Download or read book Jail House Religion written by Stephen Canup and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After being on top of the world with an office on Park Avenue, Stephen Canup lost it all and found himself homeless and incarcerated. Jail-House Religion is his true life story of God's redeeming love and grace. "Jail-House Religion", a term we have all heard and often made fun of, can be "the real thing" and not just "a cheap imitation". Stephen Canup knows first-hand how real and lasting a true relationship with Jesus can be. Jesus found Stephen in prison - broken, bound, battered, betrayed and busted. But Jesus saved him and changed him forever. This is his story."Jail-House Religion"-How many times have we heard that phrase? It's usually in a mocking way. Is it the "real thing" or a "cheap imitation"? Can someone really find God in a jail or prison? Is God close enough to sinners there to hear their sincere cry? Can a person really be heard by Him if they commit, or re-dedicate, their hearts to walk with Christ? Can He actually use a convict, who turns his life around, to advance the cause of His Kingdom?Having once been incarcerated for nearly three years, Stephen knows first-hand what "society" says and thinks about prisoners - they call them misfits, outcasts and career criminals. For the most part, they despise prisoners. Society thinks they are worthless, dangerous and not capable of changing their ways. But many people have been "imprisoned" in the free world by their own bad choices even though they may have never been actually "incarcerated". When someone is as low as they can go, and think that the only "light at the end of the tunnel" is a train headed their way, what do they do? When they finally wake up one day and realize they are sick and tired of being in bondage because of our own stupid actions, wrong decisions and addictions, to whom do they turn? Isn't this the best time to cry out to God?God always runs to welcome truly repentant sinners! Stephen's story is very much like "the prodigal son" in Luke 15!
Download or read book Jailhouse Religion written by Anthony Kelley and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jailhouse Religion written by Ronald Shultz and published by Xulon Press. This book was released on 2004-02 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Down in the Chapel written by Joshua Dubler and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Moral Communities and Jailhouse Religion written by Benjamin Meade and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meade examines the relationship between religiosity and inmate misconduct. The most important aspect of his work is an attempt to resolve unanswered questions in the existing research about the religiosity-inmate misconduct relationship using a national sample of inmates and rigorous statistical techniques. His basic thesis is that the mixed findings across studies may be attributed to issues concerning selection bias and/or contextual differences in religiosity across facilities. The findings from the studies indicate that selection bias could result in an underestimation of the magnitude of the religiosity-misconduct relationship, but the results fail to support the impact of contextual religiosity effects on misconduct.
Download or read book Streetwise Prison Ministry written by Rebecca Lewis and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2024-04-11 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year thousands of religious individuals and groups of all faiths volunteer to enter into jails and prisons to bring hope to the incarcerated. But while their intention is honorable, many of these volunteers run into the reality of a highly dysfunctional, complicated and often volatile environment hostile by it’s nature to those efforts. Jail and prison ministry is not just about bringing the gospel of deliverance to the inmates through religious programming and spiritual counseling. Wise ministry comes from knowing the dynamics of the mission field which is often filled with the condensed darkness of human suffering and evil and many wolf traps. Effective jail and prison ministry requires the religious volunteer to have an awareness of the inner nuances of that environment. A study of inmate religious games, security issues that affect civilians entering to minister, as well as their own personal perceptions of ministry in a secular environment, is part of being fully equipped for that mission. Jail and prison ministry is not for the naïve in matters that may sabotage or weaken the intended purpose of those religious volunteers who seek to bring the hope of the gospel into the dark places that are our jails and prisons.
Download or read book Down in the Chapel written by Joshua Dubler and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Principles of Prison Ministry written by Tommy Seay and published by Xulon Press. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jailhouse Religion written by Carol Cash and published by Publishamerica Incorporated. This book was released on 2008-07 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After being lured to another state and arrested for crimes that never occurred, Joseph spent eight months in jail awaiting trial. He suffered the loss of two businesses, was beaten, and some of his rights were violated. However, while there, he used the time to establish a church now known as the church of Unit A, which is still in operation. Inmates and officers began to see how the Lord was working for him. Souls were saved, families were reunited, and soon their families started calling and writing his parents to tell them how the Lord was using him in their particular situation. The episode taught him about jailhouse religion, its reality, and its worth. On the day of his trial, he wore the label proudly.
Download or read book The Angola Prison Seminary written by Michael Hallett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corrections officials faced with rising populations and shrinking budgets have increasingly welcomed "faith-based" providers offering services at no cost to help meet the needs of inmates. Drawing from three years of on-site research, this book utilizes survey analysis along with life-history interviews of inmates and staff to explore the history, purpose, and functioning of the Inmate Minister program at Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka "Angola"), America’s largest maximum-security prison. This book takes seriously attributions from inmates that faith is helpful for "surviving prison" and explores the implications of religious programming for an American corrections system in crisis, featuring high recidivism, dehumanizing violence, and often draconian punishments. A first-of-its-kind prototype in a quickly expanding policy arena, Angola’s unique Inmate Minister program deploys trained graduates of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in bi-vocational pastoral service roles throughout the prison. Inmates lead their own congregations and serve in lay-ministry capacities in hospice, cell block visitation, delivery of familial death notifications to fellow inmates, "sidewalk counseling" and tier ministry, officiating inmate funerals, and delivering "care packages" to indigent prisoners. Life-history interviews uncover deep-level change in self-identity corresponding with a growing body of research on identity change and religiously motivated desistance. The concluding chapter addresses concerns regarding the First Amendment, the dysfunctional state of U.S. corrections, and directions for future research.
Download or read book More God Less Crime written by Byron Johnson and published by Templeton Foundation Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In More God, Less Crime renowned criminologist Byron R. Johnson proves that religion can be a powerful antidote to crime. The book describes how faith communities, congregations, and faith-based organizations are essential in forming partnerships necessary to provide the human and spiritual capital to effectively address crime, offender rehabilitation, and the substantial aftercare problems facing former prisoners. There is scattered research literature on religion and crime but until now, there has never been one publication that systematically and rigorously analyzes what we know from this largely overlooked body of research in a lay-friendly format. The data shows that when compared to current strategies, faith-based approaches to crime prevention bring added value in targeting those factors known to cause crime: poverty, lack of education, and unemployment. In an age of limited fiscal resources, Americans can’t afford a criminal justice system that turns its nose up at volunteer efforts that could not only work better than the abysmal status quo, but also save billions of dollars at the same time. This book provides readers with practical insights and recommendations for a faith-based response that could do just that.
Download or read book Prison Religion written by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than the citizens of most countries, Americans are either religious or in jail--or both. But what does it mean when imprisonment and evangelization actually go hand in hand, or at least appear to? What do "faith-based" prison programs mean for the constitutional separation of church and state, particularly when prisoners who participate get special privileges? In Prison Religion, law and religion scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan takes up these and other important questions through a close examination of a 2005 lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a faith-based residential rehabilitation program in an Iowa state prison. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, a trial in which Sullivan served as an expert witness, centered on the constitutionality of allowing religious organizations to operate programs in state-run facilities. Using the trial as a case study, Sullivan argues that separation of church and state is no longer possible. Religious authority has shifted from institutions to individuals, making it difficult to define religion, let alone disentangle it from the state. Prison Religion casts new light on church-state law, the debate over government-funded faith-based programs, and the predicament of prisoners who have precious little choice about what kind of rehabilitation they receive, if they are offered any at all.
Download or read book The Cross and the Switchblade written by David Wilkerson and published by Marshall Pickering. This book was released on 1964 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harlem in the 1950s is the setting for this true story of the miracles that took place when David Wilkerson came face to face with brutal gang leaders and young lives wrecked by drugs and sexual abuse, and the complete transformation that took place in even the most hopeless situations.
Download or read book God in Captivity written by Tanya Erzen and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening account of how and why evangelical Christian ministries are flourishing in prisons across the United States It is by now well known that the United States’ incarceration rate is the highest in the world. What is not broadly understood is how cash-strapped and overcrowded state and federal prisons are increasingly relying on religious organizations to provide educational and mental health services and to help maintain order. And these religious organizations are overwhelmingly run by nondenominational Protestant Christians who see prisoners as captive audiences. Some twenty thousand of these Evangelical Christian volunteers now run educational programs in over three hundred US prisons, jails, and detention centers. Prison seminary programs are flourishing in states as diverse as Texas and Tennessee, California and Illinois, and almost half of the federal prisons operate or are developing faith-based residential programs. Tanya Erzen gained inside access to many of these programs, spending time with prisoners, wardens, and members of faith-based ministries in six states, at both male and female penitentiaries, to better understand both the nature of these ministries and their effects. What she discovered raises questions about how these ministries and the people who live in prison grapple with the meaning of punishment and redemption, as well as what legal and ethical issues emerge when conservative Christians are the main and sometimes only outside forces in a prison system that no longer offers even the pretense of rehabilitation. Yet Erzen also shows how prison ministries make undeniably positive impacts on the lives of many prisoners: men and women who have no hope of ever leaving prison can achieve personal growth, a sense of community, and a degree of liberation within the confines of their cells. With both empathy and a critical eye, God in Captivity grapples with the questions of how faith-based programs serve the punitive regime of the prison, becoming a method of control behind bars even as prisoners use them as a lifeline for self-transformation and dignity.
Download or read book Caught in the Pulpit written by Daniel C. Dennett and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it like to be a preacher or rabbi who no longer believes in God? In this expanded and updated edition of their groundbreaking study, Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola comprehensively and sensitively expose an inconvenient truth that religious institutions face in the new transparency of the information age—the phenomenon of clergy who no longer believe what they publicly preach. In confidential interviews, clergy from across the ministerial spectrum—from liberal to literal—reveal how their lives of religious service and study have led them to a truth inimical to their professed beliefs and profession. Although their personal stories are as varied as the denominations they once represented, or continue to represent—whether Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Mormon, Pentecostal, or any of numerous others—they give voice not only to their own struggles but also to those who similarly suffer in tender and lonely silence. As this study poignantly and vividly reveals, their common journey has far-reaching implications not only for their families, their congregations, and their communities—but also for the very future of religion.
Download or read book Too Many to Jail written by Mark Bradley and published by Monarch Books. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1979, there were fewer than 500 known Christians from a Muslim background in Iran. Today there are at least 100,000 believers . Church leaders believe that millions can be added to the church in the next few years ' such is the spiritual hunger that exists. The religious violence that accompanied the reign of President Ahmadinejad drained its perpetrators of political and religious legitimacy, and has opened the door to other faiths. This book sets the rapid church growth in Iran in the context of the deteriorating relationship between Iranians and their national religion. There is a major focus on the Ahmadinejad years, but the author also covers the history of the church before 1979, picking up on the central idea that the spark may have become buried in the ashes but has never been extinguished. The book is careful, proportionate, well-informed and accurate. Throughout the text there will be boxes with stories of faith, persecution, and encouragement.
Download or read book Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison written by United States Commission on Civil Rights and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Executive summary: This report focuses on the government's efforts to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting religious discrimination in the administration and management of federal and state prisons. Prisoners in federal and state institutions retain certain religious exercise rights under the Constitution and statutes including the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUPIPA), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the Civil rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Many states have similar provisions in their state constitutions and in state law modeled on RFRA. These rights must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of prisons officials, including cost, staffing, and most importantly, prison safety and security. Reconciling these rights and concerns can be a significant challenge for penal institutions, as well as courts.
