Volume 40, Number 15 · September 23, 1993
Living Others' Deaths
By Garry Wills
Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States
by Helen Prejean C.S.J.
Random House, 278 pp., $21.00
Sister Helen Prejean, of the Catholic order of St. Joseph of Medaille, was working for the poor in a black neighborhood of New Orleans when a friend on the Prison Coalition asked her to become 'pen pal' to a man on death row. The man was a loner who would not write to others; but he was a Cajun Catholic who might respond to a nun. For a nun in her fifties, who came late to social work, it was an intimidating suggestion—which is, perhaps, one reason she acted on it. Her religious order encourages its sisters to deeds of self-testing.
Review, 2406 words
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