A conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges about his ordination and prison ministry, White liberals in the church, Jesus and insurrection, and more
prison ministry
None of us wants it to end, because we know we'll never see each other again.
Here in Washington State, there is roughly the same number of churches as there are prisoners.
In the context of a seminary class behind bars, Jesus' question to Simon is a probing and challenging one.
American evangelicals and mainliners often seem worlds apart when it comes to engagement with social issues. Take prisons as a case in point. The rhetoric diverges along the lines that one might expect: mainliners rail against the American mass incarceration system, the new Jim Crow that locks away minorities and the poor and is sustained by in-prison private labor and for-profit facilities. They want to fight this sinful system through activism (protests and petitions), academia (lectures and scholarly books), and artistic endeavors (photo essays and poetry). Evangelicals seek inmate conversion.
Free on the inside
Joshua Dubler shows up at a maximum-security prison as a budding ethnographer. He becomes a man captured by friendships.
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.
Gangs excel at finding the lost, adopting them and sending them out. Therefore, gang youth can be recruited for apostolic ministry.
When I was a newly ordained pastor, I heard a speech by a federal judge. The judge said that he kept in contact with every person he sentenced to prison. His rationale was simple: he didn’t want his only impact on an individual to be the act of denying his or her freedom. Though as a pastor I visited hospitals almost daily, I had never been inside a jail. Within a few weeks of hearing that judge’s challenge, I made my first visit to the county jail.