To Break Every Yoke

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition. Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."

The four works presented in this book are about freedom: breaking free, staying free, and helping others to freedom. A college student travels south to do her part in making Dr. King's dream of freedom for everyone a reality; a mother struggles for over two decades to free her blind son from bondage; a white man finds himself entrapped in the racial laws of the nation's One-Drop Theory; a high school drop-out tries to break free from negative family forces to pursue her dream of being a dancer. The familiar characters may make you laugh, but they may also make you cry; the questions raised may provoke, but they may also stir your imaginations and challenge long-held views. Hopefully, they will leave all of us with a broader understanding of our predicament and of ways in which we may address it.

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition. Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."

In the early 1810s, North Carolina Quakers used a vagary in North Carolina law to protect slaves under their care and provide them with as much education and training as the law would allow. By 1826, these anti-slavery advocates took steps to give these ex-slaves, approximately 2,000, opportunities for freedom outside the South or to remain under the care of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting. By 1830 the Manumission Society had completed this task and went on to attempt to convince the North Carolina Legislature to abolish slavery, to little effect. About half of the Manumission Society delegates left the state for Indiana, where they continued to work for freedmen and abolition.

Is your life falling apart and you don't know what else to do? Are you tired of being in bondage? Kimberly Hargraves shares the revelation the Lord gave her about yokes and ways to pray away the enemy. This is a topical book that covers various topics you may be dealing with in life. This book includes anointed declarations to destroy the yoke of the enemy.

Looks at the Gospels and examines what Christ requires of his followers in a redemptive-historical context. New and seasoned believers will see God's loving plan for their ultimate satisfaction. Now in paperback.

Marvin L. Chaney (San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, 1969 to 2006) enjoys international recognition for his seminal role in defining and developing a social-historical approach to the Hebrew Scriptures. Among the 20 papers in this Festschrift, Phyllis Bird writes on Israelite women's religious activity outside the household, Robert Coote on the dating of J, William Dever on archaeology and the social world of Isaiah, Patricia Dutcher-Walls on queen mothers and royal politics in late-monarchic Judah, John H. Elliott on the semantics of envy, jealousy, and zeal in the Bible, Frank Frick on sexual imagery in Hosea 1-3, Norman Gottwald on the interplay of religion and ethnicity in biblical Israel, Ron Hendel on the anthropology of food in the priestly Torah, David Hopkins on agricultural labor in ancient Palestine, Richard Horsley on the political roots of early Judean apocalyptic texts, Carol Meyers on Iron II Judean pillar figurines, Richard Rohrbaugh on Zacchaeus as defender of Jesus' honor, Katharine Sakenfeld on postcolonial perspectives on Rahab, Ruth, and Jael, Luise Schottroff on the notions of world rule and serving God in traditions about Jesus, Keith Whitelam on mapping ancient Israel, Antoinette Wire on the God of Jesus in Mark, and Gale Yee on recovering marginalized groups in ancient Israel.