Down in the Chapel Religious Life in an American Prison[ePUB+Mobi][iGB]

Product Details:
Book Title:Down in the Chapel Religious Life in an American Prison
Book Author: Joshua Dubler
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Picador (August 12, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1250050324
ISBN-13: 978-1250050328

Book Description:

A BOLD AND PROVOCATIVE EXPLORATION OF ONE OF THE MOST RELIGIOUSLY VIBRANT PLACES IN AMERICA—A STATE PENITENTIARY

Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid: Four black men from South Philly, two Christian and two Muslim, are serving life at Pennsylvania’s maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in the prison chapel, where they have regular opportunities to dispute the workings of God, faith, and self-transformation. And then Sayyid disappears.

Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week in Graterford’s chapel. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, foster relationships, and commune with their makers. We observe Evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and black Muslims at prayer and study and song. And we watch what happens when an interloping scholar of religion is thrown into the mix with hopes of making sense of it all.

When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as “bad men” who fake their piety or as “poor men” who have no better option than to adopt simplistic and rigid creeds. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its vital complexity. An essential interpretation of faith in an age of mass incarceration, Down in the Chapel reveals what prisoners do with religion, and what religion does with them.

Book Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. University of Rochester religion professor Dubler (Bang! Thud: World Spirit from a Texas School Book Depository) takes readers where every American should go at least once—to prison. The highly religious United States also has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Examining chapel life at Pennsylvania's maximum-security prison at Graterford, readers follow two prison guards, five chaplains, 15 prisoner-workers, 20 volunteers, one secular professor of religion, and hundreds of religious followers of Sunni Islam, Salafi Islam, Judaism, Nation of Islam, Moorish Science Temple, Evangelicals, Catholics, Christian Science, Native American Church, and more. His postmodern frame keeps Dubler, as the interpreter, always in plain view, while profitably weaving in Graterford's social location (an era that prioritizes punishment, not rehabilitation), and historical context (Pennsylvania's early experiments in reforming prisoners through religious instruction and solitary confinement). In this important book, Dubler reveals an essential American conversation that is complex, nuanced, highly intellectual, woefully uninformed, often humorous, and deeply theological among men held in violent, repressive circumstances. This book aptly proves Dostoyevsky's claim that one can judge a society's civilization by entering its prisons. Agent: Tina Bennett, WME. (Aug.) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Heavenly Father, thank you for . . . comforting the guys that are in the hole. In the prayers of a convicted killer, Dubler finds signs of a remarkably vibrant spiritual life behind prison bars. During a week spent at Pennsylvania’s Graterford Prison, Dubler learns how robbers, drug dealers, rapists, and murderers worship and serve God. Readers see how the distinctive beliefs of Jewish, Islamic, Evangelical, and Catholic convicts animate enclaves of prison faith, enclaves always open to new converts but zealously watchful of their dogmatic boundaries. Within these enclaves, readers encounter men who profess an often rough-edged piety. They also confront the difficulties chaplains face in trying to soften the prison’s institutionalized callousness by ministering to these men. Scholars will appreciate Dubler’s intellectual sophistication, evident in his insightful references to the theology of ­Kierkegaard and Tillich, and to the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche. But a broader circle of readers will respond to the compelling immediacy of Dubler’s narrative, rich with humanizing detail. An eye-opening inquiry into a surprising religious world. --Bryce Christensen --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.