Social Justice

How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores these and other puzzles in Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, a startling account of our broken legal system.

We might think of systemic racism as an unfortunate part of American history, something that happened back in the day. But the systems were never truly dismantled in our country, leaving artifacts of injustice that continue to affect every aspect of life for Black and Brown Americans. In Brown Faces, White Spaces, Latasha Morrison—a speaker, bridge builder, and champion for unity—explores nine aspects of American life where systemic racism still flourishes, including education, healthcare, the justice system, entertainment, and the church.

An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life.

Ageism Unmasked shifts the lens, enabling us to see that we tolerate, and sometimes actively promote, attitudes and behaviors toward differently aged people that we would reject and condemn if applied to any other group. It peels back the layers to expose how cultural norms and unconscious prejudices have seeped into our lives, silently shaping our treatment of others based on their age and our own misconceptions about aging - and about ourselves.

It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? Just Responsibility integrates ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.

Social justice matters because we—each of us—matter. Unless we learn to co-exist as equals, we will never live optimally. To denigrate any one of us is to demean all of us. Absent the wholesale embrace of social justice, we risk succumbing to human tendencies to stereotype, "otherize," and scapegoat. Those tendencies, left unchecked, lead to horrific ends. When we see ourselves in others, we understand that our shared humanity eclipses all else. Through our disagreements, we must never doubt the dignity and worth of the other.

The American church avoids lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be. Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices. Soong-Chan Rah's prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church's relationship with a suffering world. It critiques our success-centered triumphalism and calls us to repent of our hubris. And it opens up new ways to encounter the other.

Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows listeners how this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.

Justice Anthony Kennedy slipped out of the Supreme Court building on June 27, 2018, and traveled incognito to the White House to inform President Donald Trump that he was retiring, setting in motion a political process that his successor, Brett Kavanaugh, would denounce three months later as a "national disgrace" and a "circus". Justice on Trial, the definitive insider's account of Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court, is based on extraordinary access to more than 100 key figures - including the president, justices, and senators - in that ferocious political drama.

New York Times bestselling author Jemar Tisby explores the true and inspirational stories of people of faith throughout history who fought against racism and persevered, inspiring young listeners to continue with hope and strength today.

The 12 Angular Points of Social Justice and Peace: Social Policy for the 21st Century presents an articulate peace agenda that contains 12 distinct proposals for reducing violence to a minimum while promoting and encouraging pleasure-seeking behaviors both in children and adults. The proposals are based upon research evidence of the often overlooked bioenergetic roots of violence, demonstrating how the historical turndown of the pleasure function through morality/moralism resulted in an inevitable upsurge of violence through the neurodissociative brain.

From Wall Street to the West Coast, from blue-collar billionaires to blue-blood fortunes, from the Google guys to hedge fund honchos, All the Money in the World gives us the lowdown on, among other things: the all-time richest Americans, who made and lost the most money in the past 25 years, the fields and industries that have produced the greatest wealth, the biggest risk takers, the most competitive players, the most wasteful family feuds, the trophy wives.

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. E

Judge Cordell, the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court of Northern California, knows firsthand how prejudice has permeated our legal system. And yet, she believes in the system. From ending school segregation to legalizing same-sex marriage, its progress relies on legal professionals and jurors who strive to make the imperfect system as fair as possible. Her Honor is an entertaining and provocative look into the hearts and minds of judges.

Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever - that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America’s devastating war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole - for a first-time drug offense.

Following Jesus has never been harder. In a culture that glamorizes sex, chases fame, and shames those who don't fall in line, it takes a rebel to be a Christian. In this book, Sean McDowell aims to encourage and inspire a generation of rebels who will dare to stand up to the madness in a just and loving manner. A Rebel's Manifesto offers clear guidance to help people navigate the many moral issues that plague this generation.

All of the humans in schools—kids and adults—deserve joy. Yet, our experiences in schools, and the experiences of our students, are often far from joyful. Humans Who Teach invites listeners to explore the complicated humanity of those who teach, with a focus on how we have been socialized to accept the status quo, our very real fears in disrupting the status quo, and how we can rely on our human capacity to love to engage in teaching for social justice even in the presence of fear.

For decades, when criminal cases of the most unprecedented nature went to trial, one woman took the stand to separate truth from fiction. Expert Witness is the extraordinary story of forensic and psychiatric pioneer Dr. Ann Burgess—inspiration for Hulu’s forthcoming docuseries Mastermind—and how she revolutionized what it means to be an expert witness in the American court system. Written through Burgess’ singular lens of compassion and lived experience, Expert Witness pulls back the curtain on some of the biggest cases in the last thirty years.

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson's mission to bring together the fight against climate change and the global struggle for human rights has taken her all over the world. It also brought her to a heartening revelation: that that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself.

After Grant Wahl died of an aortic aneurysm at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, collapsing in his press seat during a quarterfinal match, tributes to Wahl poured in from around the globe. Wahl was beloved for good reason—he was kind, generous, and unflinching in the face of injustice. He was also clearly one of the best journalists covering sports of his generation. Spanning four decades of storytelling, World Class collects for the first time the finest work of Grant Wahl.