Beyond the Walls of Separation () von Tobias Brandner

Beyond the Walls of Separation is an essential and easy-to-read guidebook for chaplains and volunteers working in the context of prison, and for all those who are professionally or through family links related to those in prison. The book tells the story of what life behind bars is, and how inmates experience transformation through Christian faith: People at the crisis points of their life, where they are shattered, and where little is left of what made them, may experience life as fragile and as a transparent filter for the mysterious. Yet they also may experience God's life-giving presence. Love, expressed in forgiveness--against all odds, against all merits and previous experiences--lies at the root of many stories of transformation that emerge from prison.The book guides visitors to approach inmates without condescension, with an awareness of the social dimension of power and inequality, and with sensitivity to the suffering and alienation that individual prisoners experience. The many years of prison ministry in different cultural contexts and with inmates from all nations have taught the author that Christ does not need to be brought to prison through visitors, through evangelistic events, or through Christian outreach. He is already powerfully present in prison.

Tobias Brandner (PhD, University of Zurich, Switzerland) is a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church and of the Hong Kong Tsung Tsin Mission. For the past twenty years, he has been working in prisons in Europe and Asia--first in Switzerland and since 1997 in Hong Kong. He is also an Assistant Professor of Church History, Missiology, and Ecumenism at the Divinity School of Chung Chi College, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.