Lawrence Wright in conversation with Elizabeth M. Bounds - Redemption
A powerful and startling account of the unsparing connection between a convent of cloistered nuns and the condemned women on Texas’s death row, exploring questions around crime and punishment, faith, and retribution in America as only Lawrence Wright can.
A Cappella Books, Georgia Center for the Book and First Baptist Church of Decatur welcome Wright in honor of his new book, “Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row.” The author will appear on conversation with Elizabeth M. Bounds, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at at Emory's Candler School of Theology.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the venue. The event is free and open to the public.
Registration is not required, but preferred—signing up guarantees your seat.
About the Book
“This unlikely story of a group of nuns in rural Texas ministering to seven women on death row is both captivating and inspiring. Two disparate groups—contemplative nuns and condemned inmates—set aside their pasts, slowly learn to trust one another, and ultimately bond as friends.” —John Grisham
In the fall of 2014, Deacon Ronnie Lastovica visited a women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas and gave communion to the women on death row. Moved by the meeting, the Deacon vowed to return weekly, but he knew he couldn’t help these women alone. He called upon the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, a group of contemplative nuns in Waco, Texas, to visit the seven condemned women with him. What follows is an incredible story of a spiritual alliance between two groups of women who, though they couldn’t seem more different, are living uniquely similar lives.
Lawrence Wright takes us into the death row unit, laying bare their stories. Some of the women in prison wrestle with guilt over the suffering they’ve caused; others fiercely maintain their innocence. As Wright learns more about their cases, unethical police practices and improper forensic methods cast doubt on whether some of these women actually committed the crimes for which they’ll pay the ultimate price.
Clear-eyed and rousing, layered and morally complex, “Redemption” explores ideas of retribution, spirituality, and the question of absolution.
About the Author
Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including “The Looming Tower,” “Going Clear,” and “God Save Texas,” and four previous novels, “The Human Scale,” “Mr. Texas,” “The End of October,” and “God’s Favorite.” His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for “The Looming Tower.” He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.
About the Conversation Partner
Dr. Elizabeth M. Bounds, who joined Candler’s faculty in 1997, is engaged in the Justice, Peacebuilding, and Conflict Transformation (JPACT) concentration, part of the Master of Divinity degree program at Candler. She also teaches courses as part of the Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding concentration in Emory’s Graduate Division of Religion.
The core of Bounds’ work is focused on moral and theological responses to conflict and violence, whether in the U.S. prison system, ordinary congregational life, or post-conflict situations. She engages questions of restorative justice and the U.S. criminal justice system, peacebuilding and conflict transformation, democratic practices and civil society, working with a variety of participatory and practical methods.
She is the author of "Coming Together/Coming Apart: Religion, Modernity, and Community" (Routledge, 1997), co-editor of "Welfare Policy: Feminist Critiques and Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics" (Pilgrim Press, 1999) and has authored several essays in edited volumes.
Bounds’ current research studies theo-moral understandings of the good life among incarcerated women. She is co-founder/administrator of the Certificate in Theological Studies at Arrendale State Prison for Women.
