Mobilizing Hope in Women’s Prison: Discovering Agency, Community, and Creative Resilience / Sarah Farmer

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

How do you find hope when you can only see yourself and your future in light of your past mistakes? When you’re certain that everyone on the outside looking in is doing the same, punishing you, immobilizing you, invisibilizing you…?

Seems the only way out of that spiral is the “God Who Sees.”

Practical theologian Sarah Farmer joins Evan Rosa to discuss her recent book, Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons. She describes the experience of prison—the ways it constrains movement, how it abridges and threatens agency, and how the constant surveillance leaves a person breathless. She illuminates the approach to theological education she and her colleagues put on offer for these women, these incarcerated theologians whose very lives were the texts to learn from. Sarah offers a contribution from Womanist Theology: Dolores Williams’ re-narration of Hagar—from the book of Genesis—the forgotten, quote, “invisibilized” Egyptian slave of Abraham and Sarah—Hagar, the woman who named God, “El Roi”… the God who sees. And she imagines a restorative hope built around self-respect and identity, connection, and resilience—a hope that shines even into the darkness of a women’s prison cell.

Show Notes

Get your copy of Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Sarah Farmer
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give