Rev. Danny Fisher

Back in June and then again just a couple of weeks ago, I posted about the “long-delayed, post-Sept. 11 federal directive intended to prevent radical religious texts, specifically Islamic ones, from falling into the hands of violent inmates.” The directive calls for the judicious purging of religious texts from prison libraries. This is a task that is currently being carried out by prison chaplains.

As I said in the aforementioned posts, I am very concerned about the directive. In fact, I think it’s wrong-headed and dangerous.

I now have a couple of updates. First, my friend Jeff Wilson over at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review has posted the list of “approved” Buddhist titles in a terrific blog post on this story. I would underscore that these titles are presently the only Buddhist books approved for prison libraries–any others would be purged. Jeff sums up the sorry state of this list well, writing:

As you might imagine, the list for Buddhist works is far, far shorter than the allowed list for Christianity, although the latter has certainly inspired more religious violence than the former. Furthermore, it is a highly distorted list, drawing almost entirely from a few narrow strands of Westernized elite Buddhism. There is almost nothing from the Pure Land tradition despite its pioneering of Buddhist prison ministry. There is barely anything from the Nichiren tradition, even though Soka Gakkai is probably the most popular Buddhism behind bars. Asian-Americans barely make the list, although they’re 75% of the American Buddhist population (some Asian teachers did make the cut, though many with large American audiences are conspicuously absent). You won’t even find a single work by D.T. Suzuki–apparently he’s a terrorist. There are no koan collections (Zen Flesh, Zen Bones does contain some koans); there is not a single Sutra. At least Christians get the Bible and Muslims can have the Koran. In fact there are very few traditional Buddhist works in translation at all, whether scriptures or famous commentaries by masters of the tradition–by far the majority are recent works written in English. Women aren’t well represented, and all of the women who did make the list are white. There don’t appear to be any African-American authors. The very idea of a limited list approved by the government is draconian, and the list that has been produced is a travesty.

Jeff sounds all the right notes in his post–you should read it. (And do check out my interview with him if you haven’t already.)

Jeff also points readers to a relevant urgent action from Sojourners. (My friend Donald was also kind enough to email me and others about it.) By following this link, you can write to Harley Lappin, the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, asking him to “put an end to [the] absurd policy [stipulated in the federal directive] and immediately return the censored items to library bookshelves.” It takes a few seconds–please write him.