Karl Marx once called religion the opium of the people—an imaginary coping mechanism that makes suffering in this world more bearable. His vision was a secular, atheistic one. But my guest today argues Marx’s vision was still intensely spiritual. In fact, he says Marx hijacked key themes from Christianity to create a false religion. Today, Bruce Ashford, dean and provost of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, joins the podcast.
We also cover the following stories:
Sen. Bernie Sanders receives heart surgery after chest discomfort
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls for religious freedom around the world at Vatican symposium
Plaintiff to appeal after federal judge sides with Harvard in discrimination suit
The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
It's a great time to stay on top of some listener mail! But first, a new segment, "Feminist Yells at News!" Jamie talks about Brett Kavanaugh's latest victim complex, and Hillary Clinton opening up in recent interviews. After that, it's listener questions! Topics include: supporting local news organizations vs. national news organizations; comedians feeling like they can't do comedy because of the PC left; is it useful to have conservatives like Ross Douthat in the NYT opinion section; are we strawmanning the Yang UBI arguments?
After that, we've got an excellent bonus 30 minutes for patrons! We talk about needing meaning in life, Jamie answers criticism on her Biden comments, and then we talk about which are our favorite musicals! (and not so favorite...)
Why haven't you seen a daily podcast in your feed this week? As we wind down Morning Shift and ramp up our new program Reset, Jenn White explains how we've got you covered from a programming perspective (more of the news and conversations that matter to you), and from a technical perspective (no need to unsubscribe/resubscribe). Check out the short message from Jenn, and see you back here very soon!
Claire Cotrill is a singer, songwriter, and producer who goes by the name Clairo. She started releasing music in 2014 as a teenager. A few years later, songs she had uploaded to YouTube had racked up over 40 million views. This year, Clairo put out her debut album, Immunity. She’s recently performed on Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel, and played arenas, opening for Khalid. In this episode, Clairo breaks down her song “Alewife.” I spoke to Claire and her co-producer Rostam Batmanglij about how the song was made.
Among countries that report to no higher authority for their actions, assuring that war crimes are punished properly remains a serious challenge. John Glaser comments.
Among countries that report to no higher authority for their actions, assuring that war crimes are punished properly remains a serious challenge. John Glaser comments.
When the guys get together to trace the story of secret societies, they aren't expecting a surprise guest to crash their podcast, revealing first-hand experience with some the most elite, secretive organizations in the United States.
When a mother with minor children is imprisoned, she is far from the only one facing consequences. Their children can end up cared for in multiple placements, they’re often unable to attend school and they’re stigmatised.
These effects on the children of the incarcerated, although predictable, have been poorly understood precisely because almost no one has done that. But Minson, who practiced both criminal and family law before entering academe, did. Following up on issues she’d seen in her work as a lawyer and after taking a master’s at the University of Surrey, she interviewed children, their caregivers and members of the Crown Court judiciary to see both how having a mom locked up affected children and how sentencing decisions that created those situations came about.
Furthermore, she shared her findings with the authorities. “I didn’t realize,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “that academics didn’t normally try to change things.”
And while that action might have been somewhat out of the ordinary , what happened next is even more unusual: the authorities listened. After telling the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights about her findings in March 2018, the committee held an enquiry centered on the rights of the children of the imprisoned, and on Tuesday, 1 October, new guidelines were released with the aim of strengthening female offenders' family and other relationships. Existing systemic problems, she believes, can be “more of a blind spot than a deliberate dismissal of these children.”
While the policy affect was likely the most gratifying reward, she also received this year’s Outstanding Early Career Impact Prize awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council in association with SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space).
In this podcast, Minson explains that the lack of research into the children of imprisoned women echoes scant data on the mothers themselves. No one knows exactly how many mothers are locked up in England and Wales because that information isn’t collected, but a “best” guess follows by multiplying the results of a 1997 study that found 61 percent of women in prison were mothers by the rough daily headcount of 3,800 women in prison. Of that estimated maternal population of 2,300, most are single mothers incarcerated up to 60 miles from home, leaving their children in the hands of a variety of carers, ranging from grandparents to friends to, as a last resort, a local authority.
“Most people don’t want their children to go into the care system,” Minson relates, “because it can be very, very difficult to get them back again. And often short sentences are given women ... so if they lose their children into care at that point, it can be years before they have them back even though they’ve only been in prison a few months.”
But those informal arrangements are also fraught, with children often living in multiple places during their mom’s confinement. And because these particular children are not recognized as ‘children in need,’ they get no priority in school places – so carry-on issues with not being in school, stigma because their mother is in prison, and resulting damage to education all plant seeds for future problems. And some not so-future ones ...
“Most of the children that I met just describe themselves as sad,” Minson says. “They have this huge grief, and therapists have written about this, whether it’s a disenfranchised grief where you’re almost unentitled to it, or an ambiguous loss because of the uncertainty – a person hasn’t died, but you don’t know when they’re coming back and you can’t talk about in the way you might if your parents separated or divorced.”
In this podcast, Minson discusses why she chose not to interview the imprisoned mothers for her research, the surprising lack of knowledge about child issues she saw in the judges she talked with, and how new court rulings are opening up non-custodial sentencing options for some mothers.
Minson is currently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford, where she is continuing to study children’s rights, this time in the wake of both custodial and non-custodial sentences.
