With programs from housing support to workplace development to art therapy, Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation serves formerly incarcerated people, their families and those struggling with crime or victimization.
Criminal Justice
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
In El Salvador, churches are essential to ending gang violence. But the government’s crackdown could hurt those efforts.
When gang members were asked about what they must do to exit the gang, a little over half said they must join a church or follow God.
Posted inFaith, Short Take
Good Friday is the perfect day to commit to ending the death penalty
Why is it that so many of us shed tears in remembering Christ’s execution on Good Friday yet condone the state-sanctioned killing of our neighbors throughout the rest of the year?
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Is it high time to reconsider our drug policies?
A Columbia professor comes clean about his casual drug use—and thinks the rest of us should think more about harm reduction than eradication when it comes to addictive substances.
Posted inFeatures, Politics & Society
Greg Boyle, S.J.: What Rodney King and racial unrest in Los Angeles taught me about policing and community
It was after this moment, 30 years ago, that chiefs of police, beginning in Los Angeles and spreading everywhere, started to say, “We cannot arrest our way out” of this.
Posted inFaith in Focus, Politics & Society
Jury duty restored my faith in the American project
Where else would we have listened to each other this way? Not online these days. Not at a school board meeting. Not at a political debate. Not at a family gathering. Not even in church.
Posted inDispatches, Politics & Society
This Catholic nonprofit in Nigeria is helping ex-convicts stay out of prison after their release
Without the Carmelite Prisoners’ Interest Organization, “I would still be suffering in the prison because I had no money to hire the services of a lawyer,” Chisom Eze said. “I had thought my life would end in prison until Capio saved me.”
Posted inFaith, Features
I’ve been on death row for 23 years. Catholic Mass gives me hope in the midst of my suffering.
“I returned to my Catholic upbringing, professing a faith I did not completely feel, because I was suffering and needed answers from God,” writes Lyle C. May, who is on death row in North Carolina.
Posted inNews, Politics & Society
Former priest serving life sentence for sexual exploitation dies in prison
Robert McWilliams, 41, was found unresponsive early Feb. 4, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said. It is believed that he died by suicide.
Posted inDispatches, Faith
A bombshell report on sex abuse left France ‘flabbergasted.’ Yet most French Catholics still believe there is hope for reform
The report landed on French Catholics like a bomb. French bishops had never considered sexual abuse a serious problem. “We have been in denial for 20 years,” Father Goujon said. “The bishops said that [that kind of abuse] could never happen here.”