Peggy Orenstein has spent much of her journalism career exploring the cultural forces that shape girlhood, revealing her insights in bestsellers such as Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Schoolgirls. But during her last book tour, she says, parents repeatedly asked her about boys. She realized she “needed to have the other half of the conversation.”

So for two years, Orenstein traveled across the country, interviewing 100 boys between the ages of 16 and 22. 

While her work on girls has focused on the problematic disconnect they have with their bodies, Orenstein says her talks with young men illustrated “how boys are disconnected from their hearts, and how that affects their romantic relationships and sexual encounters.”

Her resulting book, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity, examines relationships, consent, and a wide array of other issues related to boys’ emotional lives. And although her interviews began before Me Too, the movement only highlighted the urgency of these conversations.  

Vox talked with Orenstein about how boys learn to dismiss girls’ feelings, the dangers of internalizing ideas about traditional masculinity, and more. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese

You spent most of your career interviewing girls. How did that work inform your conversations with boys?

Peggy Orenstein

My early interviews were a disaster. I would portray shock or surprise or, inadvertently, my face would look really judgmental. And then the girls would ghost me, and I would never hear from them again. They would never answer my texts. It was like they were done. 

I thought, “Okay, I am doing something really wrong here.” I had to learn how to approach these issues — because it’s not like I was born being able to ask you about your last blow job without flinching. I needed to give them permission in the sense of, “You can say anything and use any language,” and by being curious about what their experience was and how they were reckoning with it, in a nonjudgmental way.

Hope Reese

In your conversations with boys, you say they were “eager and raw and blunt.” Why were they so open, and why did this surprise you?

Peggy Orenstein

The thing is, nobody’s talking to the boys in their lives. Their parents aren’t talking to them. Most schools aren’t doing any kind of sex education — and if they are, it’s just about risk and danger, contraception and STDs.

My biggest concern was that I would have whole transcripts of “Uh-huh.” I was surprised because we don’t think of boys as having a lot of insight into their interior lives or being able to narrate their experience. We assume that boys won’t talk. And they have learned not to, in a lot of ways. But just saying, “I want to hear from you,” in an open, nonjudgmental way opened the floodgates.

One of the things that was deeply surprising was that they could see the systems that they were caught in, that they were concerned about, and that were disadvantaging their partners. So it was not just that they talked, but the level of insight they had. 

Hope Reese

Feminism has opened up possibilities for what it means to be a woman. What’s new about what it means to be a man?

Peggy Orenstein

There is a lot that has changed for young men. Obviously, they’re engaging in the conversation about consent. Obviously, they see women and girls as deserving of their place in the classroom, or in leadership, or on the playing field of professional and educational opportunities. Nobody is going to say, “Girls don’t belong in college,” or something like that, anymore. 

At the same time, when I asked them about the ideal guy, it was like they were channeling 1955. The conventional values like dominance, aggression, wealth, athleticism, sexual conquest — and, particularly, emotional suppression — came roaring back to the fore.

In some ways, those have actually grown more entrenched. I actually saw a similar dynamic when I was first writing about girls: We were telling them, on one hand, to stand up, speak out, claim your power, all these things. This was in the early ’90s, yet we hadn’t really stopped telling them in a kind of deeper cultural way, in a more entrenched way, that they should see themselves as about their appearance and that they should be more deferential. The contradictions between the new and the old were creating such tension and conflict within them.

I feel like that’s where we are right now with boys. They’re getting a profoundly mixed message that is simultaneously more egalitarian and in some ways more restrictive than ever before. 

Boys will say that the source of those restrictive messages are their parents — particularly their fathers. They would say, “My dad said to man up or not be a little bitch.” More of them would say things like, “My dad was not homophobic or sexist. I didn’t learn toxic masculinity from him, but I did learn the emotionally stunted side of masculinity. He was more of a kind of ‘sigh and walk away’ kind of a guy than the kind who would ask you what was going on. And I learned to not have those conversations from him.” 

Hope Reese

You’ve said that rigid masculine norms — such as dominance, aggression, wealth, athleticism, sexual conquest, and emotional suppression — are super-harmful to guys. 

Peggy Orenstein

Boys cling to those norms. Why? Well, you know, they get rewarded for them. You can see in the culture — we have a president who is pretty darn rewarded for clinging to those norms right now — but those norms come at a tremendous cost. 

As our culture has opened up to women, professionally and educationally, certain kinds of misogyny and sexism — particularly those that happen behind closed doors — have grown more entrenched. [Boys] are at risk of engaging in violence, of violence being done to them, of binge drinking, car accidents, self-harm, suicide, depression. They have fewer friends. They’re lonelier. I mean, it’s really not a pretty sight.

Boys wrestle with the taboo of vulnerability — either rejecting it, embracing it, denying it, or capitulating to it. When we cut people off from their ability to acknowledge, recognize, and express emotion, and particularly vulnerability, we not only undermine their basic humanity but we take away the thing that is essential.

Brené Brown says that emotional vulnerability is the secret sauce that holds relationships together. When we deny boys’ capacity for that and cut them off from it, we harm their ability to attain and sustain the kind of relationships that we want them to have. It results in a lot of negative behavior. It also hurts their romantic relationships, and then that is reinforced by the culture of conquest that we keep seeing in the media, and in porn, and in hookup culture.

Hope Reese

When boys are vulnerable, it’s often with women — their girlfriends, mothers, sisters — but you argue that it’s a problem that they aren’t being vulnerable with other guys or with their fathers.

Peggy Orenstein

For mothers, it can feel really sweet and really good seeing your boy express vulnerability. But if we’re not careful about helping boys process their own emotions, rather than processing their feeling for them, and feeling for them, we reinforce the idea that women are there to do male emotional labor. That can feel really good when you’re talking to your son, your little boy, or your teenage boy. But I think most women can attest that it feels a lot less good when you’re in an adult relationship.

Why aren’t they being vulnerable with guys? Because men learn not to be vulnerable with one another.

Basically, as boys grow up, the only emotion that is validated for them is happiness or anger. The whole bucket of emotions that involves sadness or betrayal or despair gets funneled into anger. One of the things that we can do with little boys is to actually label their feelings and say, “It seems like you’re really sad,” or “That must be very frustrating,” to give them a broader emotional range. 

Hope Reese

Boys learn early on to dismiss girls’ feelings. How does that happen? And do they dismiss their own feelings, too?

Peggy Orenstein

Part of how American boys learn to define masculinity is as adversarial toward femininity. They learn from the kind of incessant bombardment of images from the media and from their own friends about male sexual entitlement and female sexual availability. When you’re hanging out in the locker room, how are you supposed to talk? The way that guys bond and prove their heterosexuality is through bragging about control of women’s bodies. So how do they talk about sex? They don’t talk about it as this even pleasurable experience. They say, “I banged, I pounded, I hammered, I nailed, I hit that, I tapped that.” It’s like they went to a construction site, not like they engaged in an act of intimacy.

The boys that I talked with, it’s not like they were cool with that. They weren’t just blank slates that the culture was inscribing upon. They wrestled with how to both exist in that culture and resist that culture, and it really wasn’t easy. Just a couple of nights ago, a Division One athlete came up to me at a book event and said, “I am really struggling with the locker room talk issue. I don’t know where my personal responsibility lies. I don’t know when to step in.”

You’re supposed to be on a team with these guys and work as a unit. But if you’re challenging the guys in the locker room, you’re breaking that cohesion down. What happens is that they often fall silent — and in that silence, we see so much about how boys become men. All in what they don’t say, they can’t say, they won’t say. That’s dangerous for them to say even, physically. 

Hope Reese

One deeply engrained assumption about men is that they can have casual sex more easily than women. Did you find this to be true?

Peggy Orenstein

In hookup culture, so little of that experience is about having good sex, because that’s genuinely not where that happens. It’s about status-seeking: the story that you’re going to tell afterward to your guys. So maybe you’re going to be more dominating, maybe you’re going to push. But what surprised me was how often boys said that it wasn’t that fun for them, either. They struggled with their own disappointment, with frustration and ambivalence around what that hookup culture meant. 

One second-semester freshman in college said his hookups felt like two people having really distinct experiences. There wasn’t a lot of eye contact. Not a lot of conversation. It’s like you’re acting vulnerable, but you’re not being vulnerable, with somebody you don’t know very well or care very much about. He said it’s odd, and it’s not really any fun.

Lots of guys wanted something more connected — or even had it and would talk about their partners with great love and regard — but they tended to see that as more of a personal quirk than an aspect of humanity.

The idea that guys are always “down for it” could mask that a lot of boys actually had unwanted sex. When they told me about it, it took me a while to hear that, I will be honest. That was a bias of mine. When a guy was 14 and a senior girl took him into the other room at a party and gave him a blow job, he didn’t want that. But he said he didn’t want to be made fun of. What do you call that when that happens? What do you do with that experience?

Hope Reese is a writer based in Louisville, Kentucky, currently living in Budapest. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, and Vice.

PORT ROYAL, Kentucky — Wendell Berry doesn’t like screens. The 85-year-old writer doesn’t own a TV, computer, or cellphone. If you call the landline at his country home in Port Royal, you won’t reach an answering machine. When he reads this profile, it will be because someone else printed it out. And, if his general approach to life is any indication, he will probably take his time.

It’s virtually impossible to imagine life in the modern world without our technological accessories, but Berry has consistently presented this spartan circumstance as a compelling proposition: An unplugged life, rooted in nature, he has argued, is the key to fulfillment. 

As urban farms and tiny homes and movements to unplug proliferate, it’s clear that Wendell Berry is, once again, ahead of us.

Perhaps most known for his 1977 bestselling book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the writer and farmer has served as a moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture, and the dissolution of rural communities. Now, as we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and grapple with deep polarization, his impassioned arguments on subjects ranging from industrial farming to technology have taken on a new urgency.

He has insisted on individual responsibility: Indeed, Berry contends climate change advocates don’t go far enough and that “the origin of climate change is human laziness” — a view now widely adopted by those who would ban straws and limit their air travel.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Berry has also anointed himself a defender of rural Americans. As a never-ending flood of articles, think pieces, and analyses have attempted to understand how Trump was elected, placing the blame squarely on people living in the Midwest, South, and particularly those far from urban centers, Berry has called attention to the stereotyping of rural residents and the economic distresses these areas have endured.

In a 2017 letter he wrote to the New York Review of Books, Berry called an article’s characterization of the “southernization” of rural Americans — presumably making them sexist, racist, and increasingly uneducated — as “provincial, uninformed, and irresponsible.” Instead of continuing to ignore their plight, Berry suggests, we ought to acknowledge the plundering of these rural regions by their urban neighbors. “Rural America is a colony,” Berry wrote, “and its economy is a colonial economy.”

The writer and activist Michael Pollan — who was greatly influenced by Berry — suggests that Berry remains a singular sort of truth-teller.  

The Unsettling of America, which rang the alarm bell about the future of farming, was “prescient,” Pollan says, forewarning “the industrialization of farming: what it was going to do with farmers, what it was going to do with the land, and what it was going to do to rural communities, which was wreck them.”

“How many voices do we have like this?” Pollan asks. “True rural voices that can speak to those in the cities?” 

Seven generations of farmers

If you ask the average person in Kentucky what he or she knows about Berry, those who have heard of him will tell you he’s a poet, or novelist, activist, environmentalist, or farmer. The truth is that Berry is a Renaissance man, skilled at all of it. 

He has lived on Lanes Landing Farm in Port Royal for more than half a century, since he left behind a budding career as a New York academic. But Berry, the author of more than 40 books, is well regarded far beyond the rolling hills of his home state. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him with the National Humanities Medal. In 2015, he was the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. In May, a boxed set of his work was published by the Library of America — making him one of only two living writers to have received the honor.

All of that time, he’s devoted himself to Lanes Landing, to nurturing the land, maintaining close relationships with friends and family, and crafting ideas about how best to sustain the earth and community there. 

Berry rarely grants interviews, and the only way he wanted to be reached, initially, was through handwritten letters. I began writing to him in March, and though he responded each time, he kept me at arm’s length, wanting to know more about my intentions before committing to meet or talk to me. Months passed before he relented, and when he did, he joked on the phone that I could tell my editor he was a grumpy old man. 

Berry and I finally settled in the living room of his cozy home on a sunny summer morning. The built-in shelves that surrounded us were stacked with books, from dictionaries to history books to Ann Patchett novels. He sat across from me in a rocking chair, arms crossed, wearing khakis with some minor paint stains and a button-down shirt with a small notebook peeking out of the front pocket. On his feet, he wore black socks and sandals. 

Outside the open window to my right, past the front porch, was a leafy landscape with the Kentucky River in the distance. Berry is breeding rams for several friends who have sheep flocks and has a dozen yearling ewes (one of whom I met on my walk up to the farmhouse) that he raised for his neighbor. The menagerie Berry once cared for has become “much diminished,” he says, because he doesn’t have the strength for more. 

Berry was born not far from here in 1934 in New Castle, Kentucky, but his family has lived in Port Royal for years. They were a family of farmers, seven generations of them: His father was a lawyer and farmer. Berry was a contrarian from an early age, joking to his well-educated dad that he wanted to become a bootlegger. Instead, Berry attended a military high school; he “waged four years there in sustained rebellion against everything the place stood for, paying the cost both necessarily and willingly,” he wrote in his first essay collection, The Long-Legged House.  

Port Royal (current population: 64) has changed radically. When his mother was young, Berry says, the town had 16 businesses. During his own childhood, there were 12. Rick’s Farm Center — a local farm-supply store with a small eatery featuring a lunch special for $5.75 when I visited — is currently the only enterprise, excluding the post office.

Nearly every weekday, Berry or his wife, Tanya, will stop by his P.O. box. The retail hours of the post office are just 10:30 am to noon, but Berry, a prolific letter writer, is a frequent patron. (The mail route in Port Royal offers service on Berry’s road but, like most conveniences, he doesn’t use it. “We want to support the local post office,” Berry explains. “We need that post office.”)

Here, in Kentucky, he has seen industry — coal, for example, once one of the state’s biggest employers — fleece the land and the people, sowing resentment. “The idea that rural and urban America describe two economies, one thriving and the other failing, is preposterous,” he tells me. “We’re joined by one economy. And it’s a one-way economy — the sucking and the digging is out here. The delivery is in the city. They’re prospering because they’re plundering their own country.” 

The resulting slow bleed of life and self-sufficiency from small towns alarms the author. When Berry was growing up, many people worked at local farms or businesses. Today, nearly everyone is a commuter, working under a boss, and the small farms he remembers have largely vanished. “It’s a very significant change,” Berry says, “from self-employed to employee.”

Recognizing the problem of keeping people living and working in small communities like Port Royal, Berry’s daughter, Mary, founded the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, in 2011. It is a nonprofit with the goal of strengthening the bond between small farmers and the urban communities they serve. Mary says she hoped she could help “give people who want to farm something to come home to.”

Berry’s granddaughter, Virginia Aguilar, directs the agrarian cultural center and bookstore at the Berry Center. “There is a lot working against young people having a connection with place,” she says. “There’s the language of upward mobility — that if you have a good mind, you’ll take your talents elsewhere.” Even Aguilar, with a commitment to her hometown, had a difficult time acquiring land in Henry County.

Those who still farm here, Berry tells me later, need to support it through non-farming jobs, such as working in steel and chemical factories along the Ohio River, construction jobs in Louisville, or at the state penitentiary in nearby La Grange.

“People come out here in the summertime, and it looks pretty and they say how beautiful it is,” he says. “But you could drive from Shelbyville to New Castle through some of the best grazing land in the world and I bet you won’t find a single farm with a kitchen garden or a family milk cow or a flock of chickens. They may be spending the night out there. But they’re not living from the country. Which means, in a certain profound way, they’re not living in the country.

“This little community that used to be coherent, sufficient to itself,” he says, “is a bedroom community where people come to sleep and watch TV.” 

Leaving New York City

Berry himself was once lured away by the promises of urban life. After graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1957, Berry landed a fellowship at Stanford University, followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a job teaching English at New York University. 

In 1964, Berry lived in what many considered the intellectual and cultural epicenter of America: Greenwich Village. But against the advice of his colleagues, he decided to leave his position in New York after only two years. He loaded everything he and Tanya owned into a Volkswagen Beetle and headed west toward Kentucky. 

Despite his colleagues’ warnings, Berry insists that life in the country has been intellectually fulfilling. “People come down and say, ‘Who do you talk to?’” he says. “As if a published writer like me would have very limited choices in a place like this. Well, we talk to everybody! Sometimes valuable things turn up. Some of my best teachers never went beyond the eighth grade.”   

Berry purchased his home and 12 acres of land in Port Royal the same year he left New York, and he began the difficult task of healing the land. He tells me that there were “spots of erosion, scars on the land,” and there was also a lot of work to do in getting it fenced. Instead of using tractors, Berry opted for horse-drawn plows. His farm eventually yielded a small profit, but the benefits were mostly drawn from the self-sustaining nature of the endeavor, the fact that the Berrys were producing their own food.

In the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Berry also began writing about his surroundings. But unlike Thoreau and Emerson, who were simply visitors to the natural environments they wrote about, Pollan says that Berry was actually engaged with nature: “He wasn’t just a spectator. He was a farmer.”

Berry is now also arguably the greatest writer in Kentucky history. Max Rudin, the president of the Library of America, wrote in an email that Berry is “our essential modern exemplar of an American way of thinking and writing about nature, and place, that refuses to distinguish cultural, moral, and spiritual questions from scientific and technological ones.”

As for his prose, it is clear, succinct, profound. He is skeptical of euphemisms, political correctness, and movements. He hates the vague term “the environment,” preferring to discuss trees, insects, soil — the concrete things we can see and work with. Pollan says that Berry is “suspicious of abstractions because he knows what hides behind abstractions: hypocrisy and greed.”

Bill McKibben’s environmental activism was spurred after his wife gave him a copy of Berry’s 1979 essay collection Home Economics, which offered ideas on how we can live a simple and grounded life at home. “There’s no writer working in the English language I admire as much,” McKibben says.

For the author Barbara Kingsolver, he’s something more: A fellow Kentuckian whose writings she turned to, she wrote in an email, “after I left home and learned with a shock that the outside world looks down on us.

“Decade after decade, I keep running up against the bigotry of American mainstream culture against Appalachians, farmers, and rural life, and I always come back to Wendell for solace,” she wrote. “Quietly and without bitterness he brings me home to myself, reminding me that all the ‘hillbilly elegies’ in the world can’t touch the strength of our souls or the poetry of our language.” 

Berry is now at work on a book about race, a follow-up of sorts to one he wrote 50 years ago called The Hidden Wound. “The conversation about race has become really degraded,” he says. “It has been reduced to slogans and stereotypes.” His new book will address the removal of Confederate monuments as well as “deal with the persistence of slavery” — Berry’s great-grandparents, in fact, owned slaves — and the idea that this ended when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, he says. 

“It’s either the hardest book I’ve ever done, or I’m the oldest I’ve ever been,” he joked at a book event in Louisville this spring. 

Staking out “a clear, rigid position”

On an ideal day, Berry splits his time between farming and writing. He writes in a small farmhouse on his property, overlooking the Kentucky River. The season, weather, and farming demands determine his work schedule — when it’s cold out, he’ll write indoors, but during the summer, he prefers writing outside. Because he doesn’t like using electricity to write, he will write from the untethered farmhouse during daytime hours when natural light filters through a 40-pane glass window. 

Berry cracks open a notebook and begins writing, by hand, in pencil. He writes on the right page, leaving room on the left for corrections, a system he tells me “works perfectly.” Then he will hand it over to his longtime typist and editor, Tanya, who types it up on their old Royal Standard typewriter — the same one they bought new in 1956. In the next phase, a second typist will take over, entering Berry’s words into a computer, and he will send the finished draft to his publisher.

After a 1988 essay for Harper’s Magazine, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” Berry attracted critical responses from readers who perceived that Tanya was being treated unfairly in the equation, or argued that Berry was only able to operate in an old-school way because Tanya was a “secretary,” or “a low-tech energy-saving device.” Berry responded to those letters by saying that it was unfair to assume anything about his arrangement with Tanya — readers didn’t know, for instance, whether Tanya was paid, or enjoyed the work. 

I ask Berry what the actual breakdown of domestic labor was in the household. He mentions that Tanya liked to cook, and he would often clean. Then, he says with his usual acid wit: “Well, I suppose if we were getting married now, we would have to sit down and negotiate — probably hire a team of attorneys to help us sort it out. Or maybe a psychologist or two.”

Berry is stubborn, which is both his greatest strength and his weakness. And his views, influenced by a moral tradition — he still references the Seven Deadly Sins, for instance — have a certainty baked into them. When I ask how his ideas have evolved, he tells me that though his understanding of the issues is more complex, he stands by his original ideas. He believes we are too quick to adopt new technologies, that there are critical implications in these behaviors and purchases.

And although Berry doesn’t own a computer, a friend once persuaded him to sit down and try one.

“I put a question to it,” he recalls. “I would like to know how to make a slaughterhouse that would take care of every kind of product, from fish to beef, could slaughter it, dress it, prepare it for market, and compost the offal.”

It didn’t work, he concluded: “The computer didn’t know.” 

This unyielding stance has often led people to view Berry as a curmudgeon — a categorization his daughter, Mary, dismisses. “He never stops being grateful,” Mary says, adding: “He’s not grumpy, dammit!”

Rather, Pollan says, “Wendell stakes out a clear, rigid position and does not move from it. You see the world move toward it, very slowly. It can look anachronistic. It can look unreasonable. But I’ve witnessed the power of that kind of stubbornness.” 

Living by principle

That power is evident in Berry’s work in the modern food movement. Mark Bittman has called him the “soul” of the movement; Pollan calls him its “spiritual father.” 

While Americans may now have come to some consensus about the dire consequences of our carbon footprint and the problems with eating beef, those ideas are rooted in Berry’s work. 

“People who eat have a moral responsibility to the sources of their food,” Berry says now. “People from the city should do an honest, full accounting of the food that they eat. The first thing they’ll discover is that they can’t do it. They don’t know the ecological cost or the cost to the people who did the work of production, what it costs the rural communities.”

His daughter, Mary, agrees. Urban dwellers are “dependent on [farming] whether they know it or not,” she says. “We’ve got a land-based economy, whether we know it or not, whether we’re living like we are or not.” We’re getting to the point, she says, where “urban places prospering on the decline of rural places won’t work.”

It’s hard to know what the world would look like if everybody lived by Berry’s principles. But is his insistence on a grassroots approach enough to make the drastic reversals we need to save the planet?

This summer, a dozen students met not far from Port Royal, ready to farm. They were students of the tuition-free Wendell Berry Farming Program, a collaboration between Sterling College in Vermont and the Berry Center that was just awarded a five-year grant. They are our new generation of farmers.

August Lee Gramig, 22, was among them. Like McKibben, she was inspired by Home Economics; it’s what made her want to be a farmer. She finds Berry’s ideas about resisting technology hugely important, especially in our always-plugged-in world.

“Wendell Berry,” Gramig says, “embodies the idea of being human.”

And Gramig’s generation will be necessary to make change, Berry believes. “We’re all going to have to do something to help our land, our country itself,” he tells me. “We have to find a way to pay it what we owe it. And what we owe it, of course, is our love.

“We owe it our competent love.”

Hope Reese is a writer based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, and Vice.

In 1982, a Catholic nun from Louisiana began writing letters to a man on death row who had been convicted of rape and murder. They began a correspondence. And when she realized he didn’t have visitors, she visited. But she never thought he would be executed — it hadn’t happened in the state in 20 years. 

The nun was Sister Helen Prejean, and her relationship with Pat Sonnier and witness to his state-mandated death became the subject of Dead Man Walking, her 1993 book that inspired the popular film by the same name, in which Susan Sarandon played Prejean in an Oscar-winning role. 

Today, Sister Prejean is perhaps the greatest single advocate against the death penalty.

In River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey, Prejean’s new memoir, the nun chronicles her personal transformation that led to her meeting Sonnier — from someone who looked to God for answers to someone who believed God’s work should be carried out through active community engagement. It’s a transformation that, she tells me, is “still happening.”

I talked to Prejean, now 80, about how the church’s changes in the ’60s created opportunities for nuns, about the deep structural problems with the criminal justice system, and about why many Americans are turning against the death penalty.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese

There was a point in your life where you say you shifted from a kind of personal religious journey to a relationship with God that involved engaging with the outside world. What happened? 

Helen Prejean

Before, my spiritual life was about directly praying that God would settle the big problems of the world and help suffering people. You’ve got to understand, I’m operating in a little cocoon. A little microculture of someone who was coming from a well-to-do family, out in the suburbs and in the Catholic institutions where nuns would teach. I was really separated from actual poor people, even in my own city of New Orleans.

Marie Augusta Neal, this great nun, said that Jesus could help the poor. Well, I’d been meditating on Jesus my whole life … “If you’re poor, God bless you. You share more in the sufferings of Christ. One day you’d have a great reward in heaven.” Look how superficial it was. So that talk jolted me and led me to move into the inner-city housing project in New Orleans and work at a place called Hope House. It was the first time African American people were my peers. I met them, shared with them, and learned from them.

Hope Reese

That “cocoon” you say you were living in before that … did the church also encourage it?

Helen Prejean

Yeah, they had a club called the “cocoon keepers.” Well, Vatican II [an assembly of Roman Catholic religious leaders who met between 1962 and 1965 to establish a new foundation for the church, at the behest of Pope John XXIII] was part of a huge ecumenical council. It opened the doors to saying that being a Catholic, being Christian, is not simply to go to Mass on Sunday and saying you believe in the creed. It’s getting out there and responding to the needs of the people — which Pope Francis really embodies when he says the church should be a “field hospital” where the wounded, suffering people are. So we started the church on a trajectory to move out into the world and to work for social justice.

Hope Reese

For those who aren’t familiar with Dead Man Walking, in 1982, you began writing letters to a man on death row and you eventually witnessed his execution. How did this change you?

Helen Prejean

Incrementally. First I wrote letters. Then I realized he didn’t have visitors. I had the instinct to visit him. I did this for two and a half years. The next thing I know, he’s ratcheting up to execution. [The state of Louisiana]  hadn’t had an execution in 20 years. I talk to my students about sneaky Jesus. You think, “Yeah, I’ll just write a few letters.” You never dream somebody’s going to be executed, much less that you were going to witness that.

You can’t witness a person being rendered completely defenseless in a premeditated protocol of death, strapped down and killed, and walk away from that saying, “I think I’m going to do something else in my life.” Because you’ve been a witness, you’ve been drawn in. So then the moral imperative begins.

Hope Reese

In 1993, when the book was published, the public was supportive of the death penalty. How has public opinion shifted since then?

Helen Prejean

Dead Man Walking, the film, changed the way films were done; they were much more reflective. “Wait a minute, what does this mean that we’re going to give the state this power?”

Now, over 150 innocent people who were all in the system, condemned to death, went to trial, [and were] found guilty [were wrongly convicted]. DNA helped open the door. Most of that is prosecutorial misconduct. So the staggering number of mistakes we made enters into that. 

Then the cost factor. You are throwing literally millions of dollars to execute one person, and to what end? Sometimes it doesn’t even happen. Of all the death penalties that were sought in Louisiana, over 80 percent of them never come to execution, because prosecutors are overzealous, they’re hiding evidence or whatever.

On one level, people are saying it’s not worth it. So more and more, the talk was, to be tough on crime, [we should] be smart about crime and begin putting those resources into community policing — actually making communities more safe. 

Plus, the data [shows] that the death penalty doesn’t deter anybody.

Support for the death penalty, as of a couple of years ago, dropped below 50 percent when you [asked], “Death penalty or life imprisonment?” [The most recent data, from 2018, has support at 54 percent.] Most people don’t want to kill people or trust the government to do it, and so that is a shift.

Hope Reese

What about the shift, specifically, within the Catholic Church?

Helen Prejean

I’ve been to all 50 states to talk to people, to bring them close and just say, “Look at this.” So first, I’m in Catholic parishes. Occasionally, I bump into a bishop. I’ve found that most bishops didn’t want to touch the death penalty with a 10-foot pole. But the people begin to get it. And so then I started bumping into a few popes along the way. 

And there was a man, Joseph O’Dell, in Virginia. I was with him when he was executed, and Italians got interested in his case. Pope John Paul II heard about it in Rome. And so I wrote him a letter and said, “When a man turns to you and says, ‘Sister, please pray God holds up my legs,’ while we’re making this walk to his death, he’s completely defenseless. He’s strapped down in an electric chair or lethal injection, and he’s killed. Does the church only uphold the dignity of innocent life? What about the guilty? Where is the dignity in that death? Especially when we can defend people through prisons. We don’t have to imitate the killing and kill people.”

Pope John Paul was the first to recognize that when he gave a talk in St. Louis [in 1999]; he held that up. Dignity doesn’t just belong to the innocent. The pope, of course, has a heart. He has a bent for compassion and justice. 

Well, let’s just say dialogue bumps along slowly. It took 1,600 years in the church to reach a point, on August 2, 2018, for Pope Francis to declare, unequivocally, we can never put government in charge of deciding that some of their citizens can be killed, that killing is the solution, and we are in charge of setting up the system whereby we choose who makes this happen. There were too many broken things in the system.

Hope Reese

What if there weren’t “too many broken things in the system”? Is it a problem with the system or the death penalty itself?

Helen Prejean

There’s a direct connection between those two. The massive imprisonment of poor people, and especially people of color, is directly connected to the death penalty. Who is mainly selected for death in the United States? Eighty percent of people [on death row have] killed white victims [while about half of murder victims are white]. So all victims are not equal: Some victims have status, some don’t.

Jesus talked about leavening and dough. Jesus talked about seeds growing. Things are incremental. There are no absolute boundaries. Over here you have the death penalty, over here you have the prison system.

Hope Reese

As a woman, you wrote that your voice is “muted by the Church.” Can you talk about how, in practice, you are able to be critical of the church?

Helen Prejean

Sure. The church is the people. It is many things. When you love an institution or a body of people that you’re part of, when you see something morally wrong, you speak about it. 

I’ve been in dialogue with the church about the death penalty. You can look at that and say, “Oh, she’s critical of the church.” Of course I’m critical. I’ve been in the execution chamber. What we stated in the catechism, “Oh, we can trust government,” is wrong. I’ve seen the hurt, the suffering, the cruelty. So when you see something wrong, you speak up. 

There’s constant dialogue going on in the church, especially since Vatican II, so more and more women are speaking up. Why aren’t women a vital part of decision-making in the church? When it’s an all-male group of people sitting around the table making the policies, it’s not very healthy.

In the early church, Jesus’s disciples were men and women. Mary Magdalene, who was just declared having her own feast day, was instrumental. You had strong, outspoken women who were part of the original ministry, the Gospel of Jesus and the early church. St. Paul worked side by side with women who were preaching just like the men.

One of the dangers of an institution is that it starts getting solidified and rigid as it goes along.

Hope Reese

How many executions have you witnessed since 1984? 

Helen Prejean

I’ve witnessed six total executions: three electrocutions and three lethal injections. Lethal injection is just as bad. The Supreme Court is letting states experiment with drugs, so when that person is strapped down, they literally don’t know what’s going to be injected in their veins. Like Texas, where does it get its drugs? Supposedly, it’s supposed to have FDA approval, but here’s what happened.

See, people have to be deep enough under so that when potassium chloride goes through their veins and stops their heart, they don’t feel the pain. And when the European companies that made the main drug that was the main anesthetic heard that their drugs were being used to kill people in the US, they cut off the drug supply. That is what has led to all this experimentation. We have had botched executions. You know, we had Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma. There had been a number of people yelling out, “Acid’s in my veins!”

You have an Eighth Amendment that says you won’t practice cruelty, but you turn your heads because you’ve already demeaned these people as not human anyhow. You turn the switch. Because you say, “Look what they did to the victim.”

That was [Justice] Antonin Scalia’s justification, why he always upheld the death penalty. But the death penalty’s about us. We know people do terrible things, but what about us?

Hope Reese is a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Longreads, Vice, and other publications.