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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Liberation Theology & the Historical Critical Method

They are connected—both erected on an atheistic and Marxist foundation—and understanding them is vital to effective ministry to criminals as much of the criminal/carceral narrative has developed from their convergence.

The greatest theologian of our time, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, has set the mark for Catholic discussion of each.

Writing as Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Faith in 1984 about liberation theology:

“The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of freedom and a force for liberation. In recent years, this essential truth has become the object of reflection for theologians, with a new kind of attention which is itself full of promise.

“Liberation is first and foremost liberation from the radical slavery of sin. Its end and its goal is the freedom of the children of God, which is the gift of grace. As a logical consequence, it calls for freedom from many different kinds of slavery in the cultural, economic, social, and political spheres, all of which derive ultimately from sin, and so often prevent people from living in a manner befitting their dignity. To discern clearly what is fundamental to this issue and what is a by-product of it, is an indispensable condition for any theological reflection on liberation.

“Faced with the urgency of certain problems, some are tempted to emphasize, unilaterally, the liberation from servitude of an earthly and temporal kind. They do so in such a way that they seem to put liberation from sin in second place, and so fail to give it the primary importance it is due. Thus, their very presentation of the problems is confused and ambiguous. Others, in an effort to learn more precisely what are the causes of the slavery which they want to end, make use of different concepts without sufficient critical caution. It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to purify these borrowed concepts of an ideological inspiration which is compatible with Christian faith and the ethical requirements which flow from it.”

(Introduction) Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation”.

Retrieved June 28, 2018 from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19840806_theology-liberation_en.html

Writing as Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 on the historical-critical method of scholarship:

“As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to firmer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith—the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus—became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum Jesus was the anti-Roman revolutionary working—though finally failing—to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief. If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering as icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold. Since then there has been growing skepticism about these portrayals of Jesus, but the figure of Jesus himself has for that very reason receded even further into the distance.

“All these attempts have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large. This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.” (p. xii)

Pope Benedict XVI. (2007). Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. Doubleday: New York.

Liberation theology says truth and salvation rests in political struggle and the historical critical method of viewing the past, present, and future, is the key unlocking that knowledge.

Both of these movements separate the divine Christ from Christ the man, heaven from earth, human history from supernatural truth; and their success in so doing, has largely, though temporarily, negated the power of the Catholic Church—who alone is able to provide forgiveness of sin and salvation—the strongest power against the evil of Communism and these two sin-negating narratives it engendered.