In May, the Institute on Women and Criminal Justice released a report on the growth of the number of women in prison in the U.S.
Women
Robert Roth 4-01-2006
Peter's denials and Judas' betrayal foreshadow the reactionary horror to come.
Sue Brooks 3-01-2006
“Taking Back Our Kids” flagrantly overlooks the fact that African-American women have always worked outside the home—before, during, and after the 1950s. Further, it has only been in the last couple hundred years that some women—specifically white upper-class American and British women—did not work outside the home. Immigrants, slaves, and women of lower socioeconomic standing have always worked outside the home.
Sue Brooks
Dickinson, Texas
Robert H. Baker 3-01-2006
“Taking Back our Kids,” by Danny and Polly Duncan Collum (January 2006), has many important things to say about raising children in today’s American culture, but I take issue with one assertion: that it has been the “choice” of women to enter the workforce in the 1970s and beyond that is at least one cause of the degradation of the lives of children when compared to the 1950s.
Angela M. Skinner 3-01-2006
I was disturbed by the article “Taking Back Our Kids.” The authors seem to think the best way to combat the consumer culture in which we live, and the problems it causes our children, is for one parent to stay at home. I disagree.
They assume that parents work only to keep up with the mounting bills created by a capitalist society. They neglect to acknowledge that many people, especially women, work for self-fulfillment. This is not being selfish. This is being healthy.
Tom Montgomery-Fate 2-01-2006
The remarkable thing about Renny Golden’s writing is that it provides a bridge of understanding between a silenced, disenfranchised community and those who need to hear what that community
Rose Marie Berger 1-01-2006
Members of Women’s Will, an Iraqi human rights organization, demonstrate outside the Ministry of Human Rights in Baghdad for better treatment of prisoners.
Heidi Schlumpf 3-01-2005
Sex abuse scandal, priest shortages, celibacy, ordaining women: The issues roiling the Catholic Church offer challenges - and hope? - for the future.
Charles Strohmer 10-01-2004
Since 9-11 the capacity of Islam for renewal and change has become a central issue in the complex religious and political give-and-take that now surrounds relations between the West and the Muslim community worldwide.
Laurel A. Dykstra 9-01-2003
In a time of hardened hearts, the story of Exodus is relevant once again.
Jill Johnson-Danielson 1-01-2003
QUOTES IN "Where the Boys Aren't" (by Holly Lebowitz Rossi, November-December 2002) by Rev.
Joan Chittister 7-01-2002
A recent editorial cartoon showed a clerical procession in which a mitred man is being preceded down a church aisle by two young altar boys. The cardinal is carrying a placard that reads, "Celibacy has nothing to do with pedophilia. " The scowling little altar boy who is leading the procession, however, is saying to his partner, "Oh, yeah? Well, if he were a father, I bet he wouldn't let anything happen to kids."
The message is clear: There are some things that may be clinically unrelated to the problem at hand but that definitely have a bearing on it. Surely, the role of women in the church is one of those. If the scandal points up anything at all, it begs for a review of the role of women in the decision-making arenas of the church, and the question of the ordination of women as well.
What the scandal highlights in the most glaring of ways is the total absence of women from the inner chambers of ecclesiastical discussion and procedural review. Would women have stood by quietly, said nothing, even agreed to a policy of moving clearly abusive men from parish to parish where they could jeopardize the lives of other children so that the system itself could be saved? The answer is unclear, perhaps, but the question is a necessary one.
Whether or not women as a class would have agreed to such policies is impossible to determine. We may, however, have some clues to the answer, even without benefit of the experience. Women are not more virtuous than men—they have sins of their own—but they do judge systems a great deal more lightly than men do. Women tend to be caretakers and advocates. They are, if we are to believe most of the social-science research in the area, given more to a desire to create and maintain personal relationships than they are to a desire to get and keep power. To have women at the table for discussions could, then, introduce a balance of values, another set of priorities, a broader agenda.
Joan Chittister 1-01-2002
"Whenever people discover that they have rights, they have the responsibility to claim them."
—John XXIII, "Pacem in Terris"