Published in Geez | Winter 2022 Issue |

We’d love to hear your background. How did you get involved in prison abolition work?

Hannah Bowman: I’m an adult convert to Christianity. I was baptized when I was in college and soon after I got involved with a Bible study through the college chaplaincy that took us out to a girl’s juvenile detention centre. It became an essential part of my practice and experience of Christianity.

We would go Thursday evenings, and there would be maybe three of us from the college and three girls from the detention centre who would come together for a little Bible study and church service. I think that’s one of those experiences that you can’t back away from. Once you see these are children who are incarcerated, who are some of the best theologians I’ve ever met. And we were just having these profound experiences of community in this tiny little meeting room in this facility in the middle of nowhere.

By Rev. Denise Griebler,
Preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Detroit on December 12, 2021
Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:2-6; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

Let the Weary World Rejoice

This past week I stopped in the Geez office – and there were these beautiful and simple cards – a pine comb, a pine branch and the words:  “Let the weary world rejoice.”  It broke me open. Because if this isn’t a weary world, I don’t know what is.

Today is Pink Candle Sunday – the day we open our hearts to both longing and joy and we let joy have the first and last word.  Even in the midst of a pandemic that is about to cross 800,000 deaths in this country alone, even after a school shooting, even after a night of tornadoes that wreaked havoc and suffering and are harbingers of more climate chaos to come. Still. We light the Pink Candle and sing Rejoice! 

By Kendra Watkins. First published in Geez 62: Dismantling White Theology.

Twice a week, my chevruta (learning partner) and I, both of us Black, Trans Jews, spend a few hours working our way through a page of Talmud, word by word.

Between the dictionaries and notebooks stacked up beside us, we catch a glimpse of the future, a shared vision in which we, and our people, are free.

Talmud plays a central role in my life, and the chevruta relationship is vital to studying as a practice. We learn from each other, witness each other’s brilliance, hold each other accountable, and offer each other a soft place to land when the text (and the world it represents) hurts. Together we can reach backwards into our tradition to find tools and strategies, and practice the love and care it takes to move us towards a world liberated from anti-Blackness and transphobia. We know that when we bring ourselves to meet each other and the rabbis in any given text, we aren’t passively receiving a set of laws; far from it. We receive the offerings of our ancestors and offer parts of ourselves in turn, and we are both changed because of it.

For the anniversary of her passing, (November 29)

Bill Wylie-Kellermann

(Reprinted from A Common Reader, a Journal of the Essay, Washington University, November 7, 2021)

“She lived as if the gospel were true.” Daniel Berrigan[1]

Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness[2], was placed in my hands fifty years ago by Dan Berrigan, Jesuit poet and prophet of nonviolence. Fresh from federal prison for burning draft files as a protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he was my teacher at Union Seminary in New York, and then, in a way I’d not yet understood, my “spiritual director.” The book and conversation weekly over mint tea, were my first exposure, as a young Protestant, to Dorothy and her Catholic Worker movement of hospitality houses and nonviolent resistance.

In his own autobiography, Daniel has two extended reflections on Dorothy. The first is in childhood recollections, predicated simply on the regular presence of the Catholic Worker newspaper in their Minnesota home, but it reads from a view of that seed bursting full bloomed in his life. “She became my friend and the friend of my family; and the friendship was to spur our moral and spiritual development.”[3]

By Fran Westwood. First published in Geez 62: Dismantling White Theology.

Outside in the street someone’s grandfather stoops,
sweat beads home to road dust. A bent hanger
rusted. Only a handful of bread. These mornings
not yet countries of belonging & from our apartment balcony

a survey of fraught provinces & city lines. The waters surrounding,
a borderlands. My people, we traffic in hunger: we know

& know & feast on knowing
& do not walk with, toward healing. I am still crossing

this street. Which is to say I weep for the living
as for the dead. Which is to say I have a thousand grandfathers

& they elder the streets, scattering bread for the bird – O ears,
bow. Seek what cannot be conjured. Only birthed