An Uneasy Citizenship update
Progress on the book, upcoming events, and reflections on an execution
It’s hard to believe we’re a week into October. The semester is in full swing, something I can still sense even though I’m not teaching at the moment. The leaves are starting to change colors on some trees in Northwest Arkansas. Baseball’s marathon regular season is about to give way to its sprint of a postseason. The mornings are brisk, the evenings are still, and my lawn doesn’t need to be mowed nearly as often as it did this summer.
Man, I love this time of year.
Here are some quick updates on Uneasy Citizenship, upcoming events, and more:
Writing for the book is coming along nicely. I’ve been getting into a good pattern of spending a few hours a day a few times per week focused on nothing but writing. Of course, this doesn’t always mean writing—sometimes I’m reading, sometimes I’m outlining, sometimes I’m developing arguments—but it often does include adding words to the manuscript. I’m well into the fifth chapter at the moment, and am on schedule to meet my publisher’s deadline. God-willing, this book will be released into the wild sometime in 2023.
Later this month JBU will be hosting Reimagining Faith and Public Life 2022. This is the sixth time we’ve had one of these events, which brings in speakers for a conversation on the intersection of Christianity and cultural engagement. This year we’re thrilled to welcome Jeff Bilbro and Bonnie Kristian.
Jeff is an associate professor of English at Grove City College, author of the outstanding book Reading the Times, and an alum of George Fox University, where I worked with him at the campus’s writing center for two years. Bonnie is a journalist and author whose most recent book, Untrustworthy, is being released next week.
This year’s theme is “Discerning Truth in an Untruthful World.” If you happen to be in Northwest Arkansas, I hope you come out to join us for this free event. It will also be livestreamed (link TBA), so feel free to log on and join from afar.
Next month I’ll be driving to Columbia, MO to do some filming for a project from the American Values Coalition and Truth Over Tribe. I can’t share a lot about it at the moment, but I can say that it draws on some of my work into misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Lastly, this morning I read that John Henry Ramirez was executed yesterday in Texas. I wrote about the Ramirez case in this April 5 newsletter, and I talked a bit about Ramirez in a chapel message earlier this year (starting at 10:23):
Here are details of Ramirez’s execution, in a story from the Washington Post:
As the lethal drug coursed through John Henry Ramirez’s veins Wednesday night, Pastor Dana Moore laid his hands on the Texas death row inmate’s chest. A prayer rang out as Ramirez was executed in Huntsville in a small room known as the death chamber, with its seafoam-green walls and gurney with restraints.
More:
Before he died at 6:41 p.m., Ramirez told the family of Pablo Castro, the father of nine he stabbed to death nearly two decades ago, that he appreciated their attempts to communicate with him.
“I tried to reply back, but there is nothing that I could have said or done that would have helped you,” Ramirez said, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
And more:
On Wednesday morning, the 38-year-old was transported from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston to the Huntsville Unit — a 44-mile trek. Once there, he stayed in a holding cell until 6 p.m., when he was walked to the execution chamber, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst said.
Eleven witnesses — five for the victim and six for Ramirez — watched through a window to see the inmate take his last breaths, Hurst said. Castro’s son, Aaron, read a Bible verse that asks, “Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance?”
In the death chamber, Ramirez said he regretted his “heinous act,” adding that he hoped his death would provide some comfort to Castro’s family.
Moore’s hands touched Ramirez’s chest until the inmate was declared dead, officials said.
Ramirez indisputably experienced a better death than Pablo Castro, whom Ramirez stabbed 29 times while robbing him for a grand total of $1.25. My gut reaction is to be troubled by this fact.1 At the end of the day, though, justice (in the eyes of the law, at least) was carried out while also acknowledging the constitutional rights of the condemned. Wherever you stand on the wisdom or morality of capital punishment, this is a kind of balance we should be lauding today.
Thank goodness our criminal justice system does not operate off my visceral reactions and emotions.