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 | Prison Religion: |
More than the citizens of most countries, Americans are either religious or in jail--or both. But what does it mean when imprisonment and evangelization actually go hand in hand, or at least appear to? What do "faith-based" prison programs mean for the constitutional separation of church and state, particularly when prisoners who participate get special privileges? In Prison Religion, law and religion scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan takes up these and other important questions through a close examination of a recent trial challenging the constitutionality of a faith-based residential rehabilitation program in an Iowa state prison, a trial in which she served as an expert witness for the prisoner-plaintiffs. Using the trial to illuminate the interrelationship of American law and religion today, Prison Religion argues that the plaintiffs' case unintentionally shows that separation of church and state is no longer possible because religious authority has radically shifted from institutions to individuals, making it difficult to define religion, let alone disentangle it from the state. In the course of advancing this unconventional view, Prison Religion casts new light on church-state law, the debate over government-funded faith-based programs, and the predicament of prisoners who have precious little choice about what kind of rehabilitation they receive, if they are offered any at all. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is associate professor of law and director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York. She is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton). "Prison Religion is a remarkable and illuminating book. In narrating a court case over an Iowa 'faith-based' prison program, Sullivan manages to combine a balanced account of the trial and its background--informative, fair, and detailed--with wide-ranging reflections on the problems of religion, secularism, and the law. Interdisciplinary in the best way, this book will be provocative and useful for lawyers, historians, and anyone interested in the complicated entanglement that binds evangelicalism and disestablishment in mutually assured misrecognition."--Michael Warner, Yale University "Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is one of the foremost interpreters of religion in American law, and in Prison Religion she invites us to consider how legal structures affect understandings of religious culture. This is the most provocative book on American evangelicalism that I have read in a very long time. It is also hard to imagine reading this book and not being challenged or changed by its portrait of the prison system."--Courtney Bender, Columbia University "In this wide-ranging and frequently brilliant book, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan mines her experience as an expert witness in the extraordinary case of the 'God Pod,' a section of an Iowa state prison administered by a faith-based organization that equated crime with sin."--Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania Law School Acknowledgments ix Another Princeton book by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan: Subject Areas: | |||||
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