No Godforsaken Place
Prison Chaplaincy, Karl Barth, and Practicing Life in Prison
By Sarah C. Jobe
T&T Clark, 248 pages, $26.95
How do we hold to the claim that Christ sets the captives free when every day we participate in a system that incarcerates increasing numbers of people, many of whom will never experience freedom again?
Sarah C. Jobe explores this and other tensions of prison chaplaincy in No Godforsaken Place, a fascinating theological exploration of the spiritual work being done in the American penal system. Jobe brings together her experience as a prison chaplain, plus interviews with 20 prison chaplains around the United States, and the writings of Karl Barth to put them in conversation with one another. Barth, who was himself convicted by the National Socialist state in Germany during the Third Reich, spent the final decade of his active ministry as a prison chaplain in Bern, Switzerland.
Jobe, Barth, and the anonymous prison chaplains are drawn to the theological implications of the fact that the Son of God experienced incarceration, torture, and execution at the hands of the state. While Jesus healed the sick and brought sight to the blind in his earthly ministry, he did not free prisoners. Instead, he sat with convicts as one convicted.
For Jobe, this is the central claim of Christian salvation: there is no Godforsaken place and no Godforsaken person. She calls this work “practical soteriology.”
Prison chaplains are not bringing Jesus to prison, but are in fact meeting him there. Through all of this, Jobe is careful not to glamorize the carceral state—Jesus joins the incarcerated as one of them not because the state they are in is holy, but precisely because what the carceral state does to humans is unholy.
One of the things that drew Jobe to the writings of Barth was her need to speak God’s “Yes” into the prison system’s relentless stream of “No.” What she comes to learn is that Jesus holds both “Yes” and “No” in his experience of life and death.
The interviews with prison chaplains do much to make this work feel immediate and practical. This is not a purely academic exercise. These are the struggles of ministers of the gospel who watch the humanity slowly drain from wardens, guards, inmates, and themselves. They are the struggles too of people who must constantly be on guard for their safety as they work in dangerous situations, who sit with those on death row as they take their final breaths, and who bury the prison staffers who die by suicide at far higher rates than the general population, and ministers who continue proclaiming good news.
While all chaplaincy is a ministry of presence, Jobe writes that a ministry of presence in prison provokes crises. For Jobe, Barth’s understanding of crisis—a way of seeing the “impossible possibility” of God’s truth but not being able to bring it about—is the best lens for seeing the tensions inherent in prison chaplaincy.
“Horror and holiness sit together,” Jobe asserts. The Son, while not a sinner, “became sin,” in St. Paul’s words, and in doing so left no stone unturned in his redemption of creation.
No Godforsaken Place is a powerful work that neither whitewashes nor fetishizes its subject. I have a feeling it will be sitting with me for years to come. I encourage you to let it sit with you as well.
The Rev. Michael Christian Sturdy is curate of Holy Spirit Church in Houston.
