Religious works fit for prisoners
There is a very oddly reported story in today’s NY Times about the Bureau of Prisons’ ordering chaplains to remove from prison libraries any books, tapes cds and videos that are not on an approved list. According to the story, “the Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories “ These experts were not named.
What is odd about the reporting of the story is that few of the books approved are named. The “Encyclopedia of Catholicism” is among them, as well as nine unidentified works by C.S. Lewis, and an unidentified work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and we are told that eighty of the volumes approved for Judaism (all unidentified) come from the same Orthodox publishing house, also unidentified. We are also told that there are no volumes by theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, or by the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller. One would like to know what went into the choice of these to illustrate the unapproved.
The Times has copies of the lists but chose not to tell us much about them nor to make them available on line. I would think it at least as interesting to know which books did make the list.
I couldn’t find the lists either, but I was amused (or baffled) to find a Daily Kos diarist complaining about banning of the Fathers of the Church and several Jewish publications protesting that Maimonides was unlikely to inspire many people to Islamic terrorism.
Someone on this blog the other day said that children have never had it so good. I doubt it.
Maybe the reporter didn’t know enough about religious writings to know which works were significant.
The good news is that it seems that the NYTseems to be writing more abou religious matters, sometimes even from a positive perspective. Yesterday there was a review of a book about Freud’s defense of religion in his last work (though he remained an atheist), and the reviewer took some swipes at Dawkins.
It looks like the Times wasn’t the first to report this. A Google search reveals a number of stories from various publications over the past few months. Here’s a link to a reprint of an article from The Jewish Week of July 10, 2007:
http://www.librariansforfairness.org/news_post.asp?NPI=182
I am unable to find the list itself, though.
I’d be curious to know what books are on and off the list, but I think the Bureau of Prisons should exercise control over the prison library.
Get Religion thinks it was oddly reported too:
http://www.getreligion.org/?p=2688