Picking Up Each Other's Slack

It has just seemed to be the case that when I'm in a blogging funk or on a limited topical kick, Lane Core picks up the slack with a variety of other topics, and vice versa. Well, as you know, I've been on a limited topical kick lately.

I particularly recommend two columns by Mike Adams to which Lane links. One is Prof. Adams's reading list to shore up a teenager's Christianity before he or she heads off to the godless world of higher education. The other is Adams's conversion — rather, re-conversion — story:

Pictures of Jesus look different in South American prisons. They often portray a painful expression, a crown of thorns, and blood. Not the peaceful look of the ones at home.

I talked to the man with the pictures for quite some time. He had been waiting for trial for over two years. He told me that he had faith that everything would be all right and that he would see his young children again before long. He also told me a lot about the system of justice in Ecuador. The absence of juries, the killing of "escaped" inmates who had been told they were free to go. There were 25-year sentences for drug possession and 16-year sentences for murder.

Before I left the prison, he shook my hand warmly and thanked me for coming to visit. I had already passed through the gates when I realized that I had forgotten to ask him his name.

As soon as I walked outside, I looked up at a giant statue of the Virgin Mary perched upon a hill above the prison. I realized that I had been wrong for a number of years. The man in the prison was right. How else could a prisoner be so happy? And why are so many "free" men miserable?

And, in one of those seemingly significant instances of informational ebb and flow, Patrick Sweeney links to a related news story:

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Two prisoners had themselves crucified by fellow inmates at a jail in southeast Bolivia on Wednesday while others sewed their lips together in protests to demand swifter justice and benefits for prisoners.