Monday, October 20, was the first full day of our workshop on restorative justice at Loyola University in Chicago. On Monday, we heard two presentations from professors associated with Loyola, which very much impressed me. One presentation was about the history of the criminal justice system in the United States and about the biblical and Christian religious concept of justice, present by a husband a wife: Kimaya Davis-Stovall (a law professor at Loyola) and Thomas Stovall, a pastor at a church on the Southside of the Chicago metro area. So often in our secular world, we adhere to a theory of retributive justice, where the emphasis is on justice being proportional to the crime that was committed. Retributive justice holds that offenders deserve to be punished for their wrong they have committed and that their punishment should be proportionate to the seriousness of the offense. Our speakers spoke about the biblical aspects of justice, which focuses on restoring relationships and rehabilitation and righting the wrongs in different ways. Then, we had a presentation by Loyola professors Mike Harris and Peter Jones about immigration and the movement of people throughout history, which was incredibly interesting, starting with the migration of Abraham and the Jewish people throughout their history, and then the different major waves of migration we have had throughout the history of the world. We ended the day on an architectural boat tour of Chicago river. It was a very enlightening day.
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