Regina: Is that good?
Rob: Uhh, sounds good.
Regina: (laughter)
Rob: I’m Rob Brenneman. I teach Criminal Justice and Sociology at Goshen College, and sitting across from me is my colleague Regina Shands Stoltzfus, professor of Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies. We’ve worked down the hall from each other for years, and somehow, we’ve never asked each other the questions we’re about to ask today, like what brought us to studying justice in the first place, what is justice really beyond the textbook definitions, and what does faith have to do with any of it? This is Just Stories, a podcast about the places where justice and faith intersect and sometimes collide. This is our first episode. We figured before we invite anyone else to this table, we should probably introduce ourselves, properly, the way we’d want our guests to-not with titles, but with stories. Let’s start with the basics. Tell me your name, where you are, what you teach, and a little quirky interest.
Regina: (chuckles) My name is Regina Shands Stoltzfus, and I teach Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies here at Goshen College. One thing that I think is an odd interest of mine is endlessly watching episodes of Law and Order, and I recently found a podcast about Law and Order. And one of the things that I’ve tapped into there is a sense of satisfaction when you get to the end of all of these weird cases that something has moved. (chuckles)
Rob: It’s quirky, but not so quirky given where we are, and what we’re doing, and the topic of this show. So I’m Robert Brenneman. I teach Criminal Justice and Sociology. I have been at Goshen College for six years now. Before that, I was out east at Saint Michael’s College. Quirky little interest, I like to get around on my bike, if possible, 12 months a year. But realistically, here in Northern Indiana, I do it about 11 months a year. So I often come to the office a little bit sweaty.
Regina: 11 months out of the year is pretty good for Northern Indiana.
Rob: Yeah, global warming probably helps a little bit. So we’ve been colleagues for years. I teach Sociology. You teach Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies. But we’ve never really sat down to talk about how we ended up doing this work. And I have a feeling neither of us got here by accident. Tell me why teaching justice is important to you.
Regina: Yeah, probably the simplest answer is there is a lot of injustice, and it is actually painful to me a lot of the time, and I and I know that’s true for a lot of other people. I was raised in a faith tradition and in my family to pay attention to those kinds of things, but it was sort of the the water around me. It wasn’t that I was a little kid walking around thinking about injustice and justice. Although, there was a time in sixth grade where a bunch of us were marching around the school building at recess, chanting (chuckles) Black Power slogans. That was probably something that I picked up. You know, I was a kid in the ’60s, and so picking up the kinds of things that were going on around me. So I want to balance it.
Rob: That must have felt empowering it for as a sixth grader, to march around the school like that-it’s hard to imagine that happening today.
Regina: It was kind of fun, and it was probably a weird thing to do. But speaking of of what was going on, I had teachers who became teachers in that era, and so, as with many of our students today, you can sort of see them seeing the world around them going into a profession where they want to make some kind of change and feeding messages to us. And so the air around me was full of people thinking about these kinds of things. And so,
Rob: and where was this school?
Regina: In Cleveland, Ohio. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, lived there until I came here in the early 2000s.
Rob: Okay, when did justice stop being an abstract word for you and become a personal question?
Regina: Probably during the 1980s when I became involved in the sanctuary movement that was happening in the 80 s, I happened to be around people who had interest in this. I wanted to know more, and Cleveland was a sanctuary city at that time. And actually, seeing people and hearing people’s stories was part of my growing sense of how nationally, internationally things were connected. That sense of more people need to know about these things. I mean, I did a Witness for Peace visit to Nicaragua and Honduras. The whole thing with Witness for Peace and groups like that was go and witness, and then come back and tell other people because the more people that know about this, the more chance we have of shifting the tide. And so that’s probably the beginning of the concrete movement from abstraction to yeah, this is something that I care about. Something that I want to be involved with.
Rob: You know that’s interesting because as I think about my own journey, it was Central America as well. I guess I could go back to my childhood and and also remember a particular conversation between my dad and my uncle, and my uncle was talking. It was probably in that same time period, but I was just a kid, maybe fifth or sixth grade or so. And my uncle was telling my dad, you know, the Sandinistas are are not actually as evil as the Reagan administration is making them out to be, they’re actually doing some really good things, and that was completely opposed to what I was hearing at school. In fact, I was getting very strong messages. I went to a very conservative Christian school, non-denom, that was adamant in teaching us to be good anti-communist Christians, and that being anti-communist was one and the same as being a Christian, really. So obviously, what Reagan was doing, somewhat underhandedly, to fight the communists in Nicaragua was, of course, it was what we should support. Here was my uncle, who I knew and trusted deeply, telling my dad, “Yeah, actually, they aren’t such a bad lot, and maybe we shouldn’t be opposing them. That that was just that idea just blew my world. Probably about six years later, my brother was living and working in Honduras and sending me letters and suggestions for things I should be reading and watching to correct some of the misinformation we were getting in the United States about what was happening in Central America. And when I rented on my own, senior in high school, went to the video store back in those days. You got the VHS tape off the shelf, and they had Romero. I watched that movie by myself in the living room, and honestly, it changed my world. I suddenly under started to see the world very differently. And justice is such a deep theme in that movie. So it strikes me that at different stages in our lives, that Central America was kind of this touchstone of justice because the injustice was so clear, obvious, and and really horrific.
Regina: And it strikes me then and now the way that you also remember the importance of a counter narrative. There’s the story that you’re told in the media, the story that’s told by political parties, the stories that’s told by families, and then there are other stories. Learning to discern the truths of people’s lives from their own lived experience, and that sort of mind-blowing piece of yeah, things are not as they seem. Yeah, the importance of narratives that and getting that story is really really important. (instrumental music)
Rob: Stories have been profoundly impactful for me in the late ’90s, I spent about six years living and working in Central America at a time when the gangs, transnational gangs, were becoming almost the only topic in the public conversation because they were having such an impact on urban Central America, and perhaps also because they were so easy to hate, and so easy for everyone to hate that they had become public enemy number one. When I was in graduate school, after this time, I’d returned to the United States to go to graduate school, and I read an article about gang members who were leaving the gang to join evangelical Pentecostal churches as a pathway out of the gang, and I thought, wow, that’s curious. I I know what these churches are like, and they are so different from the reality of the gang. I’d like to investigate that a little bit. So I had a dissertation, and I had some connections with people who were working with former gang members, helping them transition to life outside the gang, and they put me in touch with gang members. And eventually, I interviewed 64 former gang members across Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. One particular moment when I think I was able to see a gang member in a new light, before I went to Central America, I spent a lot of time preparing my interview script. Fortunately, my dissertation supervisor said, “Make it simple, make it human. Start by asking them, how did you end up in a gang?” Just a normal human question, rather than these sort of codified questions I had thought I needed to ask. And I had also spent a lot of time preparing. Okay, how do I make sure that I’m safe in all situations? How do I make sure I have somebody to call? I should be careful. Early on, it was probably the third or fourth interview I had done. I was interviewing a Honduran ex-gang member, and I asked him the same question: “Tell me how you ended up in a gang.” As he was telling me his story, a deeply abusive, immediate family situation, a really horrible, intolerable family situation that caused him to look elsewhere, and really the gang is about looking for home. That’s why they call each other homies. I mean, they are looking for a family, a home that they, in many cases, have not really experienced, and they’re looking for respect. As he was telling the story, his his voice got quieter and quieter and quieter until he sort of bowed his head and went silent, and maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it took me off guard. I realized he was weeping, and I was totally unprepared for this. I was ready to protect myself from anger or outbursts or bravado or being lied to or something. And here was somebody telling such a profound, in telling his story, it brought on such emotion that I realized I need to pay attention to emotion and how emotion shapes our story, and how emotion was shaping pathways into the gang, which eventually became a main topic in in my book about the gangs. It ended up not being the first time ex gang member broke down when he was telling me his story. Sometimes it was because of talking about the way they had been hurt, abandoned, abused, and sometimes it was when they were talking about what they had done to others, and that clearly sort of helped me realize, okay, these people are people who are A. real full human beings, and B. allowing themselves to open up in front of this gringo researcher, who in many cases they had just met an hour ago. (soft instrumental music)
Regina: That is such a profound story of trust of breaking down what we were talking about before. Here is the image that we present to you. Here’s what you should think about this and that. That’s that realization of common humanity. It reminds me of moments in a class that you and I both teach at our local jail here, and I remember my the first time going to the jail to interview students who would be in the class, and knowing in one part of my brain that yes, I am going to meet people, but also knowing all of the narratives and hearing the cautions of the people who you’re going to go teach a class in the jail? How are you going to protect yourself? You’re taking students? And all of that, and you get there. And within the first day, it’s sort of like we’re all just people trying to do a thing together and hearing each other’s stories, having a common experience, creating a story together-that’s the that for me. That’s one of the most powerful parts of that is we begin to create a common story, and that is a step towards justice. I think
Rob: being willing to listen to someone else’s story can be a powerful first step towards justice.
Regina: I’m struck by something that you said at the beginning of that, leading up to the importance of stories. The impression that you and all of us are given about who we’re supposed to hate. One of the things that’s really important to understand, and it’s something that I work with in the classroom and with my students is understanding that how important to the whole project of injustice the construction of enemies is. The narrative going back to that of who these people are and why they are our enemies, and why you should support whatever it is that’s going on that’s keeping them either away from us or
Rob: keeping us safe.
Regina: Keeping us safe, yeah. That because who can argue with wanting to be safe? All the better if you can construct a narrative and build on that in lots of different ways to say, and this is why this is okay. The permission for violence, another part of what goes into thinking about how all of these really complicated histories and scenarios fit together, the complexity of it is taken apart as you’ve demonstrated by actually listening to people and hearing their stories,
Rob: because it’s so much harder to hate or fear someone when you’ve listened to their story, when you’ve heard their story, and seen them as a whole person.
Regina: Exactly. Exactly.
(soft percussion music)
Rob: So we both had these moments where justice stopped being theoretical and became something concrete. But if somebody pressed you right now and asked you, “Well, what actually is justice?” What kind of answer would you give?
Regina: For me, the simplest answer to that kind of question is justice is every being, person, or other part of the created order having what they need to survive and not just survive, but to flourish. So it’s the basics: food, shelter, community, family, those kinds of things, and it pushes against that idea that we talked about before. That well, that’s for some people, but some people don’t deserve that. So yeah, at its simplest, everybody getting what they need.
Rob: That sounds kind of like shalom or salaam.
Regina: Yes. One of the experiences that I had as a young person, still college age, was spending a couple of years working in refugee camps in Thailand. I got there sort of by happenstance, I didn’t have this grand idea that I’m going to go overseas and do great things. An opportunity presented itself, and I went to northeast Thailand to work for most of my two years there in a refugee camp filled with about 40,000 Laotian refugees who were awaiting their fate, hoping to go to a third country because they could not go back to Laos. My work in that camp was pretty simple and basic. I worked in a food kitchen, mixing up milk powder and helping serve meals, especially to people who were severely undernourished, so supplemental feeding center, and so I had a lot of time in the camp to be with people and to hear stories. And I’m just this, you know, 19, 20 year old kid learning what I can from people’s experiences, who on the surface Seemed dramatically different from my own, but as you were saying, listening to those stories, listening to the things that people were concerned about, especially people who were around my age, they wanted a place to be. They wanted to be in school. They wanted to. They wanted to know what their future.
Rob: They probably wanted to pass through those life stages that would get them to adulthood and the respect of an adult.
Regina: Exactly, and so this camp itself was built on an old U.S. Army base, and so there was an infrastructure there, and there were people who were there for years. There were babies born there, people died there, and so it was kind of like a little town, but this town that was in limbo. That experience for me was life changing in a lot of ways. It was there, you know. I interrupted my time in college because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, and I didn’t come away from that experience with a full-blown plan. My experience that led me there was being part of a faith community where people regularly did overseas work, but I didn’t necessarily see myself as becoming a missionary or becoming a long-term overseas worker. In fact, one of the questions that a lot of people back stateside had for me was: There’s a lot of need here in this country. What about that? And so it was the beginning of thinking along the lines of what does justice look like? How does one participate in bringing it about if you don’t have political aspirations, which I did not. It was the start of this growing seed for me that I guess the best language I could put for it at that time was, “This feels really important, and I want to do more of it, and I don’t know what that looks like now, but it’s started me on the way of that.
Rob: I’m curious, what was it like to be an African American in this role, where your country was kind of responsible for what was going on, and here you were to help. How did people react to you? How did you feel about that?
Regina: It was weird, and it was eye-opening. So I was in a part of the country, northeast Thailand, where, like I said, U.S. Army base had been there before, U.S. fingers all up in their business for years, and I think that the most contact that locals had with African Americans were either GIs or media. So people that they had seen in movies or pop stars were the connection that people make. I was, especially for children, I was oddity extraordinaire. That was one part of it. The other part of it was I talk about my faith community and a little bit about my family, but my mother especially was steeped in black arts, and she and those teachers that I mentioned before sort of raised me on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. And the Harlem Renaissance the writers and the culture creators in that movement were all about this is what it’s like to be a black person, to be a person descended from enslaved people, to be a person that doesn’t have a country, so to speak, and so those were messages and stories and poems and songs that I had been raised on from little on up, and making the kinds of connections. So, and it extended beyond the people that I was working with in the camp. I began to see, for instance, colorism among Asians, right? And it’s like that seems familiar to me, right? And sort of the the distinctions between languages that are very close, but we say it this way and they say it that way, right?
Rob: And you’re thinking, I’ve heard this before.
Regina: Yeah, and so those kinds of really important connections, again, talking about the the common threads of humanity that bind us together that we just are urged to not notice, even if it’s not on purpose. Sometimes, lots of times, it’s on purpose. Like there’s there’s something at work that wants us to not look at things, but I think also it’s it’s human nature to sort of say these are my people and those are not, and overcoming that is really, really important. But seeing those parallels, which is one of the things that makes me really appreciate the long arc of history to sort of see the cycles, to sort of see with a view from where we are now what’s happened in the last 100, 200, 300 years. That ah, that pattern looks familiar. I can understand more of what’s happening now based on what has happened in the past. The players are different, the places are different, but the dynamics are often very, very similar.
Rob: I did want to bring up before we move on from this section. I love that quote, and we were talking about justice and what it means. A lot of times, people tend to think, well-meaning people tend to think there’s love and there’s justice, and some people, including some Christians, like to think that really what we need to focus on is love. If we could just love each other. Justice is either not our concern or it’s God’s concern. Justice is somebody else’s business. But I love that quote. I think it’s Cornel West who’s credited with saying, “Justice is what love looks like in public,” and it really kind of reminds us that justice is a way of loving at scale, in effect, by respecting the rights of other people and even those who we’re not personally engaged with. They might be in another country or in another part of our country, or n a place where I’m never going to meet them, but I still, I can still, in effect, love them through the practice or the support of justice that protects them.
Regina: Absolutely, absolutely. What you’re talking about reminds me of the movement of a term that I don’t like, and I will explain it in a moment: racial reconciliation that happened among many churches in this country in the mid ’90s or so. As you know, I do a lot of work understanding racism and and educating and organizing in anti-racist movements, and the racial reconciliation movement, especially among churches, was exactly that. We just need to love each other. We just need to be in the same space. We need to go to church together. And I’m not belittling those things because I was raised in an interracial church, and that was part of what formed me. But the failure, as I see it, and others as well, of those movements, which I don’t even know if anybody’s really doing that anymore, was that once you start thinking about the structure, once you start thinking about the system of the institutions, the churches, and the mission agencies, and all of that, that was when all of that love stuff just basically went out the window, in my view. And so, there is a part of justice that means we have to look at systems and structures. We have to understand them. We have to investigate them. And when they are not working, when they are harming people, we need to change them. And the reluctance to change structures that were working for dominant groups with that we just need to love each other message kind of meant let’s all come together and be the same. Forget about all the things that make us different. Let’s just focus on on being together and leave all that other stuff out the door. It’s not sustainable. And those movements, I think, that was the failure of many of those movements in the places where people were willing to say, “Okay, we’re not, we’re not going to look at structural issues. We’re just going to hang in there together and love each other.” Maybe they exist. I, I do wonder how it’s going.
Rob: So just before we move on to reconcile that, if you will, maybe that’s the wrong term, with the beloved community of MLK, he clearly cared about justice a lot. But he also talked about this beloved community. Is there a contradiction there, or a contrast, or how do those come together?
Regina: I don’t think that in the way that he was using that term that it was contradictory, because I think that for him, to love is to do justice, and to do justice is to think about the ways that people are being excluded, harmed at the expense of other people’s not being harmed. Because that’s really what’s going on. So many people who are in positions of social dominance, most of those people are not like rubbing their hands together and saying, “How am I going to hurt someone today?” Many of them might be unaware of what’s going on, but perhaps don’t sufficiently recognize that the way that the system is set up, it rewards them for not knowing what’s going on, and so I think that part of the idea of the beloved community is let’s all remove the scales from our eyes. Let’s face head on what’s going on. How are we, as a community of love and justice, going to face these hard things together, and still work at being community with one another, and still face the injustices that are happening in our society.
Rob: So we’ve been talking quite a bit about the past, bringing it more recently. Is there something from the past couple of years, an event, a case, something in the news that captured the kind of justice question you’re itching to discuss?
Regina: So many things, right? One of the things that comes to me most clearly, especially now that we are at the time of this recording in in summer months, there are so many years when I come back to campus in August, preparing for my fall classes, where I think about the things that have happened over the summer. And in for several years in a row, there were pretty famous cases of black boys and men, unarmed black boys and men being killed by police officers. And so, as the mother of black children, those were things that I was thinking about, right? But also, as a professor who teaches about race and violence and injustice, how do I put those two parts of my heart together and do my job in a way that that is true, that is respectful of what I am supposed to be doing, but also respects the fact that I’m a human being, and I have feelings about those events that have happened. How do I pull all of that together so that for our classroom community we can do good work and also understand why we are doing this work. Why is it important to understand these things? Why is it important to look at them? Why is it important to look at the horrible things that happen, that remind us maybe of the horrible things that have happened to people that we know and love? How do we do that in a way that honors those real stories, those real lives, our real feelings about it, but doesn’t get us bogged down in only our feelings of sadness and anger and rage? Because, while that’s good fuel, it is short-lived fuel.
Rob: You’re speaking my language of the importance of emotion in the classroom and establishing an emotional climate where emotions are not banished and they ignite some of the motivation for what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, but they’re also not the only thing driving the conversation. It’s really hard to listen when you’re really amped up, and I’ve seen this in the classroom, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen myself do it as well, where emotion gets in the way of me really listening to what a student is saying because I’m getting really nervous or upset or frustrated or irritated by what’s being said, and I can’t listen to what’s behind it and what’s there and respect it. I know that one of my because I teach criminal justice and I teach about the criminal justice system. I have to teach students about what it is and what’s working and what’s not. And over the last couple of years, last three years, really, I’ve been walking alongside a formerly incarcerated, now reincarcerated friend, who struggles with addiction, and I see the way he has had this long relationship with chemical dependency, and also with an institution, prison, most of the time doesn’t really seem to be helping, and it is amazing, especially here in Indiana, how willing we are to pay 10s of 1000s of dollars to keep someone incarcerated for years, because of what is obvious to everyone, is a chemical dependency. And I’m not saying here that we should legalize all drugs and stop prosecuting anything related to drugs. Of course not. Or like that’s a conversation for another day. But it’s almost speaking of emotions, kind of a letdown to watch the way our criminal justice system seems to be a toolbox with one, maybe two tools in it. If you count probation, we got prison and we got probation, and basically prison is a hammer. And you got a big hammer 20 years, and you got a little hammer one year, two years. We need more tools than this to address the vast and varied forms of security, violence, injustice, crime that are out there, and yet we have this really impoverished toolkit, which is why I’m always telling my students we need more tools in our toolkit. And restorative justice is is like a whole extra set of tools that we can use. They don’t work everywhere, and it’s not perfect for everything under any circumstance, but it’s it broadens the toolkit, and so that has become ever more painfully clear as I walk alongside my friend, and he sort of returns to the system that clearly didn’t work the first time, and back he is for years for possession, and it just seems wow! I can’t believe we keep swinging this hammer.
Regina: It goes. Back to that grand narrative of there are some people, either because of who they are or what they do, that we are willing, we as a society, are willing to look the other way, and the more that we don’t know about that, the better for the system to keep perpetuating itself. I’m glad that you mentioned the cost in there because if people knew the cost of that in terms of finances and social cost,
Rob: That that hammer is $40,000 a year in a cheap state like Indiana. That’s what we’re spending more than what most people pay to go to college for a year-it’s really quite unsettling when you stop and think about it. (instrumental music) When people talk about justice today, what do you think gets overlooked or undervalued in the conversation, and what gets too much attention?
Regina: Yeah, I think that reducing everything to personal choices and personal responsibility is that’s the that’s the easy place to go, and sometimes that’s the only place we know how to go, right? And I feel this way myself that there are so many parts of this that have been going on for so long, and I’m just one person. So that’s that sort of self-defeating language that I own for myself at times, but I I know that it’s out there. I think that gets overlooked because in lots of ways, that is kind of the easy way out. But when we begin to recognize the actual cost to our society, maybe it’s not touching me yet, but it’s eroding our society. So we need to look at it, and we need more tools, like you were saying, and we need to apply those tools in many places along the system, and that has that costs resources as well. So I think overlooking how these things fit together, because it’s complex, because it does feel too big, and this again is one of the reasons that I appreciate historical distance because we’ve done it before, like we have, as human beings in our various societies across time, have changed the trajectory of the very kinds of things that we deal with in our own era and in our own time. We can learn from the past. At the very least, we can learn from the past that it is possible to have change,
Rob: And that can be particularly hard for some of my students because it’s easy to see the problems that are still obviously with us, and harder sometimes to see. Well, there were some really big problems in the past that we don’t experience in the same way. If I had to answer the same question, what gets overlooked and undervalued the past five years or so, the topic of capital punishment has kind of fallen off the radar, largely, and executions are on the rise again, especially in places like Florida. And the federal government is doing it again after a kind of informal moratorium for a number of years is not really gaining much attention. And I know it affects numerically a small number of people, but it is quite something for the state to name a day, and a time, and a place, and a person who will be executed, whose life will be taken from him or her on that particular day in that particular place, it’s quite something. And for a while, there was some bipartisan, or, or I would say at least ideologically diverse support for winding down and putting to rest capital punishment in the United States, and it seems to have evaporated at least that ideologically diverse movement. And I’d like to see that happen again. At the same time, and maybe in in a different direction, I do think that we have a harder time acknowledging good policing when it happens. I’m not saying we do enough of it, but bad policing gets a lot of attention, as it should. And yet, there is often quite a bit of good policing in terms of kind of defusing situations, going out to places where people are angry, angry, upset, and sometimes chemically altered states. They are carefully, somewhat methodically bringing down the temperature of that place, but that has a hard time getting attention. But we need to be learning from it and doing it better. If we can, so those would be two areas I think that deserve more attention. (instrumental music) Our tagline is a podcast about the places where justice and faith intersect and sometimes collide. So, how do you see the role of faith in justice. Where do they meet, and where do they clash?
Regina: Where they meet, I think, is certainly in the texts of many religious communities. That part of what we are here to do is to love one another, but also create systems and structures and communities where people are taken care of, where where justice happens, where people get what they need, in both physical ways, but also for connection, the need for dignity, the need for respect. So I think certainly faith systems encourage cooperation and some measure of bringing justice where injustice lives, or creating the conditions for justice. Where they collide, I think where they collide is when people have very divergent views on what justice is, right? So talk about the criminal justice system, and for some folks, I think that’s their understanding of what justice is. You do the bad thing, and we put you away, and then we don’t have to think about you anymore. Forgetting the part that many of those people are coming back to the communities that they come from, and so, what is to be done in that case? So, yeah, for me, it would be that having very narrow understandings of what justice is, or having an understanding that that faith and justice are two different areas that two different groups of people get to decide what happens in them.
Rob: Yeah, I when I think of faith and justice, one thing that comes to mind is when I was doing my research on ex-gang members in Central America, and this was in the mid 2000s when gangs and fear of gangs was at their apex in Central America at the time. Public opinion was so strongly against the gangs that there was widespread support for social cleansing, which was off-duty police officers and soldiers extrajudicially killing young men suspected of belonging to a gang, and it was widespread. There were surveys to back this up, and small congregations, especially neighborhood Pentecostal congregations, partly because of their evangelical identity, Jesus can save anyone, were practically the only communities willing to take a chance on a gang member who had said, “I’ve had enough. I want out,” and of course, it was very hard to get out of the gang. And the churches were the one place where you could get a community. Now, it wasn’t all churches for sure, but these small neighborhood Pentecostal congregations were the most likely place where you could find people who were willing to give somebody a second chance, and that’s that kind of ability to see justice in the individual, in the personal. At the same time, where the clash was, these same congregations had a very difficult time seeing the way the structures, political and economic structures of these countries were so deeply supportive of economic inequality that they were maintaining the systems that disrespected and or consigned young men to grinding poverty and hopelessness that was driving them into the gang in the first place. In a sense, by creating these profound shame and disillusionment from young people who looked around and said there are no options for me to enter adulthood with respect, except for the gang, and so they continued to go in. So we’ve been talking about all these questions: What is justice? How does it relate to love? How does it collide or connect with faith? But there’s a bigger question: It is why did we choose to do a show about justice and faith? You can have conversations about this. You can tell stories, but why do it with microphones?
Regina: I think it’s so important to keep a running dialog about these things. You and I have offices on the same floor, and in our day to day, when we’re seeing each other, our colleagues, we get to talk about these things because it is-it’s what we do, and we have questions about our content for our classes. We have questions about dynamics in the classroom, and for me, those are really, really important and life-giving, and a constant reminder that it’s not me by myself thinking about these things. And so, in one large way, this is an opportunity for more people to be part of this conversation, and my hope is that when listening to these conversations between us and with the guests that we will have, that it gives people more to think about and more to talk about with each other, and the conversation gets bigger and bigger. It’s kind of that thing that we were talking about earlier, the more people have language for, and the more people have stories about why this matters and what are some of the ways that people have tried to approach the big, complicated problems, so much the better that people are part of that conversation.
Rob: I like that word, conversations. It’s a word that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. The first time I thought of the possibility of a podcast about justice was when I was teaching at another institution in Vermont, and I it was in the middle of COVID, and we couldn’t have class live. We had just gone to remote class. All the students went home. No one knew exactly what was happening, but I knew I needed to still teach. And I decided, well, I’m going to start having guests. And Zoom was this kind of new tool that was oddly useful. And I brought in a guest who was a state legislator who was working on reducing the prison population in Vermont, and she walked us through some of what they were doing and what they had learned. This commission that she was helping to lead, and the surprises that they had discovered, and then students had questions, and we were doing this all remotely by Zoom, and it was a marvelous class. She did so much better than I could have trying to teach about this topic. A really good conversation can get you thinking about something that you thought didn’t deserve your attention in a new way and in a more powerful way, I think if this show, which is really a show of conversations about justice and faith, can generate more conversations between other people about what they heard, about what it made them think about, about what they didn’t agree with, or what they did agree with, or about the person they discovered in this show by listening that they never knew about, and just getting them to think about justice more. I think that will be a great success if we can do that. (instrumental music)
Regina: And it does it hopefully in helpful ways. There is a lot of chatter, as we know, about the way that people see and experience things, and the discourse is often dismaying because it is people hammering in on their idea and not willing to see that there might be other ways of knowing. So, so much of what we see, particularly in social media, is just people shouting past one another with the same talking points, and I think I hope that, as you say, what we are doing is providing an opportunity for genuine conversation that does accept that yeah, people are going to think differently about different things, but if we can sit across a table and talk about those things in ways that increase both of our understanding of where the other is coming from, that’s key in thinking about the problems that seem too big to have any answer that us mere mortals can come up with-it’s a way forward.
Rob: Yeah. Circling back to our conversation about faith and justice, one of the reasons I wanted this show to address both of those things together is that I think people of faith, and in particular Christians, are not very good at talking about justice together. Now there are lots of exceptions, of course, but I would like this show to give more courage or energy to conversations about justice by people of faith with each other and with others, and I I don’t want the show to only be for people of faith, but I do want this to be a show where people from a faith tradition can see connections between their faith and justice in the real world. Again, you know, one of my favorite books that I taught often, “Just Mercy,” where Bryan Stevenson, who himself comes from a faith tradition, a Christian tradition, his stories about fighting capital punishment injustice in the American South in the 80s and 90s, he tells this beautiful story at the like he is representing a person on death row. The trial is happening. There’s a recess. He goes out. He sits down, and an elderly African American woman takes his hands in hers and says, “Your hands must be tired. You’ve been catching a lot of stones.” She’s referring to like indirectly to this story from the Gospels where Jesus tells the Pharisees to drop their stones, and she’s acknowledging, well, sometimes people don’t drop their stones; they throw them, and you’re catching stones, and your hands must be tired. And it’s such a beautiful story that relates faith to justice, which says we’re not just supposed to not throw stones; we’re supposed to catch them, which is quite a powerful, powerful injunction, a powerful call to get in the way of injustice, and a recognition that that can hurt sometimes, or it can be exhausting, and even your body will feel it.
Regina: That story, and I appreciate that. I appreciate the way that he does weave stories of vulnerabilities throughout that text, and what’s so important about framing those stories in that way and including stories like that is it takes more than one of us to do this, and it takes us doing different things. Everybody doesn’t do the same thing, and one of the flaws that I think we have in the justice community, so to speak, is when we measure what other people are doing by what we think they’re supposed to be doing. Did you go to every single protest? You know, and and one of the things that I think is important is assessing capacity, assessing capacity for the individual, assessing capacity for the community, and what is it that any of us can bring to this? There’s enough work for everyone. There’s enough to be done.
Rob: There are a lot of ways to break into this,
Regina: And everybody can’t be doing the same thing because that means some other things won’t get done. I love to think about during movements like the civil rights movement, where people were going to these church gatherings many nights during the week, somebody had to feed all those people, and we have the records. They were they were hidden for a long time, but the records of people who were supporting the movement by doing what they could do, thinking about the Montgomery bus boycott, where people needed to get to work, but were committed to not taking the bus. That means that the taxi drivers have to kick in and take less money for driving more people to support the movement, and those are the kinds of things that regular individuals were doing. And when those movements get mythologized, that there is a person who led us to to winning this particular campaign
Rob: -one hero,
Regina: one hero-that is so charismatic and so well spoken and so public, it really diminishes our imagination for what is actually possible because we need the people who are positioned to do this thing, and it might be a small thing, but if I do it, that is adding to the potential success of this campaign within the movement,
Rob: Which reminds me of one of the goals of this podcast, is that people will get energized by different topics, different things. It might be racial injustice. It will be reentry after prison. It will relate to better policing, and for other people, they will hopefully get jazzed about sentence reform, which is a huge problem. Speaking of what’s feeding mass incarceration in this country, there hopefully will be different episodes that fire up different listeners to do something, or get involved, or get informed better, and that’s a success, as far as I’m concerned. I want to back up and just give a better on-ramp for you. A little over a year ago, I asked you if you’d be interested in participating in Just Stories, and at the time it was just a concept. It was just an idea, and I don’t remember any hesitation in your voice at all. I remember you saying, “Yeah, I want to be a part of that.” Why?
Regina: This is stuff I love to think about and talk about, and I particularly appreciate having other people to talk about it with. These conversations can’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s one of the things that I often tell my students that why I teach this stuff, not just so that I get a paycheck, but this is really, really important, and what’s important for me is that you all have language and you have skills to put out into the world things you already know, like you know this stuff because you exist in the world. I want that language that you have for it to become part of what we are doing together in this classroom because I want your voice and my voice and our collective voices to become stronger, and so this platform is another way of doing that.
Rob: Is there a conversation about justice you’ve been avoiding with a colleague, a family member, or yourself that you hope this show gives you the courage to have.
Regina: I don’t think that there is anything that I have been particularly avoiding, but maybe being more quiet than I want to be about it. As a person who teaches about conflict, I will admit that I have conflict avoidance tendencies (chuckles), and so teaching my class on conflict is a way for me to regularly remind myself that there are skills that can be learned and practiced, and part of that is the willingness to speak up. I will temper that by saying, I also recognize that every single thing does not need to be verbalized all the time, and so it’s the balance between the two of them. And I think that this series of having these kinds of conversations, where people are going to have points of disagreement, right? It’s just good practice to keep entering into a space where we test ideas and and also practice kindness in the way that we test those ideas with one another. So I think that’s one of the things that I’m always hoping to be aware of and get better at.
Rob: Personally, I’m just hoping to learn more by being able to sit across the table from people who are deeply involved with a piece of the justice system I may be teaching about, but don’t really understand how it works on the ground every day.
Regina: I also hope that people will have places to go with what they have gleaned from the guests that we have, the questions that get raised, the new ideas that that come up. That they have a place to take that, and maybe that’s something that we can encourage people to do. Is what’s one question that you want to take out of this episode to your community.
Rob: Yeah.
This is Just Stories, a podcast about the places where justice and faith intersect and sometimes collide.
Just Stories is a collaboration of the Religion, Justice, and Society Department and the Communication Department at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, with funding from Lilly Endowment. I’m your host today, Rob Brenneman. Today’s guest is actually our co-host, Regina Shands Stoltzfus.
Since this is our very first episode, let me tell you how to keep up with us.
Just Stories drops a new episode every other Thursday.
You can find us by searching “Just Stories” on whatever podcast platform you love best — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen, Or you can visit us at our website: juststoriespodcast.org, I am going to say it again,juststoriespodcast.org
so go ahead and hit follow so you never miss an episode.
Want to be the first to hear our latest news, plus bonus content and behind-the-scenes extras you won’t find in the show?
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, The profiles are Just Stories, but the handles are @podcastjuststories. And we’re on LinkedIn as well!
And if you have comments, feedback, or a guest you’d love to hear on Just Stories, our contact info is on our website.
Today’s show was produced by Yebu Ji. Sound engineering by Alex Dugger. Research assistance by Alaina Wolfe. Illustration by Senna Duan. Theme music, “Umbilical Moonrise,” generously provided by the band Lotus.
Our marketing manager is Melissa Troyer, and our audience engagement manager is Courtney Dobrzykowski.
Just Stories is part of More Than Just Stories, directed by Duane Stoltzfus.
What’s one thing you hope people will say about this show after the episode?
Regina: That it’s great, and they can’t wait until the next episode.
Rob: Thanks for listening.