Abusive to go through this a you have to be prepared. Three codify if would have absolutely no interest but i have two sons that i know love the game. My oldest son and number three son josh the right think i feel safe with my oldest son because he is a massachusetts it as hard as a republican to do anything but my son josh i could see him doing something down the line. Host your publisher . What is saddam mountain . Guest they will be representing me to get the book out. He is a medium potatoes guy. Homemade rolls with the Sweet Potatoes that he loves. So this is a basic cookbook for home cooking. Its not a fancy cookbook. Where was this taken . Guest in my kitchen and laureate. Host we have a kitchen in laureate that we celebrated rather late last spring. I do remember the first chance i had to actually get the family together and be off the trail for a day or two, the first thing i did is get ready and make his favorite dinner. The romneys family table was the name of the book and it comes out and fall of 2014. Ann romney, thank you for being on book tv. Thanks so much. Up next on book tv, after words with guest host after jf from columbia university. This week Joshua Dubler and his latest book down in chapel religious life in an american prison he experiences muslim and christian prisoners that make their way through the prison chapel for more reasons than of worship. He discusses the place of religion in rehabilitation and incarceration. The program is about one hour. Good afternoon. Its a pleasure to have a conversation about this wonderful book, down in the chapel. Your book may be seen as an opportune moment. This is the year when there has been much discussion, different sorts of the place of prison in American Society and the contemporary moment i think in particular. On the one hand of michele alexander, the new jim crow, and more recently i was introduced through colleagues through the new netflix phenomena. On the one hand the public against mass incarceration and the other sort of personal story of an interesting entre in the prison system. In many ways your book is able to do both the risks detailed description of the experience and weigh in against the system as it were, wondering how you see this as a way of opening up the conversation and where it might fit in that landscape for the new jim crow. Guest we are speaking after eric holder went on the record about the mandatory minimum, and the federal court declared it to be unconstitutional, so it is a momentous gathering. I think of structure and agency has interdependence putative i think that it would be my new book on its own could raise consciousness but theyre seems to be a current, and i hope and i am ambitious that my book could contribute to the dawning sense that how we do criminaljustice is somewhat in same and a moral atrocity. With respect i havent seen oranges the new black, so the Meshaal Alexandre spectrum its very much about the everyday and the two men that read my manuscript repeatedly they may have been frustrated that time but it wasnt explicitly policy oriented. I do think there are some policy conclusions the book makes. And i would hope the readers would come to that on their own. Host i hope that we can talk about the way that you have raised criticisms and invite the discussions about solutions. What strikes me, that seems to be the urgency of the hour often overrides the complexity i think your story in fights. A couple of years ago i had the opportunity to do a story and they want to know how do we explain why their reentry numbers are so low meanwhile stories of individual lives how they make sense and their experience prior to and in the new york collection. So i want to get there but i think that what your story and perhaps the tone always invites us to linger with the complexities a little more. Maybe we could start although its not a story about you but your experience and the men that you had a chance to build relationships with. Its more than a dissertation. If you frame it in your first response, how did you come to write this wonderful book about the particular prison system or the religion in prison . Guest i tend to think people are a product of their circumstances because i am so acutely a product of my circumstances. Those two modes of incarceration on the one hand, a child growing up in the 1980s and 90s had a time when the american prison population is exploding 600 or 700 and my mother among her others worked on Rikers Island so i was aware from the young time and at a younger age about the phenomenon of the mass incarceration. And i was always horrified by it in the way that one is drawn to Something Like a vacation. As for the other piece, i think the field of religious study is populated by people who tend to be emphatically ambivalent about the positions of their upbringing. I fit into that category. I was raised essentially an orthodox jew by agnostics although i didnt figure that out until somewhat later in the game. So in fact my orientation both through judaism also stands independent of that but very ethically minded and a distinction that i learned in the Jewish State School that i talked about in the book. The amendments that pertain to one relationship the almighty and that pertain to ones relationship with a fellow man and woman, and i have always been on the latter half of the spectrum. With that said, i say in the book that to honor the complexity of the world with my description as a scholar in the way that we do is about as theological as i get. So i feel like my obligation in the world is to try to do them justice. Theyve been very generous with me and i hope to repay the debt. But as a scholar it seems as though we do a certain kind of violence to the world when we eat race that complexity that you call attention to. Host i think the way that you balance the interpreted and the descriptive or theoretical claims you are sort of reticent of making any sort of large claims about what this means to allow the men to speak for themselves, to tell their story. But then maybe you will take a direction that seems to be an engagement of religious studies but opening up those questions for the broad and the more accessible audience. So, throughout the book, you in the direction of a larger interpretation out line ten. Tell us about the visas and what role they play for you and how they inform your engagement with the details of their lives. Guest a little bit of background if the view for hasnt read it. Its structured over seven days. That was born in response to the week of events that take place in the chapel of which over ten different groups have 55 different worship sessions and bible study and music rehearsals. I did it as an experiment in which the chapel was open and that became the spine of the book. As a dissertation stage, i need was insistent the book was going to be Something Like a 95 film. I dont know if you remember but movies that dont use any external artifice where they dont use external lighting or music. So i wanted everything to be within the narrative frame including my theory. By the central character of the book is a scholar of religion. And i bring that those perspectives to bear on this conversation. But for a long time the book was largely with in that frame. When i came to Farrar Straus i came to work with an editor named paul ely, and he was productively he pushed me for more. He thought i owed it to the reader to let them know what i thought and i can decide that he was absolutely right. So i wrote for him a document. This was back in the summer of 2010. I wrote a document of the ten visas of range from the genealogical to talking about religious experience to talking about religious practice to try to encapsulate what about these mens process is productively american and tries in a number of perspectives, some of which mutually conflict. So, i wrote that for him and then i wanted to keep it apart from the book, but in the book. So theres also a lot of analysis that takes place. Sometimes by this guy that is the narrator and sometimes by what is obviously the leader joshua then you have the species that span and opposition so that the fee of the cheese stands in opposition to certain kinds of religious practice on the one hand you have the kind of day in and day out flow of complexity that messy and some of it pertains to abstraction and a lot of it is very material. Then you have the thesis that the temps to, you know, to encapsulate was going on but in tended to stand in in tension with the seven days. Host you mentioned the publisher and was very much of religious studies training you bring to bear in the conversations youll have opted for the genre that sort of pushes the standard academic monograph. I wonder what your commitment to capturing the complexity in addition to the conversations with paul ely, was their something about the creative nonfiction more so than the standard monograph that you felt help you tell the sort of story that you were trying to tell that balances the description with the analysis . Guest i dont want to sound like i was trying to reinvent the wheel or i did reinvent the wheel and that it is so open in its form and its medved. So why didnt have to topple any giants. I precede a lot of support. With that said there is the sense of the form a kind of protest against the standards of academic argumentation for the reasons i suggested earlier about what i know about people that makes people interesting. What makes people global. Its a difficult to capture that with a scholarly argument. Its precisely where people violate your expectations of them. Its the point that your supposition that they become interesting in a way that we turned to literature in a way that when i want to know people intimately i will turn rather than a book from the field. The other part of it and i guess that would be a kind of aesthetic. The other part is that the call and this is where i would really hope that this book is received by our Scholarly Community as a scholarship which is that there is a kind of way and necessarily that it seems to be in an academic conversation buying as you often to the following relationship with the people that you write about. So you have this conversation and have an empirical counter with people and then you come back and continue the conversation. The people in some way become reduced in some way by the data and what is produced is those of us that think and write about and those that have been written about. And especially when dealing with the kind of problems of power that come with writing about prisoners. I really wanted to write a book in which my interlocutors were primarily not necessarily scholars of the field all the wood is the field that makes me the person i am that asks certain kind of questions but really the man i met first and to have my perspective but against their perspective to see what happens. Host thats actually a perfect segue to begin to think about not just the sort of framing questions you bring to the book but to talk about the lives and the institutions that are essential to the book and places that you are you arent going to tell the story about prison, religion, and a grand sense that you are talking about religion in a particular time and place. Tell us about what some could argue in itself in the landscape of american prisons and history is a sort of secret space that has a special visitor that you refer to the folks on the one hand the renowned boxer Bernard Hopkins but also visits from muhammed. Tell us about this institution outside of philadelphia. Host guest there are Amazing Things that have happened over the years but its pedigree comes if you were trying to make it the microcosm. It comes from the fact that eastern state penitentiary over in downtown philadelphia, which is, you know, the prototype of the modern penitentiary when it closes down in 1971, its prisoners and many of the staff go to great referred which opened in 1922 is sort of the inheritor from Eastern States. So we are talking about Eastern States we are talking about quakers and theorizing a kind of solitary confinement where people who have come, become corrupt can be put in privacy with their meager and they can grow a new. So if i were thinking about it in the history of american presence, that is the connection that i would draw. Today it is an Old Institution in the era that pennsylvania has built more than 20 in the last 30 years. It is an old and somewhat and wielding an institution. It houses Something Like 3500 men. Of those coming you know, 4 5 or the general population prisoners and of them may be 700 or men who are serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole and in pennsylvania if youre sentenced you are not eligible for parole. So that is the culture of the book is determined by these men who are disproportionately active and all of the activities and to almost exclusively are the ones who work in the chapel. So, in the chapel you have the five chaplains who work there and to Correctional Officers and 15 prisoners who work as clerks and janitors. While i began my research doing a participant observation in the space of the religious practice explosively, you know, my deepest relationships were forged with these men who were also participants in these practices. Thats why they choose to have the job. But also just kind of their day in and day out just hanging out. Host when its not a particular service. Between the activities and maintaining the chapel. And there are some characters that you develop real life relationships with. You talk about pushing back against the subject and a scholar through this approach. Tell us about your lot in foremans which you both agree isnt the term to define your relationships but whose name in the book baracka who i think you described him as interesting, is that right . Perhaps why he can to be the person that he developed the most deep relationship with or the primary guide. Tell us about baracka and how that relationship develops and how did he become to be the one that you spent most of the time with and who is he . Guest you identify with what i think is the key passage in the book where i identify him as someone who was interesting in the world where so many of these other men are struggling so hard to be good, baracka is about something more different. Hes more mischievous than that and more skeptical of what the value of being good is in the day and age when there is no possibility of parole. I think that baracka chose the more than i chose him. He was curious, he was there in the chapel. He was curious about me and he kind of took me under his wing. One of the kind of dominant tenors of these relationships especially with baracka is a kind of paternal relationship because even though i was 30yearsold at the time in my field work and maybe i was young, in the chapel for 30 is young. Most of these men are in their 40s and 50s or even 60s and more than that, i am 30 and secular, i dont know what is true about the world, and that is very different than the way of being in the world that dominates them where you know what you are and you know what youre about and its very important both for your survival on earth and your everlasting life that you know what you are about. So you know, baracka kind of took me under his wing. I called him early on i think as my dissertation adviser. And he really liked that kind of play of being the one who introduces me to what is going on in the chapel and being my kind of primary interpreter. He himself is a very unique character in the book and different in a lot of ways. So he is a person serving life without parole and hes been in prison longer than i have been alive. It seems to me that is an insane policy. He is someone who is convicted of a homicide. He claims he didnt do it. But hes in prison for 40 years. He was in the nation of islam growing up. So he has that kind of Selfhelp Group uplift kind of attitude. Hes frustrated about people who count tale to his orthodoxy. He wants people to live up to their potential. So hes perpetually kind of frustrated by his fellow man to beat he is an estimate and he is somewhat irregular. He likes to say things to me i think he has a lot of these relationships with younger men. Know who you are and let the world of figure you out. But he is something of a holdover because one of the story is the book tells that this a time frame well beyond the seven days is about the evolution of islam at the prison. And while i see that most people watching if they have a kind of assumption about what an islamist prison looks like they think it is political, they are thinking malcolm x. But actually that is at least from 2006 and 2007 may be things are changing now that it was kind of a dying breed. Its the kind that lead the black nationalist note that want to talk about the economic empowerment. The dominant kind of mode of muslims and at gratherford they are about getting it right and getting the practice of islam right. They are theological resentment or sociological that go back generations between the two subcultures. But they think that nation of islam even after 75 when Elijah Mohammed dies and they become sunni muslims. That is a religious what thats about instrumental wising for the purpose of politics. That is essentially a blasphemy. So the dominant muslim mode at gratherford is much more sexual doctrinaire, i forget what the right answers are, trying to execute your practices according to the right doctrine. And baracka is this kind of hes different. I start the book and baracka aphorism is a god created the world and said how bad it, fellow. Host if baracka is the foil to any sort of a notion of a man in a prison attempting to be good, the men who are charged in a fury with overseeing that because you dont just tell the prison stories coming you also tell the story of Correctional Officers. Tell us about these men who are charged with overseeing the implementation of a good or rehabilitation. Host guest right. Much like the prisoner who comes to work in the chapel, the Correctional Officers that work in the travel also bid for the post. They want to have the particular job and they probably want to have the job because they themselves are men who are engaged in a religious block. I dont take them to take their tax as having anything to do with the rehabilitation. Something that is surprising in the book i think is the kind of general tone of the daytoday relationships of the Cor