The Rev. Joseph B. Ingle, a Nobel prize nominee and 1968 St. Andrews grad will return to Laurinburg to read from his new book, The Inferno: A Southern Morality Tale.
The reading is 4 p.m. on Thursday at the Scotland County Memorial Library.
Ingle, a North Carolina native, said he “looks forward to returning to Laurinburg where I spent four of the most formative years of my life.”
The event is free and open to the public. During his 45-minute presentation, Ingle will offer a reading from The Inferno followed by a question and answer session. Seating is limited. Copies of The Inferno will be available for purchase at the event.
The Inferno chronicles the 25-year journey of death-row prisoner Philip Workman, and Workman’s multiple dates with the electric chair and lethal injection as well as the blatant injustice of his conviction despite ample evidence that he did not murder the police officer whom he was convicted of killing. Ingle was Workman’s spiritual adviser and knew him for 15 years prior to Workman’s execution in Tennessee in 2007.
According to Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, “A memoir such as this is wrenching for it raises fundamental questions about our moral fabric as a nation. What does it mean to kill people, in our names, who do not kill people and are not eligible for the death penalty? These and other questions are addressed in the book as the reader descends with Philip Workman into the Inferno. It is a journey, like Dante’s in the original Inferno, that will leave your soul transformed.”
Rev. Ingle founded the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons in 1974. Before it closed in the early 1990s, Rev. Ingle visited every death row in the South and counseled 200 of the 1,200 condemned inmates in the region.
A United Church of Christ Minister, Ingle also is the former director of the Neighborhood Justice Center, a victim-offender mediation group that operated in Nashville for 13 years.
“I’m grateful for the Scotland County library for hosting this event and I’m anticipating renewing old friendship and making some new ones through this visit,” Ingle said.
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