Honor Block

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True to its reputation, the prison was violent. And ugly. I witnessed cuttings and stabbings in the yard. They erupted without warning, like lightning. At night in my cell, I heard the screams of men being beaten by the guards.

2014

The Crisis of Disability Is Violence: Ableism, Torture, and Murder

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Andre McCollins was eighteen years old in 2002 when he was a student at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts. Like many of the students at the center, a residential institution for people with disabilities, Andre is autistic and has other mental disabilities. One day in October 2002, a staff member told McCollins to take off his jacket. He said no. That was direct defiance and disobedience to directions from staff.

2014

The Rabbi Who Visited Death Row

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Rabbi Chaim Richter and I met on death row during my second year of isolation in a maximum-security women’s prison in the Florida Everglades. I was the only woman on death row at the time. Having been wrongfully convicted in the murder of two police officers, I remained under sentence of death for five years until 1981, when the Supreme Court of Florida changed my sentence from death to life imprisonment. After twelve more years of imprisonment, I won my federal habeas corpus and the federal district court overturned my case. Rabbi Richter visited, counseled, and befriended me throughout those long years.

2014

Deepening Disability Justice: Beyond the Level Playing Field

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I was very lucky to be born disabled in 1966, just as the disability rights movement was gaining strength worldwide—I was born into an era of disability activists agitating for recognition that we are human beings like any other, and that we should be treated with respect and dignity. This is a political claim, but it’s also a theological one that has resonance with the fundamental precepts of most religions. As a Quaker, for example, I am taught to look for “that of God in every one,” in the words of George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement. In most cultural contexts and for many centuries, disabled people have struggled for inclusion and survival. Throughout history, many disabled children have died or been left to die.

2014

God on Wheels: Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology

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At kiddush one day, I was welcoming a visitor to synagogue when she popped the question. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked as her eyes flicked from my face to my wheels. I’ve been asked this question in an astounding array of inappropriate venues; I didn’t flinch. “I have a disability,” I said, though it was plain she’d already noticed. A firm full stop followed that statement, though I knew full well I didn’t answer her question.

2014

Angry Jews on the Freedom Bus

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“We have to change the way we talk about and relate to the State of Israel. And we have to do it now.”

So declared one of the almost dozen Jewish participants in the most recent Freedom Bus ride through Palestine. I recently traveled the length and breadth of the West Bank on the annual Freedom Bus trip sponsored by the Jenin Freedom Theatre, a cultural center and theater based in the Jenin refugee camp. Despite having spent more than two decades living in, working on, and writing about Palestine/Israel, I was struck by the intensity of traveling through frontline communities in the unending struggle over land in the West Bank. Reading a Haaretz headline declaring that “Israel authorizes record amount of West Bank land for settlement construction” is one thing; experiencing the realities of constant settlement expansion from the perspective of the residents whose lives are most directly and deleteriously impacted by it, is quite another.

2014

Confronting the Corporate Expediter: Building the Religious Counterculture

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So I’m at a dinner party chatting with the guy sitting next to me, and he asks me what I do for a living. I tell him all about ministry, and then I ask him what he does for a living. “I’m an expediter,” he says. “An expediter,” I say, “I’ve always been curious about this. What exactly is an expediter?”

“I help companies do their business.

Activism

A Wrenching Look at Alzheimer’s

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In her book, Slow Dancing with a Stranger, Comer details her excruciating journey through the maze of Alzheimer’s, an unforgiving disease. Through this book, she is changing the conversation from acceptance of what is to demanding what should be.

Culture

Recalculating

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And then, there he was again. The chutzpa, calling her, after so many years, his notions of her still intact, his cavalier assumption of intimate knowledge and his selective amnesia. He was not easily put off.

2014

God and Goddess Emerging

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In this historical moment, we need to blend a panentheism that recognizes humans as in and part of God with the radical visions of God as YHVH (source of transformation) and El Shaddai (a love-oriented Breasted God).