Review: Texas women on death row walk the road to Redemption with a community of nuns

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Set us as preferred Book ReviewRedemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death RowBy Lawrence WrightKnopf: 272 pages; $35If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright’s latest nonfiction narrative, “Redemption,” begins with an intriguing, real-life premise: an unlikely series of encounters between seven female convicts on Texas’ death row and a convent of nuns.A Catholic prison deacon, Ronnie Lastovica, orchestrated the meetings because he saw commonalities between the two groups.Both were leading unconventional, isolated lives and relied on faith for solace, even joy.The results of these encounters were surprising.

“They ministered to us,” the initially reluctant nuns told Lastovica.The benefits were mutual.

Before the arrival of the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, the death row inmates had been plagued by petty infighting.The nuns modeled how to create a sustaining, supportive community.The Pulitzer Prize-winning Wright (“The Looming Tower,” “Going Clear”) gained extraordinary access to the Gatesville, Texas, prison, its residents and the visiting nuns, based near Waco, for a 2025 New Yorker article.

But in expanding that lengthy article into a book, he sometimes loses the thread, indulging in digressions that detract from his study of transformation and redemption.The digressions include the author’s own struggles with religious faith, references to the siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco and the mass suicide of Jim Jones’ followers at Jonestown, and an exploration of the case of a Methodist minister accused of strangling his wife.Often we don’t know quite where Wright’s narrative is going, or why.To illuminate the plight of the condemned women, Wright explores not j...