Making Good through Prophetic Redemption

This chapter examines how former gang members and the formerly incarcerated narrated becoming involved with faith-based community organizing. Respondents’ narratives contrasted their backgrounds in gangs and drugs with their efforts to experience personal reform; they had been in rehabilitation, and made efforts to “give back” to their community, through highly personal interactions—such as mentoring—in order to “make good” and distance themselves from their past. Their personal efforts to make good led them to become involved in a range of civic participation, and provided a bridge to involvement in collective and political action.

Action (physics) · Art · Bridge (graph theory) · Business · Collective action · Epistemology · Faith · Literature · Narrative · Order (exchange) · Personal narrative · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Sociology · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Religion, Society, and Development · Social Psychology