Prisons shaped early Christian history. Set Free: Early Christians, Prisons, and the Struggle for Community is a call to action, urging readers to wrestle seriously with Christ's claim to free the captives. Through critical interpretation of biblical and early Christian texts, Arminta Fox argues that prisons haunted early Christ communities, shaping them in profound ways and leaving lasting legacies. Awareness of early Christianity's carceral contexts raises important ethical questions about how followers of Christ today should engage carceral systems that continue to perpetuate oppressive power dynamics.
Employing a critical carceral-studies lens, Fox pairs stories from ancient and modern prisons, arguing that imprisonment functions similarly in the first and twenty-first centuries to control people through terror and violence. Due to their gender, ethnicity, or status, certain people were under greater threat in ancient prisons and through carceral violence, as they are today. Using published stories of modern inmates, Fox shows that for far too many people, the carceral system remains inhumane in our own time.
The result is a nuanced critical analysis that will urge a radical rethinking of Christianity's complicity in human caging, investigating the limits of forgiveness, redemption, and life in community.
