What is Abolition Lectionary?
Abolition Lectionary is an ongoing blog series for liberation. We will be following the Revised Common Lectionary — the sequence of scriptural readings used by many mainline Protestant and Catholic churches — to provide a devotional meditation or a preaching aid, reading one of the appointed scriptural texts for the Sunday in light of the abolition of policing and prisons.
This is a work of creative exegesis. Our goal is to bring our commitment to abolition to the biblical texts, and then let the biblical texts speak to it. What we will find is support for abolition and the liberation of all marginalized people all across the biblical texts. Structuring our series around a lectionary cycle lets us make abolition a constant devotional practice of study, around the liturgical year.
Posts will be published each Tuesday for the following Sunday, so that preachers looking to draw on these themes in their sermons can use #AbolitionLectionary as a resource. We are beginning next Tuesday, 11/24/20, with the readings for Advent 1, the first Sunday of the “new liturgical year” that begins each Advent.
Our contributors (for now) are: Wesley Spears-Newsome, Wilson Pruitt, Mitchell Atencio, Liam Miller, and me (Hannah Bowman). If you’d like to join us, please reach out!
We’re looking forward to seeing abolition all over the lectionary alongside you!
P.S. You may remember a pilot version of this earlier this year, before the pandemic disrupted it. We’re on a more sustainable footing now!