The Rev. Jeff Hood hauls nine large, framed paintings into the small chapel his Old Catholic congregation uses for mass at the Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church in Little Rock. Each painting depicts a face in agony, a man being executed by the state. Hood, a priest living in North Little Rock, has witnessed nine executions. As a spiritual adviser to men on death row, Hood befriended each of the prisoners. The executions haunt him. He has nightmares. He paints the men’s faces to remember — and, possibly, to forget.
“I don’t know,” Hood says, asked how he feels after he finishes a painting. “I paint and then I paint over it and paint again. It’s almost like a cycle of emotions. The kids don’t want them at the house. They say [the paintings] scare the hell out of them.”
Hood’s laugh rings out in the echoey space. He has a long beard and a shaved, monastic head and wears clear tortoiseshell glasses and heavy overalls. His image is that of a scholarly farmer, which may be intentional. In Matthew 9:37-38, Jesus told his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
He arranges the paintings beneath a banner mounted to the wall behind the altar that reads “RESIST.” The words are white against a black background. The faces captured in oil and acrylic float on similarly black backgrounds — wide-open, pained eyes and mouths frozen in mid-scream, the final faces Hood saw as each of his “guys” succumbed to lethal injection or, in one case, nitrogen hypoxia. The paintings are not for display, nor have they been exhibited. “I’ve thought about doing some kind of fundraiser with them, eventually,” Hood says of the paintings. “We’ll see.”
Hood calls himself a “self-taught artist. I just wanted to use art as a release. There’s this whole tradition of self-taught Southern artists where people put their emotions and blood and guts into paintings that aren’t these high-browed, highly technical works of art. I really connect with that.”
The oldest of his paintings is of the first prisoner he accompanied into the death chamber, Scott James Eizember, who was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester on Jan. 12, 2023. Eizember was convicted of killing an elderly couple in 2003 and committing other crimes before authorities arrested him in Texas. His attorneys did not deny that Eizember killed A.J. Cantrell, 76, and his wife, Patsy Cantrell, 70, but argued his life had value. The most recent is that of Steven Lawayne Nelson, who was convicted of killing an Arlington, Texas, pastor and executed by lethal injection in Texas on Feb. 5, 2025. Though Nelson maintained his innocence, he admitted taking part in a robbery as 28-year-old Clint Dobson was murdered.
“I believe in the marginalized and the oppressed,” Hood says. “In Matthew 25, Jesus said, ‘What you’ve done to the least of these, you’ve done to me.’” By joining the condemned in the death chamber — laying hands on them as they’re strapped onto the gurney, praying over them as they accept their last moments, watching as a lethal chemical dose is administered intravenously or, in one case, nitrogen gas fed into a facemask — Hood believes he is doing the Lord’s work. “I’ve learned that to be with Jesus, you have to be where he said he would be,” he says. “And I have found that to be most viscerally true with the guys I work with on death row.”
Hood points to a painting that’s slightly different from the others, though it captures the same agony. The face is covered with more than a dozen splotches that resemble chicken pox. This is Hood’s representation of the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in an Alabama death chamber on Jan. 25, 2024. Smith was sentenced to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire. He was the first in the nation to be executed via nitrogen gas, a method of capital punishment some experts have said could result in a torturous death. The ant-like blotches in Hood’s painting illustrate Smith’s boiling skin as he suffocated. Hood told CNN that Smith convulsed when the gas was turned on, “popped up on the gurney,” and gasped and heaved. “An unbelievable evil was unleashed tonight,” Hood said. He later described what he witnessed in a column for the Arkansas Times, once legislators in Arkansas began considering adopting the practice.
“I could see the horror in his eyes,” Hood wrote. “I will never forget.”
On March 18, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation allowing the use of nitrogen gas, making Arkansas the fifth state to sanction the execution method.
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Hood conducts a weekly mass at the St. Oscar Romero Catholic Church, which utilizes the chapel at Quapaw Quarter UMC. “The church really exists as kind of this chapel in the woods,” Hood says. “It’s intended to be a place people can come to quietly. We’ve had as many as 40 people show up and as few as four.”
He says hundreds of people — far more than the number who sit in pews — stream the service online. “The Sunday morning service is intentionally small. I’m not interested in a larger one. No offering is taken up. We don’t have music. We have several unhoused people who come. It’s a very contemplative, spoken-word Eucharist.”
The congregation is named for a Salvadoran Roman Catholic archbishop who was a vocal critic of right-wing groups and leftist guerrillas in El Salvador’s civil conflict. He was assassinated in 1980 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2018. Hood preaches in front of the “RESIST” banner on an altar painted black and is often critical of Donald Trump. He doesn’t hold back his opinion.
“Someone asked me, ‘Is Trump the anti-Christ?’” Hood says. “I said, ‘I don’t know if he is, but he is certainly anti-Christ.’”
Hood does not consider any institutionalized system of death a tenet of Christianity or any other worldview. His home library is studded with paintings he made of social justice advocates, including Sister Helen Prejean, the country’s premier anti-death penalty activist, and social justice martyrs, including Charles Moore, a minister who self-immolated in 2014 in Grand Saline, Texas, to protest what he viewed as entrenched racism in society. Hood considers them role models, along with Romero, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi. His views incorporate their teachings but are not limited to them, just as his theology is based on the Old and New Testaments but acknowledges the value of other perspectives.
“I think the message of Jesus transcends Christianity,” he says. “I don’t know that I’ve yet encountered anything good or loving or wonderful that doesn’t come from Jesus. When I’m struck by the message of Buddhism, I’m struck by the message of Jesus. When a Buddhist says, ‘Buddha teaches this,’ I go, ‘That’s wonderful.’ I am engaging through the lens I have. God is love; Jesus is the incarnation of love. Anytime I meet love, I believe I’m meeting the incarnation of Jesus.”
Yet, love has not always greeted Hood’s views. He shows me a postcard addressed to him with smiley faces and a question mark next to the word “priest,” calling him a “demented activist” and his sermons on Trump “vile bullshit.” He then reads to me dozens of text messages explicitly threatening his life and family. Hood seems to take it in stride, and he hasn’t shied away from telling his elementary-aged children about the threats.
“I think it’s important they know that the nature of loving people in a society so unloving is that it causes a reaction,” he says. “They also know we live in an incredibly conservative place that is in many ways addicted to violence — a region of the world defined by violence. Our hope is that when violence is done to us and we don’t respond in violence, they learn a lesson for life — that violence is incompatible with the mission of love. I want our children to know that the only thing that makes life meaningful is when you give it away.”
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Hood, 41, was raised Southern Baptist in South Atlanta, in a “very conservative theological context. I was shaped by two things: the civil rights culture in Atlanta, and the ‘believe and behave’ theology that says the Bible is inerrant. You know, ‘don’t drink, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.’ It’s a very rules-based faith, and I kept that kind of faith for a long time. It was safer that way.
“Our church was very concerned with the End Times,” he says. “It did not teach that our faith had any social relevance. If it did, it was abortion, gay marriage, all that stuff. My first-grade teacher, Ms. Ellington, who was the first Black teacher to ever teach at the school, introduced me to Dr. King’s writings. My maternal grandparents freaked out and stated very clearly, ‘If that’s all they’re going to teach him, we need to put him in a private school.’”
A pivotal moment came at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, when Hood’s mentor, a pastor, revealed to Hood on his death bed that he had lived most of his life as a closeted gay man. The revelation was “earth-shattering for me. That person had functioned to me as Jesus for a long time. He was the presence of Christ in my life.”
The realization led Hood to take up the mantle of LGBTQ+ issues. “They were a sort of gateway to broader social justice thinking,” he says. “I began to believe in a more powerful God, a more loving God.”
Then there was the 2011 execution of Troy Davis in Georgia for the murder of a police officer, which led Hood to become a fierce advocate against the death penalty. “That case was my first step,” he says. “The death penalty was problematic for me. The Gospel tells us to begin with ‘the least of these.’ That is, oppressed LGBTQ persons, oppressed prisoners on death row, oppressed persons that are migrants. I began to move from this ‘punch-you-in-the-face’ Jesus to learning how Jesus truly functions. It also taught me the consequences of following him.”
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In July 2016, Hood organized and led an anti-police brutality and Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. A gunman opened fire, killing five police officers and injuring nine others. Hood witnessed the shootings and used a large cross he was carrying to force people out of harm’s way. He became the center of media attention, giving interviews to such outlets as ABC’s “Good Morning America” and the Dallas Morning News. “I kept repeating, ‘love and justice, love and justice,’” Hood recalls. “I wanted to get those two words into everything I was saying.” But controversy erupted over a clip shown on Fox News, in which Hood could be seen at the rally shouting, “God damn white America!” Another showed him yelling before the shooting began, “White America is a fucking lie!”
Hood says he still believes what he said. “I think a prophetic priest is going to say things that disrupt, but only to show people there is a better way. The difficulty is that you don’t get to explain yourself in a 30-second soundbite. But I do believe Jesus is for everyone, not just white people.”
The fallout from Dallas was death threats so extreme his family had to uproot from Denton, Texas, where they lived, and move to North Carolina for a time. “People there figured out who I was,” Hood says, leading to a resumption of harassment. The family relocated again to Little Rock, where his wife found a job teaching art. “Little Rock seemed like a good place to be anonymous.”
Instead, the family lost their home at Breckenridge and Shackleford in the March 2023 tornado. “When you go from being comfortable in your home one second to the next second, your reality is destroyed,” Hood says. “When you realize that all you have is each other, you become firm in the belief that this is all you need.”
The family bought a new house in August 2023. Books and artwork fill Hood’s office, which looks out on a yard bursting with flowers. He agrees to meet me for a second conversation at his home. The kids vie for his attention while I’m there, eager to go to the park. One of them flits through his office. “Hi, Dad,” the boy calls out. “Bye, Dad.”
I ask Hood about the “guys” he’s currently advising on death row. They are in 10 states, including Arkansas. He calls their relationships “complicated. Not all of them want me in the death chamber with them. Sometimes they just want to catch up. Sometimes they want to talk about their cases. One guy has already called me four times this morning.”
Prisoners become his “guys” for various reasons, all of them hard for Hood to articulate. They communicate via email, phone calls and letters. “Some of these guys only got the death penalty in 2018 or so, so they might be 15 years out from being executed. Of course, preferably, there won’t be any executions in 15 years.”
Hood describes Sanders’ recent adoption of nitrogen gas as an execution method as “shitting in the face of Jesus.”
“I always say that the greatest argument against the death penalty is not based on those guys, it’s based on us,” he says, his voice scratchy. “Meaning, what these guys have done is secondary to who we want to be. Do we want to continue the murder and mayhem, the killing, or do we want it to stop? You can’t teach young Arkansans not to kill by continuing to kill. I mean, these guys are locked up almost 24 hours a day. They’re no threat to anyone. Why are we spending so much energy trying to kill them?”
He says the state should spend money “trying to not fill up prisons rather than creating prisons to fill up,” referring to a proposed 3,000-bed prison to be built in Franklin County. “Sarah [Sanders] supports this huge prison when nobody she loves is ever going to serve time in that prison. It’s this radical disconnect between how people say they love Jesus and how they do it. They say Jesus is love, but their practice is that he’s a jailer. He’s locking people up. He’s killing people.”
I ask Hood whether he sees himself as an evangelist. “I feel like my job is to be a hope dealer,” he says with a laugh. “I preach on Sunday morning. I drop the kids off and pick them up from school. I work with all of these guys on death row. Jesus has called me to something. To give my life, to be faithful. I want to be like Jesus.”
After witnessing nine executions, he can feel frustrated with God. “Sometimes I’m like ‘fuck you, fuck you.’ But then I hear a voice in my conscience saying, ‘I am with you always.’ So I know I’m never alone.”
Is he any closer to realizing his goals? “I think the goal is to make this world more compassionate and humane,” Hood says, grabbing a hug from one of his passing sons. “And if we can make this world more humane, then we have accomplished something.”