The God we know in Jesus is peculiar in the ways he identifies with prisoners-not only promising to be present to those who visit the incarcerated, but also facing charges, a trial, and execution at the hands of the state himself. No Godforsaken Place is an invitation to know God better by drawing near to those who experience incarceration. Jobe has not simply written a book about prison chaplaincy; she has given us a revelation of how the experience of entering prison can help you know the Creator of all things, seen and unseen.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, USA

Every once in a great while, a book is written that changes the scaffolding of a discipline. Jobe's No Godforsaken Place changes the scaffoldings of more than one. Her ethnography of prison chaplains is the first-of-its-kind, setting the agenda for the next decade of chaplaincy training. Her reading of Barth's justice-involved history reframes the theological significance of his judicial metaphors and turns tired stereotypes of his method on their heads. Jobe's fearless entry into the roiling waters of soteriology takes one's breath away. These are depths into which practical theologians rarely tread. Her centering of the carceral as the place from which God enacts the salvation of the cosmos gifts chaplains with an unflinching practical theology of atonement, and through the lives and deaths of imprisoned persons, she reintroduces the church to its incarcerated Savior. No Godforsaken Place names the horrors of carceral death, but more courageously, it inhabits the costly possibility of resurrection. It is a book that will change its readers, and in so doing, change the church.

Jerusha Matsen Neal, Duke Divinity School, USA

This passionate reading of Barth reunites the revolutionary of Romans, at odds with the German state, with the master constructor of doctrine, at the center of the Dogmatics. That is because Barth (despite claims that he stood above human experience) was able to marshal his own criminal prosecution to show Jesus as the Judge judged in our place. A deep book for difficult times.

Eugene F. Rogers, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA

This is a powerful and deeply insightful exploration of chaplaincy in prisons informed by an unprecedented set of interlocking insights. Prison chaplaincy is explored with the first in-depth ethnography ever undertaken of that constituency; the challenges and courage of the lives of chaplains are revealed with searing honesty, especially as they have traversed a terrain devastated by COVID (and the author knows this terrain very well indeed). But, in addition, Karl Barth's insights are pressed into this fraught space throughout to support and illuminate chaplains' struggles, and his own experiences of incarceration, both in Germany and in Switzerland, receive in turn, as a result, new depth and salience. The result is an utterly brilliant piece of work by a rising star.

Douglas A. Campbell, Duke University, USA