"The Incarcerated God"
Reflections on the 2025 Barth Conference from Kait Dugan
It has been a week since the 2025 Barth Conference “The Incarcerated God: Thinking with and beyond Barth on the Prison System” wrapped up. I am still processing everything that happened, but I wanted to write a few things about this unforgettable event before too much time passes.
I had two big goals for the conference: centering persons in the conversation who either are or were incarcerated and shaping the conference to be interdisciplinary to include activists and artists alongside theologians. Barth studies can often become abstract and scholastic, and I wanted to avoid objectifying those who are imprisoned. These are real people and real urgent issues we are discussing. I also wanted to include activists who are on the ground doing the hard, mundane, and daily work to struggle against a system that seems impossible to change. Even with these two things in mind, I also knew that theological reflection can only go so far to capture the complexities of incarceration. We need artistic expression to witness to the full reality of incarceration in ways that no academic paper could ever do.
These goals ultimately took various concrete forms throughout the four day event. To start, the entire conference was catered by three friends—David Lewis, Jarrette Atkins, and Fritz Georges—who were incarcerated together and started a catering business called Macrobites after they were released. They served nearly all the conference meals, and their flexibility in the midst of limited equipment to cook was truly admirable.
The eminent Dr. Benjamin Chavis, one of the original Wilmington Ten wrongfully convicted and sentenced to prison for crimes he did not commit, opened the conference on Sunday evening with powerful reflections.
On Monday, Shawn England, who was recently released from prison last year and a star graduate of the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI), gave an incredible response paper to his professor Dr. Todd Cioffi. Then Shawn led a powerful video discussion panel with four students currently enrolled in the CPI at Handlon State Prison in Michigan.
On Monday night, we hosted a documentary screening of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture’s film “Torture in Our Name” and three people from the New York and New Jersey political campaigns who worked tirelessly to outlaw long term solitary confinement in those states had a discussion with me on a panel afterwards—J. Amos Caley, Johnny Perez, and Anisah Sabur. Two of the panelists also are survivors of long term solitary confinement. Hearing just small parts of their stories will stay with me for the rest of my life.
On Tuesday, we asked an incarcerated journalist named Lyle C. May to call into the conference to give a response paper to Dr. Chris Boesel. Since 1999, Lyle has been currently on death row in North Carolina. He called into the session twice to offer his response and answer questions. My team and I prepared for this call for over a week, which even included a dress rehearsal. Our hope was that everything would go as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, nothing ever goes smoothly when you are working with the Department of Corrections. Somehow the technical difficulties and the automated messages during the call reminding us we were talking to someone in prison left a mark on everyone in the audience in ways we could not have planned for. I am not sure what it means when Christians call things “holy,” but it felt as close to it as I have ever experienced before as we pieced together two phones calls to hear Lyle’s powerful words.
Tuesday afternoon and evening, I partnered with Chesney Snow in the theater department at Princeton University to host the play “Count: Stories from America’s Death Row.” Chesney hired an assistant director, A.J. Khaw, to create the music, and he commissioned six broadway actors to Princeton for the performances. The characters these men played were fictional but their stories were real. The 7:00 PM show sold out, and we had to add chairs in the back (!) I looked around the room halfway through the evening show and was amazed to see so many people laughing, crying, and totally immersed in the humanity they were witnessing.
In between all of the above, there were amazing papers and a teaching series from wonderful scholars who have committed their lives to theological education in prisons—Todd Cioffi and Shawn England from the Calvin Prison Initiative at Calvin University, Chris Boesel from the Partnership for Religion and Education in Prisons Program (PREP) at Drew Theological School, Sarah Jobe and Douglas Campbell from the Prison Studies Program at Duke Divinity School, and Charles Atkins and Mark Edwards. I looked around many times during the conference with a bit of awe and gratitude to be in conversation with these incredible human beings who believe and confess with their lives that there is no place on earth that has been forsaken by God in Jesus Christ. The God we confess is found inside prisons.
I also worried nearly every day for weeks that I would not have enough funds to pay for the conference. There were so many parts of the conference to finance (including some very expensive and unexpected emergencies!). But I committed to making the conference as affordable as possible so anyone could attend regardless of their income or physical location. In the end, I was able to break even on costs. Thank you, thank you, thank you to our generous sponsors and partnering schools who made it possible to afford this conference!
Finally, perhaps my favorite part of the conference was its ethos: almost everyone engaged with Barth and his dogmatics, and there was deep appreciation both for his thought and life experience preaching in prison. But the conference was not really about Barth at the end of the day. No one was overly concerned with either proving they could read him right or show how wrong he was about this or that. The conference was about something so much more important than Karl Barth: the love and freedom God has given to those whom society has imprisoned. And I have to think Karl would be really proud of that.
I would be remiss if I did not give a huge public thank you to these five who helped make the entire conference possible: Shiori Zinnen, Yanan Melo, Gavin Chase, Hank Spaulding, and Isaac Sharp. Some of them worked with me for years to plan the conference. Thank you also to Izzy Rodriguez who joined us to help with parts of the event as well. I could not have pulled off this conference without them!
