7 - The Redemptive Practitioner

Summary

Redemption is an active process that engages with the dynamic nature of reality and its entanglement of energies. Through being a person-for-others (see later), and the making of ethical choices the redemptive practitioner transubstantiates (see later) matter. The redemptive practitioner is a conjunctive (not disjunctive and separate) part of the unfolding and meeting of the trajectories of past, present and future, enabling an articulation, visualization and actualization of the person as they are in themself and for others, whether having been designated criminal or victim. This seeks to heal the harms wrought by the catastrophic violation of individuals, families and communities that is criminal justice in the UK and US. These harms represent the failures of the utilitarian processes of disjunction and reductionism, the metaphysics of deontology and the elitism of virtue ethics. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer these philosophical frameworks as cor incurvum in se (Latin: the heart turned in on itself) allow no room for radical and real otherness (Clements, 2000). This is a development on the theology and ethics of Karl Barth, which challenges individualistic ideas of morality, held by economically and privileged Christians (or systems and organizations founded in Christianity) who attempt to exonerate themselves from complicity in social sin and injustice (McBride and Fabisiak, 2020).

As a matter of urgency criminal justice, practice and its underpinning criminology, theology and philosophy need to focus at the level of the individual practitioner and their resources for ethical and normative practice as the dynamics of change come from the bottom up (see Chapter 1). For Bonhoeffer this practice is one of freedom not from others, but for others, precisely as God acts towards us (McBride and Fabisiak, 2020). The ways in which we teach and train practitioners is fundamental, not least because reductionism into separate disciplinary silos means that many resources remain hidden from each other, or treated with suspicion. In part, the hermeneutical narrative of this book is an attempt to realize new perspectives across ‘science’ and ‘humanities’. Of importance is the ways in which practitioners interpret their own lives within the context of the processes and institutions of justice for example as a practitioner within the criminal justice system what are the sources of the self that are used in interpreting and creating a biographical narrative in engaging in that work?