Joshua Dubler's Books

Down in the Chapel

Religious Life in an American Prison

By: Joshua Dubler

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Down in the Chapel

Religious Life in an American Prison

By: Joshua Dubler

A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiary Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears. Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all. When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

401

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

146683711X

ISBN 13

9781466837119

Down in the Chapel

Religious Life in an American Prison

By: Joshua Dubler

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Down in the Chapel

Religious Life in an American Prison

By: Joshua Dubler

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

401

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

146683711X

ISBN 13

9781466837119

The Abyss Or Life Is Simple

Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion

By: Courtney Bender,Jeremy Biles,Liane Carlson,Joshua Dubler,Hannah C. Garvey,M. Cooper Harriss,Winnifred Fallers Sullivan,Erik Thorstensen

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Abyss Or Life Is Simple

Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion

By: Courtney Bender,Jeremy Biles,Liane Carlson,Joshua Dubler,Hannah C. Garvey,M. Cooper Harriss,Winnifred Fallers Sullivan,Erik Thorstensen

Min Kamp-or My Struggle in English-is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the year-by-year translation into English of the novels became something of a slow-gathering storm. Ambiguously figured as autobiographical by some, the six volumes present an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a Norwegian writer, an Everyman of sorts, one with the same name as the author. In its expansiveness, textures, and anti-romanticism, Knausgaard's is a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015 a small group of scholars, all admirers of Knausgaard's work, began meeting to discuss the peculiarly "religious" qualities of My Struggle and other writings. Some were interested in Knausgaard's attention to religious topics, his uses of religious histories, objects, and artworks, while others were curious about his capacity to engage various religious moods in ways that were not critical, suspicious, or celebratory. The group wanted to know, in part, what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, about themselves. The Abyss or Life is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor-a remarkable collection of interlocking essays on everything from ritual, beauty, writing, and morality to divine plans for the end of the world"--

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

204

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022682134X

ISBN 13

9780226821344

Break Every Yoke

Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons

By: Joshua Dubler,Vincent W. Lloyd

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Break Every Yoke

Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons

By: Joshua Dubler,Vincent W. Lloyd

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition. Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

265

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190949155

ISBN 13

9780190949150

The Family Roe: An American Story

By: Joshua Prager

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Family Roe: An American Story

By: Joshua Prager

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 A New York Times Notable Book of 2021 One of TIME's 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 "The scope is sweeping, the writing is beautiful. It’s an epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche." —Michel Martin, NPR "Stupendous…. If you want to understand Roe more deeply before the coming decision, read it." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court’s most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader “family” connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.

Average ratings

N/A