APPLAUSE as Col. Clifford Worthy, seated at left, is called to rise and be recognized at the recent 2022 Michigan Military Veterans Hall of Honor induction ceremony at the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing.

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By DAVID CRUMM
Editor of Read The Spirit magazine

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Col. Clifford Worthy—the oldest living African-American graduate of West Point whose ground-breaking story is told in his memoir The Black Knight—was honored at the Michigan History Museum by induction into the Michigan Military Veterans Hall of Honor.

At his publishing house, our entire team of editors and authors is celebrating this good news along with Col. Worthy, his family and friends.

The mission of the Michigan Military Veterans Hall of Honor program is to highlight Michigan citizens who have served in the U.S. armed forces and are models of courage and leadership—and civic involvement after they retired from active service.

Most importantly, “the Hall of Honor inductions want to recognize individuals who have overcome obstacles and faced adversity,” said U.S. Navy Capt. Paul Ryan (retired), who serves as the Hall of Honor vice president and spokesman.

As readers learn in The Black Knight, Clifford Worthy, the great grandson of slaves, was one of the few African-American men of his generation who was accepted and excelled as a Black Knight of the Hudson, a traditional nickname for West Point cadets. He entered the academy shortly after President Truman signed the July 26, 1948, executive order banning segregation in U.S. armed forces. In the book, Col. Worthy describes his journey to West Point, the many challenges he overcame both in his family and in the U.S. Army, including service in the front lines of Vietnam.

Rick Forzano, former Head Coach of the Detroit Lions praises Worthy’s example to all of us. “He has fought his way through virtually every stage in life with his faith in God giving him the necessary strength and courage,” Forzano writes.

And at the Michigan Historical Museum, Col. Worthy was not alone as a groundbreaker in this year’s induction ceremony.

Another was Joseph B. Anderson Jr., a Black West Point graduate who followed in Col. Worthy’s footsteps at the military academy in the 1960s and then also served in Vietnam. He became famous, while serving in Vietnam, for participating in an Oscar-winning documentary about the war, The Anderson Platoon. Later, he taught at West Point and served in the White House staff.

A Groundbreaking ‘Switchboard Soldier’

One of the most remarkable stories shared at the ceremony involved a posthumous honoree: Oleda Joure-Christides, who served in the World War I Army Signal Corps as a telephone operator. The invaluable service provided by Joure-Christides and more than 30 other female operators is told in a newly published historical novel by Jennifer Chiaverini, Switchboard Soldiers, published by William Morrow.

“Her story is fascinating,” Ryan said. “She was born in 1897 in Marine City, Michigan. When Gen. John Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Forces, got over to Europe—he realized the importance of fast communication between headquarters and front-line troops. The problem was the Army didn’t have trained telephone operators. So, the call went out in the U.S. for telephone operators to join the Army—and most of those operators were women.

“At age 19, Oleda Joure-Christides was working for Marine City Bell Telephone as their chief operator. She signed up and joined what became known as the Hello Girls Brigade in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.”

Not only was that ground breaking in terms of her gender—and also the technology she was helping to pioneer in the battlefield—but Joure-Christides had to help break down another major barrier after the war.

“And that’s the part of her story where we think about her perseverance in the face of adversity,” Ryan said. “All female members of the signal corps were demobilized with a service termination letter instead of an official discharge. They had been every bit a part of the Army Signal Corps, but they didn’t get that official discharge. As a result, they were denied veterans rights and benefits. This was an injustice that took many, many years to correct.”

As a result of Joure-Christides’s participation with other veterans of that service in letter writing campaigns and lobbying of Congress, a 1978 law finally corrected that injustice dating to World War I.

Joure-Christides lived to see that, before she died in 1984.

To all of the 2022 Hall of Honor honorees, their friends and families, all of us at this publishing house say: Congratulations!

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Care to learn more?

Click on this photo of the new plaque honoring Col. Clifford Worthy to see a larger version that’s easier to read.

Get a copy of Col. Worthy’s life story, The Black Knight, for yourself—and order more copies for friends and loved ones on your holiday shopping list who are especially interested in stories from our U.S. armed forces. There are many themes in this illustrated memoir, including the challenges Col. Worthy and his wife faced raising a special needs son in an era when professional help for such families was in its infancy.

Col. Worthy’s life, his memoir The Black Knight and his poetry are rich in references to African American traditions in family and faith—including essential shared experiences like The Great Migration and centuries of Black church and family reunions. If you are not an African-American reader, you will experience his writing at a deeper level if you also have a copy of the Michigan State University School of Journalism’s 100 Questions and Answers about African Americans and 100 Questions and Answers about the Black Church.

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By DAVID CRUMM
Editor of Read The Spirit magazine

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

The news flash this week from The Washington Post was striking: “This election made history for the diversity of candidates running. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people ran for office in all 50 states for the first time. The number of such candidates on the ballot also increased 18 percent from 2020, many of them galvanized by a wave of measures in Republican-led states attacking the community.”

At our Front Edge publishing house, we are encouraged by this news because we publish the most influential book helping Christian families to welcome their LGBTQ relatives, friends, coworkers and neighbors: Changing Our Mind. Here are two 2022 headlines about the impact of this book:

• The success of Dr. David Gushee’s ‘Changing Our Mind’ is measured in 25,000 lives inspired
• And: We’re celebrating Dr. David Gushee’s milestone of 300 reviews for ‘Changing Our Mind’

Dr. Gushee followed up that best-seller with his Introducing Christian Ethics, which steps back to provide a masterful overview of the entire field of Christian Ethics—including the foundational values that support such openness. Here’s a 2022 headline about that news:

• ‘Introducing Christian Ethics’ welcomes us with multimedia storytelling.

Why are Dr. Gushee’s books so important to read and share with others?

Let Dr. Gushee’s readers answer that question on the basis of the 103 memorable quotes they have excerpted from his books and posted into the Goodreads quote board to share with others around the world, including:

• “It says something really terrible when the least safe place to deal with sexual orientation and identity issues is the Christian family and church.”
• “The sense that card-carrying American evangelicalism now requires acquiescence to attitudes and practices that negate core teachings of Jesus is fueling today’s massive exodus.”
• “Make your church a context where parents know that the right response to their teenagers is never to reject them as human beings, never to throw them out.”

And there are 100 more quotes that readers have chosen to post to the Goodreads memorable-quotes page honoring Dr. Gushee’s work.

What’s the evidence, this week, that our communities nationwide are more open to LGBTQ leaders?

Of course, not all of the LGBTQ candidates were winners in their races across the 50 states, but the research compiled by the non-profit Victory Fund is quite compelling, including:

• 416 LGBTQ people ran for state legislatures this year, the most in U.S. history.
• The proportion of LGBTQ candidates of color grew significantly in 2022, accounting for 38.2 percent of all LGBTQ candidates.
• Candidates who are not cisgender (including transgender, nonbinary and gender non-conforming candidates) ran in record-breaking numbers, representing 13.9 percent of all LGBTQ candidates compared to 7.9 percent in 2020.

Dr. Gushee saw this coming

Early in his work with these new books, Dr. Gushee posted a now very-well-known manifesto online, headlined: Ten Reasons Why I Changed My Mind on Full LGBTQ Inclusion

Reason No. 3 is: I took seriously the growing gap between cultural acceptance and progress for LGBTQ people vs. Christian intransigence—and concluded that the culture was closer to being right.

That’s exactly what is continuing to happen across America and showed up in record numbers in political races this month.

Have you already read Dr. Gushee’s book? Consider ordering a new copy of Changing Our Mind for a friend or family member.

Illustration generated by AI via DALL-E 2

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Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history
is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact,
as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.
New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik

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By DAVID CRUMM
Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine

For many years, America has responded to crime and conflict with the mass incarceration of millions of souls—by far the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, including nations that we consider especially draconian. One out of every five people incarcerated in our world today is in our American prison system.

Click on the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Are there any signs of hope? Of course, and you can read more about some of those efforts to address mass incarceration at the end of this article.

But there also are many grassroots efforts spreading across the U.S. And, for more than a decade now, one of those fruitful efforts has been author Tina Welling’s volunteer “journaling” workshops that have begun unlocking many of those imprisoned souls in ways that may help prepare them for life after imprisonment.

She describes her unique approach to teaching writing in her inspiring new memoir, Tuesdays in Jail—What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates, which is available now from Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions.

“The one quality I continue to encounter is low self esteem among those who are living in this system,” Welling said in an interview about her new book. “And such low self esteem makes it harder to have a real relationship with someone after you get out of this system again. To continue to pummel someone who has low self esteem is not good for our society. I hoped having the inmates write and talk about their inner lives would make them more human—and would build their self esteem. And, in many cases, that has worked. You can read the stories in this book.”

In the middle of her book, she describes her goal this way:

“I wanted the men who came to the journaling workshops to know that dignity resided in a place where no person or circumstance could rob them of it. And that was a challenge when, following our workshop, each man would endure a body search before being led back to his cell. And yet there was no better time to learn tha you were not the victim you were treated as. If the inmates could acquire a sense of self-worth under such circumstances, I imagined they could own it almost unchallenged for the rest of their lives.”

Outreach to our imprisoned neighbors is central to our religious traditions

We are recommending her book to our readers for individual reading—and for small-group discussion in your congregation or community—because we know our magazine’s community of readers includes lots of other authors, journalists, educators and community leaders who feel a similar calling to somehow reach out to America’s enormous imprisoned population.

In fact, that mandate is central to the teachings of Catholic and Protestant churches as well as other faith traditions.

When you read Tina’s words—”dignity resided in a place where no person or circumstance could rob them of it”—she is echoing a key emphasis of Pope John Paul II’s teaching about the dignity of each soul. “The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person,” he wrote.

However, the interconnections between inmates’ lives and religion is complex. Sometimes, “religion” and the earliest religious images and models in our lives can be part of the problem.

When religion is a part of the problem

Tina does not represent any particular religious tradition in her work, but often has found herself interacting with her workshop participants as they wrestle with spiritual questions in their own lives. She brings a broad-based approach to those conversations, ranging from Christian and Buddhist wisdom to her own deep awareness of spiritual insights that arise from the natural world. (For more on that, you might also enjoy her earlier book, Writing Wild—Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature, also available from Amazon.)

Tina’s approach—which she describes in the many true stories in Tuesdays in Jail—always springs from questions she brings to her sessions. She never preaches or attempts to prescribe her own solutions.

“I do bring my own awareness of universal spiritual truths into my work, but I never talk to inmates in specifically religious concepts,” Welling said in our interview. One reason she draws this strict line is that she sometimes discovers that experiences with “religion”—or with “religious people” in the inmates’ lives—are associated more with trauma than with health or wellbeing.

“A lot of inmates have had hard experiences with ‘religion,'” Welling said. “Some of that started very early in their lives, sometimes in childhood with feelings of abandonment from parents and people who are supposed to be our first loved ones. When you’ve gone through that, it’s hard to come away with images of a God who is loving. If we grow up slapped, shoved side or suffering even worse abuse, this can really make it hard for people to feel there’s anything good out there in the world.”

She forged her unique approach over many years and the true stories she shares in the book are guaranteed to inspire readers, perhaps to encourage the creation of similar programs. (For more about the growing consensus of concern about this issue and ideas for such programs, see the links below this article.)

Finally, she gives us a 22-page workbook

Perhaps the most practical asset in Welling’s new book is a 22-page “workbook” she gives us, bound right into the book itself.

Just before those workbook pages, she explains to readers why the workbook was created:

“In March 2020 the pandemic closed the jail to the public. The inmates were allowed no visitors and no journaling workshops. I can’t imagine how that multiplied the miserable march of days for the incarcerated men and women. In an effort to offer the inmates a guide toward looking inward and conducting their own inquiries, I created a workbook that simulated our time together in the journaling workshops. … The workbook consists of 15 lessons. Each lesson offers five questions and is accompanied by a few of my favorite quotes. I hope the questions and quotes provide readers with new pathways as they engage in their own journeys inward.”

In fact, that workbook can be used by anyone interested in starting to write in a journal.

In closing our interview, Welling said she hopes readers will use the workbook and recommend it to friends.

“Journaling is a powerful tool for self knowledge and self awareness,” she said. “Ask yourself questions and just write. You’re going to discover so much more about your life and yourself. Among other things, I also hope people will write about what they feel gratitude for.

“There’s so much power in writing by hand on paper. That process incorporates your body, mind and spirit and emotions—as you try to pin down all of that with language. When we do this, we learn more about ourselves than we knew before we started writing.”

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Care to read more?

Wikipedia has a lengthy overview of America’s history of incarceration. Links from that article go into far more depth on many related issues. There’s also a comparison chart of incarceration rates around the world.

Wondering about that opening quote with this article? Adam Gopnik’s landmark report appeared in The New Yorker, headlined: The Caging of America? Why do we lock up so many people?

A landmark document: One of the most frequently cited critiques of America’s mass incarceration is this report for Human Rights Watch in 2006 by Jamie Fellner.

Major newspapers, including The New York Times, have been regularly reporting on the problem of mass incarceration. Here are just a few of the many Times articles worth reading on this issue:

• Federal Judge Urges U.S. to ‘Jettison the Madness of Mass Incarceration’
• New York City Bar Association Urges Reduction of Mass Incarceration in Report
• What Mass Incarceration Looks Like for Juveniles
• ‘The Writing on the Wall’: Voices of the Incarcerated

And more on the role of religion

There’s a powerful encouragement of visiting prisoners in both Catholic and Protestant traditions, which also means there are well-established organizations within major mainline denominations to help people organize new outreach programs into prisons. You don’t have to invent a program by trial and error.

You can reach out to others for guidance. In fact, reading Welling’s book provides lots of ideas. For example, toward the end of her book, she describes the volunteer work of her friend Ben who figured out a number of very practical ways he could help prisoners make a healthy transition after incarceration.

Millions of Americans have heard this appeal to help. The Catholic church teaches that visiting the imprisoned is an important work of mercy. Pope John Paul II wrote extensively about the unique, priceless value of each human soul, including prisoners. Pope Francis has followed that example.

At the root of Protestant prison ministries is John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who began visiting prisoners while he still was a student and encouraged his friends to do the same. Among the services these early Methodists offered to prisoners were “teaching them to read, paying their debts, and attempting to find employment for them,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica biography of Wesley. Throughout his life, Wesley continued to pay regular visits to prisons and encouraged all Methodists to organize similar prison outreach programs.

Nearly every mainline denomination offers a national program of training in prison chaplaincy. Beyond those formal programs, there are hundreds of grassroots outreach programs as well. For example, here is one of many United Methodist resources on prison ministry—a list that includes a group that makes recordings of incarcerated Moms reading books for their children.

And here is the gateway to Catholic Prison Ministries Coalition. Plus, here’s a more direct link to that organization’s Resources section.

With two of my fraternity brothers: Jim on the left and Bob on the right.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The great memoirist Marcel Proust described the mysterious power of human memory as if past souls were waiting for us almost everywhere, hoping we might pass by and stir them to new life. That might happen during a walk in the woods, Proust said, or by revisiting earlier elements of our lives, perhaps as simple as a cup of hot tea and little piece of cake. Such a little taste, one day, is what unlocked Proust’s more-than-4,000-page memoir, Remembrance of Things Past. This week, our online magazine is sharing a Cover Story with Tina Welling, who has developed life-changing “journaling” workshops with inmates. And we are sharing Howard Brown’s story of honoring a friend who died last year by planting trees. The third part of this triptych of memory is Benjamin Pratt’s story about a pilgrimage with friends back to the campus where they met.

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A Reunion: Memories, Bitter and Sweet

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By BENJAMIN PRATT

“That’s our ol’ ‘necking’ tree—right there in the shade of the chapel. We kissed for the first time while I was holding her close and leaning against that tree. Wow, 62 years ago—no wonder the tree is much bigger than I remembered. I still keep pinching myself when I realize how fortunate I am to have found Judith and been married for 59 years. Amazing, really amazing.”

This is where I serenaded my wife-to-be after we became “pinned.” Judith stood at the windows above the door, backed by her sorority as I was backed by my fraternity brothers.

I mumbled this to my friends at our college reunion.

Recently, we made a collective pilgrimage deep into our memories, a journey that turned out to be revelatory, tender, tough and filled with gratitude. I returned to my college with two of my closest friends who also had graduated 60 years ago. Bob drove to northern Virginia from Connecticut. Then, the three of us drove to western Pennsylvania. Bob, Jim and I were suite mates one college year. Then, I became a Resident Advisor, living with freshmen in their dorm, and that separated our threesome.

Jim and I revisited the spot where we had met 64 years ago. Our parents had just dropped us off: two disconnected, lonely, uncertain guys who were entering a new and very unfamiliar world. I had seen him standing alone, looking quite forlorn, so I walked over and said hello! We both remembered the exact spot on that huge quad. Now, here we are again, and still friends. A very sweet memory.

We all had joined one of the local fraternities, and now it was observing its 100th anniversary. We octogenarians found our time together to be delightful, eye-opening and tinged with some sad realities. I was jolted to realize how quickly I remembered names but could not conjure up that person because of facial and body changes. In addition to learning of friends’ deaths, we heard that the one man who had been keeping all of us connected had recently been sidelined by a stroke. Harry had eagerly looked forward to this reunion, only to be prevented from attending by his debilitating health. The ravages of time were visible in our bodies and faces. Yet this was not so with the ol’ campus. Some buildings were gone, replaced by attractive, state-of-the-art structures conducive to learning. It looked wonderful!

I played four years of college basketball. The stadium looks just as I remembered it except that the floor was so highly polished I could have skated on it. That stadium brought back many memories. For some unknown reason there were no upperclassmen on the team during my first year. When Westminster College came to our court with three starters who had played while in the Marines, they had us 18-0 before we scored. Not a good night! I remembered the night I held Slippery Rock’s lead scorer to eight points by constantly blocking his fade away jump shots! That was long before I wore contacts—and my glasses were smashed into my eye. And, oh yes, the painful Christmas practices. Everyone else was on break for the season, but we were there practicing, practicing, practicing—preparing for a holiday tournament.

I am so grateful for these remembered opportunities, experiences, and adventures, especially from my college years, that were enriched by dear friends and the wonderful woman, Judith, who became my partner in life. I returned to the spot where I first met her, as well as the patio from which I serenaded her in front of her dorm. I shall never forget the first time I saw her and felt an electric shock go through my body! I knew something exceptional was happening.

So many memories of the past!

While a college student, I felt the calling to enter the ministry. My decision to commit to the ministry allowed me to borrow money from the church to be paid back by years of service. Also, during this time, I became a voracious reader—a lover of books and stories.

These memories and others help me know who I am.

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Care to read more?

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.

Based near Washington D.C., the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Pratt is a retired pastoral counselor with 40 years of experience working with men and women facing a wide range of stresses and tragedies. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors and a retired member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. He writes regularly for ReadTheSpirit online magazine and also is a featured columnist at the website for the popular Day1 radio network.

His book, A Guide for Caregivers, has helped thousands of families nationwide cope with the wide array of challenges involved as more than 50 million of us serve as unpaid caregivers in the U.S. alone. In 2021, Ben will continue to write about caregiving issues for us.

His book, Ian Fleming’s Seven Deadlier Sins and 007’s Moral Compass, explores some of the themes in this week’s Holy Week column, including an in-depth look at Accidie.

If you find these books helpful, and if you suggest that your small group discuss these books, we would love to hear from you about your response, ideas and questions. Or, if you are interested in ordering these books in quantity, please contact us at [email protected]

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