Research & Writing

My research and writing explore the religious dimensions of whiteness, private property, and mass criminalization, and elucidate religious resources for a world beyond white supremacist, capitalist, and carceral systems.

My first book, White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization, will be published by NYU Press in its Religion and Social Transformation series in August 2024. The book develops an account of the criminalization of Black and economically dispossessed peoples as a religious project that serves and protects the pseudo-sacred social order of patriarchal whiteness and private property by exiling those who trespass against it to carceral hell.

My essay “Is, Was, and is to Come: Freedom Dreamworld Dispatches” appears in the edited volume Spirituality and Abolition (Common Notions Press, 2023).

In addition to these recent and forthcoming publications, I have also published essays and articles for both academic and lay audiences on a range of subjects including: political theologies of whiteness; political theologies of racial justice and economic democracy; embodied spiritualities on death row; Christian ethical orientations to the prison industrial complex; Christian faith and police accountability; and the spiritual dimensions of community organizing.

I have also facilitated and co-authored publications and collaborative reports on the criminalization of homelessness, racial profiling in police traffic stops and searches, and public funding for police and jails that eclipses spending on the public goods that actually create safe and thriving communities (2020, 2021).