CLAUDE NEWMAN

2024

A biography of John Henry Newman along with a monograph "On Conscience" written in the 1940s is now for the first time translated into English.

Radical History Review, 2006

The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in the society at large.-Ralph Aron, Marion warden Prison is a backyard form of colonialism.-raúlrsalinas, Marion prisoner The summer and fall of 1972 witnessed a series of mobilizations, political rebellions, and lawsuits by a multiracial group of prison activists at Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois. A cadre of third world activists-from the Black Liberation Army, the Republic of New Africa, and a Puerto Rican independentista fighter to Muslims, Chicanos, American Indians, and whites-came together that spring in Marion to challenge the very logic of incarceration as a form of permanent living death. 1 According to raúlrsalinas (a Leavenworth transferee), the other inmates received this multiracial group of activists "like a liberating army. .. the more we developed and joined hands across color lines, the more we became a threat." In the 1960s, because of this intense political awakening across the prisons of America, the repression became so intensified it gave rise to what raúlrsalinas and others call the prison rebellion years. 2 Such organizing proved crucial to confront the prison authority's deployment of living death as a strategy to control radical inmates.

John Henry Newman: The Making of a Saint and Its Relevance for Today, 2019

This paper is designed to give the reader an overview of the process of canonization of John Henry Newman. It also explores how his writings are very relevant to what is transpiring in today's Catholic Church and world. There is a PowerPoint which accompanies the text.

2013

After the fall of communism in 1989, Romania, as others countries from Central and Eastern Europe, had to deal with its recent past marked by two dictatorships, one on the extreme right, the other on the extreme left. However, it seems that the postcommunist society is rather preoccupied by the consequences of the communist regime than the fascist one. As the anti-communist narrative has become mainstream since the beginning of the 2000s, the victims of communist prisons received more and more attention. Several voices asked for the canonization of those prisoners that distinguished themselves for their belief. The Aiud "prison saints" are part of this current. Their stories are not simple and neither is the history: some of those who died in communist prisons were affiliated to the extreme right in the 1930s and the 1940s. While the Orthodox Church avoids to discuss their canonization, the new "saints" became the object of a popular devotion, which gathers together not only believers, but also representatives of the Church and the civil society. This article explores what the devotion for "prison saints" represents in the lived religion. Following the pilgrims to Aiud monastery and narratives concerning the "prison saints," it appears that their veneration is not "natural," but rather the result of a construction. As it turns out, lived religion is a vehicle for values diverging from the official democratic discourse.

Critical Survey, 2011

This article explores how the rehabilitative discourse of the American prison system shapes the writings of American prisoners. The article begins by tracing how the conversion narrative underpins prison reformers' theories of prison rehabilitation. Then, the article considers how American prisoners like use the conversion narrative and theories of rehabilitation in their life writings. The article argues that prisoners' life writings do not, as is often presumed, 'write back to power' so much as invoke competing discourses that contest but also reinforce the ideology of the American prison system.

Published in 'The legacy of John Henry Newman: Essays for the beatification', Grandpont Paper 2 (2012)

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2011

Between 1830 and 1930, the removal of legal and extralegal executions from public view in the United States bolstered the law’s efficiency while expanding its reach. Scholars have focused on external political effects, largely ignoring the lives of the condemned in the modern killing states. As they were withdrawn ever further behind prison walls, the condemned rearticulated the meanings of their deaths, which would to exceed, to whatever extent possible, new biopolitical regimes. An examination of inmate culture reveals death row as a site of subtle, supple struggle between the modern state and those it would kill.

New Blackfriars, 2010