Blog

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has signed legislation that allows mental health counselors and therapists to refuse to treat patients based on religious objections or personal beliefs. Critics of the law say it could result in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. As Nashville Public Radio reported earlier this month: "A group representing gay and lesbian Tennesseans [asked Haslam] to veto the legislation. ... "The Tennessee Equality Project, an LGBT advocacy...

Stacy Bannerman didn't recognize her husband after he returned from his second tour in Iraq. "The man I had married was not the man that came back from war," she says. Bannerman's husband, a former National Guardsman, had been in combat and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He behaved in ways she had never expected, and one day, he tried to strangle her. "I had been with this man for 11 years at that point, and there had never been anything like this before," Bannerman...

Children with an incarcerated parent often suffer emotionally, academically and financially, and too few policies consider their needs, says a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation . Nationwide, more than 5.1 million children have experienced separation from a parent because of incarceration — a situation that can be as difficult as dealing with abuse or domestic violence, said the report, “A Shared Sentence.” Research shows children may experience increased mental health issues,...

In the 1960s, while other middle-school students were worrying about letter jackets or boyfriends or saddle shoes, LaVerne Bell-Tolliver was simply trying to stay sane. Bell-Tolliver’s parents had volunteered her to integrate Forest Heights Junior High in Little Rock in 1961, and as the only black student in a crush of white ones, she was always on guard. Boys pushed other students into her, crowing that her blackness would rub off onto them. Teachers ignored her raised hand and gave her low...

Although it was abolished in 1865, slavery in the U.S. is still being mapped by cartographers looking for fresh approaches to the topic . The latest effort comes from the historian and cartographer Bill Rankin. Rankin’s new maps provide snapshots of U.S. slave populations from 1790 to 1870 in 10-year intervals. But his methodology is a departure from that of previous cartographers in that it doesn’t take counties as the smallest units of analysis. [For more of this story, written by Tanvi...

More than 5 million U.S. children have had a parent in jail or prison at some point in their lives. The incarceration of a parent can have as much impact on a child’s well-being as abuse or domestic violence. But while states spend heavily on corrections, few resources exist to support those left behind. A Shared Sentence offers commonsense proposals to address the increased poverty and stress that children of incarcerated parents experience. [For more go to ...

The 911 caller had reported a man with a samurai sword, lunging at people on the waterfront. It was evening, and when the police arrived, they saw the man pacing the beach and called to him. He responded by throwing a rock at the embankment where they stood. They shouted to him from a sheriff’s boat; he threw another rock. They told him to drop the sword; he said he would kill them. He started to leave the beach, and after warning him, they shot him in the leg with a beanbag gun. He turned...

Last Friday, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to more than 200,000 people with previous felony convictions. It’s a momentous stroke in both scope and effect; with an eye towards the 2016 races, The New York Times estimated its electoral impact as “ small but potentially decisive .” But the significance of McAuliffe’s efforts goes far beyond a single election. It instead marks an exorcism for one of Jim Crow’s last vestiges in Virginia’s state charter—and a reminder of...

Around the world, an average of 60 percent of children receive some kind of physical punishment, according to UNICEF . And the most common form is spanking. In the United States, most people still see spanking as acceptable, though FiveThirtyEight reports that the percentage of people who approve of spanking has gone down, from 84 percent in 1986 to about 70 percent in 2012. “The question of whether parents should spank their children to correct misbehaviors sits at a nexus of arguments from...

As I start to talk with pastors about why ACEs matter and why they should inform themselves and their congregations, I regularly hear something like this: "But why does it matter? What difference should it make in ministry? Can't I simply preach and teach the Bible and leave the results up to God?" By way of answer to these questions, I am starting to put together a training called "10 things that kid with ACEs would like you to know: moving your church toward greater empathy." The following...

In the high-beamed auditorium at the Clarkston Community Center near Atlanta, a dozen teenagers sit in a circle on metal chairs. Each one sings out his or her name, making the sound musical and adding a dramatic gesture at the request of instructor Ruth Schowalter. Shy participants screw up their courage to become dramatic. The entire group repeats each name and movement, singing the sounds loudly and energetically. Schowalter asks the group to do another exercise. It begins with the words:...

I arrived at the Anamosa Iowa Men’s Reformatory in October 1992. I can still remember riding in the van, wearing a set of cold steel shackles and handcuffs attached to a long dog chain that went around my waist and attached to a black box. The black box was padlocked around the cuffs, immobilizing my hands. I had heard rumors that a prisoner actually invented this black box contraption and I cursed him silently as we took a 2½-hour trip, which seemed more like it took all day. Immobilized in...