The Penalty is Death: The 2022 Writings is a year lived inside the machinery of state killing. Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood - theologian, abolitionist, and death row spiritual advisor - writes from the edge of the execution chamber, tracking the cases of Carl Buntion, Melissa Lucio, Kosoul Chanthakoummane, Anthony Sanchez, Benjamin Cole, Scott Eizember, and others as their execution dates approach, arrive, and pass. These are dispatches written under pressure: clemency letters, lamentations, open letters to governors, reflections composed hours before a man dies.
But The Penalty is Death is more than advocacy journalism. Hood moves between the execution chamber and the theological imagination, tracing what state killing does to the soul of a nation - and to his own. Woven through the urgency of individual cases are meditations on incarnation, doubt, forgiveness, and the weight of a dead man's belongings. His seven-part dialogue with Ohio death row philosopher Keith LaMar on a concise theology of love stands alongside open confrontations with Catholic indifference, Christian nationalism, and the abolitionist movement's own failures of honesty. The penalty, Hood insists, is always death - not only for the condemned, but for the society that kills them.
