Joseph – Yusuf Presentation

Yusuf in Zuleikha’s party. Painting in Takyeh Moaven-ol-Molk, Kermanshah, Iran, By Coffeetalkh at Persian Wikipedia – Transferred from fa.wikipedia to Commons., GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31803000

This semester at the Graduate Theological Union‘s Berkeley School of Theology, I am taking three classes as part of my Doctor of Ministry studies. They are: “The Qur’an: Origin, Application, Interpretations” (Dr. Majabeen Dhala, Center for Islamic Studies), “Introduction to Prison Ministry” (Father George Williams, Jesuit School of Theology), and “Examining the Case for Reparations for African Americans” (Dr. Ronald Burris & Dr. Aidsand Wright-Riggins, BST).

I just gave my first presentation in Dr. Dhala’s class, called “Joseph – Yusuf.” In this presentation, I considered the story of the patriarch / prophet Joseph – Yusuf as presented in the Torah / Hebrew Bible and in the Qur’an, in the context of my ministry as a jail chaplain. The class and I had a good discussion!

You can see the whole presentation here. See the last pages of my presentation for where I found the images and other sources.

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DMin Project & Dissertation Proposal

I revised my Doctor of Ministry “Project and Dissertation Proposal” in a Berkeley School of Theology (BST) class led by Dr. Valerie Miles-Tribble in January 2023. BST is in the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. I have since discussed the proposal with my doctoral committee, Dr. Aidsand F. Wright-Riggins, III and Dr. Ronald D. Burris of Berkeley School of Theology, and the Rev. Liz Milner (Executive Director, Correctional Institutions Chaplaincy). My DMin proposal starts:

“The Problem: As part of changing a life path that repeatedly ends in Santa Clara County jail, many inmates want to learn about and develop their faith and theology but lack resource access and the reading capability or education to move forward. Inmates who are Spanish language speakers, have reading difficulties, and those with mental health challenges are at a particular disadvantage and are often isolated and disempowered. America’s punishment-based, racist and classist carceral system, and the constant population churn inside jails, militate against empowering inmates’s spiritual well-being, success, and change of life. Tailoring educational and faith programs to particularly disadvantaged inmates may help to reduce long-term recidivism.

The Purpose: To support the most invisible of the largely-unseen and severely marginalized population of jail prisoners in Santa Clara County, this project revises existing Bible study and theological reflection program materials to support inmates in three particularly-underserved and vulnerable groups: those whose primary language is Spanish, and/or have mental health challenges, and/or have reading comprehension difficulties. Making materials more accessible may help to encourage their faith walk, sustain their difficult journey, and discourage recidivism after release.”

Read the whole proposal here.

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Busy End of Year

Katy Dickinson, Lee Satterfield, TechWomen 10 Year Honor, 20 October 2022

As 2022 is ending, I have been reflecting on how busy these last few months have been. In October, I mentored the remarkable and inspiring TechWomen Team Tunisia, and was one of the 21 mentors honored by the U.S. State Department – Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs for ten years’ service to the TechWomen program. (I was the TechWomen Process Architect 2010-2011, and have been a mentor each year since.) Also that month, my husband John Plocher said a fond goodbye to Apple, and started a new job at Ford Greenfield Labs.

Katy Dickinson, TechWomen 10 Year Honor, 20 October 2022

Katy Dickinson, TechWomen Honor, 20 October 2022

Katy Dickinson, Tunisia TechWomen, 16 October 2022

John Plocher with Ford Mach-E

In November, John and I became grandparents with the birth of baby Alex to our daughter, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, and son-in-law, Matthew Holmes.

Jessica, Matthew, Baby Alex, 19 November 2022

I helped our son Paul D. Goodman manage two successful craft sales in December 2022. Yesterday, I turned in the final paper for the Fall term of my Berkeley School of Technology – Doctor of Ministry program. Also yesterday, as part of the Saint Joan’s Chapel and Correctional Institutions Chaplaincy team, I gave holy communion to 92 Elmwood jail inmates. Our team gave communion to 198 prisoners in three visits, starting on Christmas Day. The guys inside were happy to sing and dance with us to the tune of “Feliz Navidad.”

Looking forward to my next adventure!

Paul D. Goodman, 17 Dec 2022

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Privilege, Punishment, and Vision

This semester, I am taking a class at the Graduate Theological Union called “Christian Ethics: Radical Love Embodied” from Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Professor of Theological and Social Ethics. One of the texts for this class is Dr. Moe-Lobeda’s own 2013 book, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation. Chapter 4, “Unmasking Evil that Parades as Good,” has caused me to think deeply on how background social and cultural understandings perpetuate and affirm the way things are, even if those understandings are destructive or evil. The author characterizes this as “‘hegemonic vision’… the constellation of socially constructed perceptions and assumptions about ‘what is,’ ‘what could be,’ and ‘what ought to be’ that maintain the power or privilege of some people over others, and ‘blind’ the former to that privilege” (Moe-Lobeda, 88).

Dr. Matthew Clair, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, uses the word hegemony with regard to U.S. law, but does not use the phrase hegemonic vision in his 2020 book Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. He presents similar concepts, writing of how racism and classism intersect, “I found that the working class and poor, especially racial minorities, often sought to learn their legal rights, contest their defense lawyer’s expertise, and advocate for themselves in court. Meanwhile, the middle-class people I got to know found themselves in trusting relationships with lawyers and thus were more likely to defer to their lawyers and the court. Privileged people were rewarded for their deference, whereas the disadvantaged were punished for their resistance and demands for justice” (Clair, xv). That is, Dr. Clair reports that the U.S. justice system has a vision of how people should behave that is based in middle-class assumptions and communication patterns. He finds that those who are poor or working class who do not communicate as expected are disproportionately penalized.

The Prison Policy Initiative affirmed what Dr. Clair has written in their “Mass Incarceration: the Whole Pie 2020” in which Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner write, “People in prison and jail are disproportionately poor compared to the overall U.S. population. The criminal justice system punishes poverty… Poverty is not only a predictor of incarceration; it is also frequently the outcome.”

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Race, Class, and Prisoners

Books for Race, Class, Prisoners, Dec 2021

The Reverend Doctors Ronald Burris and Aidsand Wright-Riggins were our professors for a Berkeley School of Theology Fall 2021 doctoral class called “Racism in America.” My final paper was “Race, Class, and Prisoners.” The paper starts:

“In How to Fight Racism, Jemar Tisby writes, “White supremacy is the belief or assumption that white people and their culture are inherently superior to other people and cultures.” I said in our class discussion of Tisby that understanding white supremacy and its associated racism in the United States is incomplete without also considering class and classism. In this paper, I expand my argument that class is a key factor in racism to include why people of color are imprisoned disproportionally. In support of this, I consider historical, literary, and academic sources as well as my personal experience as a jail chaplain in Santa Clara County.

In researching this topic, I found that race and class were conflated in most analyses, and that usually only race was addressed. Sometimes it seemed as though class and classism were invisible. For example, historian Tyler Stovall, whom I quote on race and class below, has racism in his Index but not class or classism, even though both are extensively discussed. Publications where race and class were considered individually came from many academic disciplines, including anthropology, economics, education, history, sociology and literary analysis. I begin with definitions of class and race.”

You can read the whole paper here.

Note: there is a typo on page eight of the paper: I have been a volunteer jail chaplain with the Correctional Institutions Chaplaincy since 2015 (not 2005).

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Doctor of Ministry Project

My Doctor of Ministry program started in August 2021 with a week-long online class in which our new DMin cohort got to know each other and our two leaders, Dr. Aidsand F. Wright-Riggins, III and Dr. Ronald D. Burris at the Berkeley School of Theology. BST is in the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. My final paper starts:

“In this paper, I begin the discussion of my Doctor of Ministry project and dissertation for the Berkeley School of Theology. In the first section, I present the problem of creating a theological study program for use in jail and my vision for its solution. The second section considers my theological basis, including three inspiring scriptures that have influenced my thinking. These are followed by a summary and conclusion. My theological basis and the proposed project and dissertation are informed by my experience as a Santa Clara County, California, jail chaplain since 2015.” The three Bible scriptures are Matthew 25:31-46, Genesis 39-41, and Acts 16:22-40. Read the whole paper here.

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Ethnocentrism and Racism

The Curse of Ham by Goldenberg, Stand Your Ground by Douglas

The Reverend Doctor LeAnn Snow Flesher was our professor for a Berkeley School of Theology class this summer called “White Supremacy and the Bible.” My final paper was “Ethnocentrism and Racism.” The paper starts:

“Are ethnocentrism and racism different or the same, and what difference does this make? I engage these terms regarding American social structures, biology, and power / domination, as well as considering to what extent ethnocentrism and racism are mutually exclusive or overlapping. I will focus on two of our class books that examine these and related concepts, the Rev. Canon Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, and Dr. David M. Goldenberg’s The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This paper starts by reviewing definitions of ethnocentrism and racism from a variety of sources, followed by a section on what Douglas and Goldenberg write and seem to mean by those concepts, concluding with a section that considers how these meanings make a difference.”

You can read the whole paper here. Below is the “Social /Cultural Group Evaluation – Ethnocentrism <-> Racism Scale” graphic, discussed on pages 19-20 of the paper.

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