How do you find hope when you can only see yourself and your future in light of your past mistakes? Practical theologian Sarah Farmer joins Evan Rosa to discuss women's prisons, agency, connection, and theological education for incarcerated women—all featured in her recent book, Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons.
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 transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Sarah Farmer: So much of education is really about what we know and that we're valued for what we know. And I think being in the prison, when I think about agency and about hope, it's really about being valued for who we become. I think the, the clearest insight for me in the prison was when people described hope. So much of their identity was stuck.
They were trapped in, in their mistakes or trapped in their behaviors that got them incarcerated. And so when they talked about hope, hope was always about being able to be who they are, but also become who they are. who they're supposed to be. The possibility of becoming more. How do our classroom become spaces where they can be and become?
A space where there's collaboration and communal encounter and connection where people can really encounter each other as human beings. When you're teaching in the prison classroom, the students lives become text.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and 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. It seems that maybe the only way out of that spiral is the God who sees. El Royi. That's the name that the Egyptian slave Hagar gave to God when he spared her life and assured her of her son's life in Genesis 16. This way of seeing oneself, being surveilled, and yet somehow also being invisibilized.
It takes on a new meaning when we consider that right now, the Vatican is sponsoring an art exhibit in an active women's prison. An exhibit called With My Eyes. Pope Francis, even in his poor health, just visited the exhibit slash prison in April 2024. As part of the Venice Biennale, an international art festival, the Vatican transformed the Giudecca Women's Detention Home into the Holy See Pavilion, an art exhibit that redefines the prison with a new way of seeing.
And if you want to see it with your eyes. You have to make a reservation, you have to get a background check, travel to the island prison off the southern coast of Venice, and then be led through it by a female prisoner herself. You wouldn't just be an art connoisseur, you'd be a guest of these incarcerated women.
Now this is a beautifully fitting example for our episode today. With me on the show is Sarah Farmer, a former research fellow of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and a practical theologian. And she agreed to talk with me about her recent book, Restorative Hope, Creating Pathways of Connection in Women's Prisons.
Sarah describes the experience of prison, the ways it constrains movement, how it abridges and threatens agency, and how the constant surveillance leaves a person both constantly seen and yet somehow invisible. She illuminates the approach to theological education that she and her colleagues put on offer for these women.
These incarcerated theologians whose very lives are the texts to learn from. Sarah offers a contribution from womanist theology, Dolores Williams re narration of Hagar from the book of Genesis that I mentioned earlier, the seemingly forgotten, invisiblized Egyptian slave of Abram and Sarai. Hagar is the mother of Ishmael, And she's the woman who named God El Roy, the God who sees.
In total, Sarah, through her book and in this conversation, imagines a restorative hope built around self respect and identity, connection, and resilience. A hope that shines even into the darkness of a woman's prison cell. All with a hope of seeing, hearing, and feeling. and being seen with new eyes. Thanks for listening today.
Sarah, it's such a delight to have you on For the Life of the World. Thanks for joining me.
Sarah Farmer: Thank you for having me.
Evan Rosa: Sarah, it sounds like your early development, whether it's your childhood or early experience has really led you to this point of caring about practical theology, caring about The kinds of community development issues that you do.
I wonder if you share a little bit like about your personal background.
Sarah Farmer: Absolutely.
Evan Rosa: About what led you to this particular project? Looking at women's imprisonment, incarceration,
Sarah Farmer: I often tell people that I grew up in a community where young people going to prison was more of a rites of passage than going to college.
I didn't know how much it shaped me, but it was definitely shaping me. And I think when I. Probably got into my PhD program is finally when I had language to understand what was happening. And this came about, I was taking a course with Myisha Nguyen, um, and she was teaching literacy as a civil rights in the topic around school, the school to prison pipeline came up and it became really clear to me that what I had witnessed growing up with seeing so many young people incarcerated.
I saw that enfleshed growing up, and so this gave me a language for it. And as I was taking that course as a PhD student, I was also serving as a teacher's assistant in a course where everyone in that class was chaplains in the prison. So having this experience where I was shaping really an interest for me to Say, oh, I wanna get into the prison and I want to teach in that setting.
And so another student who was taking the educational studies course with me, Keisha Green, we decided to co-teach a course in the prison. And the reason why I taught with her was because she had the Inside Out training. Inside out is the program where you're trained to take students who are outside, um, the prison.
So they're outside students. Inside the prison to have one class with both outside students, which would be university students and inside students, which would be those persons who are incarcerated. And that was actually my first time in the prison. And I think going in, I had a lot of assumptions about how I would be able to relate as a black woman, as a woman who has experienced marginalization because of.
Race and class as one who so many of my network growing up had been incarcerated. I thought I would be able to relate really easily, and I wasn't. I was, I was confronted in some ways with my own privilege. And so that really gave me a deeper interest into this topic around incarceration and confinement.
Evan Rosa: Going to prison to be this rite of passage more than going to college. I wonder if you could speak to the expectation there. And I'm really thinking about stuckness. Talk about a community that's stuck in that way of thinking. And for me, this relates to your book's topic of agency and the feeling that, oh, to, to become mature, to become, to become an adult.
to become experienced is to go to prison. It's not to become educated. It's not to become free in the sense of the kind of freedom that education offers. I wonder if you can comment on that.
Sarah Farmer: So I think two things happen in this context. The first way or the first way of thinking about this idea around stuckness is just this idea that your imagination is automatically foreclosed.
And I will never forget this story about a substitute teacher who substituted at school in Philly. Philly is less than 30 minutes from Chester and she had went to pick up the ball of a young boy in elementary school and she's making easy talk like, how are you doing? Uh, what do you want to be when you grow up?
And he says, I want to be a basketball player. And so she's like, great. And he's still standing there with this kind of look when it stays. And she's like, you know, what is it? Why are you still looking like that? And he says, because I'm trying to figure out if I should go to prison first, before or after basketball.
And so just this idea that prison is a fixed reality in so many children's minds. is part of the kind of stuckness around imagining other possible futures. The other one or the other way in which I thought about this in the book is just this idea around mobility. And this part of the drive is to move away from this kind of carcerality that is a fixed notion in the back of people's reality.
And I'm saying it in very real ways. Like there are some schools that have There are some schools that literally sit across the street from prisons. And so just this real kind of spatio temporal reality that is also at play when I'm thinking about just hope and incarceration and ideals around stuckness.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. You talk about the first time you, I think you were ever in a prison right away at the beginning of the book as well. I'm wondering if you would describe a little bit about that.
Sarah Farmer: This kind of stiffness almost comes over you as you go through the metal detector, as you sit in, in everything is surveilled.
It's so disorienting to have to be checked at every entryway, uh, do you belong here? People are patting you down and I have a suspicion about whether or not you can be in that space. We could talk, sit at a table, but you have guards walking around you the whole time. I don't know, just feeling like I was holding my breath the whole time because even though I wasn't thinking of doing anything wrong, there are so many rules that you feel like you're just.
Or high alert, you're hypervigilant. I think you feel when you're no longer surveilled like you because of the hyper vigilance and the hyperawareness, when you leave the space, you feel the difference.
Evan Rosa: You talk about mobility too, like the fact that you're able to move and, and I want to connect this now to the title of your book, restorative Hope.
You talk about movement and mobility as. This very important aspect of hope, and I think this is a really evocative way to think about hope. What is, what's working there for you about mobility and how central the concept of movement is to hope?
Sarah Farmer: This idea around hope comes from the women's stories. I wasn't just interested in what hope means for them, but I was interested in what hope does for them.
And so much about hope is about movement. Moving against, moving through, moving among, moving within, moving beyond. And so when I thought about hope, it wasn't a static thing. It wasn't abstract, ephemeral thing. It was forward moving, moving, you know, away from carcerality, but towards possibility and life giving possibility.
And so how I talk about hope as a form of mobility is hope as that, that moving, that movement, that driving force. That enables people to, to move toward, it could be as simple as breast. When I talk about resilience and embodied resilience, I'm simply talking about breasts. The fact that our very being is alive points to a possibility, even when everything else speaks against it.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And I think that this is speaking to the very mission or like you described the goal of your book being helping expand the definition of hope into these dehumanizing contexts. Because I think it's easy to use words like hope and think of, think from a, from the outside and looking in on a dehumanizing context, like the carceral system.
Hope's almost too easy at times, but we need to expand it to really unearth how it's operating, even in these very dehumanizing and demeaning contexts.
Sarah Farmer: Absolutely. I think, I hope people leave the book knowing that hope is not sanitized. That is a navigational tool to get through life, but it doesn't mean that challenges and difficulty won't come in people who are in dehumanizing context, I think have something to teach us about what it means to hope.
Evan Rosa: So I think this is like that point where we need to frame it in the context of incarcerated women. And so I'm hoping to get a clearer picture for myself and for the listener about. the experience of women in prison and what that carceral experience is like and the kind of issues they face. How would you orient and introduce women's prison to someone who is just unfamiliar?
Sarah Farmer: Absolutely. I think, I mean, first I would say that there's not enough research on women's prisons. Maybe just in the last couple of years, you see more research on women's prisons. Um, but I think it's important to know that prison really wasn't designed for women. And so even when I think about, like, women's carcerality, um, I think about the first question is around how women enter the prison system, which is very different from men.
As Marian Wright Edelman uses the term cradle to prison pipeline, where she's really trying to identify poverty. as one of the gateways into prison, partly because poverty plays a role in the unmet needs, physical, emotional, mental needs of women, which then go unmet, which then results in women's counterproductive ways of coping.
And that could be substance use disorder, which then leads to property offenses or for girls in particular becoming runaways, so truancy. And this is important because unlike men who oftentimes might be in prison for more violent offenses, Women are often incarcerated for property offenses, drug offenses, offenses that relate to relational.
They did something for their partner and it got them incarcerated. If one styler talks about us kind of punishing or criminalizing the survival strategies of women, also just the over policing. of women, the criminalization of women as they enter the system. So I think entering the system is a big thing.
And then once they get into the system, because the prison wasn't designed for them, a lot of the things they come in there with, such as the issues around, they have issues around mental health, it's exasperated. And it's, you can think about just isolation, for instance, when people go into lockdown and they're locked up for 23 hours straight.
The ways in which that alone kind of can exasperate. It's the same thing for health care is not up to par. So even a woman who goes into the system in their pregnant maternity, thinking about how do you deliver and give birth, there's also a high mortality rate for women in prison and some of the things that women are more likely to commit and it's been increasing death by suicide.
So a lot of the things that women go in with, it actually is exasperated and it's worse when they leave. Um, and it could create lasting impact. And then just, I think women have a unique situation too, because Over 50 percent of the women who go into prison go in as mothers. They, they leave and they were the primary caregiver of their children.
And so automatically that relationship is severed when they get into the prison and figuring out how do you keep contact. So there are some really unique challenges with women who are incarcerated.
Evan Rosa: I want to focus in on the fact that prisons exacerbate rather than solve problems. The fact that there's this complex web of issues, causes, factors, all sorts of elements that you need to factor for why a person ends up in prison.
And yet the prison system itself seems to fail at rehabilitation, seems to fail at any kind of restoration. It really is a form of like deep punishment for punishment's sake in so many ways. And that is a kind of telling scenario. So one, I'm wondering, does that track with your experience of listening to people on the inside and how once they enter, they enter along a continuum and they have to deal with the threat of prison continually thereafter?
Is this track?
Sarah Farmer: Absolutely. And I talked a lot about mobility as something before you enter in for closing the imagination of what one can be, but it's absolutely this idea around carcerality remains even when people are released and they are constantly trying to mobilize themselves against it, like trying to move away from the collateral consequences of being incarcerated.
Things like housing and employment and even some of the ideas around a person's own value and self worth because they feel like they can't get a job where they can contribute their, their best possible selves. All of these become really important, which then is not just a psychological thing, but it's also a very real, like, if you don't have a house to live in, how can you flourish if you don't have?
It's a means to buy food and pay bills. How do you live? How do you even say you can raise a child in that circumstance is when you, yeah, when you think about just these ideas around poverty can create intrigue and then poverty is there when people, you know, when women get out and, and then the burden of proof is on women who have been incarcerated.
even more so that they're worthy to prove that they could be a productive citizen in a society that has not given them the resources or the ability to really do that well.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. And so it really is a kind of mistaken story that we're, that to call it any kind of rehabilitation, any kind of restoration.
And in light of that, I'm wondering if you would comment on how education And in particular, theological education can invest in a more restorative, rehabilitative, and agency giving kind of project.
Sarah Farmer: Absolutely. So I think that so much of education is really about what we know and that we're valued for what we know.
And I think being in the prison, when I think about agency and about hope, it's really about being valued for who we become. And that education is about. who we become. And I think the, the clearest kind of insight for me in the prison was when people described hope. So much of their identity was stuck in what they had done or how people viewed them was stuck in what they had done.
They were trapped in, in their mistakes or trapped in, in their behaviors that got them incarcerated. And so when they talked about hope, hope was always. about being able to be who they are, but also become who they're supposed to be, the possibility of becoming more. And so when I think about theological education, I'm not just thinking about what I want my students to know and how much information I want to give.
That's important. But I'm also thinking about who I want them to be in society and creating the type of educational experience that allows them to, to try out, to rehearse where the classroom becomes a place where they can try and want to try out different ways of being, whether that's things like critical dialogue, whether that's modeling, being friend, friends across difference, whether or not that's being able to advocate.
How do our classroom become spaces where they can. Be and become. I also think about the experience of education sometimes can be competitive, especially depending on the institution you're in. Sometimes it can be isolating, especially if you don't come from a background where education was a norm in your family.
And so how does education not be a space of just competition, but also a space where there's collaboration and a communal encounter and connection where people can really encounter each other as human beings that has something valuable to teach. So the teacher isn't the only teacher in the classroom, but our lives become text in the classroom, which is prominent when you're teaching in the present classroom.
The students life become text. And then lastly is how do you, how does the classroom become a site where students can even practice kind of resistance and being able to advocate for the common good? And I think those are some of the ways that I think about theological education that I think being in a prison forces us to ask the question about what is the purpose of theological education?
Who are our students? And even in the classroom behind our institutional walls, is that the best place for theological education to take place?
Evan Rosa: I want to talk a little bit more about this and I know you explore it in chapter five of the book. The idea that it's an alternative and you say transgressive space, theological education as resistance to what is the norm of prison life.
And, and that it's a kind of way to. to break free in a very important way. And I think thinking about education in this way is, there's a lot of fascinating letters that we have, books that were written in prison, historically speaking, but I love this idea of theological education as a transgressive act for these prisoners.
I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about that.
Sarah Farmer: Every program does it different, but even when we talk to our students, we call them theologians. And so just this idea. That they could be a theologian, that they could participate in this critical way of thinking about the Bible was in and of itself a transgressive act.
It was interesting also just because some of the rules that the prison had, for instance, where you couldn't call people by their first name, you had to call them by their last name and being able to even. transgress that and say, no, we're going to call them theologians. That's going to be their identity.
So even, so just being able to live into a new identity, I think is transgressive. I think a lot of women in those spaces also was able to, just like when we go, other students come into a seminary space, they're able to question some of the kind of tacit assumptions that taken for granted ways in which they've been formed theologically that caused them to think about themselves and God.
And maybe sometimes very distorted ways. And so being in that space, in a community of learners, allowed them to grapple with some of their own theological assumptions, their embedded theology, and be able to name things differently. Name their own reality, but also reclaim a way of seeing themselves in a way of seeing God that was able to give them a sense of agency in the prison environment.
And we, some of the assignments we did, I think also invited women into that space. For instance, their final year was a year where they had to do a leadership project. And one of our women in the prison created a library, a theological library that was conceived to be used. After the project itself, that continued to serve as a resource for all of those in the prison that were taking the theology certificate, those are some of the ways that immediately come to mind.
Evan Rosa: You talk about this idea that it's, that hope seems more dangerous than living. And so you have this quote, and I'm coming from the preface, I'm wondering if you would read that quote.
Sarah Farmer: What happens to hope that seems more dangerous than living? It's just too difficult to hope, a student said. Hope is like a roller coaster for me.
With my parole hearing coming up and the recent medical news I received, I just cannot afford to hope.
Evan Rosa: I mean, that statement is just heartbreaking. And to listen to that and to hear that, it's also, I realized from my perspective, it's a privilege to call it merely hope, merely heartbreaking. From her perspective, it's a necessity.
And help me, but help the listener as well. Just understand. that sentiment that it's too difficult to hope. And how do you move on from that?
Sarah Farmer: This actually, this student said this to me in the context we had been, I had been teaching a class actually called Perspectives on Hope. And she was in the class and one day when I came in, I saw her and she was sitting somber.
It's very respectful, very, but you could tell she had a resolve. And she had told me she was just going to try out the class. I went and I asked her, was she going to continue in the class and she, this is what she said that it's just too difficult. She couldn't do it. And this was also within the timeframe that one of our students who was on death row, their hearing had come up, it was time for them to be sentenced and to go through with the process.
And for whatever reason, there were like three stays. Two or three stays on the execution. And so I was teaching this class on perspectives of hope during a time when there was literally a rollercoaster with one of the women who many of the people in our classrooms had really grown a respect. And so she wasn't the only student that dropped the class where we were supposed to be talking about perspectives of hope.
I think I had two other students drop the class and it was for similar reasons that. Life is already hard. You know, we all, we all wrestle with this desire, this capacity, this kind of the need to hope, right? But I think with women who are incarcerated, who have no control over so much of their lives, and literally, right?
Like, Things as simple as when they go to sleep and when they wake up, what they eat, what they, how they can play and can't play, how they can connect with people. To be in a situation where there is one thing after another kind of being they're confronted with and they have no control or feel like they are completely out of control.
I think for them to hope, it means that if their hope is disappointed or thwarted, it, it really could be. Like, death dealing, hoping can be death dealing.
Evan Rosa: In what sense then, can there be this restorative hope? Can you say more about how to help someone along through to that vision of restorative hope that you try to outline in the book?
Sarah Farmer: When I talk about restorative hope, I'm thinking of it as holistic in the sense that it's a way of seeing. It's a way of knowing, it's a way of being, and it's a way of doing that kind of leads to life giving possibilities. And when I talk about the ways in which hope is nurtured and sustained in a prison, there are three things that I talk about.
One is kind of identity reformation or being able to live into an authentic sense of self. The second is connection, and the third is resilience. And I want to focus. With this question on connection, because when I talk about hope, a lot of times when we think about hope is isolated, and it's privatized, and the notion of hope that I'm talking about is communal, and public and hope and help are connected.
And so just even the sense of us having a responsibility. for being with people in those spaces become really critical. And so one of the, one of the ways in which women describe the prison is as darkness, as just like utter darkness. I heard that so many times in my interviews. And when I asked one woman to, to describe hope, she drew a picture.
And in the picture, she just drew herself in a, in a circle of utter darkness. And then there was light from the outside. She talked about how hope for her was light. And that the reason why she knew there was a guy is because they, there had been some situations. Even within herself, but in that place where it was just utter darkness and the only way Hope could come in is through outside, something beyond herself.
And so when I think about just the ability to walk someone alongside, I think connection and the connection to self, others, and God is important, but also this idea of institutional connection where people's interpersonal relationships. And I think it's important for us to actually mobilize them to create possibilities for people who are either incarcerated or coming out who are returning citizens to get them jobs, to get them to help them have the things that poverty sometimes neglects or the things that system sometimes restricts and keeps, but other people in situations requires.
can sometimes mediate and help people in those very physical kind of practical ways. But also when I think about walking someone along, it's also about people being able to rewrite their future and rewrite their story. That being able to see that where they are now is not the final say, that life can be the final say, that possibility can be The final say in being able to help people imagine the ways in which that might happen for them amidst everything else that's going on, which can be challenging is also what I would say a responsibility of people who have the luxury of hoping without the kind of deep seated challenges that other people experience.
Evan Rosa: What I hear in that hope and help and the communal nature. of the hope that you describe. And it brings me, I do want to hear how womanist theology and, and those perspectives on, on inhabiting a particular, I love this phrase of this kind of mundane, the mundane art of surviving oppressive contexts that womanist theology can offer, which you really do need to think of prison as this kind of of course, dark and dangerous, mundane, that it's, it's almost extinguishing the idea of a light completely going out is there.
And yet I'm just curious how womanist theology has, has offered any resources for thinking through the kind of hope that you're putting on offer here.
Sarah Farmer: Absolutely. I think even, I think womanist theology helps us think about women's embodied experiences in prison and their voice and that their voice matters.
And when I think about Dolores Williams and her brilliance with Hagar, when she provides an exemplar with Hagar to help us ask new questions, I think those new questions are things that are also questions that help us reimagine the types of questions we should be asking when we think about prison. So for instance, Hagar was asking both about her life and her son's life.
So Dolores Williams, she highlights Hagar as a character. It really talks about her as a slave woman and it compares her to African American women. And so she really does re illustrate this narrative or re narrate this story that so many of us have learned. And many of us have learned to look at Hagar as an afterthought, but what Dolores Williams says is she centers.
Hagar and Hagar's narratives. And so in ways in which Black women are invisibilized, Williams then centers her narrative. And so when we think about just reimagining prison and how womanist theology would help us to reimagine prison, I think there are questions that Dolores Williams asks when she's talking about Hagar that I think are important for us to ask when we're thinking about prison.
For instance, Hagar was asking about both her and her son's life as a slave woman. She also wanted to know in very practical ways how she could continue to live. And so she wasn't just thinking about these ephemeral kind of things that's flighty in a way, but she was thinking about things like water.
How can I get water to survive this wilderness that I'm living in, which is, I think, another way you can think about prison as a wilderness. But there is also this story of being seen, where she is now seen so that the society that had tried to invisibilize her did not win because she was seen by God.
And so what does that mean for how we reimagine and rethink about prison? I think that processes and procedures in prison, if it was a womanist way of thinking, would be marked by healing and wholeness, not just for women in the prison system, but also for society in general, that voices are un muted, that bodies that have been criminalized and marginalized actually become part of us helping us to rethink the ways in which processes and procedures.
should be done. What would happen is people took serious the experiences of women who were at these prison tables as making decisions for women in, in ways that are completely not gender responsive. I think if women took the lead, they will also highlight well being and flourishing. Um, for self would just be just as important as care for others, which is another way I think I've seen women in the prison lean into.
A way of like resilience and a body that marginalized and isolated women exercising, women looking for communion and community in that space in ways that are very womanish, very sassy and very transgressive. Nancy Lynn Westbill talks about the gathering, the ways in which Black women have found ways to gather outside of being surveilled.
So we did that during slavery with the Hutch Harbors. And I think these spaces, you see this sort of agency happening inside the prison where women are creating these spaces despite the system. But I think these spaces would be, you know, it would be celebrated. So those are some of the things that I think of off the bat for womanish theology.
Evan Rosa: The idea of seeing the woman that would be invisibilized, that would otherwise be invisible Bringing a theological education into the prison space to be able to see those women and not just keep them in the margin, not keep them behind the darkness of a prison, but to be able to see them and to face the realities that they represent.
The kind of work of bringing that out into the open, out into a communal place and doing that as a transgressive. Active protest. That's a really beautiful thing. I wonder if you would close by, what do you hope people take from this book and the work that you've put into it and the stories that you've shared through it?
Sarah Farmer: I hope people leave knowing that hope is a luxury for some, and that hope is very complicated. And the ways in which women practice agency in those spaces is really complicated. So when I think about one particular story where I was about to teach and a woman was sitting outside crying, she wasn't actually one of my students, but I was trying to get her in the classroom because I knew if the guard came by, she would get in trouble for not being in the classroom.
So I said, just come into my classroom. And so I was talking to her and she was saying that She had to make a choice today about whether or not she would continue in the class and get a certificate of theological studies or if she would visit with her son during those times, so that she had, she had to make a choice.
As we think about education in the prison, That's flourishing, that's caring for yourself and your child for the future. But when you think about visitation, that's like a very real kind of in the moment you want to be present for your child now. And she had to make a decision between two impossible decisions.
She had to make a decision between two hard choices. And she ended up doing the visitation with her son. But sometimes women in the prison are making choices between two really impossible choices. Decisions. And so when we think about agency and when we think about hope, I want people to leave thinking about that type of context that is not black and white, but it's very nuanced and, and it really does require a sort of ability to move out and beyond these circumstances in order to, to survive and especially to flourish.
Evan Rosa: I think one of the lasting impressions your book has had on me is This idea of hope as movement and mobility is that even beginning to just go through those motions and the kind of gift that you gave those women in offering them an educational space, encouraging them, pushing them to move and to fight and to act, to find their agency.
That's really beautiful. I love that addition to the meaning of hope that you're offering in this book.
Sarah Farmer: Thank you.
Evan Rosa: So Sarah, thank you so much for Joining me on the show.
Sarah Farmer: Thank you.
Evan Rosa: Production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Sarah Farmer. Production assistance by Alexa Rallo. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith. yale. edu, where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources to help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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