Friday, March 12, 2010

Reclaiming Our Children


In his indispensable new book, Reclaiming Our Children, much-honored author/lecturer/social critic Robby Dixon explores crucial questions – and offers penetrating answers and prescriptions – few before him have even thought to ask, about imprisonment (and our prison systems) in America, about socio-psychologico-spiritual dynamics that have led so many of our youth to incarceration… and most importantly, about how parents can proactively inoculate children against the forces that lead to imprisonment and contribute to the genesis of a national shift away from mass soul-and-actual confinement, to a new, spreading paradigm of material productivity and spiritual liberty.

Where does imprisonment really begin? Dixon asks. Long before the iron doors slam behind a person, he avers. In fact, Dixon says, incarceration’s start is three-leveled – and begins in the mind and heart in ways that if not prevented virtually ensure that a child with a “pre-imprisoned” mind and spirit will eventually end up behind bars. Such spiritual incarceration begins as a child’s moved by the power of images received from unsuspected sources. Dixon clearly identifies these and gives parents incisive guidance about how to deal with them and replace their harm by teaching children the vital significance of the most priceless image of all: the image of God in which human personhood is made. Only from such understanding, Dixon persuasively argues, will a child develop an accurate and spirit-mind-saving sense of true self-worth.

Dixon writes unabashedly from a Judeo-Christian perspective (while not denigrating the value of other spiritual “ways”), reasoning that if knowledge of the importance of one’s being made in the image of God is central to spiritual and personal growth, it makes little sense to excise all reference to and reliance on God from America’s social fabric. He concludes this landmark work by laying out a powerful, comprehensive, God-based vision for replacement of outworn cultural and sociological expressions, institutions and practices with humankind-nation-nourishing mass and individual thought and action that will amount to nothing less than national “repentance” and renewal.

www.reclaimingourchildren.com

No comments: