How Martin Luther King,Jr’s Pacifist Liberation Theology Makes Reinhold Niebuhr’s Political Realism Possible

Reinhold Niebuhr crafted a compelling theologically based theory of political realism, which became the basis for a withering critique of pacifism. Martin Luther King, Jr was influenced by Niebuhr’s Augustinian realism in his own political theology and practice. However, King lived and thought from a different perspective, had more apocalyptic expectations of divine intervention in history, and embraced pacifism. I argue that Niebuhr fell short of his own realist vision through his idealistic faith in US democracy, and that King’s political theology better enacts Niebuhrian realism. I suggest King achieves this largely because his theology is a liberation theology grounded in pacifist praxis in solidarity with the oppressed. By rejecting Niebuhr’s acceptance of American violence and basing his theology on lived confrontation with American violence, King makes Niebuhr’s political realism possible. This reading of King and Niebuhr illustrates the value of pacifism and theology for political theory and practice.     

The role of empathy in anger arousal in violent offenders and university students

A lack of empathic responsiveness toward others has been consistently identified as an important antecedent to aggressive behavior and violent crime, with many rehabilitation programs for violent offenders incorporating treatment modules that are specifically designed to increase offender empathy. This study examined the extent to which cognitive (perspective taking) and affective (empathic concern, personal distress) empathy predicted anger in a clinical (male prisoners convicted of a violent offense) and a nonclinical (student) sample. Perspective taking emerged as the strongest predictor of self-reported anger in response to an interpersonal provocation, as well as being most consistently related to scores on measures of general trait anger and methods of anger control. While the relationship between perspective taking and anger was apparent for offenders as well as students, the results did not support the idea that an inability to perspective take is a particular characteristic of violent offenders.     

The meaning of anger for Australian Indigenous offenders: the significance of context

The problem of overrepresentation of Indigenous offenders in Australian prisons highlights the need for effective tertiary intervention programs within correctional settings as a way of reducing Indigenous reincarceration. This study seeks to explore meanings of anger within an Indigenous context that might inform the development of more acceptable and potentially more effective rehabilitation programs. A methodology that acknowledges the importance of narrative, context, and culture was devised to explore how anger as an emotion is understood and experienced by a group of Indigenous men in a South Australian prison. Although some of the major themes reflected experiences of anger common to many offenders, it was evident that for these Indigenous men, anger was experienced within a broad social and political context that imbued the experience of anger with layers of culturally specific meaning. It is suggested that these layers of meaning constitute sufficient difference to warrant further exploration.     

The recruitment and retention of indigenous criminal justice agency staff in an Australian state

In Australia, as in other countries that have experienced colonisation, indigenous people are massively overrepresented in all stages of the criminal justice system. If criminal justice agencies are to provide culturally responsive and effective services to this group, it is important that they employ significant numbers of indigenous staff across all levels of their organisations. Despite the positive intentions of many justice agencies to increase the proportion of indigenous staff members they employ, the numbers remain low. In this article, we explore some of the possible reasons for this by reporting the results of focus groups conducted with existing indigenous justice agency employees. The employees raised a number of issues relevant to recruitment and retention. These are discussed in terms of their potential value in improving justice agency indigenous recruitment and retention strategies.     

Contact Disputes: Narrative Constructions of `Good' Parents

This paper explores contact disputes in England and Wales. We discuss the legal background as well as separating parents' experiences of contact disputes. Contact has been high on the agenda since the U.K. Government report, Making Contact Work, (2002) examined various means for facilitating contact between non-resident parents and their children. More recently, the issue has featured prominently in the headlines, largely as a result of the campaigning efforts of fathers' rights groups who complain of injustice and demand changes in the law. The idea that contact is necessary for children's well-being seems to have acquired the status of uncontestable truth. This paper examines the ways in which these ideas about children's interests have become embodied in adominant welfare discourse that is embedded in law and informs policy thinking. Family law has long abhorred parental conflict, particularly that which involves the children. It is frequently assumed that conflict can be reduced if parents could be persuaded to accept the premises of the welfare discourse. In this paper, we consider how parents themselves, in talking about their experiences of contact disputes, makes sense of family law. We found that parents regularly invoke the welfare discourse in their talk, but they interpret it in unexpected ways. Often these interpretations fuel conflict rather than reducing it.     

Criminology and genocide studies: Notes on what might have been and what still could be

Scholars of genocide and mass killings have proposed several theories explaining how the behaviors of governments, political leaders, and ordinary citizens contribute to extreme violence. Many of the explanatory constructs developed in these theories bear a striking resemblance to core concepts of criminology or could be readily integrated with criminological ideas. As examples, this paper briefly describes the ideas of Herbert Kelman, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and R.J. Rummel from the perspective of criminology and examines their applicabilitythe recent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. The conclusion is that criminology, by largely ignoring the crime of genocide, has missed opportunities to both contribute to the field of genocide studies and to improve the specification of its own ideas.     

Community assessment of NGO housing delivery: lessons from Port Vila,Vanuatu

This article reports on a 2016 field-based multiple case study of three communities in peri-urban Port Vila, Vanuatu. It offers robust empirical evidence that participatory planning, partnerships, and programme evaluation, as espoused in the literature from the last two decades and readdressed in Habitat III Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, is not regularly occurring in aid-based housing programmes. The study identifies that in sacrificing consultation – community cohesion, capacity building, resiliency, and innovation, are also sacrificed. This research differs from peer literature by employing an inductive and underutilised methodology, storytelling, and by focusing on an at-risk country which receives little academic, NGO, or development attention.