This term at the Berkeley School of Theology, I have focused on developing the Hebrew Bible section of my Doctor of Ministry (DMin) project. My project is to revise the Transforming Literature of the Bible (TLB) material I have used in Santa Clara County jail classes since 2018. TLB was originally created by the Rev. Canon William Barnwell. Read the complete project proposal here. I have been rewriting the 2018 material 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. To make the written material more engaging, I added public domain images, some of which are featured here. I turned in a mature draft of the 127 pages completed so far to my DMin committee last week. (I edited down the 2018 TLB which had 256 pages on the Hebrew Bible.) While I am waiting for committee comments, I am starting work on the Christian Testament section.
The Hebrew Bible section includes information about the class setting and very positive student feedback from the first two surveys. An except about that:
“The first class to use the updated Transforming Literature of the Bible – Book One, Hebrew Bible materials started in August 2023 with sixteen potential students and ended with five who were graduated on 6 December 2023. All students were male inmates in a minimum-security protective custody dorm of Santa Clara County Jail, in California. Jail students leaving class because of release or transfer to prison, or another facility are normal patterns. Population churn is part of what makes jail-based education and faith-based pastoral care challenging. The Prison Policy Initiative wrote in their annual analysis ‘Mass Incarceration: the Whole Pie 2023.’”
“Prisons are facilities under state or federal control where people who have been convicted (usually of felonies) go to serve their sentences. Jails are city- or county-run facilities where a majority of people locked up are there awaiting trial (in other words, still legally innocent), many because they can’t afford to post bail… In 2021, about 421,000 people entered prison gates, but people went to jail almost 7 million times… At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail will be arrested again within the same year — often those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose problems only worsen with incarceration.”[1]
“Each week, Katy Dickinson wrote the TLB chapter for the following week and distributed it in paper form to the class. Homework was to read the next week’s Bible and TLB reading assignments. Class feedback and responses were used to update TLB material as the class progressed. TLB homework often included literary selections to complement and extend topics raised in the scripture reading.”
“The TLB was available in both English and Spanish. The Spanish was an uncorrected machine translation in Microsoft Word of the English version. Four students read both Spanish and English versions and one read only in English. Class discussions and reading aloud alternated between English and Spanish (and sometimes Spanglish). An example of the benefits of a class presented in two languages was a discussion we had about how the English word righteous translated into Spanish as justicia. The common translation of justicia is the English word justice. The class had several discussions of what it meant that righteousness could be equated with justice.”
[1] Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: the Whole Pie 2023,” Prison Policy Initiative, 14 March 2023, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
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