

Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society.
© 2023 The Christian Century.
A prison cell transfigured
While teaching in a prison, I got to know a gardener.
A very long discernment
Luke is in a maximum security prison. He wants to be an Episcopal priest.
Women after incarceration
Anthropologist Jorja Leap bears witness to the struggles of women reentering society through programs designed for men.
Why was the apostle Paul in prison so often?
Perhaps for the same reasons people are today.
by Sarah Jobe
How people deal with pointless suffering
Scott Samuelson considers seven responses to the age-old mystery.
Tasting salvation during a fellowship meal at a maximum security prison
None of us wants it to end, because we know we'll never see each other again.
Thinking about the Paul Manafort sentence as a prison abolitionist
Patrick Beadle is serving 12 years after police found medical marijuana in his car. His incarceration doesn't make me feel safer, and neither does Manafort’s.
Take & Read: Global Christianity
Philip Jenkins recommends the best recently published books in his field.
selected by Philip Jenkins
My state has the same number of churches as prisoners. This fact haunts me.
by Chris Hoke
Imprisonment in this country is long on punishment and shamefully short on rehabilitation.
Marie Gottschalk describes an American penal system that has all but abandoned any real attempt to rehabilitate its inmates.
reviewed by Timothy Mark Renick
Bruce Dancis is keenly intelligent, soft-spoken, and possessed of a quiet dignity. So is his new memoir of his time as a draft resister.
In the context of a seminary class behind bars, Jesus' question to Simon is a probing and challenging one.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison comes under the category of “Books to Be Read on an Annual Basis”—like Augustine’s Confessions, King Lear, or anything by Flannery O’Connor. In general, we read too many books and return to too few.
The hunger strike among California prison inmates is a month old today.
The state's corrections department maintains that the strike is a ploy to free up gangs to do business behind bars. But the longer this thing goes, the more ridiculous that sounds.
When I met Jonah I noticed two things: he was wracked with overwhelming guilt and very much wanted to die, and he knew the Bible.
In a recent interview with the Century, Michelle Alexander, the civil rights lawyer and author of The New Jim Crow, wonders about the stigma in many churches attached to people who have been recently released from prisons. “The deep irony,” she says,” is that the very folks who ought to be the most sensitive to the demonization of the ‘despised,’ the prisoners, have been complicit and silent.”
But the kinds of conversations that Alexander’s book seems to demand are very difficult to have--in churches and outside them.
Americans seem to relish putting their fellow citizens behind bars. Lately, some conservatives have begun to see this as a problem.