June 18, 2021
Is it possible to be a catalyst for good with a shaken faith caused by witnessing injustices in the world? In this episode, Jim McCloskey, MDiv ’83, a lay minister and founder of Centurion, the first nonprofit dedicated to the vindication of the wrongly convicted, speaks to this question in his book, When Truth Is All You Have: A Memoir of Faith, Justice, and Freedom for the Wrongly Convicted. He shares his minister-turned-prisoner-advocate experience, which inspired author John Grisham’s book, The Guardians. Listen to Jim’s astonishing story of faith, justice, and liberation and how this work provides a beacon of hope for those seeking justice in a flawed judicial system.
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Jim McCloskey spent three years as a U.S. Naval Officer, including a year in Vietnam, subsequent to graduating from Bucknell University in 1964. He spent the next 12 years working for two different management consulting companies specializing in Japanese business affairs, the first in Tokyo and the second with the Hay Group in his hometown of Philadelphia. In 1979 Jim felt a call to leave the business world and enter the ministry. In 1983, upon graduating with a Master of Divinity degree from the Princeton Theological Seminary and freeing an innocent man he met as a student chaplain at Trenton State Prison, Jim founded Centurion Ministries. After 35 years, although still a member of Centurion’s Board of Trustees and still managing several cases he has been working on for years, Jim retired from the active management of Centurion’s organizational affairs in May 2015. He is co-author of When Truth Is All You Have: A Memoir of Faith, Justice, and Freedom for the Wrongly Convicted, a book about Centurion’s experiences with our nation’s criminal justice system.
“To be in a community where I got to hear so many different perspectives—that was profound for me. I’m grateful for the curiosity, for the practice of learning that was cultivated for me at Seminary.”