Maintaining the Family Name

Maintaining the Family Name
Deuteronomy 25: 1-19

I have just read about a court in Britain sending a woman to prison for killing someone in a car crash that happened while she was texting. The victim’s mother and the prosecution are appealing for a stiffer sentence. The newspaper comments that texting while driving has become a practice that is widespread and socially acceptable, but the court has treated this death as not a tragic accident and “just one of those things” but a heinous crime. It is often tricky to negotiate between personal responsibility, personal freedom, and social obligation, and tricky to discern what counts as punishment that properly recognizes the “heinousness” of a crime and acts as a deterrent to other people yet does not excessively humiliate the person about whom many other people would have to acknowledge, “It could have been me.”...