For anyone who was extremely disappointed with the lack of posts to this blog yesterday, my apologies, but I hope you will forgive us, since we spent the day in Knoxville. I met with the Catholic Diocese of East Tennessee in the morning and then Stacy and I spent the afternoon with lawyers for Paul House and E. J. Harbison (a link on this shocking case will be coming to the TCASK website soon). In the evening, I spoke at St. John Neumann in Knoxville with Hector Black and Joyce House (see our previous post "Dream Team").

The weather was really ugly yesterday, raining, and storming, and Joyce called me in the afternoon to ask if the talk was still on. But, this son of a mailman is not going to cancel speaking engagements due to inclement weather. Sadly, everyone doesn't feel the same. We had initially been scheduled to speak to a group of adults from the church, but with such terrible weather, only a few showed up. Never mind! We co-opted two teenage religious education classes to beef up the audience and the newly enlarged group was privileged to hear the amazing stories that Hector and Joyce have to tell. And those stories, stories of forgiveness and hope, move people.

So we had a small audience, but we had a mobilized audience. And that can mean a lot. In this case, it means that people want to have us back to speak with the entire parish. And it means that a member of the parish council is interested in bringing a moratorium resolution to the council and putting St. John Neumann on record as supporting a time out on executions.

As the saying goes, never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world; in fact it's the only thing that ever has. It may be rainy and stormy, but we will continue to speak to groups small and large and find the most effective ways to move those people to take effective steps toward abolition.