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Or from the military hero Xyboys who returned from bombing the shit out of civilian cities in Iraq and then said, laughing and proud, on international TV: “All I need, now, is a woman”? Or from the hundreds of thousands of American football fans? Or from the millions of Americans who would, if they could, pay surrealistic amounts of money just to witness, up close, somebody like Mike Tyson beat the brains out of somebody else? And which university could teach Mike Tyson about the di¤erence between violence and love? Is there any citadel of higher education in the country that does not pay its football coach at least three times as much as its chancellor and six times as much as its professors and ten times as much as its social and psychological counselors? In this America where Mike Tyson and I live together and bitterly, bitterly, apart, I say he became what he felt. He felt the stigmata of a prior hatred and intentional poverty. He was given the choice of violence or violence: The violence of defeat or the violence of victory. Who would pay him what to rehabilitate inner-city housing or to refurbish a bridge? Who would pay him what to study the facts of our collective history? Who would pay him what to plant and nurture the trees of a forest? And who will write and who will play the songs that tell a guy like Mike Tyson how to talk to a girl? What was America willing to love about Mike Tyson? Or any black man? Or any man’s man? Tyson’s neighborhood and my own have become the same no-win battleground. And he has fallen there. And I do not rejoice. I do not. —June Jordan, poet, essayist, professor, activist, was the author of many books, including Technical Diªculties (essays), and Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan. An Interview with Sister Helen Prejean, Criminal Justice Activist and Author of Dead Man Walking Judy Pennington january 1996 q: Do you think Americans have rejected the eye-for-an-eye image of God? helen prejean: I think there’s a spiritual search going on in this country, but I’m concerned about the rightwing, fundamentalist stu¤ which o¤ers such easy solutions. And you have this simplistic thing, too, of patriotism and religion: “God is with government. If government’s doing it, God blesses it because government Pennington / Interview with Sister Helen Prejean 177 is authority and God is the ultimate authority.” We have to get past that kind of thinking. Spirituality is rooted in personal integrity, community, and love. q: Are you saying that religion plays a part in upholding death and violence? prejean: It plays a very big part. Some polls show that the more often people go to church, the more they believe in the death penalty. I want to say that Christianity is domesticized, so acculturated—a comfortable religion of people, rather than a religion dealing with the real challenge of what Jesus was all about. I mean, Jesus had people of all classes and types eating together when the whole culture was about keeping people apart. Jesus moved across the whole spectrum of society and said, “This is what it means to have the kingdom of God, when people are sisters and brothers.” In this country today, the most segregated day of the week is Sunday , when people go to church. Churches are segregated, class-oriented. They preach about this personal God that will love and comfort me, and there’s very little about standing in solidarity with the people who are su¤ering the most. Very little about building one body, one community—which means crossing over into the inner cities and building community together so that if one of us is hurt, all of us are hurt. q: How can you, as a radical thinker, be a nun in a Church that appears to be so ideologically conservative? prejean: It’s not monolithically conservative, though; that’s the key thing. On the death penalty, it’s been hospitable to me, because the U.S. Catholic Bishops have been very strong against the death penalty, and so have a growing number of bishops around the world. q: What about other issues, though—how can you be part of a church with so many problems with its politics? prejean: Because all organizations I know of are weeding weeds. Some things are coming...

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