Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class addresses the reality of how unstable environments permanently hurt children. It’s an especially good read because Henderson not only grew up in such a troubled environment, but is also a Ph.D. psychologist from Cambridge University. You may have noticed that I frequently link to his work, and he has one of the best Substacks out there. Thus he has a mix of compelling personal experience, and the intellectual ability to put this into a social science and cultural context.

It’s a truism that having kids gives you a new perspective on childhood. My son is seven years old. He’s never missed a meal in his life. It occurred to me that the idea that there might not be food to eat when he’s hungry has probably never entered into his head. Similarly, he’s probably never even imagined that his mother and I wouldn’t be there, that he might be taken out of our house and dumped somewhere he’s never been to live with people he’s never met.
As we age, we learn, both intellectually and through experience, that the world is full of terrible things, and that pain and suffering are an unavoidable part of the human condition. Even as adults, some experiences are so traumatic that their effects linger for years or even for the rest of our lives.
When these things happen to young children, so-called “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” it can distort their development and permanently damage them and their prospects in life because they don’t have the mature resources necessary to cope with what has happened to them. In a sense, even if they “overcome” these experiences, they never truly leave them behind.
Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class addresses the reality of how unstable environments permanently hurt children. It’s an especially good read because Henderson not only grew up in such a troubled environment, but is also a Ph.D. psychologist from Cambridge University. You may have noticed that I frequently link to his work, and he has one of the best Substacks out there. Thus he has a mix of compelling personal experience, and the intellectual ability to put this into a social science and cultural context.
Henderson’s life is a case study in crazy. He never met this father, after whom he was named. Later, he learns through a DNA test that his father was Hispanic. His mother was Asian, and deeply troubled, with a serious drug problem. She had already had two other children with two different fathers when he was born, half-brothers he has never met. Henderson was taken away from her and put into a foster care, where he rotated through a series of foster homes.
Here was one such experience:
Months later, Gerri, my social worker, came to the house. It was time for me to go live somewhere else, she said. I’d just turned seven, and this time I didn’t cry. I was dejected, but the tears didn’t come. I’d learned to shut down, sealing myself off from my emotions. Gerri helped me gather my clothes and put them into a black garbage bag. She picked up a shoe box next to my bed, and a bunch of cards fell out…We packed up and walked out to her car. I wondered if this was how the rest of my life would be: moving to a home, staying for a while, and Gerri putting me somewhere else. By this point I knew that other kids didn’t have to do this.
I previously served on the board of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for Children of Cook County, Illinois. CASA trains volunteers who serve as special advisors to the judge in cases of children who are involved in the juvenile justice system on account of parental abuse or neglect. These children have done nothing wrong themselves, but are merely unlucky to have messed up parents and home life. Since social service case workers are typically overloaded, and pretty much everybody involved in the case has their own personal interests at stake, CASA volunteers spend time learning about the case and the child and are chartered with acting as advocates for the best interests of the child to the judge.
During our initial board training, someone came into the room and gave us black garbage bags. We were told to put all of our possessions in that bag, and come with her to a place we didn’t know and had never been.
For us, we knew the reality of what was happening, so it didn’t really affect us all that much truth be told. But reading about Henderson’s experience took me back. Imagine being a small child, and a government case worker comes into your bedroom out of the blue and tells you to put everything you own in a black garbage bag and bring it to some strange new place. Unless it actually happened to us, we can’t really relate to that. Children without our intellectual and life perspectives experience these things in completely different ways that we might think they do:
Children believe that if a family loves them, then that family won’t let them be taken away. Adults understand on an intellectual level that this isn’t true—the foster system works the way it works—but little kids don’t fully grasp this.
This happened many times to Henderson, who I believe lived in about seven different foster homes, some of which were candidly exploitative of him. As it put it:
I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family.
Being in foster care puts a kid into pretty much the highest risk category in life you can be. Of boys, Henderson notes:
Studies indicate that in the US, 60 percent of boys in foster care are later incarcerated, while only 3 percent graduate from college.
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“As Christians, we are not contradictory when we support the death penalty yet oppose abortion. Yes, both actions will end the life of a human being. But while the death penalty ends the life of a convicted murderer, abortion ends the life of an innocent baby. It is immoral for us to fail to see the difference between these two categories of humans.”

There are some believers—especially some Catholics—who seek to argue that the Christian should be “fully” pro-life and oppose all killing—certainly things like capital punishment, along with things like abortion. Sometimes this is referred to as a “consistent life ethic” and the like.
But is this a fully biblical position to hold to? And is it morally and mentally coherent? I and many others—including many Catholic ethicists—believe it is not. I have discussed this matter before, but it keeps arising. So let me give it another hearing.
Here I want to just look at capital punishment and how it differs from abortion. One person recently came to my site seeking to make the “seamless garment” case. I get folks like this quite often. In this recent case, I told the person:
I—along with so many others—am a social conservative and biblical Christian who fully agrees with the rightness of capital punishment. I strongly differ with those who want to push the claim that we should oppose abortion AND capital punishment. The two could not be more different: Abortion involves the unjust murder of the innocent while the death penalty involves the just killing of the guilty. So there is no moral equivalence here whatsoever. See here for more on this.
What I said there should really suffice, but let me tease it out further. First, as I have argued often enough, killing and murder are NOT the same. The Sixth Commandment proscribes the latter, but not the former. I have in some detail made the case for three biblically and morally licit forms of killing in previous pieces.
On self-defence, see this.
On just war theory, see the many articles featured here.
And here are 23 articles making the biblical, moral and social case for the death penalty.
Second, as I have sought to argue elsewhere, there most certainly is a place for the death penalty in Catholic social teaching. Even some supporters of the seamless garment recognise this reality. See here.
Third, much of this has to do with the biblical concept of justice. Too often folks—including many believers—think that love and mercy somehow trump justice, or are more important. See the piece on James 2:13 above that looks at one such passage they appeal to. But let’s look at justice further.
One brilliant thinker who specializes in philosophy, politics and ethics, and strongly appeals to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and natural law theory, J. Budziszewski is well worth appealing to here. He has penned many important volumes that could be drawn upon, but let me restrict myself to his vital 2009 work, The Line Through the Heart. In his chapter on capital punishment, he writes:
Justice is giving each what is due to him. So fundamental is the duty of public authority to requite good and evil in deeds that natural law philosophers consider it the paramount function of the state, and the New Testament declares that the role is delegated to magistrates by God Himself…
So weighty is the duty of justice that it raises the question whether mercy is permissible at all. By definition, mercy is punishing the criminal less than he deserves, and it does not seem clear at first why not going far enough is better than going too far. We say that both cowardice and rashness miss the mark of courage, and that both stinginess and prodigality miss the mark of generosity; why do we not say that both mercy and harshness miss the mark of justice? Making matters yet more difficult, the argument to abolish capital punishment is an argument to categorically extend clemency to all those whose crimes are of the sort that would be requitable by death.
I ask: Is there warrant for such categorical extension of clemency? Let us focus mainly on the crime of murder, the deliberate taking of innocent human life. The reason for this focus is that the question of mercy arises only on the assumption that some crime does deserve death. It would seem that at least death deserves death, that nothing less is sufficient to answer the gravity of the deed. Revelation agrees. As Genesis instructs: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Someone may object that the murderer, too, is made in God’s image, and so he is. But this does not lighten the horror of his deed. On the contrary, it heightens it, because it makes him a morally accountable being. Moreover, if even simple murder warrants death, how much more does multiple and compounded murder warrant it? Some criminals seem to deserve death many times over. If we are considering not taking their lives at all, the motive cannot be justice. It must be mercy.
The questions to be addressed are therefore three: Is it ever permissible for public authority to give the wrongdoer less than he deserves? If it is permissible, then when is it permissible? Is it permissible to grant such mercy categorically?
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 12, 2021
He spat on the ground and made mud. Since Jesus frequently heals with a word or a touch it seems oddly specific, and convoluted, to mix spit and dust and then send the man to a specific pool. How strange. While John’s narrative and the theological points he wants to make carry on despite how Jesus accomplished the man’s healing, it always makes me sit up and start to think.  It’s possible its just a detail, “because that’s how it happened” that has no further import, but the Bible never works like that.

John wants us to see Jesus as the light that brings sight to dead eyes, physically and spiritually. To compare the arrogant Pharisees who condemn Jesus for healing on the Sabbath to the blind man who confesses that he does not know who Jesus is, but he must be from God. To compare the physical healing to the spiritual healing as Jesus forgives the blind man when they later meet after revealing himself as Daniel’s ‘Son of Man’, the divine Messiah coming to rescue and rule.
It’s majestic, with sweeping theological themes I’ve barely touched written lightly across the story. It’s not difficult to dive deeply in many directions—the Bible is usually like that, but John wears it more obviously than the other gospel writers. I always get caught on one detail though:
Having said these things, he spit on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.
John 9:6–7
He spat on the ground and made mud. Since Jesus frequently heals with a word or a touch it seems oddly specific, and convoluted, to mix spit and dust and then send the man to a specific pool. How strange. While John’s narrative and the theological points he wants to make carry on despite how Jesus accomplished the man’s healing, it always makes me sit up and start to think.  It’s possible its just a detail, ‘because that’s how it happened’ that has no further import, but the Bible never works like that.
Here are some initial reflections on what we can speculate was going on:
Dust
He takes dust, the material the God uses to affect the curse against humanity, that cannot enter Holy ground (hence all the foot-washing and shoe removing) and works healing with it. Jesus has been asked whether the man sinned to be born blind, he’s already answered (no), but then picks up the stuff of the curse to make his point clearer. Jesus takes the material that speaks the curse to us to use it to bring new life. He has declared himself the seed of the woman. (Genesis 2-3)
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