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.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 122, March 16, 2017

______________________________________________________________

Norman Mailer, Jack Henry Abbott: Liberals & Criminals

__________________________________________________________

There is a new book out by Jerome Loving, Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: primarily about the relationship between Norman Mailer, one of the foremost liberals of the 1960’s and beyond, and John Henry Abbott, the criminal/convict whose book, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, is a compilation of letters between Mailer and Abbott while Abbot was still in prison; a book I devoured when it was published in 1981, a short 12 years after my own release from prison in 1969.

Mailer proclaimed Abbott as a significant thinker and writer and helped him get released only to witness Abbott’s killing of a restaurant manager outside the New York City restaurant he managed, six weeks after Abbott’s release.

As a former criminal and convict who served time in some of the same prisons as did Abbott—though several years before him—and who shared his prison experience of serious reading while locked away in solitary confinement; I respect Abbott’s writing and his intellectuality underneath the hyperbole and believe he may have been one of the foremost intellectuals among prisoners, though, I am sad to say, based on information I learned about in the Loving book, he would not be a member of the professional criminal cohort—those to whom Lampstand’s mission is directed—which I define as:

Professional criminals—as defined by the Lampstand Foundation—are those who commit crimes for money, have served at least five years in a maximum security prison, and are not informants, pedophiles, rapists, or serial killers.

As Jerome Loving writes in his book, Jack and Norman:

As his prison misconduct in the federal system continued and worsened, Abbott became known as a reformer among fellow inmates and troublemaker to his jailers. In making the rounds of the many federal prisons as a result, he landed for the first time, in 1979, at Marion. When, by 1980, he received a tentative parole date from federal authorities, he decided to break the inmate code he had so often boasted to Mailer about in his letters and became a “snitch.” Around December 12, 1980, he identified the leaders of what became at the time the longest strike in federal prison history. Through biographer Peter Matthiessen, Mailer got wind of this information the following year, before it became public with the Adan stabbing, while Jack was still at a halfway house in New York. Although shocked that Jack had broken the inmate code he had all along boasted that he would uphold, Mailer let the matter go, wondering about what lengths he himself might go after half a lifetime in prison. (pp. 36-37)

What brings extra heft to this charge of being an informant is the status accrued by serving time in Marion, which at that time, was, within the carceral world culture, equivalent to a PhD from Harvard in the culture of the academy; consequently those who were informed on would have had great influence and stretch throughout the prison system, federal and state; so their labeling of Abbott as a snitch would ensure he was in danger, certainly while still in prison, and, in most cases, even when out.

The great swirling of complimentary verbiage from the literary community around the publication of Abbot’s book was not surprising to those of us who had actually spent time in prison as opposed to those who think they know what prison is like, or more importantly, what they want prison to be like; and my reaction was exactly as expressed by Death Row prisoners in an article by Bruce Jackson in the Buffalo Report 1 March 2002:

In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner’s Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott’s letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott’s first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).

When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.

Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that “they’re the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn’t know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will.” He and several other men on the Row found the book’s success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were. (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://www.murderpedia.org/male.A/a/abbott-jack-henry.htm )

Liberals have long been enamored by criminals and outlaws, a social stance captured wickedly by Thomas Wolfe as Radical Chic and noted in an article in the New York Post by Michael Kaplan, February 16, 2017:

At a 1981 press conference before New York media, a grim-faced Norman Mailer held up that day’s edition of The Post. A headline blared, “Norman Mailer Shocker: I’d Help Killer Again.” The city was aghast, Mailer lobbed a $2 million libel suit against the paper, and a law-abiding restaurant manager was dead.

The headlined killer in this disaster tale was Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime product of the American prison system and an unlikely darling of Manhattan’s literary scene.

In the guilt-stink of “Radical Chic” — a term coined by Tom Wolfe after Leonard Bernstein hosted an event in his home that brought together society types and the Black Panthers — Abbott’s prison memoir, “In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” was poised to be published to rave reviews and best-seller status.

The collision of macho posturing, a publishing industry hungry for authenticity and an ex-con whose considerable literary gifts were tragically overshadowed by jailhouse paranoia are all chronicled in “Jack and Norman” (St. Martin’s Press), by Jerome Loving, out Tuesday.

Long before Abbott entered the picture, Mailer thrived on his reputation as an Ivy League brawler. He punched out Gore Vidal, stabbed his wife and, as Loving tells The Post, he was “a tough guy in the way that Hemingway was a tough guy. Mailer boxed until he was 60, got drunk and fought people in the street; he once got into a confrontation with somebody who made fun of his dog. Mailer had a bad temper and would not back down from anyone, but he had never been in a true danger zone. Abbott with a knife was very dangerous — and he often had a knife on him.” (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/how-norman-mailer-helped-a-criminal-kill-again/ )

The story surrounding his life and thought after the New York killing and return to prison, is admirably captured in the book by him—co-authored by Naomi Zack—My Return, which can be purchased at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/My-Return-Jack-Henry-Abbot/dp/0879753552/ref=sr_

My Return is a must have as a companion to In the Belly of the Beast and Jack and Norman, as an admirable case study of a convict’s life amid the liberal literary world.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 121, February 16, 2017

______________________________________________________________

Women in the Church

______________________________________________________________

The mission of the Lampstand Foundation is to develop material which leads to the reformation/transformation of criminals through deep exposure to Catholic teaching as the only body of thought potent enough to trump the driving narrative of criminality which is based on the way of the world.

The most enduring work Lampstand has produced are the 11 books focusing on certain aspects of Catholic teaching which can interfere with that ministry through either misunderstanding of the teaching of the Church on the part of ministers or criminals, or ambiguous and misleading teachings calling for Church reform.

One of these books examines women as priests in the Church: Women in the Church, St. Catherine of Siena, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin & Criminal Reformation, as opening paragraphs note:

For this book, a quote from Groppe (2009) frames the over-arching theme:

In a culture that systematically denigrates, commodifies, and violates women’s bodies in advertising, film, and pornography, it is imperative that the church bear public and symbolic witness to the mystery that women and men alike can serve as an icon of Wisdom made flesh. Groppe, E. (2009). Women and the persona of Christ: Ordination in the Roman Catholic Church. In Abraham, S. & Procario-Foley, E. (Eds.) Frontiers in Catholic feminist theology: Shoulder to shoulder. (pp. 153-171), Minneapolis: Fortress Press. (p. 171)

That is bare bone essence, isn’t it?

The Church stands in the world as a sign of contradiction and as the world since time immemorial excluded women from full personhood; the Church must ensure that within her embrace, woman’s full personhood is deeply rooted and complete; which can only be accomplished by priestly ordination and full equality with men in the leadership of the Church on earth as that equality is certainly so in Heaven. Women in the Church (pp. 9-10)

Consequently, the recent article in the Vatican magazine, noted in Sandro Magister’s Blog is cause for hope.

On August 2, 2016, Pope Francis instituted a commission to study the history of the female diaconate, for the purpose of its possible restoration. And some have seen this as a first step toward priesthood for women, in spite of the fact that Francis himself seems to have ruled it out absolutely, responding as follows to a question on the return flight from his journey to Sweden last November 1…:

“For the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last clear word was given by Saint John Paul II, and this holds.”

But to read the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the question of women priests appears to be anything but closed. On the contrary, wide open.

“La Civiltà Cattolica” is not just any magazine. By statute, every line of it is printed after inspection by the Holy See. But in addition there is the very close confidential relationship between Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the magazine’s editor, the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro.

Who in turn has his most trusted colleague in deputy editor Giancarlo Pani, he too a Jesuit like all the writers of the magazine.

So then, in the article with his byline that appears in the latest issue of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” Fr. Pani calmly rips to shreds the “last clear word” – meaning the flat no – that John Paul II spoke against women’s priesthood.

To see how, all it takes is to reread this passage of the article, properly speaking dedicated to the question of women deacons, but taking the cue from there to express hopes for women priests as well.

ONE CANNOT SIMPLY RESORT TO THE PAST, by Giancarlo Pani, S.J.

[…] On Pentecost of 1994, Pope John Paul II summarized, in the apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis,” the outcome of a series of previous magisterial statements (including “Inter Insigniores”), concluding that Jesus has chosen only men for the priestly ministry. Therefore “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women. This judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

The statement was a clear word for those who maintained that the refusal of priestly ordination for women could be discussed. Nonetheless, […] some time later, following the problems raised not so much by the doctrine as by the force with which it was presented, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was presented with a question: can “ordinatio sacerdotalis” be “considered as belonging to the deposit of the faith?” The answer was “affirmative,” and the doctrine was described as “infallibiliter proposita,” meaning that “it must be held always, everywhere, and by all the faithful.”

Difficulties with the answer’s reception have created “tensions” in relations between magisterium and theology over the connected problems. These are pertinent to the fundamental theology on infallibility. It is the first time in history that the congregation explicitly appealed to the constitution “Lumen Gentium” no. 25, which proclaims the infallibility of a doctrine that is taught as definitively binding by the bishops dispersed throughout the world but in communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter.

Moreover, the question touches upon the theology of the sacraments, because it concerns the subject of the sacrament of Orders, which traditionally is indeed man, but this does not take into account the developments that the presence of woman in the family and in society has undergone in the 21st century. This is a matter of ecclesial dignity, responsibility, and participation.

The historical fact of the exclusion of woman from the priesthood because of the “impedimentum sexus” is undeniable. Nevertheless, already in 1948, and therefore well ahead of the disputes of the 1960’s, Fr. Congar pointed out that “the absence of a fact is not a decisive criterion for concluding prudently in every case that the Church cannot do it and will never do it.”

Moreover, another theologian adds, the “consensus fidelium” of many centuries has been called into question in the 20th century above all on account of the profound sociocultural changes concerning woman. It would not make sense to maintain that the Church must change only because the times have changed, but it remains true that a doctrine proposed by the Church needs to be understood by the believing intelligence. The dispute over women priests could be set in parallel with other moments of Church history; in any case, today in the question of female priesthood the “auctoritates,” or official positions of the magisterium, are clear, but many Catholics have a hard time understanding the “rationes” of decisions that, more than expressions of authority, appear to signify authoritarianism. Today there is unease among those who fail to understand how the exclusion of woman from the Church’s ministry can coexist with the affirmation and appreciation of her equal dignity.” […] Retrieved February 9, 2017 from http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2017/02/07/latest-from-santa-marta-open-doors-for-women-priests/

Concluding paragraphs in the Lampstand book, Women in the Church, St. Catherine of Siena, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin & Criminal Reformation:

Christ says in John 12:32:

[31] Now is the judgment of the world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. [32] And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.

Teilhard’s concept of evolution in Christ is built upon this, for if evolution is true, and Teilhard, as a scientist, knew that it is; and if Christ is true, and Teilhard as a Jesuit and son of the Church, knew that he is, then Christ is at the center of and animating evolution.

Teilhard de Chardin (1971) knew that understanding this was crucial to the Church:

My profound conviction, born of the experience of a life spent simultaneously in the heart of the Gentile world and in that of the Church, is that at this very moment, we have reached a delicate point of balance at which a readjustment is essential. It could not, in fact, be otherwise: our Christology is still expressed in exactly the same terms as those which, three centuries ago, could satisfy men whose outlook on the cosmos is not physically impossible for us to accept. Unless we admit that religious life and human life are independent of one another (which is a psychological impossibility) such a situation must a priori produce a feeling of dismay, a loss of balance. That it has already done so cannot be denied. I can testify to this in my own case, and the whole of what we call the modernist movement bears me out. What we now have to do without delay is to modify the position occupied by the central core of Christianity—and this precisely in order that it may not lose its illuminative value.

If we ask in what exactly this correction in relationship consists, the answer must be in bringing Christology and evolution into line with one another. Chardin, P.T.D. (1971). Christianity and evolution. (Trans. R. Hague). New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (p. 77)

This call to bring into alignment science and faith was part of the impetus for Vatican II, and much good has come from that council, but there are still central aspects that have not, and the status of women in the Church still reeks of centuries-old ideas which have indeed, caused the Church to lose some of “its illuminative value.” Women in the Church (pp. 118-119)

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

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.

________

The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 122, March 16, 2017

_________________________________________________________

Norman Mailer, Jack Henry Abbott: Liberals & Criminals

__________________________________________________________

There is a new book out by Jerome Loving, Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song: primarily about the relationship between Norman Mailer, one of the foremost liberals of the 1960’s and beyond, and John Henry Abbott, the criminal/convict whose book, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, is a compilation of letters between Mailer and Abbott while Abbot was still in prison; a book I devoured when it was published in 1981, a short 12 years after my own release from prison in 1969.

Mailer proclaimed Abbott as a significant thinker and writer and helped him get released only to witness Abbott’s killing of a restaurant manager outside the New York City restaurant he managed, six weeks after Abbott’s release.

As a former criminal and convict who served time in some of the same prisons as did Abbott—though several years before him—and who shared his prison experience of serious reading while locked away in solitary confinement; I respect Abbott’s writing and his intellectuality underneath the hyperbole and believe he may have been one of the foremost intellectuals among prisoners, though, I am sad to say, based on information I learned about in the Loving book, he would not be a member of the professional criminal cohort—those to whom Lampstand’s mission is directed—which I define as:

Professional criminals—as defined by the Lampstand Foundation—are those who commit crimes for money, have served at least five years in a maximum security prison, and are not informants, pedophiles, rapists, or serial killers.

As Jerome Loving writes in his book, Jack and Norman:

As his prison misconduct in the federal system continued and worsened, Abbott became known as a reformer among fellow inmates and troublemaker to his jailers. In making the rounds of the many federal prisons as a result, he landed for the first time, in 1979, at Marion. When, by 1980, he received a tentative parole date from federal authorities, he decided to break the inmate code he had so often boasted to Mailer about in his letters and became a “snitch.” Around December 12, 1980, he identified the leaders of what became at the time the longest strike in federal prison history. Through biographer Peter Matthiessen, Mailer got wind of this information the following year, before it became public with the Adan stabbing, while Jack was still at a halfway house in New York. Although shocked that Jack had broken the inmate code he had all along boasted that he would uphold, Mailer let the matter go, wondering about what lengths he himself might go after half a lifetime in prison. (pp. 36-37)

What brings extra heft to this charge of being an informant is the status accrued by serving time in Marion, which at that time, was, within the carceral world culture, equivalent to a PhD from Harvard in the culture of the academy; consequently those who were informed on would have had great influence and stretch throughout the prison system, federal and state; so their labeling of Abbott as a snitch would ensure he was in danger, certainly while still in prison, and, in most cases, even when out.

The great swirling of complimentary verbiage from the literary community around the publication of Abbot’s book was not surprising to those of us who had actually spent time in prison as opposed to those who think they know what prison is like, or more importantly, what they want prison to be like; and my reaction was exactly as expressed by Death Row prisoners in an article by Bruce Jackson in the Buffalo Report 1 March 2002:

In 1978 Abbott began a lengthy correspondence with Norman Mailer, who was at the time writing The Executioner’s Song (1979), a fictionalized biography of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Mailer got some of Abbott’s letters published in the prestigious New York Review of Books, which led to publication of Abbott’s first book, In the Belly of the Beast (1982).

When Abbott came up for parole Mailer wrote a strong letter on his behalf, not only saying he was fit for release but that Mailer could guarantee him gainful employment in New York. Abbott was transferred to a New York halfway house in early in June 1981.

Diane Christian and I had done some research on Death Row in Texas not long before that and we were exchanging regular letters with several men on the Row. One of them read In the Belly of the Beast and wrote us that “they’re the kind of letters somebody on the inside writes somebody on the outside who doesn’t know jack-shit about the penitentiary and never will.” He and several other men on the Row found the book’s success in New York proof of how easily conned people in the free world were. (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://www.murderpedia.org/male.A/a/abbott-jack-henry.htm )

Liberals have long been enamored by criminals and outlaws, a social stance captured wickedly by Thomas Wolfe as Radical Chic and noted in an article in the New York Post by Michael Kaplan, February 16, 2017:

At a 1981 press conference before New York media, a grim-faced Norman Mailer held up that day’s edition of The Post. A headline blared, “Norman Mailer Shocker: I’d Help Killer Again.” The city was aghast, Mailer lobbed a $2 million libel suit against the paper, and a law-abiding restaurant manager was dead.

The headlined killer in this disaster tale was Jack Henry Abbott, a lifetime product of the American prison system and an unlikely darling of Manhattan’s literary scene.

In the guilt-stink of “Radical Chic” — a term coined by Tom Wolfe after Leonard Bernstein hosted an event in his home that brought together society types and the Black Panthers — Abbott’s prison memoir, “In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison,” was poised to be published to rave reviews and best-seller status.

The collision of macho posturing, a publishing industry hungry for authenticity and an ex-con whose considerable literary gifts were tragically overshadowed by jailhouse paranoia are all chronicled in “Jack and Norman” (St. Martin’s Press), by Jerome Loving, out Tuesday.

Long before Abbott entered the picture, Mailer thrived on his reputation as an Ivy League brawler. He punched out Gore Vidal, stabbed his wife and, as Loving tells The Post, he was “a tough guy in the way that Hemingway was a tough guy. Mailer boxed until he was 60, got drunk and fought people in the street; he once got into a confrontation with somebody who made fun of his dog. Mailer had a bad temper and would not back down from anyone, but he had never been in a true danger zone. Abbott with a knife was very dangerous — and he often had a knife on him.” (Retrieved February 21, 2017 from http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/how-norman-mailer-helped-a-criminal-kill-again/ )

The story surrounding his life and thought after the New York killing and return to prison, is admirably captured in the book by him—co-authored by Naomi Zack—My Return, which can be purchased at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/My-Return-Jack-Henry-Abbot/dp/0879753552/ref=sr_

My Return is a must-have as a companion to In the Belly of the Beast and Jack and Norman, as an admirable case study of a convict’s life amid the liberal literary world.