Repenting for our prisons
At the heart of what Christians believe there are two fundamental ideas: imago Dei and metanoia. If every human being bears the image of the Creator and is valued and loved by God, then human beings have social responsibilities to value one another. Metanoia, a Greek term often translated as “repentance,” means a complete turnaround, a change of heart and mind, a new way of thinking and being. Both ideas have huge implications for us individually, but also socially, politically, and economically.
Both concepts come into play when we decide that one of us needs to be incarcerated—removed from the community and held in secure confinement. While we give mental and verbal assent to these two Christian concepts, we do our actual living in the world very differently. This includes our decision making on issues like crime and punishment.
Two resources recently stirred up my thinking. One is Jeanne Bishop’s book, Change of Heart (see “The path of forgiveness”). Bishop questioned the justice of locking up her sister’s killer for life without parole, observing that it’s a Christian duty to make good on our promise to forgive as we have been forgiven. (See also Steve Thorngate’s article “Death without killing.”)
