Breton & Lehman - Mysterious Justice (Future Talk - July 21, 2002)
Channel: safvio
Date: 2014-12-13

¤ Does punishment create justice among us?

¤ Do rewards make us happy?

¤ What if justice isn't about blaming and hurting but about restoring and healing?


Almost daily, we encounter a world that seems unjust, while authorities we depend on seem to be powerless or working for the wrong side. To make matters worse, we often feel judged by those same authorities—parents, teachers, employers, religious leaders, and legal officials. Though Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman agree that our justice system should be restructured, they speak to our individual and collective trials in a surprising way. They forge a solution in our own backyards and schoolyards.

In their ground-breaking book, Breton and Lehman show how reward-and-punishment systems dehumanize every aspect of our lives, beginning in childhood. Carrots and sticks, instead of making us productive, shut down creativity. As our inner motivation is destroyed, our creative expression wanes, a loss for us and our societies.

The alternative is to create a culture—as well as a justice system—that affirms the soul, the uniqueness of each individual, crafting social forms that draw out that uniqueness. The Mystic Heart of Justice offers both powerful examples and methods for forging a “soul-centered” society that provides every citizen with an inner and outer sense of fairness and wholeness.

Denise Breton lectures and counsels on practical spirituality and is the co-author of The Soul of Economies: Spiritual Evolution Goes to the Marketplace; The Paradigm Conspiracy: Why Our Social Systems Violate Our Human Potential and How We Can Change Them; and Love, Soul, and Freedom: Dancing with Rumi on the Mystic Path.

Stephen Lehman is former editor and publisher of Elysian Fields Quarterly, co-author of two children’s books, and author of a chemical dependency treatment curriculum for criminal offenders.

http://livingjusticepress.com 

The Mystic Heart of Justice: Restoring Wholeness in a Broken World by Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman
ISBN: 0877853002

http://www.dragonmother.org/article-6.html