Our educational materials will help you bridge the gap between immediate anti-racism and police/prison reform movement work and the longer struggle toward prison and police abolition and compassionate transformative forms of justice.
We teach the theological basis for prison abolition and the deep resonances between abolition work and the gospel calling of Christians. For Christians, the story of God redeeming and reconciling the world is foundational to our commitment to solidarity and liberation for those who are incarcerated.
We contextualize the day-to-day struggles for abolition in the story of God’s ongoing redemption of the entire creation. Ultimately, we can imagine prison abolition as participation in the saving work of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and in the life of the world to come.
Our director Hannah Bowman can provide for your adult education program a variety of options:
- One introductory live 90-minute webinar, providing an overview of the Christian case for prison and police abolition
- Four live 60-minute webinars, offering the Christian case for prison abolition alongside participatory studies of relevant Biblical texts:
- Jesus declares freedom to prisoners (Luke 4:17–21)
- Jesus’ death on the cross as an act of reconciliation (Luke 23:32–43)
- God’s justice always takes place in community, but prisons are places of banishment from community (Matthew 18:12–14 and 2 Corinthians 5:17–21)
- Jesus’ identification with prisoners is part of God’s new creation (Matthew 25:31–46)
- Both options include additional written resources, including an additional study on what the Bible says about prisons, across the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, suitable for independent individual or congregational use or for an inside/outside correspondence study with incarcerated friends. Hannah can also facilitate this study for your congregation or group.
- Both options will offer extensive time for Q&A and conversation, among participants and with Hannah, to help you as individuals and a community imagine and discern what your role in abolition work might be and how abolition fits into your community’s values and identity.
There are many entry points to abolition. Hannah can help you decide what practical pathway is right for you.
- If you are interested in the practical theology of accountability within Christian communities, we can also structure a study to work through our Accountability Toolkit.
- We can provide more traditional political education to help your congregation understand the racist history of systems of policing and mass incarceration.
About Hannah:
Hannah Bowman is a theological scholar and writer, literary agent, and prison abolitionist. She holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles; her scholarly work focuses on the connections between Christian theology and prison abolition.
The founder and director of Christians for Abolition, Hannah writes and teaches on the Christian theology supporting prison abolition. She has developed extensive educational materials on the Christians for Abolition website and written for Sojourners, National Catholic Reporter, The Living Church, Earth and Altar, Episcopal Café, and The Hour about prison abolition and theology. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Political Theology, the Anglican Theological Review, and Crucible. (A fuller summary of her theological writing is here.) She has taught guest classes at the Institute for Christian Studies, participated in programming for the Institute for Christian Socialism, and appeared on various podcasts including The Magnificast, Theology and Socialism, Public Theologians, A Peoples’ Theology, and The Living Church podcast.
Hannah has also worked with the LA pilot Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) program, in collaboration with the Fresno Community Justice Center, and, from 2016 to 2020, was a lay chaplain in the LA County Jails with Prism Restorative Justice.
To schedule educational events, please contact us!