David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom.We are beginning a new week, looking at epistles, letters, and incarceration–having plenty of time to do some writing. So I’m calling it “Allow Me to Post this Episode.”Of the twenty seven books of Christian Scripture, twenty one of them are epistles, are letters. Then, what is an epistle? An epistle is a letter designed as a literary work rather than as a communication to one individual. The term isn’t much used nowadays. I guess people have decided that it sounds maybe a little bit too, too. So nowadays we call epistles letters for the most part.The most famous in American history is probably “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King back in nineteen sixty three. There has been a lot of writing done in jails and prisons, however, over the many centuries.For example, Oscar Wilde–De Profundis, one of his last works, and also “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” after his incarceration. What can you say about a Western tradition that begins with a couple of its most famous people being people who are tried and executed? We’ve got Jesus before Pilate over here and Socrates declaiming why he is going to take that hemlock after being condemned by the Athenian Senate in his apology.There he is quaffing his his hemlock. Socrates said this: “I said to each one of you individually and in private what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has then with what he is so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible.”OK, one of the most famous things about Socrates at his trial is that he says–you know, you ought to be giving me money instead of condemning me. And that kind of ticked the court off. But he wanted people to be excellent and rational, as he says.Famously, the Roman, Pilate, says, so you are a king. Jesus says, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” To which Pilate says, “What is truth?” It has long been debated whether or not Pilate was asking a deeper and more intricate question than Jesus had just answered. Perhaps Pilate himself had a very nuanced vision of truth, unlike the Jewish people he was dwelling among in the day.As the Christian scriptures unfold, Paul very famously wrote several of his epistles from prison. Yeah, you can find all kinds of illustrations online of Saint Paul, either writing or transcribing.That’s one of the debates–how much do some of these folks do the writing and how much do they talk about it and have a scribe write it? As Paul says, “I am in chains now, still preaching.” So there he is.Another very early Christian one is Constellation of Philosophy by Boethius. Here is Sophia, Philosophy, talking to Boethius, who was imprisoned by the Roman emperor. Boethius may or may not have been a Christian. It’s still debatable, but he definitely wrote from a standpoint of Greek and Roman Stoic philosophy about the trials and tribulations of fate and being alive.Another famous incarcerated person is Paul Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress was entirely written in prison while he was there for twelve years in Bedford in the UK. Debatable about whether or not he had too much going on. Apparently he was able to see some people and had a fairly good visitor schedule there. Bunyon says: “I will stay in prison till the moss grows ...