[1] For this issue of JLE, papers were invited to discuss the ethical issues involved with the U.S. criminal justice system’s current use of incarceration and the ethics involved in detention centers for immigrants.
[2] The current issue publishes four papers on the topic using four different methods of ethical inquiry. The result is that the reader of the full issue will have the opportunity to consider the ethics of incarceration by looking at Luther’s perspective on Scripture, contemplating a Lutheran systematic theological approach, experiencing a personal story from a prison minister, and hearing a normative ethical demand.
[3] To begin, the first essay comes from Finnish scholar, Tapio Leinonen who took a close look at Luther’s Lectures on Deuteronomy, a volume that Luther considered one of his three most interesting doctrinal works. In this essay, Leinonen explains that Luther’s teachings consider the Law to be the godly way—the rule that stresses fairness and love. This might seem a radically new understanding to many Lutherans who consider Luther an anti-nomian and to many Americans who consider fairness to be necessarily rationally distant from love or care.
[3] Reorientated to consider the necessity of the Law and the importance of justice as fairness as love, the second essay, by Lauren Larkin takes seriously Lutheran understandings of justification and how Lutheran theology forbids the dehumanizing of anyone, even the criminal. Larkin requires the reader to fully consider what faith in justification really means as one looks in the mirror and at one’s neighbor. No one is a superhuman and no is sub-human. We are compelled to acknowledge each other’s human-ness if we truly believe we are justified only by God’s grace.
[4] Larkin ends her paper by considering how worship is a space where we recognize each other’s humanness. The third paper takes up this proposition in practical ministry. Pamela Gustafson narrates her personal journey that led to her work in prison ministry and the insights she has been given by that ministry. Gustafson gives a practical answer to the question, “What can I do?” She lifts up the life changing moments she has encountered talking to and praying with incarcerated men. She also explains the challenges that happen in a prison worshipping community (they are not so unlike those in brick and mortar churches) in regard to differing opinions about doctrine. Importantly, she stresses the mutuality of the gifts that prisoners and those who accompany them exchange.
[5] Finally, Tessa Faust uses ELCA church teachings as well as Scripture to assert a clear ethical command. “Any failure on the church and its members’ part to speak out against injustice is an act of injustice in and of itself.” Faust speaks specifically about the current practices of incarceration of immigrants and others detained by ICE. She argues using Scripture and ELCA church teachings that this issue is not one to remain academic; she maintains this requires real action on the part of church-goers.
[6] The four writers this issue, three scholars and a practitioner in prison ministry, demonstrate four different ways of approaching issues of ethics. Their study and their practices are re-orienting to readers who wish to approach anew questions regarding criminal justice, incarceration, and immigrant detention.
