Lawrence Wright with Preet Bharara: Redemption

Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright returns with a stunning reflection on American spirituality and capital punishment — and his new book, Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row, the true story of the unlikely alliance between a group of Waco nuns and capital punishment in Texas.

In 2014, when Deacon Ronnie Lastovica visited a women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas to give communion to seven women awaiting execution, he was profoundly moved by the encounter, vowing to return to help the inmates. He turned to the Sisters of Mary Morning Star for help — a contemplative cloister of nuns from Waco whose lives of silence, prayer, and enclosure seemed worlds away from the death row unit. Yet over time, these two groups of women formed a profound spiritual alliance built on trust, confession, companionship, and the fraught hope for grace — and a powerful sense that their lives were uncanny mirror images.

Laying bare the daily lives and histories of the condemned women in Gatesville, the nuns who forged an unbreakable bond of sisterhood with them, and the unethical police practices and forensic methods that cast doubt on the prisoners’ guilt, Lawrence Wright delivers an account as intimate and haunting as his modern classic, The Looming Tower — a deeply reported critique of the American criminal justice system and a poignant vision of faith and solidarity.

Don’t miss an unforgettable conversation with one of America’s great journalists, in conversation with former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara — on crime and punishment, faith and forgiveness, and what redemption can mean in America.

“This unlikely story of a group of nuns in rural Texas ministering to seven women on death row is both captivating and inspiring.” — John Grisham