NOTES

These notes exist for the conventional scholarly purposes of citation attribution, clarification, and supplementation. For those wishing to pull on this or that thread, I have also included some suggestions for further reading. If you are incarcerated and are interested in receiving selections from one or more of the cited sources to which you otherwise have no access, please write me at the Department of Religion and Classics, University of Rochester, Box 270074, Rochester, NY, 14627–0074, and I’ll do my best to honor your request.

PREFACE

  1. With the exception of public personages, all names have been changed.

  2. Isaiah 1:7. A note on biblical translation: when the Bible is quoted, I try to use the translation most commonly used by the relevant community. For Protestants, that means either the American King James or the New International Version. For Catholics, that means the New American Bible.

  3. According to internal statistics from the time of this book’s action, Graterford’s permanent population broke down demographically as follows: 67% African-American, 20% white, and 12% Hispanic. With respect to religious identifications checked off upon a convict’s first entry into the system, or as changed thereafter at a prisoner’s own initiative, 30% of Graterford’s residents identified as Protestant, 26% as Muslim, and 16% as Catholic.

  4. As of 2010, Pennsylvania trails only Florida and Louisiana in its number of state prisoners serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP), also known as “death in prison.” Of the 41,095 people serving LWOP nationwide, 4,343 are in Pennsylvania state prisons. At 9.4 percent of Pennsylvania’s prison population as a whole, there are a third again as many people serving LWOP in Pennsylvania as there are people on death row in the United States. See Ashley Nellis and Ryan S. King, “No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America,” The Sentencing Project (July 2009); and Ashley Nellis, “Throwing Away the Key: The Expansion of Life Without Parole Sentences in the United States,” Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 23, No. 1 (October 2010). For a Pennsylvania lifer’s first-person account of everyday life, see James A. Paluch, Jr., Thomas J. Bernard (ed.), and Robert Johnson (ed.), A Life for a Life: Life in Prison: America’s Other Death Penalty (Roxbury Publishing Company, 2004). On lifers at California’s San Quentin State Prison, see John Irwin, Lifers: Seeking Redemption in Prison (Routledge, 2009).

  5. On race and mass incarceration, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010); and “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration By Race and Ethnicity” (The Sentencing Project, 2007).

THE MEN OF GRATERFORD’S CHAPEL

  1. Few of those men classed by the Department of Corrections as “Protestants” would actively affirm this identity. Some call themselves “Christian,” but others, like Al, do not. In most cases, on account of the presence of Bebbington’s hallmark characteristics of Biblicism, crucicentrism (an orientation toward the atoning work of Christ on the cross), conversionism, and activism, it would not be wrong to group these men as “Evangelicals.” See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1989). A similarly apposite label could be “Bible believers,” or its more practical correlate, “Bible-carrying Christians.” See Nancy Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (Rutgers University Press, 1987); and David Harrington Watt, Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (Oxford University Press, 2002).

MONDAY

  1. “200 Convicts Riot at Graterford,” New York Times, August 26, 1934.

  2. This architectural form is commonly called a “telephone pole design.” See Norman Johnson, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

  3. Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster, Parish Priest (William Morrow, 2006).

  4. Michael Medved, Right Turns (Crown Forum, 2004). For an ethnography about reading in prison, see Megan Sweeney, Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  5. See David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth (University of California Press, 1990). For a global perspective see Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (IVP Academic, 2009).

  6. On Christian Science in historical perspective, see Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (University of Nebraska Press, 1993); and Claire Hoertz Badaracco, Prescribing Faith: Medicine, Media and Religion in American Culture (Baylor University Press, 2007), pp. 49–89.

  7. The term interlocutor, which I favor for its dialogical resonances, was suggested by Amira Mittermaier. See Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011), pp. 22–23.

  8. Baraka has quoted to me the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius as saying “Our life is what our thoughts make it”; and, in a similar vein, “Vincit qui se vincit—he conquers who overcomes himself.” For more, see Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Penguin Classics, 2006).

  9. On American religious pluralism, see Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (Harper San Francisco, 2002). For pluralism in historical perspective, see William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America (Yale University Press, 2004). For critiques of the pluralist project, see William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Duke University Press, 2005); and Pamela E. Klassen and Courtney Bender, “Introduction: Habits of Pluralism,” in Bender and Klassen (eds.), After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 1–28.

10. Jeffrey Stout specifically touted a narrative form as conducive to getting at the chapel’s “lived religion.” See Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in David Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 3–21.

11. Since 1941, Pennsylvania law has required all life sentences be imposed without the possibility of parole. See Marc Mauer, Ryan S. King, and Malcolm C. Young, “The Meaning of Life: Long Sentences in Context,” Sentencing Project (2004), p. 7, and http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_meaningoflife.pdf.

12. My position in this argument is informed by John McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 167–97, and Richard Rorty, “Non-reductive Physicalism” in Objectivity, Relativism, Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 113–25. In support of his position, Vic repeatedly invoked “constructs” in what he dubbed “the Chomskyan sense,” through which reality is hardwired into the brain. See Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Walter de Gruyter, 2002).

13. Andy and Lana Wachowski (dirs.), The Matrix (1999).

14. On postmodernism, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 1–66.

15. See Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Study (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 269–84. For a survey of touchstones, see Daniel L. Pals, Eight Theories of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Ivan Strenski, Thinking about Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). On the civic stakes of this scholarly enterprise, see Russell T. McCutcheon, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation (Equinox Publishing, Limited, 2005).

16. During the three-year period ending in 2005, the reincarceration rate for men released from Pennsylvania state prisons was 47%. See Recidivism in Pennsylvania State Correctional Institutions (Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, December 2006). This figure is in line with national numbers. According to a frequently cited statistic with a lower threshold: two out of three prisoners released from prison will be rearrested within three years of their release. For these statistics, and other recidivism data, see the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ website: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17.

17. See Rules and Regulations, Title 37—Law, Board of Pardons [37 PA. CODE CH. 81], http://www.pabulletin.com/secure/data/vol28/28-22/849.html; Act 1995–8 (SS1), http://www.palrb.us/pamphletlaws/19001999/1995/1/act/0008.pdf; and “A Call to Make Pardons Tougher to Get for Lifers/The Effort to Change the Rules Is Being Put before Pa. Voters on Next Month’s Ballot,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 26, 1997. For commutations by gubernatorial administration see http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/statistics/19543/commutation_of_life_sentence_1971_-_present/765885. In the 1970s, when Omar came to Graterford, a Pennsylvania lifer could expect to serve, on average, eighteen and a half years. See Vaughan Booker with David Phelps, From Prison to Pulpit (Cadell & Davies, 1994), p. 122.

18. In his 2004 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush called for $300 million to be directed toward prisoner reentry. See http://www.justice.gov/archive/fbci/docs/fed-prisoner-reentry-resources.pdf.

19. The pop song was Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” (1996).

20. Marcel Mauss, The Gift (W. W. Norton and Co., 2000).

21. Under the then-existing contract, base pay for rank-and-file COs ranged from $23,660 to $38,369, with overtime compensated at time and a half. See http://www.pscoa.org/wp-content/uploads/H1_Contract_2005-2008.pdf.

22. The one-in-three figure refers to black men in their twenties and can be found in “Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later,” The Sentencing Project (1995). In “Uneven Justice” (The Sentencing Project, 2007) the same dispiriting fraction is used to designate the third of black males born today who can expect to spend some time in prison should “current trends continue.”

23. On the racialization of Jesus in America, see Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

24. The version of the Book of Jasher Watkins found was probably the one originally published in seventeenth-century Venice, translated into English in 1840, and republished in 1887 by a Salt Lake City press, before being uploaded to the Internet sometime prior to 2006. In all likelihood, this Jasher was uploaded by a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, among whom, evidence suggests, there is some belief in the text’s authenticity. See http://www.ccel.org/a/anonymous/jasher/home.html.

25. As de Tocqueville noted: “Americans so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other; and this is not one of those sterile ideas bequeathed by the past to the present nor one which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.” Alexis de Tocqueville (trans., Gerald E. Bevan), Democracy in America (Penguin, 2003), p. 343.

26. See Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Cornell University Press, 2006); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1991); and Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 2001). On the awakenings in sum, see William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (University of Chicago Press, 1980).

27. As of 2006, according to one survey, more than a quarter of all Americans had read The Da Vinci Code. See “American Piety in the 21st Century” (Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, September 2006). On black biblical hermeneutics among African-Americans, see Vincent L. Wimbush, “Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,” in Vincent L. Wimbush (ed.), African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2003), pp. 1–43. On the hermeneutics of paranoia in black America, see Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (University of California Press, 1994).

28. To this point, it is worth noting that the language of “a house of prayer for all peoples” itself comes from Isaiah 56:7.

29. Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith’s ‘The Meaning and the End of Religion,’” History of Religions, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Feb., 2001), pp. 205–22; Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 177–204; and Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 375–90. On liberal Protestantism beyond the study of religion, see Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey (eds.), American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012).

30. For a variety of conceptualizations of the secular and secularism, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford University Press, 2003); William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (eds.), Secularisms (Duke University Press, 2008); and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

31. See United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965), and Paul Tillich, Shaking the Foundations (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), p. 57. Seeger further quotes Tillich: “The source of this affirmation of meaning within meaninglessness, of certitude within doubt, is not the God of traditional theism but the ‘God above God,’ the power of being, which works through those who have no name for it, not even the name God.” Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. Two (University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 12. For a critical assessment of the legal appropriation of Paul Tillich’s thought, see James McBride, “Paul Tillich and the Supreme Court: Tillich’s ‘Ultimate Concern’ as a Standard in Judicial Interpretation,” Journal of Church and State (1988) 30(2): 245–72.

32. See Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton University Press, 2005); and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Prison Religion (Princeton University Press, 2009). For prisoners’ religious rights, see John W. Palmer and Stephen E. Palmer, “Religion in Prison,” in Constitutional Rights of Prisoners (Anderson Publishing, 2006), pp. 105–42. For critical appraisals of the Supreme Court’s attempts to define religion, see “Note: Toward a Constitutional Definition of Religion,” Harvard Law Review 91 (March, 1978): pp. 1056–89; and Eduardo Peñalver, “The Concept of Religion,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 107, No. 3 (December, 1997), pp. 791–822. For critical histories see Courtney Bender and Jennifer Snow, “From Alleged Buddhists to Unreasonable Hindus: First Amendment Jurisprudence after 1965” in Stephen Prothero (ed.), A Nation of Religions (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 181–204; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); and Eric Michael Mazur, The Americanization of Religious Minorities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

33. Africa v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 662 F.2d 1025. On MOVE, see John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor, Burning Down the House (Norton, 1987); and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE (University of Chicago Press, 1994). On the Five Percenters, see Felicia Miyakawa, Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission (Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 1–37. While Five Percenters have generally been classed by prison administrators as a street gang, in 2003 the Southern District of New York recognized the Five Percenters’ First Amendment right to free religious exercise. See Marria v. Broaddus 2003 U.S. Dist. Lexis 13329.

34. Inmate Religious Accommodation Request Form, DC-ADM 819-1 (September 17, 2004).

35. See The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), Pub.L. 106–274, codified as 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc-1, which the Supreme Court upheld in Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709 (2005). RLUIPA was Congress’s response to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of 1993’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997). Like its predecessor, RLUIPA preserved for all institutions receiving federal or state funding the two-pronged “Sherbert test.” Pursuant to the Sherbert test, the government may “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person—(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963). For federal enforcement data, see “Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison,” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2008).

36. Exodus 22:18.

37. According to internal statistics, in the eighteen months preceding June 2005, the Religious Accommodation Committee (RAC) fielded ninety-two requests for accommodation and approved eleven.

38. For an ethnographic study of neopaganism, see Sarah Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (University of California Press, 2001).

39. As an archetypal and consequential instance of this critical impulse, recall then Texas governor George W. Bush shedding mock tears on behalf of born-again and soon to be executed Karla Faye Tucker.

40. The “jailhouse Muslims” as gang motif featured prominently in the HBO prison drama series Oz, which aired from 1997 to 2003.

41. Walter Kaufmann, “Who Thinks Abstractly?” In Hegel: Texts and Commentary (Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 113–18.

42. See Joshua Dubler, “The Secular Bad Faith of Harry Theriault, the Bishop of Tellus,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 92.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2009), pp. 21–50. On sincerity, see Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1972); and R. Jay Magill, Sincerity (W. W. Norton & Co., 2012).

43. See Edward E. Curtis IV, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For a searchable archive of the complete works of Elijah Muhammad, go to http://www.seventhfam.com/.

44. See David Harrington Watt, “What’s In a Name?: The Meaning of ‘Muslim Fundamentalist,’” Origins 1 (June 2008), pp. 1–5. See also Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

45. See Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1970); and George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford University Press, 1980). For an ethnography of contemporary fundamentalists, see Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell (Princeton University Press, 2001). For his part, Falwell has been known to define a fundamentalist as “an evangelical who [is] mad about something” (Harding, p. 16).

46. Inasmuch as all quests for origins are to some degree bound by their point of departure, the principal parameter for Abdul Wahhab’s excavation of the tradition was the Hanbali School of Law, and in particular, the work of fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya. On the roots of contemporary Salafism, see Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford University Press, 1993); and Henri Lauzière, “The Construction of Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the Perspective of Conceptual History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010), pp. 369–89. For Salafism as a global movement, see Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for the New Ummah (Columbia University Press, 2004); and Roel Meijer (ed.), Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (Columbia University Press, 2009). For a critique of Salafism, see Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly,” in Omid Safi (ed.), Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oneworld Publications, 2003), pp. 33–77. For a defense of Salafism widely read at Graterford, see Haneef James Oliver, The “Wahhabi” Myth: Dispelling Prevalent Fallacies and the Fictitious Link with Bin Laden (T.R.O.I.D. Publications, 2004).

47. On originalism, see Antonin Scalia and Amy Guttman, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton University Press, 1998); and David Strauss, The Living Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 7–32. For a reflection on the ascendancy of an originalist practical perfectionism among contemporary Orthodox Jews, see Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 1994), pp. 64–130.

48. Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (Prentice Hall, 2000).

49. James Crocket [pseudonym], “Ninian Smart’s ‘Doctrine Dimensions’ Explained by Karen Armstrong,” final paper for Religion, Faith, and Reason, a course in Villanova’s Program at Graterford (Fall 2005). In addition to Smart’s Worldviews, Crocket’s unpublished paper is directly in dialogue with Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (Ballantine Books, 1994). More obliquely, Crocket’s essay engages a scholarly paper by Robert J. Schreiter, which he gave me along with his own work, about religion in the age of globalization and postmodernity. See Schreiter, CPPS. “A New Modernity: Living and Believing in an Unstable World,” paper presented at the Anthony Jordan Lectures, Newman Theological College, Edmonton, Alberta, March 18–19, 2005.

50. Abu Bilal Mustafa al-Kanadi, The Islamic Rulings on Music and Singing (Abul Qasim, 1991); and Saleh as-Saleh, The Three Letters: The Beard, Isbaal, Smoking (Daar al-Bukhari, 1995). http://abdurrahman.org/character/Isbal-Dr-Saleh-as-Saleh.pdf.

51. Surat Al-’Aĥzāb, 33:36.

52. From conversation, I know, for example, that Sayyid rejects the notion of epoché—the conceit shared by some scholars of religion that an observer may simply bracket his own prejudices so to access the experience of religion from the insider’s perspective. On epoché in the study of religion, see Robert A. Segal, “In Defense of Reductionism”; and Peter Donovan, “Neutrality in Religious Studies,” both in Russell T. McCutcheon (ed.), The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (Cassell, 1999), pp. 139–63 and 235–47.

53. Romans 13:12.

54. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006).

55. Expert opinion yields little more certitude. A recent in-house study conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections estimated that 7% of Pennsylvania prisoners have been victims of sexual assault, and in 2010 the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 4.4% of prison inmates are sexually abused annually. See “Special Issue: Prison Rape Elimination Act,” Research in Review, Volume 10, Number 4 (Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, December 2007); and “Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008–2009” (U.S. Department of Justice, August 2010). Pressed in part by a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, in January 2011, the Justice Department released a new set of numbers according to which, in 2008, more than 216,600 American prisoners were sexually abused—a figure closer to one in ten. The NYRB authors suspect that number also understates the reality. See David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, “The Rape of American Prisoners,” “The Way to Stop Prison Rape,” and “Prison Rape and the Government,” in New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010, March 25, 2010, and March 24, 2011. On the place of the prison in the construction of modern American sexuality, see Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

TUESDAY

  1. The spokesman for this nation of religiously confident men could well be the nineteenth-century preacher Alexander Campbell, who detailed his methods as follows: “I have endeavored to read the scriptures as though no one had read them before me. And I am as much on my guard against reading them today, through the medium of my own views yesterday, or a week ago, as I am against being influenced by any name, authority or system whatsoever.” (Quoted in Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity [Yale University Press, 1991], p. 179.)

  2. See Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Metropolitan Books, 2004). For data on the self-identified unreligious today, see “‘Nones on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (October 9, 2012).

  3. On Joseph Smith as the quintessential American religionist, see Harold Bloom, The American Religion (Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 69–130.

  4. See Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Routledge, 1996), pp. 37–68; and “Grid and Group, New Developments,” paper presented at the London School of Economics, June 27, 2005, available on the Web at www.psych.lse.ac.uk/complexity/Workshops/MaryDouglas.pdf.

  5. According to one study, black men in prison do indeed outlive their nonincarcerated counterparts. See David L. Rosen, David A. Wohl, and Victor J. Schoenbach, “All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Black and White North Carolina State Prisoners, 1995–2005,” Annals of Epidemiology 21 (2011), pp. 719–26.

  6. Only the United States and Somalia sentence juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole. See “Amicus Brief on Behalf of Petitioners Miller and Jackson,” Human Rights Watch (January 26, 2012), p. 4. Pennsylvania is the national leader in sentencing juveniles to die in prison. While figures, even at the state level, are difficult to ascertain definitively, according to one set, of the 2,570 juvenile lifers in state prisons nationwide, 444 are in Pennsylvania. See http://www.endjlwop.org/the-issue/stats-by-state/. On June 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatorily sentencing juveniles to die in prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. See Miller v. Alabama, 132 S.Ct. 2455 (2012). The following October, Governor Tom Corbett signed into law legislation that makes thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds convicted of first-degree murder eligible for parole after twenty-five years. Fifteen-to-seventeen-year-olds will now be parole eligible after thirty-five years. The law is not retroactive.

  7. For phenomenologies of “prison time,” see George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago Review Press, 1994); and Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (Vintage, 1991); for Jean Genet’s version, see Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies, No. 91 (1997), pp. 64–79.

  8. The biweekly pamphlet, called Our Daily Bread, is distributed around the world by RBC Ministries of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  9. For an ethnographic study of Jehovah’s Witnesses, see Andrew Holden, Jehovah’s Witnesses: Portrait of a Contemporary Religious Movement (Routledge, 2002). On the seminal place of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the twentieth-century expansion of First Amendment religious rights, see Shawn Francis Peters, Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (University Press of Kansas, 2002).

10. On performativity, see John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Clarendon Press, 1962); and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997).

11. In a scholarly article authored by members of the Graterford’s LIFERS association, rehabilitation and transformation are contrasted as follows: “Rehabilitation seeks to change the way a person behaves; transformation changes how a person thinks. Rehabilitation looks to the past; transformation is future oriented. Rehabilitation often occurs externally; transformation originates from within. To transform a person, one must first empower that person to see the world differently; to reconfigure one’s way of not only relating to the world, but also fundamentally changing his or her way of perceiving that world as well.” The LIFERS Public Safety Steering Committee of the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, Pennsylvania, “Ending the Culture of Street Crime,” The Prison Journal (2004) 84: 48S–68S, p. 61S.

12. “Transformation” is the driving metaphor for InnerChange Freedom Initiative, the state-partnered, faith-based reentry program sponsored by Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship. Founded in 1976 by convicted Watergate coconspirator and best-selling author Charles Colson, Prison Fellowship offers a range of Christian-based services to prisoners and their families in over a hundred countries. See http://www.prisonfellowship.org/why-pf. For a critique of Colson’s rhetoric of transformation, see Tanya Erzen, “Testimonial Politics: The Christian Right’s Faith-Based Approach to Marriage and Imprisonment,” American Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 3, September 2007, pp. 991–1015. For a critical account of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, 432 F. Supp. 2d 862 (S.D. Iowa), which found against InnerChange’s constitutionality, see Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Prison Religion (Princeton University Press, 2009).

13. See http://endviolence.org/evp/index.shtml. The End Violence Program is run by people affiliated with Landmark Education. A corporate-age reconfiguration of the seventies’ self-help group est, Landmark is a for-profit organization that develops curricula and offers a series of programs—most notably the Landmark Forum—geared toward personal improvement and self-actualization. The influence of Landmark Education’s “educational technology” on the End Violence Program is prominently credited in the LIFERS’ “Ending the Culture of Street Crime,” The Prison Journal (2004) pp. 52S and 68S (note). On Landmark Education, see “Do You Believe in Miracles?” Elle (August 1998). On est, see William Warren Bartley III, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of est (Clarkson Potter, 1978).

14. On Malcolm X in prison, see Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Ballantine, 1973), pp. 154–94; and Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking, 2011), pp. 70–99.

15. In his cell, Sayyid has the Qur’anic commentary of the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Kathir—the same collection that the Imam has in his office. Sa’di was a twentieth-century Saudi scholar. On Tafsir, see Muhammad Ayoub, The Qur’ān and Its Interpreters (SUNY Press, 1984); Walid A. Saleh, The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition (Brill Academic Publishers, 2004); and Norman Calder, “Tafsir from Tabari to Ibn Kathir,” in G. R. Hawting and A.-K. Shareef (eds.), Approaches to the Qur’an (RoutledgeCurzon, 1993), pp. 101–40.

16. The last time the Bureau of Justice Statistics produced a report, roughly one in ten incarcerated Americans were military veterans. See “Special Report: Veterans in State and Federal Prison, 2004,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (May 2007), http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/vsfp04.pdf. But at this point, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had just begun.

17. This quotation is commonly attributed to Dostoyevsky and, more specifically, to Constance Garnett’s translation of The House of the Dead. However, I have been unable to confirm it.

18. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more than half of prisoners nationwide suffer from mental health disorders. See “Special Report: Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (September 2006). http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/mhppji.pdf. On treatment and custody, see Lorna Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 99–160 especially.

19. A Negro spiritual.

20. For a cultural history, see Marni Davis, Jews and Booze (NYU Press, 2012).

21. The Watchtower, December 15, 2005, pp. 24–29.

22. Ergo the rabbinic rhetoric of Yam ha-talmud—the Sea of the Talmud.

23. For this alternative genealogy of Ashkenazi Jews, see Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Kazar Empire and Its Heritage (Fawcett Popular Library, 1978). On African-American appropriations of Judaism, see Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (eds.), Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (Oxford, 2000), pp. 15–90.

24. Counselors are the other.

25. This widely collected and cited hadith may be found in Shaikh Ali Hasan Alee Abdul Hameed’s Forty Hadith on the Call to Islam and the Caller (al-Hidaayah Publishing, 1994). Hameed was a student of the Salafi scholar Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani.

26. On violence, see Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections (Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 277–300; Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–36 and 111–40; and Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” in The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation (Hackett, 2004), pp. 32–94.

27. Vic’s initial question was why anyone would possibly assume that Noam Chomsky would have any sympathies with Zionism as an ideology. On Zionism, see Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (Jewish Publication Society, 1997). For a critical history see Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (Verso, 2008).

28. On T. D. Jakes, see Jonathan Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (NYU Press, 2009), pp. 103–24.

29. For an ethnographic study of purity practices among Cairo’s Salafi Muslims, see Richard Gauvain, Salafi Ritual Purity: In the Presence of God (Routledge, 2013).

30. This count includes the black nationalist Nation of Islam, Mohammed’s Temple, and Moorish Science Temple, and a handful of other neotraditionalist sects.

31. “At Graterford, Officials Collected Stories Along with the Contraband,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 27, 1995.

32. See William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty … And How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (Simon and Schuster, 1996). For a critique, see Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). On candidate Bill Clinton’s pivot to toughness on crime, see Marshall Frady, “Death in Arkansas,” The New Yorker (February 22, 1993). As president, Clinton finished his triangulation on criminal justice with the 1996 passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which severely limited the conditions under which prisoners could file habeas corpus petitions. See the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104–132, 110 Stat. 1214 (1996).

33. On neoliberal penality see David Garland, The Culture of Control (University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Duke University Press, 2009). On the economic and social logic of neoliberalism more generally, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2007). For a periodization of American mass incarceration that takes a somewhat longer view, see Bernard E. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press, 2011).

34. Angela Y. Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” ColorLines (Fall 1998). On the historical emergence of mass incarceration, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007); and Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006). For ethnographic studies of the now dominant custodial logic, see John Irwin, The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Lorna Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (University of California Press, 2004).

35. For a current map of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections system, see http://www.cor.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/institutions/5270.

36. In 1980, the state of Pennsylvania had 8,582 prisoners, representing 72.3 people for every 100,000 members of the population. By 1995, the state prison population had nearly quadrupled to 32,410, representing 269.1 per 100,000 Pennsylvanians. See the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency 2002 Fact Sheet at www.pccd.state.pa.us/pccd/lib/pccd/stats/criminaljusticetrends/prisonsandjails/prisonpop2002.pdf.

37. Designed as streamlined “pods” rather than ungainly tiers, the new blocks allow two COs to effectively oversee forty men. This compared to the old side blocks, where, all concede, the six COs on duty couldn’t possibly look after the 500 men in their charge.

38. Figure given in “Schools to Use Inmate’s Book,” York Daily Record, August 13, 1996.

39. See “Hits and Misses in Candidates’ War of Words over Crime,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 1994, and “GOP Looking to Revive Crime Bills That Failed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 28, 1994.

40. The guarantee of ceremonial autonomy was enshrined in the Religious Activities Handbook (BC ADM-819). On February 3, 1995, a bulletin from the deputy commissioner informed correctional staff and inmates that the relevant section had been deleted.

41. “Prison Swept for Drugs Cell by Cell,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 1995.

42. “Flush with Success?” Philadelphia Daily News, October 27, 1995.

43. “Graterford Raid Paid Off,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 5, 1995.

44. “Inmate Throne for a Loss,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 26, 1995.

45. “Staying Alive Was the Name of the Game for Ex-Inmate,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 25, 1995.

46. On the professionalization of the figure of the imam in the United States, see John H. Morgan, Muslim Clergy in America: Ministry as Profession in the Islamic Community (Wyndham Hall, 2010).

47. Quoted in al-Samad v. Horn, 913 F. Supp. 373 (E.D. Pa. 1995), trial record.

48. Ibid.

49. Among the new technologies adopted at Graterford are horse patrols, canine units, drug detection devices, and bioscans.

50. According to other data presented at my Graterford orientation, the same three-year period saw a 65% drop in positive drug tests.

51. For an insider portrait of the pre-raid era, authored by a member of Graterford’s Jewish community, see Victor Hassine, Life without Parole (Roxbury Publishing, 1999); for a post-raid analysis by a Graterford employee, see B. Scott Gallie, Sr., Circle of Conviction (First Books, 2000).

52. Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963). In addition to Brady and ineffective assistance of counsel, for long-term prisoners, one of the few available avenues for judicial relief is Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), which prohibits the striking of potential jurors solely on the basis of their race. This issue is especially salient for many at Graterford due to the existence of a 1996 Philadelphia district attorney’s office training video that explicitly stressed the importance of excluding potential black jurors (along with seemingly intelligent candidates of any race). See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5102834972975877286.

53. Sean Patrick Griffin, Black Brothers, Inc.: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia (Milo Books, 2005).

54. Four civil society organizations survived the raid: the Brotherhood Jaycees, the NAACP, LACEO (the Latino Prisoners’ Association), and LIFERS; and each has an annual fundraiser. While the leadership cadre of all four groups is made up largely of lifers, LIFERS (long-incarcerated fraternity engaging release studies) is not limited to men serving life. For a study of the LIFERS at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon, see Frances N. Huber, Communicating Social Support Behind Bars: Experiences with the Pennsylvania Lifers’ Association (Ph.D. dissertation in Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, 2005).

55. Though they differed in their specifics, many medieval scholars enumerated the commandments at 613, with the most influential tally belonging to Maimonides.

56. Up to a quarter of Pennsylvania’s death row prisoners are imprisoned on Graterford’s J Block. Pennsylvania’s death row is the fourth-largest in the country.

57. Nas, “One Love” (1994).

58. On the metaphor of the game and its application to language and practice, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Prentice Hall, 1958), especially pp. 30–34, and Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 66–82. For a contemporary take on blacks and Jews in the game, watch the sixth episode of the second season of The Wire, in which Omar, who robs drug dealers for a living, says to Levy, the Jewish lawyer: “I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game, though, right?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYj7q_by_2E.

59. In the image, Day, ancient and defiant, is framed by the torsos of two armed law enforcement officials. For Day’s quotation in context, see Daniela Gioseffi (ed.), Women on War: Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age (Touchstone Books, 1988), p. 103.

60. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in his Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New Left Books, 1972), pp. 136–70. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 108–14; and Andrea Sun-Mee Jones and Joshua Dubler, Bang! Thud: World Spirit from a Texas School Book Depository (Autraumaton, 2006).

61. Exempla of this prevailing democratic impulse in the Princeton Religion Department include Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Vintage, 2004); Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperOne, 2005); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2004); and Cornel West, Race Matters (Vintage, 1994).

62. This reification of the system calls to mind Michael Taussig’s discussion of State fetishism, in which the capital S of the State is forged at the intersection of reason and terror. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (Routledge, 1991), pp. 111–40.

63. Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick used the example of the mass incarceration of African-American youth to question the impulse behind “paranoid reading” practices that purport to unmask appearances and expose what’s really going on: “Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enrolled in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure, there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hyper-visible from the state may be offered as an exemplary spectacle, rather than remaining to be unveiled as a scandalous secret.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing (Duke University Press, 1997), p. 18.

64. According to press reports from the time of his trial, David accused the boyfriend of molesting his daughter, a charge that was denied by the boyfriend and seemingly did nothing to aid David’s defense.

65. It is impossible here not to think of Agamben’s “bare life.” See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998). On bare life in the context of the concentration camps, see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (Zone, 2002).

66. Leviticus Rabba 30:12.

67. My general policy—outside of the week at hand—was to take notes during religious rituals only when others were doing so too. I generally composed my field notes in the dead time between activity blocks and via digital recorder on the drive back to Philly.

WEDNESDAY

  1. I’ve come to regard this as the “City Slickers principle,” after the 1991 film (Ron Underwood, dir.), in which Jack Palance’s sage cowboy exhorts a midlife-crisis-torn Billy Crystal that he must identify the “one thing” that matters to him. Reconciling his longing to be a man with his antecedent domestic obligations, the nebbish Crystal rises to the challenge to embrace his “one thing”—his family.

  2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 2000), pp. 168–74.

  3. On Jesus in American culture, see Stephen Prothero, American Jesus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

  4. 1 Corinthians 13:11.

  5. Habakkuk 1:3.

  6. EFM is a lay ministry program, generally administered by correspondence, which is sponsored by the University of the South. See http://www.sewanee.edu/EFM/.

  7. Philippians 4:11.

  8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (Hackett, 1980), p. 8.

  9. On “total institutions,” see Erving Goffman, Asylums (Anchor Books, 1961). In popular culture, the “jailhouse Muslim” also comes in this sadder secondary variety, with religion framed as simply a means of psychical and physical survival. In this vein, I’ve seen Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart each make a seemingly unscripted aside about how when he was in prison, he too was a Muslim.

10. On doubt, see René Descartes (ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Donald Cress), Meditations, Objections, and Replies (Hackett Publishing Company, 2006); Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus (Serpent’s Tail, 2001); and Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History (HarperOne, 2004).

11. This deliberation is what, after the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, American pragmatists dub “the tragic.” See Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (Basic Books, 1974); and Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 114–24.

12. I’m thinking of Derrida’s observation that in feeding his or her own mewing companion, the cat lover de facto consigns the rest of the world’s hungry cats to starvation. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 71. For an alternative ethics, see Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 229–43, and Peter Singer, “Outsiders: Our Obligations to Those Beyond Our Borders,” in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 11–32.

13. For contemporary assessments of Paul’s influence on Western philosophy, politics, and ethics, see Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford University Press, 1997); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford University Press, 2004); and Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf (MIT Press, 2003).

14. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 144–49, and Jeffrey Stout, “What Is the Meaning of a Text?” New Literary History, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1982), pp. 1–2.

15. On the silent thrust of a social norm and the misrecognition that attends such habituations, Pierre Bourdieu speaks of “The best-kept and worst-kept of secrets (since everybody kept it).” Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 114.

16. I have been advised to shield the identity of this group.

17. See Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (Routledge, 1991), pp. 11–36.

18. See “Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States” (Human Rights Watch, January 2012), http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/01/26/old-behind-bars. On Pennsylvania in particular, see “Report of the Advisory Committee on Geriatric and Seriously Ill Inmates” (Joint State Government Commission, June 2005), http://jsg.legis.state.pa.us/publications.cfm?JSPU_PUBLN_ID=40.

19. My project was originally slated to take place in New Jersey’s Rahway Prison. However, between May 2005, when my proposal was approved, and September, when my research was to commence, the New Jersey Department of Corrections suspended all research inside its institutions. Six months after the NJ DOC’s approval was retracted, the project was approved by the Pennsylvania DOC’s Office of Planning, Research & Statistics. Throughout, my research was vetted by Princeton University’s Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects. On the institutional obstacles of doing prison ethnography, see Loïc Wacquant, “The Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ethnography, 3–4 (2002), pp. 371–97.

20. For the master-slave dialectic, see G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 111–19, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phba.htm. For a pragmatist rendering, see this 2008 interview with philosopher Robert Brandom: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1034802594689246468.

21. Galatians 6:10.

22. On feeling, doing, and knowing as the overlapping faculties at the heart of religious piety, see Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Continuum, 1999), pp. 5–12.

23. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. I (Zone Books, 1991). Also referenced in my lecture were Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (Zone Books, 1992); and René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

24. Bruno Latour, “A Few Steps Toward an Anthropology of the Iconoclastic Gesture,” Science in Context 10, 1 (1997), p. 77.

25. On self-consciousness as a cornerstone for a revolutionary ethics, another graduate of Graterford’s Villanova Program wrote: “For me, I try to operate in the interstices of the architectural and ideological Panopticon as far as I can even recognize its dimensions. And an important part of that attempt is to recognize that I too am subject to the gale of ideologies—panoptic and beyond—that we are all buffeted by. To that end, I try to remember that it is the internal priest, the internal guard and the internal oppressor that is the hardest to overthrow. If I direct my gaze continuously outward—a panoptic worldview, if you will—I lose sight of what is most crucial to my personal liberation. In my revolution, it is not the Kalashnikov or the Molotov cocktail that will slay the oppressor within; it is not the rat or the video camera that will reveal my truth; and it is not the sword or even the pen that will etch a new meaning onto my existence; what is the most essential tool for my, and, I believe, all meaningful revolution is the mirror … and I plan to look into it.” From Tom Schilk, “Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Elements of Panopticism in the Modern Prison),” unpublished final paper for Religion in the Tradition of Social Theory, a course in Villanova’s program at Graterford, Spring 2007.

26. See Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (MIT Press, 1991), pp. 141–67; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1999), pp. 194–203 especially.

27. Bryan Singer (dir.), The Usual Suspects (1995).

28. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (CreateSpace, 2010), p. 8. For the relevant sociology, see W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). On Du Bois and religion, see Jonathan Kahn, Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press, 2011).

29. See Sigmund Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader (Norton, 1995), pp. 96–110. For a study of Freud’s “seduction theory” that contributed to the rubric of “recovered memory,” see Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

30. On “animism” in the modern anthropology of religion, see Pals, Eight Theories of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2006), especially pp. 18–52.

31. See Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It (Penguin, 2012).

32. On piety, see “Euthyphro,” in Plato, Five Dialogues (Hackett, 2002); and “Introduction,” by James Gouinlock, in Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman (eds.), George Santayana, The Life of Reason, or, The Phases of Human Progress: Critical Edition (MIT Press, 2011). On irony, see Søren Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (Princeton University Press, 1992); and Jonathan Lear, “A Lost Conception of Irony,” Berfrois (January 4, 2012).

33. On Elijah Muhammad, see Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997); Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (Vintage, 1999); and Herbert Berg, Elijah Muhammad and Islam (NYU Press, 2009).

34. In 1983, the name of this holiday was changed from the singular, Saviour’s Day, to the plural, Saviours’ Day, to emphasize collective responsibility.

35. See Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930–1980 (Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 89–124; and Matthias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 99–118. For a video of Wallace Muhammad’s Saviour’s Day speech, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQPe9yAbRqU.

36. Lawrence H. Mamiya, “From Black Muslim to Bilalian: The Evolution of a Movement,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 21:2 (1982), pp. 138–52.

37. Early in this period, Masjid Sajdah weathered a schism when a dozen men (then a significant fraction of its ranks) pledged their allegiance to the Dar ul-Islam movement. The Dar was a national organization based in New York that was dedicated to spreading Sunni Islam among African-Americans. The faction petitioned Yunus to take Masjid Sajdah in that direction. When the Dar demanded that its affiliate members pledge a bayat (oath of loyalty) as a rite of community initiation, Yunus refused: “I understood what they wanted, but in the penitentiary system, we should not pledge that allegiance because we would be transferred.” If members of Sajdah were shipped, Yunus doubted the national organization would go to bat for them. On the Dar, see R. M. Mukhar Curtis, “Urban Muslims: The Formation of the Dar ul-Islam Movement,” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith, Muslim Communities in North America (SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 51–73.

38. For a dissident account of this history, see Umar Lee, “Rise and Fall of the Salafi Movement,” http://www.umarlee.com/rise-fall.html. For an apologetic rejoinder, see the two-part lecture delivered in response by Dawud Adib, formerly imam of the Germantown mosque, in June 2011 at the Salafi Conference in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixXMlFkgms and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7mKE-7W6cw&feature=related.

39. Two influential texts were Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab, Kitab at-Tauhid (Dar-us-Salam Publications, 1996); and Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, The Evolution of Fiqh (A. S. Noordeen, 1989).

40. While Warith Deen and Sajdah were far and away the most prominent, in the heyday preceding the raid, Graterford had five other traditionalist Muslim groups. Of these secondary groups, the most visible was Masjid Taubah, which conceived of itself as Shia and met in a third room in the basement. No one I’ve spoken with identifies as having belonged to this masjid, but one young Muslim characterized the bygone sect as follows: “If Warith Deen Muhammad were the political Muslims, and Sajdah were the pious Muslims, Taubah were the cool Muslims.” More spiritual Muslims, meanwhile, would likely have been drawn to the meditation and chanting sessions of the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. This Sufi sect, which was founded by a Sri Lankan guru on the Philadelphia Main Line in the 1960s, still retains a monthly chapel slot, though they meet only sporadically. Others included the Dar ul-Islam–affiliated splinter group; a residual group of Ahmadi Muslims; and, as inspired by a briefly tenured contract chaplain, a group identified with the Habashi sect, which has a mosque in West Philadelphia. As Yunus explained the bygone sectarianism: “Everybody could come up with some kind of gimmick. ‘They’re Muslim?’” he said, as if speaking for that era’s administration. “‘As long as we have someone in the street to vouch for them, they can have what they want.’” On the Bawa, see Gisela Webb, “Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary American Islamic Spirituality,” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith (eds.), Muslim Communities in North America (SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 75–108; on the Ahmadiyya, see Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 109–46; and on the Habashi, see A. Nizar Hamzeh and R. Hrair Dekmejian, “A Sufi Response to Political Islamism: Al-Ahbash of Lebanon,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996), pp. 217–29. For comparison’s sake, see the history of Masjid Sankor at New York’s Green Haven Prison in Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 165–88.

41. Jochanan Kapliwatsky, Arabic Language and Grammar, Part III (Rubin Mass, 1976), pp. 40–42.

42. See Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979), pp. 1–28. On “Black Orientalism,” see Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 99–130. For an oblique cultural history of American Orientalism, see Nathaniel Deutsch, Inventing America’s “Worst” Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (University of California Press, 2009).

THURSDAY

  1. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Free Press, 1995), and Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

  2. On “black religion” as distinguished from “African-American religion,” see Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Davies Group, 2004), pp. 145–70; and Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 23–58.

  3. According to the typology, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one thing. See Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (Ivan R. Dee, 1993).

  4. More than a few Graterford old heads carry scars on their bodies from having been used as human guinea pigs in pharmaceutical and other product testing at Holmesburg. See Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison: A True Story of Abuse and Exploitation in the Name of Medical Science (Routledge, 1999).

  5. In 1960, 26% of Philadelphia’s population of two million plus was black. By 1980, African-Americans accounted for 38% of a city population that had fallen to 1.68 million. See Sean Patrick Griffin, Black Brothers, Inc. (Milo Books, 2005), p. 14.

  6. On Frank Rizzo, see Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, The Cop Who Would Be King (Little, Brown, 1977), and S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo (Camino Books, 1993).

  7. “Overcrowded Holmesburg Was Ruled Unconstitutionally Cruel in 1972,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 1, 1973, p. 1.

  8. Griffin, Black Brothers, Inc., p. 48.

  9. Ibid., pp. 196–208.

10. William Brashler, “Black on Black: The Deadly Struggle for Power,” New York (magazine), June 5, 1975, p. 56. Quoted in Griffin, p. 207.

11. Griffin, p. 97, and Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad (Duke University Press, 1996), p. 189.

12. For an oral history of Temple Twelve, see Minister Jeremiah Shabazz, Top of the Clock (First Impressions, 1997).

13. See Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Ballantine, 1973), pp. 158–59. On Temple Twelve’s founding, see Jeremiah Shabazz, Top of the Clock (First Impressions, 1997), p. 17.

14. Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 32.

15. See David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton University Press, 2003), and Elijah Muhammad, Yakub: The Father of Mankind (Secretarius Memps, 2002).

16. On the Nation of Islam as a species of Protestant dispensationalism, see Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity (New York University Press, 1998).

17. On African-American Ahmadiyya, see Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 109–46. On the Ahmadiyya more broadly, see Simon Ross Valentine, Islam and the Ahmadiyya Jama’at: History, Belief, Practice (Columbia University Press, 2008). It should be noted that upon his arrival in Philadelphia, the Ahmadiyya missionary Muhammad al Sadiq was taken into custody and detained for a number of weeks. See Turner, pp. 115–16.

18. “Moslem Musicians,” Ebony (April 1953), pp. 104–10.

19. “2 Arraigned in 2 Killings at Holmesburg,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 2, 1973.

20. For a fine-grained history of black politics and social organizing in Philadelphia from the forties to the seventies, see Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

21. On the era of penological progressivism, see Erik Olin Wright, The Politics of Punishment (Harper Colophon, 1973); James B. Jacobs, New Perspectives on Prisons and Imprisonment (Cornell University Press, 1983); and Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 165–96.

22. For a portrait of Graterford during the Robert Johnson era, see Vaughn Booker and David Phelps, From Prison to Pulpit (Cadell & Davies, 1994), pp. 120–41.

23. On the prisoners’ rights movement, see Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows, pp. 77–114. On prison riots, see Bert Useem and Peter Kimball, States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots, 1971–1986 (Oxford University Press, 1991).

24. See Kathleen Moore, “Muslims in Prison: Claims to Constitutional Protection of Religious Liberty,” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Muslims of America (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 136–55, and Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Spirit of the Law: Religion and Litigation in Modern America (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 96–132.

25. As Elijah Muhammad wrote: “Our true God is not like the ‘Spook God’ of Christianity who demands death for our salvation and redemption. He is offering us Freedom, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness on this earth while we live.” Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Secretarius Memps, 1973), p. 54.

26. On Shamsud-din’s involvement thirty years later in the “pay to play” racketeering of Philadelphia mayor John Street’s administration, see Griffin, Black Brothers, Inc., pp. 6–10.

27. While no one in the chapel recalled it for me, on at least one occasion, these disputes allegedly provoked a riot. See “Graterford Riot Blamed on ‘Religious Differences,’” Gettysburg Times, July 29, 1972.

28. On the resurrection of the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan, see Matthias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 119–43.

29. Allah v. Menei, 844 F. Supp. 1056 (1994).

30. C. Eric Lincoln’s study was published in 1961. See Black Muslims in America (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994). For other influential early representations see James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Vintage, 1992), pp. 47–82, and the 1959 documentary produced by Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax for public television, The Hate That Hate Produced. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6140647821635049109.

31. Popular especially (but hardly exclusively) among members of peripheral groups like the Nation and the Native Americans are works that self-consciously evince a “conspiratorial view of history.” See, e.g., A. Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand (Publius Press, 1985). In an ideological wrap-around, also common in these marginal discourses are the challenges against governmental authority generally associated with the Sovereign Citizen movement, whose roots are in the white supremacist Christian Identity movement.

32. See “Radical Rhetoric, Conservative Reality: The Nation of Islam as an American Conservative Formation,” in Peter Eisenstadt (ed.), Black Conservatism (Garland Publishing, 1999), pp. 109–32.

33. As written into the DOC’s charter, the Prison Society’s official visitors are authorized to be admitted throughout the system—a key reason why in this current era of heightened controls and barriers to access, Pennsylvania’s prisons remain relatively permeable.

34. Conspicuous among this pile of texts are copies of a trucker ministry pamphlet called Highway News and handfuls of small, cardstock Chick comic booklets. On the latter, see Robert B. Fowler, The World of Jack T. Chick? (Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2001).

35. http://www.libertyministries.us/.

36. On Mennonites in Pennsylvania, see John L. Ruth, Maintaining the Right Fellowship (Wipf & Stock, 2004).

37. Donald P. Hustad (ed.), Hymns for the Living Church (Hope Publishing Company, 1974).

38. Isaiah 11:6.

39. For an ethnography of Evangelical Bible studies, see James S. Bielo, Words Upon the Word (New York University Press, 2009).

40. Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism (Penguin, 2005), p. 52.

41. 1 John 1: 26–27.

42. Hebrews 5:12–14.

43. John W. Matthews, “Bonhoeffer at 100,” The Lutheran, February 2006. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Touchstone, 1997), and Martin Marty, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (Princeton University Press, 2011).

44. While noting it is “the subject of considerable Christian homiletic expansion” dating back to the fourth century, J. Z. Smith rejects this purported etymology in favor of a denotation having to do with “the careful performance of ritual obligations.” Smith in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Study (University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 269.

45. See Carolyn N. Long, Religious Freedom and Indian Rights: The Case of Oregon v. Smith (University Press of Kansas, 2000), and Leonard Peltier, My Life Is a Sun Dance (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000). See also James B. Waldram, The Way of the Pipe: Aboriginal Spirituality and Symbolic Healing in Canadian Prisons (University of Toronto Press, 1997).

46. Warcloud v. Horn, 97–3657 (E.D. Pa. 1998). Trial record.

47. Ibid.

48. Passed in 1993, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was Congress’s legislative response to the Supreme Court’s Oregon v. Smith ruling that free-exercise claims did not trump generally applicable laws. See The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Pub. L. No. 103–141, 107 Stat. 1488 (November 16, 1993).

49. On the controversy over the inclusion of intelligent design in the Dover County, Pennsylvania, school curriculum, see Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005), Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul (ECCO, 2007), and Lauri Lebo, The Devil in Dover (New Press, 2008).

50. “Worship, Dark and Steamy, for Murderers and Rapists,” New York Times, June 25, 2005.

51. See Migene González-Wippler, Santería: The Religion: Faith, Rites, Magic (Llewellyn Publications, 2002).

52. The Seventh Circuit recently found in favor of an Illinois prisoner requesting a hair exemption on the basis of a Nazirite vow. Grayson v. Schuler, No. 10–3256 (January 13, 2012).

53. Rico wrote his brief polemic against anthropology in the context of a course I taught through the Villanova Program titled “Event, Ethnography, History.” That was the third course I taught at Graterford, the prior two being “Religion in the Tradition of Social Theory” and “Freud, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky.” With the exception of the allusion above and note 25 for Wednesday, I have not made use of my students’ work in the writing of this book. Needless to say, however, while my classroom goals were altogether different, my encounters with my Villanova students greatly broadened my understanding of the terrain chronicled and analyzed in this book—and for that I thank them. For power-conscious critiques of anthropology, see James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture (University of California Press, 2010), and Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 2002). For an affirmative defense of ethnography, see Michel-Rolph Truillot’s “Anthropology and the Savage Slot” in Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (SAR Press, 1991).

54. Having survived the raid, the music program was done in by its success when, in 2002, for the pilot episode of the reality TV program Music Behind Bars, VH1 featured a Graterford heavy metal act, Dark Mischief. One of the band members had been convicted of murdering two teenage girls, however, and the airing of the show provoked outrage—outrage that began with the mother of one of the victims and soon made its way to the O’Reilly Factor. In the wake of the resulting public relations disaster, the music program was defunded.

55. Martin Scorsese (dir.), Goodfellas (1990).

56. Holy Name Society v. Horn, Civil Action No. 97–804 (E.D. Pa. 2001), trial record.

57. Williams Brothers, “I’m Just a Nobody” (Blackberry Records, 2005).

58. Sid Roth, The Last Lap (MV Press, 2001).

FRIDAY

  1. Noble Drew Ali, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, 12:8–10. Also known as the Circle Seven Koran for its cover graphic, it may be found online at http://www.hermetic.com/bey/7koran.html.

  2. See Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 3–92, and Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (North Carolina University Press, 1998). For a documentary history, see Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (Garland Publishing, 1984).

  3. On the Moorish Science Temple, see Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks, pp. 203–205; Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 71–108; Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 15–34; Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America (SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 45–62; and Susan Nance, “Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago,” Religion and American Culture 12, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 123–66. On mind-cure, see Charles S. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963). On black nationalism, see William L. Van Deburg (ed.), Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York University Press, 1996).

  4. See Herbert Berg, “Mythmaking in the African American Muslim Context: The Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the American Society of Muslims,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 73, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 685–703.

  5. See, for example, Linda Walbridge, Without Forgetting the Imam: Lebanese Shi’ism in an American Community (Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 16–47.

  6. For a cultural history, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (Rutgers University Press, 1988). For a critical assessment, see Ian Haney López, White by Law (New York University Press, 2006).

  7. For speculation on Fard’s identity and disappearance, see Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 147–73, and Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 276–92.

  8. Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), pp. 41–51 especially. On the Great Migration, see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House, 2010). On religion in particular, see Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land (Duke University Press, 1997).

  9. Holy Koran 25:1–5.

10. For a critique of tolerance, see Benjamin L. Berger, “The Cultural Limits of Legal Tolerance, “in Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen (eds.), After Pluralism (Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 98–123; and Slavoj Žižek, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008), pp. 660–82.

11. See Søren Kierkegaard (Thomas C. Oden, ed.), The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2004); Pete A. Gunter, “Nietzschean Laughter,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Summer 1968); and Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing (Routledge, 2004).

12. Run-DMC, “Hollis Crew” (1984).

13. To place Islam at Graterford in international perspective, see James A. Beckford, Daniele Joly, and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Muslims in Prison: Challenge and Change in Britain and France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

14. Qur’an 6:38. The Salafi favor the Noble Quran, edited and translated by Saleem Al Hilaali and Muhsin Khan, http://www.dar-us-salam.com/TheNobleQuran/index.html. Followers of Warith Deen have long used the Holy Qur’an translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, http://wikilivres.info/wiki/The_Holy_Qur%27an.

15. As a partial explanation of this gap, Qasim invoked the principle of al-darrur, pursuant to which that which is proscribed becomes permissible when circumstances make abstention impossible.

16. Saleh as-Saleh, The Three Letters (Daar al-Bukhar, 1995).

17. The injunction that a Muslim must reconcile with another Muslim within three days comes from a hadith that appears in both Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Sahih Muslim, which for Sunni Muslims are the two most authenticated hadith collections.

18. On the problem of authority in African-American Islam, see Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican (Oxford University Press).

19. On the “path of the middle way” (wasatiyya) see Brigitte Maréchal, The Muslim Brothers in Europe: Roots and Discourse (Brill, 2008), pp. 5, 148; and Muhammad bin Salih Al-Uthaimeen’s commentary on Ibn Taymiyyah, Aqeedatul-Wasitiyyah (Dar-us-Salam, 2009).

20. On the concept of the mujaddid for the Ahmadiyya, see Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, pp. 112–13; for Wallace Muhammad’s appropriation see Curtis, Islam in Black America, p. 116. For a primary source, see Bilalian News, February 15, 1980, p. 17.

21. Warith Deen Muhammad died in 2008. For his obituary, see “W. Deen Mohammed, 74, Top U.S. Imam, Dies,” New York Times, September 9, 2008. On the “Old Guard” Sunnis’ mistrust of Warith Deen Muhammad, see Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican pp. 67–70.

22. Karl specifically referred to the Collective Purchasing Conference (CPC), a Muslim American Society economic initiative.

23. Mamduh, who is politically a leftist, is a reader of Z Magazine and a listener to Democracy Now!

24. On the transformation of the former Nation of Islam under the leadership of Warith Deen Muhammad, see Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims (Scarecrow Press, 1984), pp. 89–124, and Matthias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 99–118.

25. U.S. v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965).

26. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 13.

27. Malcolm X employed the rhetoric of “by any means necessary” not infrequently. See Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X Speeches & Writings (Pathfinder Press, 1992).

28. The American public’s readiness to cast Muslim prisoners as would-be terrorists is, to a significant degree, I would contend, an expression of this collective bad faith. Consider the case of alleged would-be “dirty bomber” José Padilla. Padilla, a Puerto Rican convert to Islam, it was widely reported, converted to Islam while in prison. In a 2002 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, evangelical prison ministry giant Charles Colson pointed to Padilla to note how “Islam, certainly the radical variety, feeds on resentment and anger all too prevalent in our prisons” and “is raising a class of angry, dangerous men with anti-American, Islamist sympathies.” It was Padilla’s doubly demonized status as a “jailhouse Muslim”—i.e., both gangster and terrorist—that made him a perfect trial balloon for indefinite extraconstitutional detention of American citizens. After five years in solitude in a South Carolina brig, Padilla was convicted—in a trial that made no mention of “dirty bombs”—of providing material aid to terrorists. By this time, those who cared to could have known that José Padilla had never been in prison, only in a Florida jail, during which time, according to the New York Times, he’d read the Bible voraciously. Since the War on Terror began, every couple of years has offered up another jailhouse Muslim terrorist scare, and we may be sure that the next time a handful of intemperate, feckless, and, in all likelihood, mentally ill cons or ex-cons flatter themselves with delusions of destruction, the demagogues of screen and state will sound the requisite alarms. For examples, Google the phrases “2005 Los Angeles Bomb Plot,” “Liberty City Seven,” and “2009 Bronx Terrorism Plot.” For Colson’s op-ed, see Charles Colson, “Evangelizing for Evil in Our Prisons,” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2002. On Padilla’s personal history, see “Terror Suspect’s Path From Streets to Brig,” New York Times, April 25, 2004. For a recent survey, see SpearIt, “Facts and Fiction About Islam in Prison: Assessing Prisoner Radicalization in Post-9/11 America,” Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (December 2012). On bad faith, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Washington Square Press, 1992), pp. 86–116, and Slavoj Žižek, “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows about Abu Ghraib,” In These Times (May 21, 2004).

29. This hadith appears in the collections of Tirmidhi and ibn Majah.

30. On the prison telephone industry, see Steven L. Jackson, “Ex-Communication: Competition and Collusion in the U.S. Prison Telephone Industry,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 22, Issue 4 (2005), and John E. Dannenber, “Nationwide PLN Survey Examines Prison Phone Contracts, Kickbacks,” Prison Legal News, Vol. 22, No. 4 (April 2011).

31. Qur’an 4:86.

32. Qur’an 3:134.

33. See Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Isḥāq’s Sīrat rasūl Allāh (Oxford University Press, 1967).

34. Werner Herzog (dir.), Grizzly Man (2005).

35. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (New American Library, 1986). On the trope of the “Magical Negro” see Krin Gabbard, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2004).

36. This was the Imam’s off-the-cuff translation. Similar language may be found in Book 88 of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, which contains hadith about the end times.

37. These verses, too, were the Imam’s translations out of Arabic. While the latter seems to reference Qur’an 12:87, I remain uncertain as to the source of the former.

38. Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1940), and Gresham M. Sykes, The Society of Captives (Princeton University Press, 1958). For subsequent touchstones of the genre, see John Irwin, The Felon (University of California Press, 1970), and James B. Jacobs, Statesville (University of Chicago Press, 1977).

39. See Bas van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 31–63.

40. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (Macmillan, 1997).

41. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 52–97; Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of Splendid Vices (University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 23–44; and Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 1–39.

42. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 176.

43. Among innumerable other examples, see Edward W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (W. B. Whittingham & Co, 1887), pp. 1–29.

44. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

45. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 20–36.

46. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), pp. 162–215. For a broad critique, see Russell R. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 1997).

47. Also known as phylacteries, teffilin are black leather boxes containing scribed passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy traditionally worn by Orthodox Jewish men on their forehead and weak arm for non-holiday morning prayers.

48. See William James, “The Will to Believe,” in his Essays in Pragmatism (Hafner Press, 1948), pp. 88–109.

49. For inspiration, see Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007); Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche Reader (Blackwell, 2000), pp. 114–23; and Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Walter Benjamin (Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 444–88.

50. Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat, folio 31a.

SATURDAY

  1. The domain of these world-making activities in the ongoing present is what I have been calling “practice.” See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press). On ritual practices in particular, see Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford University Press, 1992).

  2. For an attempt at reconstructing the origins of religion, see Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). For a critique of the drive toward origins, see Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

  3. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (First Fortress, 1991), pp. 1–79; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for the Study of Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 269–84; and Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011).

  4. The reformists called themselves the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. In 1886, a century after its founding, the organization changed its name to the Pennsylvania Prison Society. See Benjamin Rush, “An Inquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals and upon Society,” in Essays: Literary, Moral and Philosophical (Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), pp. 136–63. On the history of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, see Norman Johnston, Kenneth Finkel, and Jeffery A. Cohen, Eastern State Penitentiary: Crucible of Good Intentions (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994), and “Pennsylvania Prison Society” (Pennsylvania Historical Society, Collection 1946, 2006). On the age’s reformist milieu more broadly, see Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 11–29.

  5. On the emergence and evolution of the penitentiary, see Orlando Faulkland Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776–1845 (Prison Association of New York, 1922), and David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Walter de Gruyter, 1977). On the limits of religious reform, see Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), and Andrew Skotnicki, Religion and the Development of the American Penal System (University Press of America, 2000). For thinking about the place of the penitentiary in American culture, see Anne-Marie Cusac, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (Yale University Press, 2009), and Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009).

  6. Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (Verso, 1995), pp. 29–95. On incarceration and liberalism, see Thomas L. Dumm, Democracy and Punishment (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Native Order (Harvard University Press, 2011).

  7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Vintage, 1995), pp. 195–230 especially.

  8. In his essay “Philadelphia, and Its Solitary Prison,” Charles Dickens observed: “My firm conviction is that, independent of the mental anguish it occasions—an anguish so acute and so tremendous, that all imagination of it must fall far short of the reality—it wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world. It is my fixed opinion that those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased.… What monstrous phantoms, bred of despondency and doubt, and born and reared in solitude, have stalked upon the earth, making creation ugly, and darkening the face of Heaven!” Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, Volume I (Chapman and Hall, 1842), p. 262. For other contemporaneous critiques, see Dorothea Dix, Remarks on Prison and Prison Discipline in the United States (Joseph Kite & Co., 1845), and Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight, Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada (Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, 2005). For a more bullish assessment, see Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (Southern Illinois University Press, 1964).

  9. See Jennifer Graber, The Furnace of Affliction (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 157–78, and John Lardes Modern, “Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol. 75, Issue 3 (2007), pp. 615–50.

10. Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (Anchor Books, 2008); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). On turn-of-the-century criminology, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (University of Illinois Press, 1997). On the slipperiness of rationales for punishment, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (Vintage, 1989), pp. 57–98.

11. See “The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium,” Justice Policy Institute (May 2000); “Correctional Population in the United States, 2010” (Bureau of Justice Statistics, December 2011), http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus10.pdf. Over the last two decades, as the number of Americans in prison and jail has doubled, rates of violent crime have actually dropped. See Franklin E. Zimring, The Great American Crime Decline (Oxford University Press, 2007), and Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (eds.), The Crime Drop in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006). For policy prescriptions, see Mark A. R. Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton University Press, 2009). For critical reappraisals see Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformations in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December 2010), and Christopher Glazek, “Raise the Crime Rate,” n + 1 (January 2012). Toward an abolitionist program, see Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003). To get involved nationally, go to http://criticalresistance.org/, and, in Pennsylvania specifically, http://decarceratepa.info/.

12. History told with an eye trained on the power-steeped processes through which the contingent elements of our social world have obtained their sheen of necessity, inevitability, and immutability is genealogy. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell University Press), pp. 139–64.

13. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Modern Library, 1999), p. 36.

14. On the ways that religious practices enable assurance, suffering, antipathy, and order, see, in turn, Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Anchor Books, 1990); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1977), pp. 3–43; Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

15. Matthew 21:42–46.

16. Deuteronomy 18:15.

17. 1 Peter 5:6–14.

18. Leon Uris, Exodus (1958) is a novel about the founding of the State of Israel.

19. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (Prometheus Press, 1989); Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Jo Elster (ed.), Karl Marx: A Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 20–23; online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

20. While the generative character of ideology is already evident in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” for a programmatic account of the role of ideas, religious and otherwise, in shaping social relations, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New Left Books, 1972). Toward a materialist study of religion, see Manuel A. Vasquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2010).

21. If as a concept the poor man is the child of Karl Marx, the nomenclature is owed to Jacques Rancière, who observed the awkward place allotted the poor man as the paradigmatic object of philosophical inquiry. See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Duke University Press, 2004).

22. Contra the “poor woman” impulse, see R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters (University of California Press, 2000), and Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety (Princeton University Press, 2005).

23. It is surely a tribute to the Nation of Islam that a man like Charles would associatively couple religion and slavery. See Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Secretarius Memps, 1973). To complicate this picture, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Vintage, 1976), pp. 159–284; Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1980); and Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 17–64.

24. This scapegoating function is a dominant feature of the new atheist bestsellers. See, for example, Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books, 2007).

25. Listen to Laura Bush’s radio address of November 17, 2001, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=24992#axzz1nxwfqpq3. And see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104:3, pp. 783–90 (2002).

26. On freedom, see Isaiah Berlin (Henry Hardy, ed.), Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 166–217. On the inextricability of freedom and movement, see Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: A History of a Political Problem (Duke University Press, forthcoming). For building an affirmative case for the possibility of achieving freedom in prison, see Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 116–38; Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2010), most especially Boym’s discussion of Dostoyevsky’s “freer freedom,” pp. 108–14; and Jenny Phillips (dir.), The Dhamma Brothers (2007).

27. On the prophetic, see Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), especially pp. 95–130.

28. John Boorman (dir.), Deliverance (1972).

29. Donald Clemmer, The Prison Community (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1940), p. 236.

30. Rudolph Otto, Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 5–30.

31. See Carrie A. Rentschler, Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S. (Duke University Press, 2011); and Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 77–114.

32. On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, see Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (Image Publishing, 2000).

33. Peter Hoffman [pseudonym], “A Path of Penance: A Reflection upon Living St. Francis’ Exhortation to Penance” (2005) (unpublished).

34. On restorative justice, see Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Good Books, 2002), and Barb Toews and Howard Zehr (eds.), Critical Issues in Restorative Justice (Criminal Justice Press, 2004). For a critique, see Gregory Shank and Paul Takagi, “Critique of Restorative Justice,” Social Science Vol. 31, Issue 3 (2004), pp. 147–63.

35. Ephesians 4:22–24.

36. Romans 12:17.

37. Romans 12:21.

38. For Peter’s sources see James Meyer, OFM, The Words of St. Francis (Franciscan Herald Press, 1982), and Jeffrey Keefe, Francis of Assisi: Life and Brief Devotions (Pauline Books, 1993).

39. Romans 12:2.

40. See Genesis 3:19; and Voltaire, Candide: Or Optimism (Penguin, 2005), p. 144. For further Christian critique of American criminal justice, see James Samuel Logan, Good Punishment: Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment (W. B. Eerdmans, 2008) and Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2001).

41. On Inside-Out, see Kerry Dunn, Re-forming the Social: Neoliberal Voluntarism in the Warehouse Prison (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

42. On the movement from resignation to action, see Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Penguin Classics, 1986).

43. To date, no such bill has gotten any traction. For a recent historical reflection and call for reform from a legislative principal, see Senator Stewart Greenleaf: “Prison Reform in the Pennsylvania Legislature,” 160 U. PA. L. REV. PENNUMBRA 179 (2011), http://www.pennumbra.com/essays/12-2011/Greenleaf.pdf.

44. Orlando Faulkland Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs (Prison Association of New York, 1922), p. 218. On solitary confinement as torture, see Atul Gawande, “Hellhole,” The New Yorker (March 30, 2009); Matt Stroud, “Why Are Prisoners Committing Suicide in Pennsylvania?” The Nation (May 7, 2012); and Shane Baver, “Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons,” Mother Jones, Nov/Dec 2012.

45. The Church’s problem did not go away. In March 2011, the Philadelphia Archdiocese placed twenty-one priests on administrative leave for alleged sexual abuse. In June 2012, in a first-of-its-kind ruling nationwide, Monsignor William Lynn was convicted in a Philadelphia County courtroom of endangerment for reassigning priests accused of molesting children. Lynn was sentenced to three to six years in prison.

46. On Mumia, see Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience (Plough Publishing, 1997) and Live from Death Row (Harper Perennial, 1996). In 2011, Mumia was removed from Pennsylvania’s death row and resentenced to life. Divergent attitudes toward Mumia remain a litmus test of Philadelphia’s racial divide. For two recent films that dramatize this fault line, see Tigre Hill (dir.), The Barrel of a Gun (2010), and Kouross Esmaeli (dir.), Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2010).

47. On the roots of crime see Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life (Harvard University Press, 1995).

48. The simple dualism of innocence and guilt in which the condition of one or the other is thought to be a simple matter of fact obscures the many movements between crime and punishment. Consider, for example, the case of Ephraim of EFM who is serving life for homicide. According to Ephraim’s own documentation, prosecutors charged five men with the crime. Ephraim, who was present at the scene, and knew the perpetrators but claims to have had no direct involvement with the crime, was offered a plea deal that would have gotten him out of prison in five years. Largely out of a sense of loyalty to his codefendants, Ephraim refused. The rest of the men took deals and testified against Ephraim. Of the five men originally charged with the crime, Ephraim is the only one still in prison. For critiques of the preoccupation with innocence at the expense of attention to fairness, see Stephen B. Bright, “Is Fairness Irrelevant?: The Evisceration of Federal Habeas Corpus Review and Limits on the Ability of State Courts to Protect Fundamental Rights,” 54 Washington and Lee Law Review 1 (1997), http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol54/iss1/2; and Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker, “The Seduction of Innocence: The Attraction and Limitations of the Focus on Innocence in Capital Punishment Law and Advocacy,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Winter 2005), pp. 587–624.

49. For an international perspective on the ascendancy of LWOP sentencing in the United States, see Catherine Appleton and Bent Grover, “The Pros and Cons of Life Without Parole,” British Journal of Criminology 47 (2007), pp. 597–615.

50. Bennett Miller (dir.), Capote (2005).

51. On apocalypticism and millennialism in contemporary American culture, see Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999), pp. 285–310. To better understand his own views on such matters, Al lent me his copy of J. Dwight Pentecost, Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology (Academie Books, 1958).

52. On Reginald McFadden, see “Accused Serial Killer And 92 Days of Freedom,” New York Times, April 4, 1995. On Mudman Simon’s history of violence, see “1975 Report: ‘Mudman’ Is Dangerous,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 11, 1995. In 1999, Mudman Simon was beaten to death in New Jersey State Prison.

53. Thomas C. Reeves, America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (Encounter Books, 2001).

54. As Father Gorski explained over dinner, there are three levels of Franciscan brothers: the first level is the cloistered monks; the second level is those who have taken vows of chastity but who work out in the community; the third level is the secular order.

55. On “the event” as an animating concern for ethics, see Alain Badiou, Ethics (2000), pp. 40–44 and 67–77. On spiritual exercises, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Wiley-Blackwell, 1995). On spiritual practice and compulsive repetition, see Sigmund Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader, pp. 429–35.

SUNDAY

  1. In a still more pointed response to my theses, one Villanova student—himself decidedly not a frequenter of the chapel—employed Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky to assess the chapel’s “palliative effect.” As R. R. wrote: “A tangential comparison may be made between those seeking solace in the chapel and those who avoid it. I’m thinking specifically of Nietzsche’s void—those who throw themselves into it and perish; those who threw themselves into and return the stronger; or those who see the void, turn, and ignore its presence. This obviously is redolent of Dostoevsky’s Ivan and the three types of men: fierce and rebellious, rebellious and weak, weak and unhappy.” R. R. concluded: “You only meet the third type of lifer in the chapel. The second type of lifer you never get to meet as they are all housed—indefinitely—on J or L blocks, while the first type only enter the chapel—in spirit—during their memorial service. The way I see it most are the third type—prayerful and hopeful for the first seven to ten years (the period of time it takes for one’s appeals to get shot down). From there many move to the second type. They then age (or tire) and return back to category three, unless they have the strength to step into the void and become the first type” (R. R. Craig, personal correspondence).

  2. Isaiah 55:1–5 and 53:1–6.

  3. On transsexuality in prisons, see Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (eds.), Captive Genders (AK Press, 2011).

  4. This morning’s Sunday Service song list includes, in order: “Thank You, Lord, for Saving Me,” “Because of Who You Are,” “You Will Surely Drift Away,” “He Is Good,” “In the Sanctuary,” “Ninety Nine and a Half (Won’t Do),” “Take It to Jesus,” “Think About His Love,” “You Ought to Run and Tell That,” “God Will Make a Way,” and “Happy Birthday.”

  5. John 3:3.