You are probably curious about why a retired Alabama circuit judge established a website!
Here is your answer:My Ideas
The felt need to publish the ideas and writings described on the Home page and this page inspired the creation of this website. But to explain how these ideas developed, I needed also to tell my story, and describe the things that caused the ideas to develop. Publishing the website enabled me the ideas several ways, including opinion editorials, laity talks and other writings and ideas that developed during my career.
My Story
In an earlier era, I would likely have written a book of memoirs. But we are into a new age. I can preserve memories electronically. My ideas are inseparable from my story, and this website allows me to describe the environment in which the ideas contained in my books developed, and the writings found on this website help to present a complete picture.
Dale's Ideas and Story
The ideas presented on this website arose in the experience of rich and full life: a birth into a two room shack in rural Macon County, Alabama at the outset of US participation in World War II, a childhood in depression-like conditions in rural Alabama; education in a very small white public school in a mostly Black county, Huntingdon College, the University of Alabama Law School; election as a Circuit Judge in a rural Alabama Circuit; strong participation in judicial education, both as student and presenter; lifelong participation in United Methodist Church activity, many opportunities as a UM Lay Speaker, service as Lay Leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church; Alumni work and service as a Trustee, including chairing the board of trustees for Huntingdon College; and intense reading in philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology and history all the while.
A Work in Progress
Please understand that this website is a work in progress. It will never be finished! None of the work is necessarily complete. In this accordion I will briefly describe and the various categories.
Human Faith Within a Conscious Biosphere
This collection of essays containing my most current ideas has been published by Bookbaby. https://store.bookbaby.com/…/human-faith-within-a…
Conscience and Command,
The original was published in 1994. https://store.bookbaby.com/…/human-faith-within-a...
The second edition, or Conscious and Command, Revisited, is a work in progress that I hope to publish. It will be both a good prologue and a good epilogue to Human Faith Within a Conscious Biosphere. It will show how my thinking has developed, and also provide an example of one of the social systems that I describe in FWCB. It will, suggest the plateau that I had reached in 1994.
My Story
I have only begun this project. I have tried to suggest the beginning of the story, and have outlined the narrative, but I hope to add much more. In summary, I was born in abject poverty, among impoverished people. They bore the poverty without complaint and enjoyed life life was good. In 1944, a school bus came to the front of our two room house, where there was no water, plumbing, electricity or telephone and picked up my older brother Wade and carried him to the public school in Shorter, Macon County Alabama. I caught the same bus to the first grade in the same school in 1948. I try to catch something of the spirit of the community in the episodes that I relate. That is the school to which Mary Christine DeBardeleben returned in about 1945. The missionary work that I describe in telling her story had not ended. The work of the Shorter Public School was excellent, and the story is worth telling, and I include that story. We got an excellent education, but in the 1960’s the little school white school in a predominantly Black county was caught up in the controversies of Civil Rights, while I was at Huntingdon College, and the University of Alabama Law School. It did not survive. But I returned to the County that gave me that education, and that is the environment that gave rise to my ideas. Its all a matter of trying to understand. And being understood. I also tell the story of my work in the United Methodist Church.
Mary Christine DeBardeleben
A work in progress. I am seeking additional information, and hope to publish a formal biography later.
Opinion Essays
Over 30 opinion essays are included. They deal with Law and Race, as well as opinions about the legal system itself and other miscellaneous topics. Most of these were originally published in the Alabama Gazette, but I am likely to add too the collection.
Laity Talks
I served as a lay speaker in the United Methodist Church for over forty years. During that time, I served as Conference Lay Leader of the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. I had many opportunities for lay speaking. Not nearly all were written out or recorded, but a fair sampling is included here. It is possible that more will be added as I review my records. If anyone remembers a talk that I made and will remind me of if, I will look, or even reconstruct!
The following posts are samples from the various types of writing found in the menu.
1.03 Marriage Meltdown and Moral Formation
Twentieth century psychology correctly identified the sources of moral formation. Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and others showed that moral formation occurs in stages of development. Internalization of the commands and images of the...
1.04 Child Support and Spousal Support
Family is the basic economic unit of our culture. Other essays in this series have examined the breakdown of family and problems related to the problem of trying to resolve family disputes in an adversarial judicial system. Problems related to child and spousal...
1.05 Counterintuitive Thoughts on Criminal Justice
The tremendous increase in the rate of incarceration that has occurred over the past forty years or so strongly indicates more crimes are happening. There are many insightful explanations for the increase, but none exclude the possibility that more crimes are...
1.06 Accounting for Crime
This essay is the second in the series dealing with counterintuitive thoughts about how we deal with crime. In the first essay in the series I suggested that the solution to the problem of crime will not result from stronger law enforcement, but from stronger moral...
1.07 Crime: Human Economics
In the two preceding essays I suggested that the principle cause of crime is inadequate moral formation, and that spending money on law enforcement and penitentiaries does not solve the basic problem. In this essay I explore social dynamics that underscore these two...
1.08 The Problem With Penitentiaries
In other essays in this group, I discuss the breakdown of the family and the impact of family breakdown on moral formation. I suggested that inadequate moral formation is the root cause of crime. I suggested the possibility that the breakdown of the family has...
1.09 Race and Incarceration
In other essays, I discuss the alarming increase in the rate of incarceration. Bryan Stevenson and James Farmer, Jr. have written excellent books dealing, among other things, with that critical issue. I have suggested that the increase in the rate of incarceration...
1.10 Probation Sponsorship
Four hundred years of slavery and segregation created a cultural system in our black communities. That system did not disappear just because the Civil Rights Movement adjusted the legal system in an attempt to treat all persons equally. The cultural system that had...
1.11 Economic Development in the Black Belt
In several essays, I discuss problems with the criminal justice system and incarceration. Our exploration of problems concerning the corrections system suggested that 400 years of slavery and segregation created a Black cultural system that understandably put distance...
1.12 The “Melting Pot” Doesn’t Work
In several essays on this website, I deal with issues of law and race from a different and unique point of view. In the background of all of the articles is consideration of differing cultural systems. I note repeatedly that the 400 years of slavery and segregation...