In 2001, the Barnard Center for Research on Women invited Sister
Helen Prejean to open the year's programming with the second lecture in
our newly inaugurated "Women Seeking Justice" series. Sister Helen, a
tireless activist working toward the worldwide abolition of capital
punishment, and, most famously, author of Dead Man Walking: An
Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the U.S., seemed to us to
embody the idea of a woman seeking justice, one who could help us to
continue our public conversation on incarceration. When we scheduled
the lecture for September 13, 2001, we at the Center had no idea of the
importance that the date would take on. But, having Sister Helen on
campus just two days after the attacks of September 11th provided a
crucial step toward healing for the Barnard students and faculty, as
well as for those community members who attended the lecture.
With regard to the death penalty, Sister Helen believes in taking seriously
the ramifications of violence, while also advocating that violence is
not met with more destruction. No message could have been more relevant
as the Barnard community, and indeed the United States, struggled to
come to terms with the extent of the violence on September 11th and a
sense of appropriate responses. Sister Helen reminded us that there are
many ways to respond to violence, including murderous violence. She
also provided a message of hope that even when facing systems and cycles
of violence that seem intractable, we can act to change the world for
the better. In the question and answer session, a student came to the
microphone who was simply overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems in
the world she now found herself facing. Sister Helen reminded her that
she as a student alone did not have to address these problems in their
entirety, but rather she needed to find "one thing" that she could do to
make a difference. Sister Helen had not intended to become a
world-renowned opponent of the death penalty, but had instead taken up
the single act of writing to a prisoner on death row. It was this small
action on behalf of a better world that had started the chain of events
leading to her book, the film based on Dead Man Walking and her
organizing to end the death penalty. If this young Barnard student
would just take up one thing to address the problems of our world, it
could lead to a lifetime of action. Today, we are nearly six years away
from this moment in time, but the issues that Sister Helen addresses,
the ravage of the death penalty and the question of how to respond to
all forms of violence, are perhaps even more insistent now than they
were then. So, we offer this lecture as part of S&F Online in
the hope that it might continue to inspire us to take up "just one
thing" to make our world a better, less violent place.
