The Writings of Jeff Hood : A Fifteen-Year Archive of Resistance
For approximately the past fifteen years, I have been engaged in a long, ongoing project of collecting, shaping, and publishing my written work. What began as scattered reflections…sermons delivered in churches, blog posts written in moments of urgency, letters exchanged in pastoral care, theological essays, public statements and personal journals…has gradually become something more structured and intentional.
That project is now known as The Writings of Jeff Hood.
This series is not simply a collection of books. It is, in many ways, an evolving archive of a life lived in motion: a record of faith wrestling with doubt, activism confronting injustice, pastoral care meeting human suffering face to face and theology being tested in the real world rather than in abstraction.
Across these volumes, you will find a consistent thread of engagement with questions that do not offer easy answers…questions about violence and nonviolence, religion and power, sexuality and faith, incarceration and the death penalty, hope and despair, and what it means to remain human in systems that often work to diminish humanity.
Each book represents a particular stretch of time, a particular set of experiences and a particular set of conversations. Taken individually, they stand on their own. Taken together, they form a kind of longitudinal narrative…an unfolding record of how thought, belief and witness develop over time under pressure.
The Writings of Jeff Hood #1 — The Queering of an American Evangelical: The Sermons, Statements, and Prayers of a Southern Baptist Minister
This volume collects sermons, statements, and prayers from Jeff Hood during his time as a Southern Baptist minister. It traces theological reflections formed within the tensions of evangelical tradition and an emerging queer identity, documenting a period of internal and institutional transition.
At this point in my life, I was still operating fully inside Southern Baptist structures while beginning to experience a widening gap between inherited theology and lived conviction. Much of this writing comes out of that fracture—preaching publicly while privately rethinking the boundaries of faith, identity, and belonging.
Rev. Jeff Hood is trying to figure out what following Jesus means.
https://www.amazon.com/Queering-American-Evangelical-Statements-Southern/dp/1532612532
The Writings of Jeff Hood #2 — The Year of the Queer: Thoughts, Blogs, Letters and Sermons, 2013–2014
This collection gathers thoughts, blogs, letters, and sermons written during 2013–2014, reflecting a year of sustained public theological engagement across multiple platforms and audiences.
My public voice became increasingly visible in this season, carried through digital writing, preaching, and correspondence. Attention and resistance both intensified as theological commitments moved further into public view, shaping a more defined identity at the intersection of activism, pastoral work, and emerging queer theology.
A theologian, historian and bioethicist by academic training, Rev. Jeff Hood is a graduate of Auburn University, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, the University of Alabama, Creighton University, and is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Ministry in Practical Theology at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. His ordination rests within the Southern Baptist Convention. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Jeff currently lives in Denton, Texas, where he serves as a pastor to persons in communities throughout the region.
https://www.amazon.com/Year-Queer-Thoughts-Letters-2013-2014/dp/1532612621
The Writings of Jeff Hood #3 — Love Remains: Prophetic Writings, 2014–2015
This volume gathers prophetic writings focused on love as a theological and ethical force within contexts of injustice, division, and struggle. It reflects a sustained engagement with public theology and moral urgency.
My work increasingly confronted systems of harm while attempting to articulate love as something active rather than sentimental. Much of the writing comes from pastoral encounters and public engagement where love had to be named in tension with conflict, not in spite of it.
The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a radical Baptist mystic, theologian and activist living and working in Texas.
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Remains-Prophetic-Writings-2014-2015/dp/1532612419
The Writings of Jeff Hood #4 — Manifestations of Violence: The 2015–2016 Writings
This collection examines violence in its social, political, and theological forms through writings produced between 2015 and 2016. It reflects on how violence is embedded in institutions, relationships, and cultural systems.
My attention increasingly turned toward violence not as exception but as structure—something woven into everyday life and institutional practice. Pastoral and public work demanded sustained engagement with harm as lived reality, shaping writing that resists abstraction and insists on naming what is often normalized.
From 2015 to 2016, the Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood-a radical theologian, activist, and vocal opponent of the death penalty-lived through and witnessed repeated manifestations of violence: state executions in Texas, police killings, hate crimes against marginalized communities, racial terror, and the everyday brutality of systemic oppression. In this unflinching collection of daily writings, short reflections, poems, prayers, and sermons, Hood confronts the intersections of death penalty abolition, queer theology, racial justice, LGBTQ+ liberation, and radical Christian love in the face of profound evil.
Spanning intense personal moments (including the birth of children amid chaos), public activism (rallies, vigils, and pilgrimages against executions), and theological provocations (from “The White Jesus is a Serial Killer” to queer reinterpretations of scripture and Christmas), these pieces document a turbulent era of American violence while calling readers to embody dangerous, liberating love.
Part of The Writings of Jeff Hood series, Manifestations of Violence: The 2015-2016 Writingsis a raw, prophetic testament to surviving-and resisting-in a world soaked in blood, offering hope through unapologetic queerness, mercy, and the refusal to kill. Ideal for readers interested in abolitionist theology, queer Christianity, social justice, and confronting the intersections of faith and systemic harm.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Manifestations%20of%20Violence%3A%20The%202015-2016%20Writings
The Writings of Jeff Hood #5 — I Disagree: A Sampling of Published Denouncements of Popular Opinions, 2011–2020
This volume compiles a decade of published writings focused on dissent, critique, and disagreement with dominant cultural and religious assumptions. It reflects a sustained practice of public theological resistance.
Across these years, I repeatedly found myself at odds with prevailing narratives in both religious and political spaces. This collection reflects that ongoing friction—an archive of refusal to accept consensus when it obscures moral or theological clarity.
Written over the course of a decade, these assorted dispatches recorded what was seen, felt, and refused in times of intellectual and social solitude. I Disagree collects those lonely moments — published essays and denouncements that took on football culture and white privilege, the violence hiding inside spiritual direction, the lie of calling, the death penalty, and the quiet machinery of injustice that runs beneath ordinary American life.
These are not think pieces. They are confrontations — with institutions, with comfortable religion, with a culture that has learned to look away. Short, direct, and deliberately unsettling, each essay asks the reader to sit with something they would rather avoid.
The Writings of Jeff Hood #6 — A Life in Writings: 2017–2019
This collection gathers writings from 2017–2019 spanning pastoral work, public theology, and personal reflection. It reflects a transitional period marked by sustained engagement across multiple communities and contexts.
These years were defined by constant overlap—between pastoral care, activism, and public writing. Responsibilities and relationships stretched across different settings, and the writing reflects a life lived in motion, where boundaries between roles became increasingly fluid.
A Life in Writings 2017-2019 collects the raw, unfiltered theological reflections, sermons, protest statements, and spiritual meditations of Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood – activist, abolitionist, and prophetic voice in contemporary Christianity.
From eulogies at the scene of police shootings to meditations on the Transgender Christ in Chelsea Manning, from furious condemnations of Confederate monuments and gun culture to tender encounters with the marginalized, these pieces refuse easy piety. Hood confronts white supremacy, state violence, border cruelty, mass incarceration, and the idolatry of nationalism with the fierce love of a Jesus who stands with the oppressed.
Written in the heat of Dallas-Fort Worth activism, during the rise of Black Lives Matter protests, the Trump presidency, and waves of police killings, this collection captures a theology born in the streets: one that declares God is found in the revolting, the imprisoned, the undocumented, the executed, and the silenced.
Blending personal vulnerability, scriptural fire, and uncompromising calls to embodied resistance, A Life in Writings 2017-2019 challenges readers to leave sanitized faith behind and meet the living Christ among the crucified of our time.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/A%20Life%20in%20Writings%3A%202017-2019
The Writings of Jeff Hood #7 — God is Sick: The 2020 Writings
This volume collects writings from 2020 shaped by global crisis and disruption. It reflects on faith, language, and meaning during a time of instability and widespread upheaval.
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped nearly every dimension of life and pastoral engagement. Writing emerged directly from grief, isolation, and systemic breakdown, as familiar theological language struggled to hold the weight of collective experience.
In the crucible of 2020—a year defined by pandemic, racial reckoning, political upheaval, and unrelenting violence—Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood confronted the raw manifestations of a suffering divine. God is Sick: The 2020 Writings collects his unflinching reflections, sermons, essays, and prophetic cries from that fateful period. From George Floyd’s final prayers to the Capitol insurrection condemned from the grave of Officer Brian Sicknick, from COVID-19’s assault on the vulnerable to defiant stands for religious liberty and disability justice, Hood wrestles with a God who is intimately wounded by human cruelty.
Drawing on radical theology, queer perspectives, abolitionist fervor, and mystical Baptist roots, these writings challenge white Christianity’s complicity, question slogans in times of crisis, and proclaim a love that refuses to be contained by empire or death. Hood’s voice—fierce, vulnerable, and unapologetically prophetic—invites readers to see God not as distant or triumphant, but as sick with the world’s pain, yet rising in resurrection hope.
Part of The Writings of Jeff Hood series, this volume captures a theologian and activist at the edge of despair and faith. For anyone grappling with justice, faith, and survival in chaotic times, these words matter.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/God%20is%20Sick%3A%20The%202020%20Writings
The Writings of Jeff Hood #8 — Scribblings from Solitude: Writings from 2021
This volume gathers writings from 2021 produced in a context of solitude and reflection. It reflects a quieter, more interior mode of theological and personal writing.
Public-facing engagement receded, giving way to slower rhythms of thought, processing, and reflection. The work from this time carries a more internal tone, shaped by distance from constant external demand and a renewed attentiveness to interior life.
Scribblings from Solitude: Writings from 2021 invites readers into the raw, unflinching mind of Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood-a radical theologian, activist, and prophetic voice confronting the darkness and light of a tumultuous year.
Spanning January to December 2021, this collection of essays, meditations, and theological provocations emerges from a season of isolation and intense reflection. Hood wrestles with nonconsensual touching in schools, vaccine ethics, police violence, the resurrection of George Floyd as incarnation, abolitionist love, queer faith, the crosses of liberation, and the embodiment of Christmas amid suffering. From the self-immolation of Rev. Charles Moore to critiques of missions, racism, and dehumanizing slogans, these writings refuse easy answers, blending mysticism, heresy, and fierce compassion.
Part of The Writings of Jeff Hood series, this volume captures a theologian who dares to see Christ in the marginalized, the condemned, and the forgotten-calling readers to embody love in a world of tragedy and resistance. Whether exploring eschatology in perilous times or envisioning a heaven without hell, Hood’s voice is unapologetically bold, deeply personal, and relentlessly hopeful.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Scribblings%20from%20Solitude%3A%20Writings%20from%202021
The Writings of Jeff Hood #9 — The Penalty is Death: The 2022 Writings
This collection focuses on capital punishment and the ethics of state-sanctioned death, bringing together writings produced in 2022 that engage directly with death penalty systems and justice structures.
Engagement with death row accompaniment deepened significantly, bringing sustained proximity to individuals facing execution. The writing reflects lived encounter with state violence and the emotional, ethical realities of witnessing those processes over time.
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.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/The%20Penalty%20is%20Death%3A%20The%202022%20Writings
The Writings of Jeff Hood #10 — Witness to Death: The 2023 Writings
This volume continues engagement with capital punishment, focusing on themes of witness, accompaniment, and moral presence within systems of execution.
Work centered heavily on presence alongside individuals on death row and the ongoing demands of witnessing in that context. The writing reflects accumulated experience and the ways sustained proximity to death reshapes theological language and ethical imagination.
Witness to Death: The 2023 Writings is the account of a year spent inside the execution chamber. Jeff Hood — theologian, abolitionist, and Old Catholic priest — witnessed four executions in 2023: Scott Eizember, Arthur Brown, Anthony Sanchez, and Casey McWhorter. This book is the record of what it cost.
Hood opens the year suing the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for barring him from the chamber with Eizember, and closes it preparing to witness Alabama’s first nitrogen hypoxia execution of Kenneth Smith — filing another lawsuit to secure Smith’s religious liberty before the state can proceed. Between those bookends is a year of clemency letters, press releases, federal complaints, lamentations, and theological reckoning written in real time, often hours before a man dies. Hood does not smooth the edges. He documents the legal fights, the institutional indifference, the moments of grace inside the worst rooms in America.
But Witness to Death is also a book about what witnessing does to the witness. Hood writes with the plainness of someone who has run out of distance from the thing he is describing. The condemned are not abstractions here — they are men he has prayed with, argued with, anointed. This is the literature of proximity, written at the exact place where theology, law, and death converge.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Witness%20to%20Death%3A%20The%202023%20Writings
The Writings of Jeff Hood #11 — Executing Hope: The 2024 Writings
This collection explores the tension between hope and systems of punishment, control, and despair. It reflects on how hope persists under conditions that repeatedly challenge its sustainability.
Long-term engagement with death row accompaniment and abolitionist work continues to shape this writing. The tension between endurance and exhaustion becomes more pronounced, as hope is tested within environments structured by loss and institutional violence.
Executing Hope: The 2024 Writings is a powerful and unflinching collection from Jeff Hood, offering a rare, firsthand look into the realities of death row, execution chambers, and the moral struggle surrounding capital punishment in America. Written from the front lines of ministry and activism, these essays, reflections, and parables chronicle a year marked by historic executions, including the controversial use of nitrogen hypoxia, and the human lives caught in their wake.
Blending theology, social justice, and deeply personal narrative, Hood brings readers inside prison walls and into the final moments of those facing execution. As a spiritual advisor to condemned prisoners, he bears witness not only to death, but to faith, fear, resistance, and the enduring search for dignity. His writing challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about justice, morality, and the value of human life.
Through prophetic voice and pastoral care, Executing Hope wrestles with some of the most urgent ethical questions of our time.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Executing%20Hope%3A%20The%202024%20Writings
The Writings of Jeff Hood #12 — The Suffocation of Hope: The 2025 Writings
This most recent volume gathers writings focused on the pressure placed on hope under sustained injustice and violence. It explores how hope can be constrained and strained while still remaining present in fragile and persistent forms.
Years of continued engagement with incarceration and execution systems inform this collection. The writing reflects accumulated witness—where hope is no longer abstract but something continually pressured, tested, and quietly sustained through persistence.
In The Suffocation of Hope, Jeff Hood delivers a searing, unfiltered account of a year spent confronting the brutal realities of the American death penalty. These writings are not distant reflections or abstract arguments—they are eyewitness testimony. They are born from execution chambers, prison cells, and the sacred, often unbearable space between justice and mercy.
Through a powerful blend of narrative, theology, and prophetic resistance, Hood invites readers into a world most never see. A world where human beings are strapped to gurneys. Where new methods of execution—like nitrogen hypoxia—are refined. Where the line between law and morality begins to collapse.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/The%20Suffocation%20of%20Hope%3A%20The%202025%20Writings
Taken together, these twelve volumes trace an arc of writing shaped by faith, critique, accompaniment and lived engagement with systems of power and suffering. Each book stands alone, but together they form a continuous journal of witness…one that spans years of change, confrontation, and reflection.
Over time, this body of work has become more than publication. It has become a kind of ongoing testimony. These writings do not attempt to stand outside the world they describe; instead, they are embedded within it.
If there is a unifying thread across the series, it is the insistence that theology cannot be separated from lived experience. Faith, in these pages, is tested in encounter, refined in struggle, and reshaped by suffering.
For those who have followed this work over the years, this series offers a consolidated archive. For those encountering it for the first time, it offers an entry point into a sustained conversation about hope, violence, love, justice and the human condition.
All volumes in The Writings of Jeff Hood are now available in print and digital formats.
With God’s help, more volumes will be added to the collection in the years to come.
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