The Deliverance of Hope is a guide to one of the most quietly radical acts a person can undertake: writing letters to someone on death row. Authors Wendy Ramage and Jeff Hood...veterans of this practice...don't sell it as charity work or activism. They call it what it is: a spiritual discipline that will cost you something, and give you far more than you expected.

Drawing on years of correspondence and the voices of people living under sentence of death, Ramage and Hood walk readers through the world of death row with unflinching honesty...the isolation, the time distortion, the spiritual violence of a system designed to make people disappear. They explore what it takes to show up consistently for another human being across concrete and razor wire: how to write, what to write, how to hold boundaries, how to sit with grief and helplessness, and how to keep going when the system interrupts.

This is not a book about saving anyone. It is a book about becoming more human...and about refusing, one letter at a time, to let the state have the last word.

The Deliverance of Hope is for anyone drawn to this work from any direction: faith, justice, loneliness, curiosity, or the stubborn sense that some things simply should not be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Your words can become a lifeline. This book shows you how to send them.

Dr. Wendy Ramage is the Dean of The Institute for Death Row Correspondence. She holds degrees in Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work and works as an empowerment life coach specializing in grief and life transitions. Her abolition work grows from a lifelong commitment to human dignity and ending the death penalty.

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a nationally recognized Old Catholic priest, public theologian, and author of over one hundred books, with media appearances ranging from NPR and CNN to Rolling Stone and GQ. He serves nationally as a death row spiritual advisor and has been present at more executions in more states than any other spiritual advisor in the country.