Duke Chapel Reads Series Features Book with Stories of Compassion Among Former Gang Members

As part of its Duke Chapel Reads series, the Chapel is organizing discussion groups about the book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Fr. Gregory Boyle.

Students and others who would like to join a reading group during the season of Lent in March and April should contact the Rev. Bruce Puckett, assistant dean of the Chapel.

In Tattoos on the Heart, with wit and tenderness, Fr. Boyle tells the stories and lessons he has learned from creating Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit in Los Angeles that offers former gang members opportunities for work, healing, and belonging.

“As a Jesuit for thirty-seven years and a priest for twenty-five years, it would not be possible for me to present these stories apart from God, Jesus, compassion, kinship, redemption, mercy, and our common call to delight in one another,” Fr. Boyle writes in the preface of the book. “If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than others.”

Through Duke Chapel Reads, the Chapel aims to curate spaces for reflection and conversation based on a common book reading.

“At Duke Chapel we have been focusing this year on our value of ‘compassion,’” Chapel Dean Luke A. Powery said. “In Fr. Greg’s book, we get to see compassion in action—including the adventure, sorrow, and wisdom that comes from it.”

“Reading this book together during the season of Lent is an opportunity to see our shared humanity presented in vivid—and often humorous—detail,” he said. “It is an invitation to the type of fast described by the prophet Isaiah—‘to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.’”

Watch a video of Fr. Boyle and members of Homeboy Industries discussing the book: