This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written ten books and each one of my books is a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

________

Book Excerpt

We need deep knowledge leaders with the endurance and strength of spirit surviving the prison yard and the death row cell.

A Symbiotic Relationship

12) The effectiveness of the criminal transformative teaching I am asserting is dependent upon the existence of a deep understanding of the principles of Catholic social teaching.

When I first began working with the social teaching and realized that the guiding principles animating it also formed the foundational ideas of the nonprofit sector, I assumed that the social teaching could be used effectively by anyone.

I now realize that—though that hope remains attainable—the most optimal use of the teaching can only come from being an active, well-catechized Catholic.

However, Merkle (2004) also instructs us on how to advance the knowledge of the social teaching of the Church in the world:

Some ecologists say it is not the general conditions of an ecosystem that ultimately determine its capacity to sustain itself, but that single factor that is in short supply in a given system that determines its carrying capacity. Is community that single factor that marks the Church’s capacity to transform Social Catholicism for this new century? Some caution that the Church must link the social encyclical tradition to new social carriers, or face irrelevance in the social realm. These carriers might occupy different places along the sociological matrix of community: from association, to movements, or groups, yet as collectives within the Church, all have a common dimension in some degree. (p. 241, highlighting added) Merkle, J. A. (2004). From the Heart of the Church: The Catholic Social Tradition. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press.

13) Through the work of The Lampstand Foundation we plan to build a new platform from which the social teaching can enter into congruence with one of the “new social carriers” called for, and become part of the criminal transformative community.

Criminal transformation and Catholic social teaching form a symbiotic relationship, a natural law of criminal transformation, where the truth of the teaching is the only reality strong enough to trump the truth of the world—the city of men—which is the truth the criminal lives by. (pp. 16-17)

David H. Lukenbill (2008) Carceral World, Communal City, Sacramento, California: The Lampstand Foundation, Chulu Press.