My name is Lawrence Christopher Skufca. I am a civil rights activist and community organizer in the Camden, New Jersey area.
I hold a Juris Doctor from Rutgers School of Law; a B.A. in Political Science from Furman University; and an A.A. in the Social Sciences from Tri-County Technical College.
Religion and Science have shared a complex relationship which has historically fluctuated between cooperation and conflict. Both disciplines arise from an intellectual desire to explain the natural world, but their paths have diverged over the nature of knowledge. Holmes Rolston III, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University, sees their missions as complimentary, but different: “Science operates with the presumption that there are causes to things, Religion with the presumption that there are meanings to things.” Religion agrees that the world is intelligible and is capable of being logically understood. However, natural law alone provides only the beginning of illumination. Religion was an ingenious solution to many of mankind’s earliest fears and needs. The understanding gained through our senses is useful, but incomplete. Its full value is realized by imparting significance, or meaning to the phenomenon. Reality is subject to our conscious awareness; shaped by interpretation, as well as, by experience. Religion’s purpose is to supply the meanings for why things happen; to explain what is in order to evaluate what ought to be. Religion may seem irrational to many, but the needs remain.
Man, since the dawn of the species, has taken great consolation and joy in his religions. “Faith” and “belief” do not necessarily surrender to logic: they cannot even be declared to be illogical. They can be things quite apart. Religious tolerance does not mean one cannot express his own beliefs or must adopt the ideology of others. It does mean that seeking to undermine or attack the religious faith and beliefs of another has always been a short road to trouble.
Tolerance is a good cornerstone on which to build human relationships. One is at liberty to hold up his own beliefs for acceptance. One is at risk when he seeks to assault the beliefs of others, much more so when he attacks and seeks to harm them because of their religious convictions. When one studies the suffering caused by religious and ideological intolerance throughout human history, it is easy to see that intolerance is a very coercive and non-productive activity.
The words ‘know thyself’ – ‘gnothi seauton’ – were inscribed in stone above the Ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Philosophers have mused on self-knowledge and its uses ever since. But is it possible to ever ‘Know Thyself’? Psychologists, such as Bruce Hood, have even suggested that the self is an illusion and there may not be a self to know.
Synopsis: In a CNN Special Report, actress and long-time child trafficking advocate, Jada Pinkett Smith, travels to Atlanta – a trafficking hotspot – to try and unravel the complicated web of human trafficking that’s happening right here in the United States. The forty-two minute documentary is a gritty, raw look at the human trafficking industry in the United States, the lives of children caught in its web, and those fighting back against this form of modern-day slavery. In this powerful report, Pinkett Smith and CNN delve deep into the heart of this heinous crime, following undercover officers on raids and rescues of underage victims, accompanying aid workers on outreach missions, and spending time with the survivors in shelters as they share their harrowing stories.
Synopsis: According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are at least 100,000 underage females being sex trafficked in America today. That’s a conservative estimate based on what little hard data currently exists; NCMEC believes the real number could be as high as 300,000. According to studies, pimps can make up to half a million dollars a year, and they frequently prey on the young and the vulnerable over the internet — the new marketplace for underage sex trafficking. In 2011, victims’ advocates referred to the internet classified site Craigslist’s Adult Service Section the “Walmart of child sex trafficking.” In a yearlong investigation, CNN’s Amber Lyon reveals the devastating realities of the U.S. commercial trade in underage sex.
Synopsis: What’s your blueprint for a just society? Your answer probably reflects who you are and the situation you find yourself in. If you’re rich, you may well be in favour of the freedom to earn and enjoy the fruits of your efforts; if you’re poor you’re likely to be more supportive of a system that redistributes wealth. John Rawls argued it might be more just to construct this blueprint from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’.
Synopsis: Karl Marx believed that work, at its best, is what makes us human. It allows us to live, be creative and flourish. But under capitalism he saw workers alienated from each other and the product of their labour. Karl Marx remains deeply important today not as the man who told us what to replace capitalism with, but as someone who brilliantly pointed out what was inhuman and alienating about it.
Synopsis: Social activist, political scientist and labor historian, Howard Zinn, delivers a presentation on “The History Of The American Working Class.” The presentation took place in San Francisco at an educational forum sponsored by the Labor Video Project. Zinn was political science professor at Boston University and was considered the preeminent scholar on civil disobedience during the Vietnam War Era. He has authored more than twenty books, including his highly influential work, A People’s History of the United States.
Synopsis: In the final weeks of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. increasingly turned his focus on Americans plagued by poverty – “the other America.” On April 14, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at Stanford University suggesting there are two America’s: one which “is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity,” and another where individuals “find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” He called for “a guaranteed minimum income for all people,” urging social justice advocates to turn their attention towards organizing a national movement to address the problem of the nation’s growing economic disparity.
Do you have a fixed character? Or do you play many roles depending on the situation? Sociologist Erving Goffman argued that we display a series of masks to others, enacting roles, controlling and staging how we appear and constantly trying to set ourselves in the best light. If this is true do we have a true self or are we endlessly performing?
Camden Civil Rights Project 