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.

Teilhard, O’Connor, & the Church

This book review by Flannery O’Connor of Jesuit Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Divine Milieu published in The Bulletin, February 4, 1961, noted:

“Where is the Catholic as passionately vowed by conviction and not by convention to spreading the hopes of the Incarnation as are many humanitarians to spreading the dream of the new city?” Teilhard asks this question toward the end of the Divine Milieu, the second of his books to be published in America. It is a question depressing to answer today when the sense of expectation has largely disappeared from our religion. No writer of the last few centuries is more capable of restoring that sense to the Christian world than Teilhard, whose work is both scientific and profoundly Pauline.

“Teilhard, who was a Jesuit and a paleontologist, was not allowed by his order to publish but was permitted to continue his work and was sent to China, the best place for its continuance. There he played a major role in the discovery of Pekin man and wrote the books which are being published now after his death and which will probably have the effect of giving a new face to Christian spirituality. The first of Teilhard’s books to be published here, The Phenomena of Man, is scientific and traces the development of man through the chemical, biological and reflective stages of life. This second volume is religious and puts the first in proper focus. They should be read together for the first volume is liable to seem heretical without the second and the second insubstantial without the first. It is doubtful if any Christian of this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has reseen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has cast upon it.” (p. 161)

The Divine Milieu, P. Teilhard de Chardin, Harpers, 1960. 139 pp. $3. Reviewed by Flannery O’ Connor. Reprinted in the book: Flannery O’ Connor: Her Life, Library and Book Reviews. Studies in Women and Religion. Lorine M. Getz. (1980). The Edwin Mellon Press: New York.

The outstanding insight—which I share completely—that leapt out to me is in the final sentence: “It is doubtful if any Christian of this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has reseen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has cast upon it.”

The cosmic light Teilhard so brilliantly shined was that of the compatibility of evolutionary science and Catholic spirituality.

And had the Church embraced his work rather than forbidding him from publishing it, what changes might have occurred in relation to the women in the Church and the other personal identity issues involved in gender, marriage, and children, that could have negated some of the horrors that evolved through the sexual abuse scandals still plaguing Catholicism.

I believe that at some point—perhaps far into the future—the Church will recognize the treasure that is Teilhard’s teaching and he will become a saint and a Doctor of the Church.

I just found out that there is a move to accomplish this, a petition to ask Pope Francis to make Fr. Teilhard a Doctor of the Church, at https://action.groundswell-mvmt.org/petitions/declare-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin-s-j-a-doctor-of-the-roman-catholic-church

Please pray the rosary—the full 15 decades as Our Lady called for, as this article notes https://traditioninaction.org/religious/d013rp15Decades_Stretenovic.html —for the Church.