04.25.2020 🎧 The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning

Not sure how to sum this up. I benefited from the reminder of the greatness of God's love, and the utterly staggering truth that his love is never, ever dependent on what I do. God does invite us to change, but by the gift of his Spirit, not by shame.

I loved the examples he gave of an AA member who "fell off the wagon" and showed that responses of compassion, empathy, and presence were so much more likely to actually help a person get back to the good, desired behavior than responses of disbelief, unacceptance, and shame.

There were points where I thought I either wasn't sure where he stood and wanted to, or was fairly certain he was venturing into theological territory where I didn't want to follow. It probably won't be the one that I recommend very highly. Obviously, there were some praiseworthy quotes (below). But on the whole, for this topic, I far prefer writings by Tim Keller, or better yet,Alan Kraft's Good News for Those Trying Harder. the entire work that includes and puts flesh on Tim Keller's quote:

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

Quotes from The Ragamuffin Gospel:
 
"Jesus spent a disproportionate amount of time with people described in the Gospels as the poor, the blind, the lame, the lepers, the hungry, sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, those possessed by unclean spirits, all who labor and are heavy burdened, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last, and the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
"In short, Jesus hung out with ragamuffins.
"Obviously, his love for failures and nobodies was not an exclusive love. That would merely substitute one class prejudice for another. He related with warmth and compassion to the middle and upper classes not because of their family connections, financial clout, intelligence, or Social Register status, but because they too were God's children."

"The gospel of grace is brutally devalued when Christians maintain that the transcendent God can only be properly honored and respected by denying the goodness and the truth and the beauty of the things of this world."

"Yahweh is first perceived by the Jewish community as a personal, relating Being. Their concept of God was vastly superior to that of the pagans whose gods were quite human, fickle, capricious, erotic, as unpredictable as the forces with which they were identified--wind, storm, fertility, the nation, and so forth.
"But Israel knew a holy God, transcending everything visible and tangible, yet personal. He was somehow reflected in things but was not to be identified with things. Exodus depicts God as stable, interested, a Rock of dependability among so many dependents."

"The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior."

"Perhaps the supreme achievement of the Holy Spirit in the life of ragamuffins is the miraculous movement from self-rejection to self-acceptance. It is not based on therapy or the power of positive thinking; it is anchored in their personal experience of the acceptance of Jesus Christ."

04.18.2020 🎧 The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

This one seemed underwhelming in the beginning, but I'm so glad I pushed through because the threads came together beautifully and brought themes of love, friendship, and the possibility of change into clear view. Also, the bookishness of it all was so endearing. The truth that right book isn't the right book until the right time shines brightly here. Also, "I like talking about books with people who like talking about books."

"The things we respond to at 20 are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at 40 and vice versa. This is true in books, and also in life."

"The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a sh*t about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a sh*t about everything."

"Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, AJ decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes, so that we can be exhilarated every now and again."

04.12.2020 📘 Coming Clean and The Book of Waking Up

COMING CLEAN

"The bottle is not the thing. The addiction is not the thing. The pain is the thing" (71).

"In the school of bootstrap theology, children learn straining and striving. They learn a responsible, if not tired, faith. The sin prohibitions promote personal holiness, and personal holiness kept our Sunday best from tarnish, and in turn, it kept us from tarnishing the glory of God. After all, the Christian faith isn't all about us; it is about God, we were told. And told. And told" (73).

"These prayers and supplications tire me. After all, it is an insane person who engages in the same behavior in the hope of achieving a different outcome. I don't suppose myself insane, so instead of these spiritual gyrations, I find a way to kill any expectations" (87).

"[The area of my nonconformity to God's will] is my inability to accept that God's plan might be opposed to my own human will, my desire for immediate healing. And the mismatch between my will and God's gives rise to the anxiety, to the pain" (137).

"It bears admitting--this word from God could be nothing more than the tired mind playing tricks...This is why our more conservative, systematic brothers in the faith tell us not to trust listening prayers. THere is a danger that one might conflate the voice of God with your own, they say, and I am not naive to this. This, some believe, is the reason we listen for answers only and always through the Scriptures, never through the still small voices that speak to us in the night. I find this notion ironic. No one ever has misread, misheard, and misapplied a passage of Scripture..." (151).

"Titus's healing would bring steel to the legs of my faith. But in praying through the divine no, in asking God to relent, I am finding that my will is becoming more malleable; I am becoming more open to the not my will but yours be done. This is the slower process of shoring up genuine faith, and it seems a different expression of faith than that of the faith healers of long ago.
"This is an expression of faith that hurts.
"The bones of faith are brittle. This is a product of the human condition. When our prayers go unanswered, when God does not meet us at the point of our desires, we turn to the lowercase gods to ease the pain of living. Bow to the god of booze; bow to the god of sex; bow to your food, to your material possessions! I traded my prayers for a liquid fire-god, because the idea of having my will bent around God's (as if I'd yet discerned it) was unbearable" (157-158).

"The invitation to make our will known to God, to beg fro his intervention, is an invitation to act like the blood-sweating Jesus in the garden. Bending the will, though, requires the Christlike willingness to endure the cup of unmet expectations" (158).

“I consider his presence then, his presence now, and I’m hopeful that the bending of my will to his is yet another sign that he is with me, even to the end of the age (158).

"If you can seek comfort in the arms of another," she says, "you can handle the worst the world has to offer" (177) quoting Sue Johnson in some EFT teaching.

"As Buddy Wakefield, spoke-word poet, says, 'forgiveness is releasing all hope for a better past.' At the same time, though, forgiveness is the manner of preparing oneself to forgive all future deaths, releasing all expectation of a pain-free future.
"Forgiveness is unbounded by time and space. It operates within the fifth dimension to this dynamic marvel we call life" (199).

Quote from Henri Nouwen, page 210: "Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."

THE BOOK OF WAKING UP

"If the life of Christ shows us anything, it's that the Stuff of Earth is meant to point us to the substance of heaven. How? Consider the way he came eating and drinking" (51).

"Pain has a shape, yes. It has a voice too. It spins archetypal narratives.
"Scarcity whispers, 'There's never enough.'
"Abuse pounds, 'No one is safe.'
"Loss reminds us, 'You're always alone'" (82).

"...ask yourself this: Am I able to shake the temptation to use whatever it is, or do I always give in?
"See how so many of our coping mechanisms sound a great deal like addictions? See how we all might be addicted to something?"....
"Often, habits, affections, attachments, and dependencies lead you around by the nose, just as cocaine leads the hardcore drug user" (116-117)

The brain is "primed to chase pleasure when pain comes knocking" (119).

"If you turn to the Stuff of Earth when you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, or all four, there's a good change you're running in a groove etched by a dopamine loop" (135).

"Dr. Gabor Mate' writes, 'Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics.' Put more succinctly, he writes, 'The question is never, 'Why the addiction?' but 'Why the pain?'" (148).

"Addiction is nothing more than attachment to the thing that could never satisfy our deepest longing, the longing for bonded connection" (151).
This is where the word "attachment" gets confusing to me. I think he's using it to mean our habit of seeking pleasure, relief from the pain; it also seems so connected to the 'attachment' of Attachment Theory / Science.

"Sobriety is all about ordering our affections, our loves. It's about being awake to God in every moment, even the moments of our pain, and fixing our adoration to him. It's a call that can be seen throughout the Scriptures, even in the oft-misunderstood Ten Commandments" (164).

"Jesus knew that true sobriety--a sobriety characterized by living int he love of God--requires a deeper sort of awakening, an awakening to our underlying emotions, desires, imaginations, even our pain" (171).

page 183:
132. Jesus Used Bread to Point to the True Bread, Wine to Point to the True Wine
Yes, Jesus came preaching a message of proper attachment: Don't attach to the Stuff of Earth. Attach to me, the only one who can satisfy you. But still, he used the Stuff of Earth to draw the people into that attachment. In the aforementioned gospel story, he used loaves and fishes to point to himself as the bread of heaven. In the water-to-wine miracle in Cana, he used wine to point to himself as the true life of every party. He used water as an object lesson to invite a serial divorcee into his eternal love (John 4:7-15). He used spit and mud to give sight to a blind man( John 9:6). He even used a coin to invite the religious leaders out of a fixation on the Roman Empire and into the eternal kingdom (Mark 12:16-17).
See? For Christ, all material is useful for drawing us into the Divine Love of God. He uses the Stuff of Earth to direct us to the love of heaven.

"[The goal is] a true, inner, sobriety. A sobriety that is less about avoiding addiction and more about the practice of adoration. It is a way of seeing the Stuff of Earth with eyes wide open. A way of understanding how all things--bread, books, clothing, making money, and even wine--are diving portals to draw us deeper into his Divine Love" (193).

"Step 1: Wake to your pain and invite God into it.
Step 2:Wake to your coping mechanisms, your lesser loves and confess them.
Step 3: Wake to the Diving Love and pursue it as best you can" (196).

Community, with whom we "eat the waking meal" (communion), "sing the waking songs," and "participate in the waking community."

_____________________________________

What can be said to sum these up, to make them into concise ideas, articulated to bring understanding? Probably nothing I can say. I think these works and ideas are so important. Probably especially to us Enneagram 9s, who numb out with the best of them. Haines teaches that we all have pain, and we all turn to addictions/coping mechanisms to deal with them. He points out how this Stuff of Earth can often be either sacramental, or idolatrous and harmfully addictive, depending on how we choose to partake. I so appreciated these thoughts. I wanted more about what Waking Up looks like. How do I stop doing the old habits to find pleasure and escape pain?

Probably the biggest take-away for me was the idea that we all have pain (yes, different pain, and some pain is bigger and worse...but we all have it; that's real) and that we all, by our very brain chemistry, seek out practices/substances/experiences that give pleasure so as to stop feeling the pain. We are all addicted, in a way, looking to the Stuff of Earth (which he wisely points out CAN ALSO BE SACRAMENTAL. DRAWING US TO CHRIST, when we are seeking to be "rightly attached" to him and he is our greatest love,) to bring relief, in the form of alcohol, food, shopping, social media, or, he even mentioned once, books (!). Often the first step is to identify the pain, and look right at it and sit with it, stop trying to lessen it with these addictions. But we only experience victory over addiction when we actually stop looking at the addiction and how to avoid it, and turn to adoration of Christ.

I still have so many questions about how. It makes me want to revisit You Are What You Love, all about how every-day liturgies can draw us into loving Christ more. It makes me want to Just Practice the Thing. I loved his three general types of pain and something about that rings true. I was left wanting to know a lot more about the pain, but maybe it's something each individual needs to approach in the presence of God. I was also left wanting more facts and definitions, etc related to attachment. He talked a lot about attachments and affections, and it seems to have so much overlap with Attachment Theory/Science (and he does seem to be sympathetic with/come from a perspective of EFT, so it seems like he knows it too) but maybe that's something I'll have to work through for myself.

It had a lot of concepts I've been learning already in my journey of healing. It had a few more ideas for me. And I'm hungry to keep going.

04.11.2020 🎧 The End Is Always Near by Dan Carlin

"The idea of 'progress' is not without bias."

"The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account."

"So much of war is about nerve and morale and avoiding panic."

"Looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective...premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me that things are pretty good now."

I started this book exactly 6 days before Covid Got Real (in my world.) I wanted to read it because I've listened to some Hardcore History with Andrew, and I certainly like his story-telling approach to things, and I liked even more the idea of his words contained in a focused, succinct book, because my attention span is often no match for the podcast.

The first two chapters were my favorite. I loved the questions he raised about toughness, like: Do tough times make more resilient, even virtuous, people? Considering how different cultures have different definitions of and morality assigned to the concept is fascinated. I was then absorbed by the questions about how different child-rearing practices might have affected people in different cultures, because of differing interpretations of said practices. All of this reflection on what is truly timeless and what is culture-based is so interesting, especially for one always on the lookout for how to have a better hermaneutic for a text in which a deity identifies himself as Father.

Each chapter after that is a vignette of a different point in history defined by sudden transformation, either "progress" or "fall." I didn't really get into the main part of the book until it became available on Scribd as an audiobook, and I think listening to Dan Carlin narrate was the ideal way to consume this book. The point of all of these historical snapshots was well-made and hard-hitting: the people described here probably didn't expect their city to be taken, or their way of life to suddenly change any more than we do now (or did a few weeks ago, when our sense of control and security in predictable comfort were even greater than they are now.) It's so easy for us in our current age to think that we are uniquely unassailable... but every country conquered, every culture with a sudden change to their way of life thrust upon them probably thought the same thing too.

@tonyreinke has pointed out in one of his books that our current relationship with digital media has made us lose our place in history and gives us a "miscalibrated time stamp." I think maybe one of the applications of that concept is this: when something terrible happens in our lives or especially in the world at large (like, say, a global pandemic), it can be easy for some of us to think that this is the first time the world has ever seen something like it. (Am I talking about myself, confessed history ignoramus and stereotypical millennial, obsessed with having feelings about my feelings? ((This idea is from @iamdavidkessler on @artofmanliness podcast, and yes, I feel seen.)) Why, yes, I think so.) Reading this book was oddly comforting to me because it showed that humanity has survived far worse changes in the past. I also learned a lot!

03.23.2020 🎧 Chasing Vines by Beth Moore

"What's fertile for a vine might be fatal for corn."

"God doesn't mind being misunderstood."

God loves watching things grow... "we don't have to despise the process."

"Holier than thou people usually end up holier than nobody."

04.27.2020 📘 Surprised by Paradox

Attention to all who think respect for paradox is reserved for those who disregard absolute truth: "While there are certainties in the Christian faith, at the heart of the Christian story is also paradox." Here, Michel explores examples in the incarnation (of the fully God, fully man named Jesus), the kingdom (that is here already and is not yet), grace (given freely, but somehow in a way that doesn't exclude law and effort), and lament (both a complaint to God and an expression of faith). As always, Michel has insightful, beautiful things to say. I found the third section the most helpful. For a good part of my adult life I've been unlearning a penchant for legalism, and lately (studying Galatians) have been beholding the mystery of life by the Spirit that also is a life with responsibility.

The older I get, the more I discover that certainty can be elusive. I want to be clear here. I believe in certainty, but I do not believe in comprehensive certainty....We know in part. —Russ Ramsey, forward

Theological understanding should not become a substitute for faith. Studied rightly, theology should lead to awe and wonder. —Russ Ramsey, foreword

I am not talking about abandoning orthodoxy or venturing away from the faith. God forbid. I am talking about venturing deeper in. —Russ Ramsey, foreword

Examples of paradox: the three-in-one God, the incarnation, grace (6).

"'How do you keep God's story prominent in your writing rather than your own?' I've puzzled over that question for years, understanding, on the one hand, the fear that we're raising up a generation of people who know no truth beyond their personal experience, who do not understand their stories as windows into the bigger, grander story of God. And still, I can't help wondering just how exactly to point to the place where my story ends and God's story begins. When God rained bread on his hungry people and opened rivers from rocks, whose story was that?" (44).

"A bodily life, which is to say a spiritual life, is a scandalously particular life. A special life. The incarnation, resting as it does on the paradox of particularity, reminds us of this. Jesus was the second Adam, born of God, born of Mary. But his life is not simply a model of universality. God narrowed infinite possibilities to become a particular man in the fullness of time....We learn to be human from Jesus, but this isn't to say that Jesus was a generic human" (47).

"Was God...up to something as generic as womanhood and manhood in each of our lives--or was there more to be discovered for living our unique, embodied lives of faithfulness?" (47).

"Though we sing a collective song of praise in eternity, we sing it from the particular timbre of our own voices. Though we are finally gathered as the single people of people, we are not a faceless mass of humanity. Sin, like dross, is burned away: specialness is not" (48).

"To receive grace, we need humility" (116).

"The curse of the law is that we cannot keep it. The evidence of grace is that we should want to" (121).

"There is fruitful tension between grace and law, law and grace, and paying attention to that tension helps us avoid the either of legalism (which separates God's law from grace) and the or of antinomianism (which separates God's grace from obedience). It is a paradox that God's gratuitous grace should rain on the righteous and the unrighteous--and that obedience should be demanded for no other apparent reason that 'it is his word'" (125). 

"Human agency is not sufficient for justification, but human agency is critical for sanctification. And this is just a fancy way of saying that we must work in a life saved by grace.
"The only kind of faith that the Bible mentions is obedient faith (Rom. 1:5)" (139).

"This is what the spiritual disciplines are: not the rain shower of God's grace but the effort to get outside" (139).

"Spiritual response, said Jesus, is an easy yoke and a light burden, which is to say something lightweight and yet something to be carried nonetheless" (141).

"Lament, with its clear-eyed appraisal of suffering alongside its commitment to finding audience with God, is a paradoxical practice of faith" (147).

"...what lament teaches me, at the very least, is that it is not equanimity that I need in the face of death, but outrage" (159).

"There is pluck to lament, pluck to its faith. Lest we think that faith is slack surrender to God's will, the testimony that we have in Scripture is a faith paradoxically emboldened to ask, to question, to challenge, to complain" (167).

"Just as there is a necessary learning in our life of desire, there is also a necessary learning in our life of grief...we must be apprenticed in God's sorrow. As J. Todd Billings explores in Rejoicing in Lament, there are distorted forms of lament, including the complaint "about interruptions in [our] comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, without an eye toward seeking God's kingdom." The troubles we regularly bring to God might be more closely examined for what they reveal about the things we treasure, the things we most vigilantly protect, the things we cannot lose" (175).

"There is a way to complain about injustice in the world that has nothing to do with faith. There is a way of hoping to repair the world that has nothing to do with relying on God (and all about trusting in one's own do-gooding). There is also a way of existing in the world that doesn't complain or grieve but rather insulates itself from the everyday travesties of injustice. But there is yet another way, a more Godlike orientation to the world, and it's the paradoxical way of weeping. It's the way of Jesus outside the tomb of one of his closes friends, tears falling despite all his reassurances about resurrection of life. That way of Jesus is the way of lament. Lament cries out its anguish to God" (182).

"God's suffering is not an answer necessarily, but is a consolation. And even if the cross does not put to rest all the questions we have for the troubles we face, it assures us that god is fit to comfort" (186).

12.28.2019 📘 The Locust Effect by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros

"We have come to call the unique pestilence of violence and the punishing impact it has on efforts to lift the global four out of poverty the locust effect" (Xi). The problem is that the world knows that the poor suffer from hunger and disease, and people are working to fix it. People don’t know that "endemic to being poor is a vulnerability to violence" and because of that, efforts to change this reality are lacking.

“For reasons that are fairly obvious, if you are reading this book, I’m pretty sure you were not among the very poorest in our world – the billions of people who are trying to live off a few dollars a day. As a result, I also know that you are probably not chronically hungry, you are not likely to die of a perfectly treatable disease, you have reasonable access to fresh water, you are a literate, and you have a reasonable shelter over your head. But there is something else I know about you. I bet you pass your days in reasonable safety from violence. You will probably not regularly being threatened with being enslaved, imprisoned, beaten, raped, or robbed. But if you were among the world’s poorest billions, you would be. That is what the world is not understand about the global poor— and that is what this book is about” (xi).

“It turns out that you can provide all manner of goods and services to the poor, as good people have been doing for decades, but if you were not restrain the boys in the community from violence into that as we have been feeling to do it for decades – then we are going to find the outcomes of our efforts quite disappointing.... no one will find in this volume any argument for reducing our traditional efforts to fight poverty. On the contrary, the billions still mired in years probably cry out for us to be double our best efforts. But one will find in these pages and urgent call to make sure that we are safe guarding citizens from being laid waste by the locusts of predatory violence” (xiii).

"Once I asked a bonded slave who was held illegally in a rock quarry why he didn't go to the local police and get help. His answer clarified things for me. 'We don't have to go to the police,' he said, 'the owner pays the police to come to us--to beat us'" (74).

"Facts are hard things--and either we deal with the facts, or the facts will deal with us" (82).

"...efforts to spur economic development and to alleviate poverty amount the poor in the developing world without addressing the forces of violence that destroy and rob them can 'seem like a mocking.' To provide Laura and Yuri with the promise of schools without addressing the forces of sexual violence that make it too dangerous to walk to or attend school seems like a mocking. To give Caleb job training or Bruno a micro-loan for his belt business without protecting them from being arbitrarily thrown into prison where Caleb loses his job and Bruno loses his business seem like a mocking. To provide Susan with tools, seeds, and training to multiply crop yields on her land without protecting her from being violently thrown off that land seems like a mocking. To provide Laura and Mariamma with AIDS education and training on making safe sexual choices without addressing the violence in the slums and brick factories where women don't get to make choices seems like a mocking. To establish a rural medical clinic in the area where Gopinath is held as a slave without addressing the violent forces that refuse to allow him to leave the quarry and take his dying kid to a doctor seems like a mocking" (98).

"In the end, outsiders can seek to provide all kinds of assistance to the poor in the developing world--to the tune of more than $3 trillion over the last half century--but if there is not restraint of the bullies who are prepared to steal every sprig of prosperity away from those who are weak, then the outcome of our assistance is going to be disappointing (as in many ways it has already proven to be)" (100).


...why do the poor suffer such evastating and disproportionately high levels of violence in the developing world--violence htat so relentlessly steals away their chance for a better life? Why does the locust effect destroy their hopes and futures with such brutal routineness?
"The most obvious--and most neglected--answer is that the poor do not get the most basic protections of law enforcement that the rest of us depend upon and unconsciously presume are there every minute of every day. The basic capacities of the law enforcement systems in the developing world are so broken that, as the UN's global study concluded, most poor people live outside the protection of law" (116).

"To be clear, a law enforcement response to violence will never be sufficient on its own. Law enforcement is necessary,  but insufficient to adequately address violence. But it is necessary. To be effective, law enforcement must work in tandem with other interventions that address other complex social causes of violence--cultural norms, gender bias, economic desperation and inequality, lack of education, marginalization of vulnerable groups, etc. But these interventions will never be successful in the absence of a reasonably functioning public justice system that restrains, brings to justice, and deters violent predators" (122).

"Broken public justice systems auction impunity to the highest bidder, and when victims are too poor to purchase protection from private substitutes, impunity comes cheap" (195).

"...most law enforcement systems in the developing world are colonial relics that were never set up to protect the poor from violence (but to protect the regime from the poor), and that, tragically, these systems have never been fundamentally re-engineered to serve the common people" (197). "Across much of the developing world, the instruments of law enforcement failed to evolve because the authoritarian regimes and political elites that came to power in the developing world found that the colonial forms of policing very conveniently served their interests. Indigenous political and economic elites found that modern law enforcement models (with their emphasis on accounability to the community and general public) would be threatening" (179). Furthermore, "elites with wealth and power in the developing world have abandoned these dysfunctional public justice systems and have set up systems of private security that protect them from violence. They have financed the growth of massive private security forces that replace the need to rely on public policing, and they have abandoned the clogged and corrupt court systems to dysfunction and decay because they have found private means fro resolving disputes in their favor" (197). Finally, "the massive global movement to address poverty in the developing world over the last half century has not made a meaningful effort to address the problem" (198). "Only about 1 percent of aid from institutions like USAID or the World Bank can even be plausibly described as targeting improvements in justice systems in the developing world so that they better protect the poor from violence" (203). This is somewhat discouraging, but also hopeful in a way, because it indicates that if we try, things could change.

3 agendas that seem worth the risk: security vacuums, international crime ("when [wealthy countries find] the criminal violence threatens to spill over and affect their own societies" 208), and attracting business and commercial investment.

"In every society there are people, interests, and institutions that are intentionally trying to make a justice system fail and to make poor people and marginalized groups weaker and more vulnerable to violence. They are seeking to advance the personal, economic, political, and exploitative interests through violence and fear—and they are threatened by a functioning criminal justice system that would restrain their coercive power. And so they vigorously oppose reform" (230).

We look back at now-reasonably-funcitoning criminal justice systems and see that they all were once corrupt, racist, and ineffective, and this gives hope. We see examples of collaborations and work being done to reform areas of criminal justice in areas of the world. It is possible.