Film Recommendation: “Healing Justice” available through World Trust Films

“As you watch this film you may experience a range of powerful emotions. Please know that you are not alone. May our thoughts and feelings create fires that ignite the gifts of learning, healing, and transformation. May we recognize and honor the depth of our inter-connectedness. May we nourish the flames that burn away hatred and fear. May we utilize these gifts to mend ourselves and our communities.” These words begin the film, “Healing Justice,” which has been recommended to us by a friend familiar with the Justice Conversation project. It is a good film for sharing with educators, law enforcement, judicial professionals, as well as non-profits. After viewing it, I also want to emphasize that it’s a good film for adults in the general public. For anyone who votes. For anyone who may at some point come into contact with our justice system. For you. I will add, though,… Continue reading

Centering Prayer

People working for justice are regularly witnesses of others’ pain. Often those painful circumstances rearrange the other person’s life, or even ends it. Justice workers, and in fact all of us, need to practice self care in order to not close down, give into anger, harden, retreat, project, or attack. In speaking of justice workers, I’m thinking broadly -of police officers as well as activists; lawyers, lawmakers, prison guards, and sometimes offenders; judges, ministers, volunteers, and aid workers; artists, writers and performers who tune their work to the timbre and call justice and injustice. Centering Prayer is a daily practice in which you rest in the Presence of Love, of the Ground of Being, of God. It is a form of meditation, and a time of healing. Centering yourself daily in Love can offer a reserve of strength and a practice of letting go, a steadiness which contributes to the… Continue reading

Book Review: ‘The Desire for Mutual Recognition – Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self’ – Peter Gabel

Image showing book cover

Contributed by Elaine Quinn, editor of The Conscious Lawyer This review first appeared in the online magazine, The Conscious Lawyer, vol IV, October 2018. You can purchase this book through Routledge Taylor & Francis Group or through your favorite bookseller. “…our original longing from birth [is] to be seen by the other in a way that fully recognizes our humanity and our longing to simultaneously affirm our recognition of the other in the same way.” (Chapter 3, page 58) Before reading any further, take a moment to sit and look at the striking portrait below. This unusual and powerful invitation is one made to the reader in the first chapter of the book. It is an invitation that perhaps experientially captures the essence of what the author wants to convey – the experience of being truly recognized by a fully present human being, of deepening into our own natural presence… Continue reading

Book Review: Transforming Justice, Lawyers, and the Practice of Law by Marjorie A. Silver

Review by Elaine Quinn This review first appeared in the online magazine, The Conscious Lawyer, vol II, May 2017. Available through Carolina Academic Press If I had an understanding before that law needs to change and that that change is already happening, this book has helped that understanding become a conviction. The book reinforces the message that our society is undergoing a shift in consciousness from an experiential sense of innate separateness to one of innate togetherness, that scientific evidence is available to prove the validity of this shift, and that our cultural institutions – law being one of the most essential – need to join with and support this shift rather than resist and hold it back. One of the core messages in the book echoes that of ‘The Ecology of Law – Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community’. That is that legal thought needs… Continue reading