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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Catholic Nuns & Desert Mothers

The subjugation of women is the greatest wrong in history and something the Catholic Church, sadly but unmistakably, shares much responsibility.

From the beginning, when Adam’s unneeded rib was required to create a woman, through Aquinas—whose work in almost every other case is monumental—women have been marginalized, oppressed and discounted.

The importance Catholic Nuns and Desert Mothers played in the early life of the Church was very deep and still misunderstood; but the marvelous book, Sisters in Arms, by Jo Ann Kay McNamara, addresses it like no other I have read; a must read for anyone interested in the history of women religious in the Catholic Church.

Here is a quote:

“Thus, by the time the Roman Empire was crumbling in the west, women who had escaped the confinement of the gender system by renouncing sexual activity were again restricted to the wife-to-widow cycle in the institutional life of the church. Married to clergymen or partnered with them in separate living spaces, women were distinctly subordinate to the control of the episcopacy. As brides of Christ, they had to submit to the strictures that bound other wives. But their husband was, after all, in heaven and they enjoyed special prestige when dealing with his stewards. Jerome encouraged Paula to make the most of her dignity as God’s mother-in-law. This was not enough for Paula, or for Jerome either. As the fifth century opened, they joined the growing exodus of Christians who sought a return to the apostolic life in the desert. There were Christians, as there always would be, who looked back to the old radical days and still sought the transformative powers of the virgin life as exemplified by the Letter to the Galatians. Women as well as men, seeking a higher order of perfection, fled to the deserts beyond the Roman cities. There they submitted their bodies to the discipline, ascesis, that would transform them into contenders for a new martyr’s crown. There, still, the vision of Perpetua, whose heroism made her a man, lured her sisters forward.” (pp. 59-60)

Jo Ann Kay McNamara. (1996). Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England.

And, the entire first chapter is online, thanks to the Washington Post; here is an excerpt:

“Chapter One: The Apostolic Life

“The women of Galilee were the first Christians. They came up to Jerusalem with Jesus and stayed with him in the bitter hours of his death. They buried him and later announced to the other disciples who were hiding from the Romans that the tomb was empty. One woman testified that she had spoken to him, earning the title Apostle to the Apostles. Having come to believe that their teacher was God himself, who had voluntarily taken a human body to redeem humanity with his own suffering and death, they determined to pursue fulfillment of his mission. Their earthly future was bleak. Jesus’ legacy was nothing but a share in his suffering. But they believed that compassion, participating in his sacrifice through imitation, would earn them a place in his eternal kingdom. To that end, they were prepared to take up arms against the empire of this world.

“We know some names: Mary, Jesus’ mother, and her sister Mary, Clopas’s wife; Mary of Magdala, Joanna, the wife of Chuzah, and Susanna, a trio from whom Jesus had exorcised demons; Salome and Mary, the mother of the sons of Zebedee. They were childless widows and separated wives. One had lived for a dozen years with a flow of blood, presumably a menstrual disorder that made her unclean to her Jewish community. Tradition named her Berenice or Veronica. There were other women too, though we do not know whether they were part of the group who followed Jesus to the cross. The Samaritan woman, who confided with shame that she was living with a man who was not her husband, was the first apostle Jesus sent to proclaim him as Messiah. Mary of Bethany, who sat among the apostles listening to Jesus after he refused to send her off to the kitchen, and her busy sister, the practical Martha, provided hospitality for his disciples out of affection for the master. Finally, there was the nameless woman taken in adultery and the Canaanite woman who begged for her child’s cure as if for crumbs from a rich man’s table.

“The women of the gospel had no social identity, though we know that some were rich. They had fallen or leapt through the cracks in a dying order. They lived at a crossroads, a Janus time, that gave simultaneous birth to the Roman Empire and to the Christian religion. The men who should have anchored them to their society had apparently cast them adrift. For centuries, Rome had been engaged in the systematic conquest of the Mediterranean world, engulfing its diverse polities and sapping the power of their oligarchies. In general, these polities shared a sociopolitical model: the mass of people were ordered and supervised by a ruling class of “fathers” who headed great families of cadets, women, children, and slaves. In addition, the fathers controlled diverse groupings of dependents and clients. In contrast, the simpler unions of humbler people were barely recognized by the empire as marriage at all. The fathers’ public life and their family responsibilities were thus mutually dependent. As Rome undermined their public power, they also lost the ability and even the will to protect their private domain from outside intervention. The final victim of this unifying conquest was the Roman Republic itself. “

Retrieved March 10, 2019 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/sistersinarms.htm

We can help our Church by praying the traditional Rosary: “When the Virgin Mary asked us at Fatima to pray the Rosary every day, she was not asking for five decades. She was asking for fifteen. When Our Lady says “Pray the Rosary,” she is speaking of what has been termed her Psalter, a word referring to the Book of Psalms, which contains one hundred and fifty Psalms of David. From the time of St. Dominic, “Mary’s Psalter” was the 150 Hail Marys. In 1569 St. Pope Pius V, himself a Dominican, issued an apostolic letter establishing the fifteen-decades as the official Church-authorized Rosary.” (Retrieved March 14, 2019 from https://traditioninaction.org/religious/d013rp15Decades_Stretenovic.html )

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David H. Lukenbill, President, The Lampstand Foundation

Post Office Box 254794   Sacramento, CA 95865-4794

Website: https://davidhlukenbill.wordpress.com/

Blog: www.cathliceye.wordpress.com

E-Mail: Dlukenbill@msn.com

With Peter to Christ through Mary