Spirituality and Abolition

• Ashon Crawley won the 2021 nonfiction Lammy Award for The Lonely Letters
• Book features interventions and artwork from incarcerated writers and artists
• Speaks to those interested in connecting spiritual practices and revolutionary politics
• Emphasizes the importance of spirituality and faith in cultivating hope during the COVID-19 pandemic, ecological crisis, and the violence of capitalism 
• Abolition Collective is comprised of leading scholars and activists in the world abolition. The project is unparalleled in both its contributing members and its audience, from academics to incarcerated prisoners, as well as from students to veteran activists.
• Builds on the work of Abolishing Carceral Society and Making Abolitionist Worlds to offer a primer on what visionary activists mean when they connect the interlocking systems of repression, exploitation, and racism.
• A powerful call to join abolitionist movements in this country to address the roots of injustice.
• The question of abolition has gained significant traction in recent debates about police, prisons, as well as border detention and deportation—from #BlackLivesMatter to #AbolishICE.

List of contents

​​Searching For An Abolitionist Spirituality—Jared Ware

The Manual For Liberating Survival: Lesson 1. How self-care matters as an embodied practice of abolition—Rae Leiner and Jasmine Syedullah

Is, Was, and is to Come: Freedom Dreamworld Dispatches—Andrew Krinks

Resurrection at the Fractured Locus: Incarcerated Black Trans Embodiment and Decolonial Abolition Praxis—AK Wright

God is Blackness: Mysticism of the Unowned Earth—Peter Kline

The Abolition of Hell: Abolitionist Interpretations of Jesus’ Descent into Hell—Hannah Bowman

About the author

Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is a collectively-run project supporting radical scholarly and activist ideas, poetry, and art, publishing and disseminating work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism.

Summary

Abolition can be a spiritual practice, a spiritual journey, and a spiritual commitment. What does abolition mean and how can we get there as a collective and improvisational project?
To posit the spirituality of abolition, is to consider the ways historical and contemporary movements against slavery, prisons, the wage system, animal and earth exploitation, racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and the death penalty necessitate epistemologies that have been foreclosed through violent force by Western thought of philosophical and theological kinds. It is also to claim that the material conditions that will produce abolition are necessarily Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, feminist, and also about disabled and other non-conforming bodies in force and verve.

Abolition and Spirituality asks what can prison abolition teach us about spiritual practice, spiritual journey, spiritual commitment? And, what can these things underscore about the struggle for abolition as a desired manifestation of material change in worlds we inhabit currently? Collecting writings, poetry, and art from thinkers, organizers, and incarcerated people the editors trace the importance of faith and spirit in our ongoing struggle towards abolitionist horizons.

Foreword

National radio and podcast campaign, targeting interviews on Chapo Trap House, KPFA, This Is Hell, and more
National print and online campaign, targeting reviews and interviews in The Nation, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, and more
Online/social media campaign, including book trailer, giveaways, contests
National university and bookstore tour
Reading group guide
Promotion through the collective’s website: www.abolitionjournal.org and social media: @AbolitionJournal
Promotion through activist newsletters and social mediaTargeted outreach to progressive religious and spiritual organizations and communities

Additional text

Praise for Abolition Collective"Abolishing Carceral Society is an immense contribution to contemporary struggles for freedom."—Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law

is a wonderful mix of provocative ideas married with art, to help us consider a world without prisons, policing, and surveillance...This inaugural issue from Abolition Collective pushes us to ask a number of questions that are important to moving us toward an abolitionist horizon."—Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This 'Til We Free Us

Abolishing Carceral Society, presents incisive interventions in the current debates about prison abolition and abolitionism as a political principle. It is a bold beginning for what will become an essential forum for all insurgent thinkers."—Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and the Feminist Struggle and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation

—Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine

—James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time

"Finally, here is a journal providing a platform capacious enough to embrace the insurgent knowledge of activists, the analytical rigor of scholars, and the visionary power of artists."—Jackie Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism

—J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty and editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics

*Winner of the 2021 Lammy Award in Nonfiction*

"Ashon T. Crawley pushes his readers to contemplate the intimacy of living the life of the mind as a spiritual, enfleshed, and intellectual matter."—Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine

“Danny Haiphong and Roberto Sirvent are two of the most courageous and truthful intellectuals in the belly of the U.S. imperial beast!"—Cornel West

Product details

• Authors: Ashon Crawley, Roberto Sirvent
• Assisted by: Abolition Collective (Editor)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 14.02.2023, delayed
• EAN: 9781942173724
• ISBN: 978-1-942173-72-4
• No. of pages: 224
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Law > Criminal law, criminal procedural law, criminology; PHILOSOPHY / Religious, RELIGION / Religion, Politics & State, RELIGION / Theology