Month: August 2020

Edited November 2022: a new version of the toolkit is available here. I have also updated the links below to the new version.

What is accountability? How is it different than punishment? How do we practice taking accountability, and how can our spiritual practices support the practice of accountability? What does non-punitive community accountability work look like in cases of serious harm, and how do we prepare for that by practicing the skill of accountability and developing intentional relationships in our communities?

Drawing on the work of restorative and transformative justice practitioners, our new Accountability Toolkit is aimed at offering an introduction to the practices of transformative justice and non-punitive community accountability, specifically for churches and Christian communities. Download it here.

Some sneak peeks:

Download the full toolkit.

I have a new essay up at Anglican magazine The Hour, about the necessity of specificity to expand our moral imagination towards abolition:

The ethical role of the church is to develop moral imagination. The church exists as the first frontier of the kingdom of God, at the boundary between the coming kingdom and the world under the sway of the powers of death. As an outpost of the inbreaking reign of God, the Church’s role is to interpret to the world the new life of grace, the new way of being in freedom, the ultimate liberation of the cosmos. This has aspects beyond the ethical, but on the ethical level, this ultimacy of freedom looses our imagination for new possibilities. To do Christian ethics is precisely to do imaginative ethics, to let the newness and absurdity of the gospel break down the walls in our thinking and nourish new possibilities of love and divine freedom.

Other new resources from this week:

From States of Incarceration, a fascinating essay on Captivity and Spirituality in Medieval Christianity and the Mexican Empire.

From Faith for Justice, a Pledge to End Carceral Christianity.