Justice Reform: Who\u27s Got the Power

As the US prison population continues to rise despite the significant decrease in crime rates, scholars and social activists are demanding comprehensive reforms to the penal system that disproportionately affects minorities and the poor and has become a significant burden on the taxpayers. This paper examines some of the processes that contributed to the rise of the modern day carceral state, such as the determinate sentencing reform and the proliferation of mandatory minimum sentencing. It also explores the unintended consequences of these penal developments and traces the reaction and subsequent resistance to these sentencing schemes from the judiciary, as well as other sources. Finally, this paper examines the dynamics of power between various actors in the struggle for meaningful reforms in the penal system and argues for a concerted action aimed at stimulating meaningful action from the legislature that has so far largely abstained from major efforts at reforming the criminal justice system

Informing, inviting or ignoring? Understanding how English Christian churches use the internet

This thesis investigates how English Christian leaders and churches use the internet for personal and corporate communication, and looks for evidence of challenges to traditional understandings of authority arising from online communication. Early studies in this area suggested that online religion would cause enormous change but more recent studies reflect less polarised opinions. Religious people tend to use the internet to augment rather than replace practice of their faith, holding true for different religions globally. Leaders use the internet for a wide variety of religious information tasks. The project uses a longitudinal website census, quantitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews. 400 churches in four English denominations (Baptist, Methodist, Anglican and Catholic) were surveyed over a three year period to establish if they published a website. 147 churches from the same four denominations, located in an area equivalent to Chelmsford Diocese, were assessed on 75 categories of information and their hyperlinks analysed. Interviews with church leaders and interested parties helped foster understanding of why and how sites were created, and explored the leaders personal use of the internet. The percentage of churches with a website increased over the survey period for all denominations. Content analysis showed that currency, extent and accessibility of information on websites varied, with some being out of date, others showing no contact details and few having specific information for newcomers to church. Interview findings revealed perceptions of email overload, varying degrees of governance and control of websites by church leaders, and leaders own use of the internet and social media. Interactivity was rare on church websites. Different levels of expertise are mooted as reasons why control and governance varies between leaders. Perceptions of the internet may be influenced by moral panic. The influence of the age of congregations on adoption of social media, and the impact of volunteer webmasters are examined. Recommendations for churches planning to revisit or review their sites are included, limitations are noted and suggestions for further research mad

Other Than Him: Superman as the Alien That Made Good

When discussing depictions of the alien in American popular culture—as extraterrestrial, as strange foreigner, and as both, an otherworldly Other—the most famous example is rarely considered; SUPERMAN. Introduced in 1938, this strange visitor from another planet possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men but walks among us disguised as a mild-mannered human. He’s the fantastic hiding in plain sight as the most mundane, an Other beloved as familiar, a singular being of another race who’s come to symbolize the best in humanity. And not by accident. Superman was created by two Cleveland teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. They were Jews in the Midwest during the rise of Nazism abroad and at home, bashful geeks bullied by other boys and rejected by girls, one the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the other an immigrant himself. They were Others in every sense, and into their alien hero they poured all their wishes, to belong and be accepted but also to be exceptional and revered. To be special but also to blend in. To be both Super and man. They gave their assimilation/assertion fantasy a nebbish secret identity based on themselves and empowered him with their Jewish heritage; the origin story of Moses as a baby sent adrift to safety, the physical and moral strength of Samson the mighty lawman, and the mission of the Golem as an inhuman protector of his creators. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In following decades, Superman’s mostly Jewish writers, artists, and editors continued to borrow Judaic motifs for their stories, further exploring the character’s unique standing as an alien who’s accepted as human, an Other who’s come to embody our idealized selves. In the postwar era he was blamed for causing juvenile delinquency, in the sixties and seventies he underwent frequent Kafkaesque metamorphoses, in the eighties he unsuccessfully attempted to renounce his alien heritage and with it his Otherness, and more recently he’s been featured in various alternate narratives in which he turns evil, like The Dark Side comic books, Injustice video games and Zack Snyder’s Justice League film. Tech Mod: Tim Lenz

Spartan Daily, September 15, 2003

Volume 121, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9878/thumbnail.jp

Teaching from the Tent: Muslim Women\u27s Leadership in Digital Religion

Muslim women’s accounts of their own religious leadership have been consistently absent from historical documents and present-day reporting. The absence of narrations does not necessarily indicate the absence of women, however, and today more and more women are leading and becoming public figures using new platforms provided by the Internet. In order to understand the essence of their leadership, this study sought to discover and describe the religious leadership lives of Muslim women, to disentangle the relationship between feminism and feminist work per Muslim women religious leaders, and to understand how digital religion influences their leadership. This qualitative study is a feminist phenomenology of seven Muslim women who are public figures and religious leaders. Using long interviews, document analysis of their publications, public teaching observations, and netnographies. I gathered data about the essence of their leadership. I further triangulated the data with a six-week study of a WhatsApp chat that happened between 75 Muslim women religious leaders who remain anonymous in this study. The feminist theories of bell hooks (2000), Nell Noddings (1985), and feminist theologians, along with Aristotle’s theory of knowledge as expressed by al Farābi, and Chaos theory as applied to social systems as described by Fritjof Capra (2002) came together to form the theoretical underpinnings of this study. Careful analysis of the data resulted in a model of Muslim women’s religious leadership that can be used to both appreciate the unique aspects of their leadership and improve education and training for Muslim women who wish to enter into the field

Creating Church Online: An Ethnographic Study of Five Internet-Based Christian Communities

“Online churches” are Internet-based Christian communities, seeking to pursue worship, discussion, friendship, teaching, support, proselytisation and other key religious goals through computer-mediated communication. These online churches are one example of “online religion”, a new kind of digital religious practice that promises to transform worship, authority, community and the construction of identity. This thesis examines five online churches, representing diverse media, theological traditions, leadership structures and forms of external oversight. Each has created a sizeable congregation and offers forms of worship and community online. I used ethnographic methods to examine these churches with particular attention to media, worship, community and leadership. I conducted long-term participant observation over the three years of my research, taking part in online and offline activities whenever possible, speaking informally with as many people as possible and interviewing over 100 leaders and members. Survey data and other written materials were also studied where available, including media reports, participant accounts and online blog posts. My research suggested seven important themes present in each group: mass appeal, the formation of community, spiritual experience, the replication of familiar elements of architecture, liturgy and organisation, the prevalence of local churchgoing among online participants, patterns of internal control and systems of external oversight. Each case study demonstrates the very different negotiations of those themes at work in each group. In my final chapter, I bring together threads and insights from each case study according to four key dimensions of one common theme: the relationship between digital and everyday life. Online churches deliberately replicate familiar elements of everyday activity, become part of the everyday, remain carefully distinct from the everyday and become distinctively digital. We must attend to all four of these layers to adequately understand and evaluate what takes place online, and what role that online activity plays in everyday religious lives

Supreme Court Opinion Authorship Attribution on a Case-by-Case Basis

This thesis analyzes the authorship of Supreme Court opinions and the theory that Justices on that Court might be delegating portions, if not the majority, of opinion authorship to their clerks. I test the theories that as Justices age they are more likely to delegate, and that delegation has increased across all justices over the past several decades of the Court’s history. I employ a content analysis method known as stylometry to assign authorship attributions on a case by case basis and use those attributions to inform larger trends regarding authorship. I ultimately find that there is little evidence to support the age or time-period theories but that there is significant variation across Justices in attribution, indicating that clerks are likely playing a large and measurable role in opinion drafting