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 twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being 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—free to members—and 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/
Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/
The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.
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Lampstand E Letter: July 16, 2017, The Romance of Communism & Why the Left Still Loves i
A few months ago I wrote two pieces about Communism focusing on Dorothy Day and the Soft Communism in the Catholic Church, which she played a major role in developing.
Today I want to focus on why the left still loves Communism and the major reason, I believe, is that the Romance of Communism, the Romance of the Rebel, the Outlaw, has taken up pretty much permanent lodging in the American Left’s mind and spirit.
It has taken up that home, I believe, through the use of the actual language of the Communist narrative, which is powerful and stresses all people being together and fighting injustice—One Big Union, McCarthyism, Healthcare for All, Abolish Prisons, Tolerance, Diversity—and even though this language has little real connection to Communist-run countries, the words are effectively used.
A 1978 book by Vivian Gornick,
From the 1917 book by John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, to the 1981 movie, Reds, commemorating him, the American Left has adored and supported Communism; a tragic reality that continues today, well outlined by the series of articles in the New York Times, called Red Century: Exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution; of which there are at this point ten, one every week since March 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/column/red-century
American Communism is still the meta-narrative that underlies the American outlaw narrative, and has deeply penetrated the social justice narrative of the Catholic Church.
This centrality is captured in one of the Red Century articles:
My parents were working-class socialists. I grew up in the late 1940s and early ’50s thinking of them and their friends as what they themselves called “progressives.” The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers.
Vivian Gornick (2017. When Communism Inspired Americans, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html?rref=
That time, the early ‘40s and ‘50s were when the full force of Communist’s romantic power hit, as Gornick (2017) writes:
It is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive. (Ibid)
Thornton (2017) notes two reasons for Communism’s continued allure:
There are two reasons for the continuing mystery of this affection for a murderous ideology. One is, as many commentators pointed out decades ago, communism was and is a political religion, a secular substitute for a discarded Christianity. Historian Michael Burleigh details the similarities:
It is relatively easy to transpose some of the key terms from the Judeo-Christian heritage to Marxism: “consciousness” (soul), “comrades” (faithful), “capitalist” (sinner), “devils” (counter-revolutionary), “proletariat” (chosen people) and “classless society” (paradise). The ruling classes were also going to face a revolutionary form of “Last Judgement” . . . But there were far deeper and unacknowledged correspondences, including nostalgia for a lost oneness and the beliefs that time was linear . . . , that the achievement of higher consciousness brought salvation, and that history was progressing with its meaning and purpose evident to the discerning, knowledgeable vanguard.
Bruce Thornton. (2017, May 5) The Left’s Continuing Homage to Communism: Why progressives pay no price for clinging to their murderous ideology. Frontpage Mag. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266596/lefts-continuing-homage-communism-bruce-thornton
This article from The Catholic Thing puts it into a correct context with the Pro-Life Movement
To perpetrate a great evil it takes a great lie portraying the evil as a great good. That was the con man’s trick of Communism. Even though Communist theory imagined a laughable utopia (for anyone who thought it through), and the reality was demonstrably more murderous than anything in modern history, lots of people – sophisticated intellectuals and ordinary working folk who sought a more just society – continued to defend it well past the point when the evil was impossible to deny. Some still do.
Something similar has been going on for the past half-century and more with abortion and the sexual revolution. In the heyday of Communism, you would hear from people suffering under Marxist regimes how leaders made it seem like down was up, right was left (or wrong), repression was liberation. Any criticism was either naïve or the work of dark capitalist forces.
For decades, pro-lifers have thought that they were merely trying to defend life in the womb. For their pains, they have been accused of wanting to control women’s bodies, defend patriarchy, destroy the environment, perpetuate Western imperialism – and now (in crazier but ever more influential circles) to disrespect alternative forms of family and human life via hetero-normativity and transphobia. (I know, I don’t get the connection either – can’t you be gay or trans and pro-life?)
Let’s recall some hard facts. Communist ideology killed roughly 100 million globally in the 20th century and has not yet entirely finished its run. The pro-abortion ideology has killed 60 million in America alone, 6 million in Italy, and by reasonable estimates close to 1.5 billion worldwide since 1980. It’s no wonder abortion advocates, like the old Communists, try to cloak the carnage in terms of a warped moral crusade and to divert attention to side issues from the central reality – the innocent child in the womb.
Retrieved May 22, 2017 from https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/05/22/defending-life-in-rome/
And to provide one answer to the question implicit in these observations—why do some intellectuals love dictators—comes this article from City Journal:
Though Hollander does not claim that there is a single explanation for intellectuals’ attraction to dictatorships such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Castro (or Khomeini, in the case of Foucault), let alone to have found it, he nevertheless believes, in my view plausibly, that the longing for quasi-religious belief in an age when actual religion has largely been rejected is a significant part of the explanation. The totalitarian dictators were not the typical politicians of democratic systems who, whatever their rhetoric, seem mainly to tinker at the edges of human existence, are ready or forced to make grubby compromises with their opponents, reveal themselves to be morally and financially corrupt, are more impressive in opposition than in office, have no overarching ideas for the redemption of humanity, and make no claims to be panjandrums of all human knowledge and wisdom. Rather, those dictators were religious leaders who claimed the power to answer all human questions at once and to lead humanity into a land of perpetual milk, honey, and peace. They were omniscient, omnicompetent, loving, and kind, infinitely concerned for the welfare of their people; yet at the same time they were modest, humble, and supposedly embarrassed by the adulation they received. The intellectuals, then, sought in them not men but messiahs. Retrieved May 23, 2017 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/crushing-crushers-15207.html
Finally, don’t forget to read a few of the pieces of the series, The Red Century, from the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/column/red-century, where, underneath the scholarly veneer, the boundless love pours off the page.