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Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, by Joshua Dubler
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1190140 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2013-08-13
- Released on: 2013-08-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.10" h x 1.41" w x 6.40" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
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.)
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
Review
“Mr. Dubler chronicles something remarkable . . . : committed worshipers who, at times, debate what religious belief is or should be . . . Most of the winding conversations that Mr. Dubler records are more down-to-earth about religious matters . . . Dubler's ability to capture these conversations--the differences among inmates, their changing moods and shifting positions--is nothing short of amazing.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“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.'” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Scholars will appreciate Dubler's intellectual sophistication, evident in his insightful references to the theology of Kierkegaard and Tillich, 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.” ―Booklist
“This book is a masterful and magisterial probing into our new Jim Crow, told with subtle intelligence and genuine compassion. I salute Brother Joshua Dubler!” ―Cornel West
“Brilliantly written with insight, wit, and empathy, Joshua Dubler's firsthand account explodes stereotypes about religious life in prison.” ―Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief
“Down in the Chapel is a beautifully written, thought-provoking, and thoroughly unsettling analysis of American religion and American freedom. Taking readers through a week in the life of a prison chapel, Joshua Dubler's rich rendering gives us much more than the sum of its days. It compels readers to consider deeply how we make choices about what stories to tell, and asks us to ponder how we are all ‘doing time.” ―Courtney Bender, author of The New Metaphysicals and Heaven’s Kitchen
“The United States' unenviable incarceration rate--one of the highest in the world--has created a separate population inside prisons that most of the rest of us know nothing about. Joshua Dubler's brilliant, engagingly written ethnography takes us inside. Among the lifers who frequent the prison's chapel, there is an amazingly rich grappling with the profound theological questions that all of us confront at one time or another in our lives. I highly recommend this book.” ―Robert Wuthnow, author of Remaking the Heartland and The God Problem
“In this rare account of the complex world of a prison chapel, Joshua Dubler lets us in on the spiritual and everyday lives of prisoners and staff while never forgetting the larger contexts that frame their struggles. A wonderfully fine-grained, compellingly readable ethnography!” ―Lorna A. Rhodes, author of Total Confinement
“In the chapels where many of America's countless prisoners congregate, religious cooperation and conflict take on a special intimacy. Down in the Chapel describes a single week during which the author spent twelve hours a day in one such place. It is a world of horrors and wonders, and once the story has been told, a reader must decide whom to believe and what to do. This is a book for all of us to grapple with, as citizens and as human beings. The world it describes is our world, our responsibility.” ―Jeffrey Stout, author of Blessed Are the Organized
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Groundbreaking Examination of American Religious Life
By Joshua M
For anyone interested in America, the prison-industrial complex, religion, ethnography, or philosophy, this book is a must read. This is to say that there is something for everyone in Down in the Chapel. Dubler's chronicle of 7 days in the lives of prisoners in the chapel of Graterford Prison is a dynamic look at the way that individuals conceive of themselves religiously in the modern day.
Mixing incisive critical thoughts on the American obsession with incarceration, penetrating comments about what makes us believe and draws us to religion, and deeply humanizing portrayals of prisoners, Dubler has written a must-read book. There is so much to pore over and explore-- it's the type of book you want to keep permanently on your desk so as to have it for easy reference for its nuggets of wisdom, moments of pathos and hilarity, and its absorbing writing-- you might want to buy 8 copies of it for your closest friends.
One can only rejoice in the possibility of future publications by Dubler. This book is a must-read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A compellng fascinating read. Could not put it down.
By Ken Wright
This book is absolutely essential, as well as a very compelling read, for anyone who
wants to know what really goes on inside a prison, especially from a religious, mission
oriented point of view.
The ability of Joshua Dubler to gain the trust of the prisoners to the point that they would
actually confide in him their truths, which is unheard of in a prision, is outstanding and a tribute
to Joshua's dedication to his purpose and faith. No simple, naive "do gooder" is Joshua: He knows
his stuff and holds his own with all the postulations of the prisoners he encountered over his year inside.
Anyone considering a mission effort to a prison should read this first to get a first hand, realistic
view of what he/she is getting into.
Ken Wright, North Palm Beach, Florida
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
In-depth review: a Penn penitentary's converts, contenders, and chaplains
By John L Murphy
Adapting his Princeton dissertation, a professor of religion at the University of Rochester, Joshua Dubler, guides readers through a prison week in early 2006. He uses a week's chronology to intersperse summaries from ethnography and sociology on prison religion, mingling these with a year of sacred and profane discussions among those who gravitate towards one prison chapel, which can be a bleak or comforting "cellular edifice". Combining scholarly distance with first-hand reports as a participant-observer, he introduces us to 15 chapel workers chosen from a general population of 3,500, their five chaplains, and a pair of officers enlisted to keep order in this quiet corner of Pennsylvania's Graterford State Correctional Institution.
The inmates reflect the racial and ethnic demographics of this prison, thirty-odd miles northwest of Philadelphia. About a quarter of those locked up there identify as Muslim, often drawn from the same South Philly neighborhoods which claim the allegiance of inmates at Graterford, about two-thirds of whom are African-American. Trusting those who they knew outside before they all wound up on the inside, many stick together to attend a particular service among the Islamic options. Three include Warith Deen as the successor to the disbanded Nation of Islam, the Nation of Islam itself as revived under Louis Farrakhan, or an enduring manifestation of earlier Islam in black America, the Moorish Science Temple. Dubler explores this trio; he elaborates how tensions in this prison had once worsened between factions of black Muslim observance. These sparked resentment among staff and politicians who suppressed what they perceived as subversion in a more permissive atmosphere. In a 1995 crackdown on drugs and smuggling, tough-on-crime authorities gained control over Graterford.
Dubler "as a Jew and a pluralist" sides with these expressions of black identity. As a counter to the "expansionist universalism" of Sunni Muslims, fervent Catholics, or fundamentalist Protestants, he admits his soft spot for a "living genealogy of black religion". This heritage, however, seems increasingly an urban African-American legacy within a globalizing community, open to religious competition. Reverend Keita is a Bible-based Protestant from Sierra Leone; the prison imam is from Nigeria.
Today, many African-American Muslims opt for an increasingly appealing take on fundamentalism, imported from the Salafi sect in Saudi Arabia. The selection of that imam from Africa may reflect a wish among supervisors to inculcate a more traditional, less politically charged, style of supervision through conducting services and monitoring inmate activity. Whatever the denomination, Dubler reveals the tensions chaplains share. They soon are "burned" by the appeals and scams of inmates conniving to use their phones or computers (rare instances of such devices accessible at Graterford, at least legally), so chaplains can "burn out", caught between the strategies of staff who use chaplains for surveillance and the scams of inmates who seek to manipulate those assigned to care for them.
Nevertheless, a "palliative" quality of religion, in one common explanation for its ubiquity (which Dubler diminishes as he does any neat formula to shrink down human experience to theory), sedates. At least according to the conventional wisdom, which justifies a widespread practice of prisoner faith. As the liberal Lutheran, Reverend Baumgartner (some names are changed in this narrative), avers, the jaded staff regards chaplains as "as affable opiate peddlers", in Dubler's memorable phrase.
Such a tone, drifting between character studies and theoretical rumination (nearly thirty pages of dense footnotes attest to the origins of this project), creates frequent shifts. Dubler as an Ivy League-trained professor incorporates ten theses, in self-aware, suggestive language, which highlight his attempts at applying theory to the situations he studies. This can disconcert, for the range of this study is vast and despite lots of documentation, he can assume his general reader is as smart as he is as to certain allusions or scholars. However, he alters this by varying narrative voices to highlight his own predicament, listening to those on the inside, but always knowing he possesses the freedom denied his informants and confidants. He stays cautious of the staff and cameras watching his moves.
He reports in long conversations the tensions of the body and the spirit, the restless minds and the stifled desires. These he dramatizes, from inmates, chaplains, and guards. (I wondered how often he took notes, took liberties with dialogue, and/or if he transcribed tapes but I cannot ascertain--except for one mention of him transcribing a brief sermon--the precise methods by which he recalls so much, given this hefty expansion of his dissertation.) He blends academic discussions with hip-hop lyrics, trash talk, debates, and his hyper-aware sensibility. After all, he does not fit into this regimentation.
Raised well-off in Manhattan, he reveals how he descends from "agnostic observant Jews" who don't believe in God anymore but who take comfort in belonging to a set of values, a community, and a family. This key insight emerges late on, for it's not until Friday of the dramatized week when we hear it, by way of Dubler at Shabbat service. He then opens up, badgered by Brian, to account for his own Jewish identity, and the merits of his dissertation. How can this one prison stand for millions incarcerated? How can a single study account for unprecedented religious variety among inmates?
Dubler accepts the narrow limits of his project on practical grounds, but he rejects expansion of his observations to create a heady, sweeping statement about religious life in all American prisons. He admits its small scope. He strives to follow academic convention in methodology. Yet, he rejects rigidity as to theory. Earlier, he dismisses both the "bad man" trope where those incarcerated use religion as part of a con and the "poor man" stance where those convicted turn to religion as solace: humbled, beaten down, or too weak to react in other than a pitiful submission to life's hardships.
Investigating the marked "do-or-die certitude" habitually if not totally asserted by most of the six Muslims, four Protestants, two Catholics, as well as the one atheist who works in the chapel, Dubler notes the necessity for prisoners to adapt such a stubborn line of defense for survival. It's rare to hear irony when they proclaim their beliefs, for Graterford like any prison is a place "where men tend to bind themselves to the masts of their convictions and tenaciously hold on to those revolutionary moments in time when they first become what they continue to resolutely become". This subtle phrasing typifies Dubler's preference for a flexible expression of religion, rooted in his preference for postmodern lack of resolution and his professed tendency to act out, rather than mull over, ideas. He suspects those locked into a warped, defensive pose, who cannot flex or bend to save themselves.
Among his Jewish fellows, Dubler lets down his academic guard. He has opposed the liberal Protestant position which courts have adopted. This criterion aligns the sincerity of what is professed "interiorly" with what is indicative of truth through an exterior manifestation. This limits the expression of a sanctioned faith to a denomination demanding a material representation of belief. Dubler resists any judgement which promotes religion by a particular legal or academic label. He responds to Brian's challenge: "As I see it, rather than in the discreetly mapped forest, it is in the territorial mess of trees and shrubs, undergrowth and earth, where the stuff of religion takes place."
In such a thicket, he orients himself, given a wavering reaction towards his ancestral Judaism. Rejecting facile scholarly definitions, Dubler affirms that religion is a convivial activity, but it need not be profession of a creed or a ritual enacted as in scripture. It can be what is joyfully, intuitively shared. He equates religion with eating and drinking at a meal "with one's friends, with one's 'people'".
Among others, too, he seeks to understand varieties of religious experience. At a Spanish-language revival service, he wonders if the preacher's fulminations against "the Jews" are meant symbolically, practically, or personally. He sits gingerly on the frozen ground as part of a Native American circle. He follows Father Gorski to the death row block. He talks with a Catholic inmate applying Franciscan principles of restorative justice to ease relations with the family of his victim. Dubler attends what he confesses to be a dispiriting Mass on a dreary Saturday night. Still, as the book nears its conclusion and the year reaches its end, Dubler lets readers glimpse his growing sadness at departure. He assures those he has spoken to that he will treat them fairly in what he reports to us.
Within Graterford, neither jailhouse terrorists radicalized by Islam nor crazed prophets railing at the their carceral confines materialize. Dubler concedes long-term prisoners learn to endure as ascetics rather than revolutionaries during harsh sentences. "Not system shatterers, today's religious prisoners are, in their own quiet and righteous way--much like the majority of us--system sustainers." Demonstrating devotion to a system, even in its "messy and putatively noncoercive assemblage of music, altar patter, and Bible readings", the "anticlerical, antiliturgical" Protestant Sunday service led by Reverend Baumgartner rouses gratitude at God's call. Joy sustains its appeal into the rest of the congregants' week. Certainly, Dubler enjoys it much more than the Catholic Mass the previous night.
This book educates with references to Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Feuerbach, along with casual nods to The Wire, Dungeons and Dragons, and pro football. Dubler diligently navigates between his privileged status as an academic and his trusted role as an interviewer in an unpredictable environment. He may never shake off his own protective garb, that scholarly, liberal, idealistic mindset which drives him to spend a year at Graterford for his doctoral fieldwork, but he lets down his guard long enough to learn lessons from a formidable cadre of teachers and mentors on the inside.
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