The Jonestown Trilogy

The Jonestown Trilogy gathers three landmark works by Jeff Hood into a single volume - a sustained, unflinching theological descent into one of the darkest events of the twentieth century.

On November 18, 1978, over nine hundred people died in the Guyanese jungle under the command of Jim Jones. For most, Jonestown is shorthand for fanaticism, a punchline, a cautionary tale. For Hood, it is something else entirely: a site of profound theological confrontation, a place where sin and death are laid bare - and where, he dares to argue, God was present nonetheless.

Five Visions of Jim Jones / Jonestown, Systematic Theology/Shit: Revelations from Jonestown, and The Slaughter of God: Theologies from Jonestown each approach this darkness from a different angle - through healing and resurrection, through mystical wrestling with God's hiddenness, and through the raw words of the death tape itself. Together they form a trilogy that refuses easy answers, refuses closure, and refuses to let Jonestown be forgotten.

This is not apologetics for Jim Jones. It is not sensationalism. It is the work of a theologian who believes that any hope worth holding must be large enough to include the worst of what human beings have done to one another - and that a God who cannot be found in the valley of death is no God at all.