the cloister and into the wider world. More than any other Catholic group, the sisters heard Saint Pope John XXIII's call to a new openness to the world. They got educated. They devoted themselves to the poor. They dropped the cruelty and terror tactics. I am thankful for that. But I will never forget what they were for me as a small, frightened boy who only wanted to be good and was treated as little more than an incipient criminal.

White noise

An observation: when white folks want to defend white cops accused of assaulting or murdering blacks, they are pretty chatty. They come all with all kinds of reasons why it's OK  -- the black person was resisting, or had a long arrest record, or was carrying a gun, or could have been carrying a gun, or had actually hurt himself. The list of excuses and justifications is impressively creative.

But when it starts to look like the cops were actually in the wrong, as it did today when six Baltimore cops were charged with causing Freddy Gray's death, the chattering dies out completely. No apologies, no retractions. Just silence, until their next outbreak of outrage.

Makes you wonder whether the attitude of many whites is about defending the law or just defending folks that look like them.

Prejudice -- to pre-judge based on little or no evidence -- cuts both ways. It prematurely exonerates whites while rushing to judgment on blacks.

Welcome to post-post-racial America.