A Political Theology for the Us-Mexico Borderlands

"Can These Bones Live?"
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-72151-7
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 208 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 318 g

Reihe: Political and Public Theologies

Since 1994, over 4,000 human remains have been recovered from the Sonoran Desert. Victims of a border enforcement strategy that weaponizes the landscape against migrants, the ever-growing ledger of the dead counts the human cost at which the present political paradigm is secured. Through a series of readings of biblical texts, informed by philosophical, theological, and legal theory, this book facilitates a reckoning between the self-determining polity and the excluded outsider’s ethical demand. Finding in their demand the motivation for novel forms of legal interpretation and political agency, Ellrod sketches a hopeful, life-affirming alternative to Realist Political Theologies of Migration.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ellrod, Bryan M

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Sonstige Religionen Sonstige Religionen: Theologie, Doktrine

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface: Besetting Danger

Acknowledgments

List of Figures

Introduction 1 The Bones in the Valley 2 Politics as a Project of Redemption 3 Pernicious Messianism in the Borderlands 4 Between Worlds 5 Argument Summary

PART 1. Realism, Bodies Politic, and Bodies Remembered

1 Contesting Realism in the Christian Ethics of Migration 1 Introduction: Christian Ethics and Political Theology 2 Christian Realism 3 Realism and the Christian Ethics of Migration 4 Hopelessness in the Borderlands 5 An Eschatological Imperative

2 The Remembrance of Dismembered Bodies 1 Mortalities on the Margins and the Danger of Spectacle 2 The Ethical Demand 3 The Distribution of the Sensible 4 “Las Madres/No Mas Lágrimas:” a Metonymic Encounter with the Dead 5 Metonymy in the Scriptural Imaginary

PART 2. Cain & Abel

3 Politics Haunted 1 Strangers or Estranged Siblings? 2 Fratricide: a Problem of Beginning 3 Abel’s Ghost: a Theological Case for Haunting 4 Troubled Closure: Haunting and the Politics of Self-Determination 5 A Riven Condition

4 Exorcising the Ghosts 1 Prevention through Deterrence as Practical Solution 2 The Making of the ‘Alien’ 3 Legal Rights and the Dignification of Demands 4 Disappeared in the Landscape 5 Fatal Contradictions 6 Can These Bones Live? a Provisional Answer to the Question

PART 3. Samaritans & Sojourners

5 The Samaritan’s Virtue 1 From Contempt to Compassion 2 “Who is my Neighbor?”: the Parable’s Context & Stakes 3 On the Road from Jerusalem to Jericho: the Neighbor as Object 4 Moved by Compassion: the Neighbor as Ethical Subject 5 Compassion and Law

6 A Samaritan in the Sonoran 1 What Must We Do to Live? 2 Encounters on a Different Road 3 What is in the Law? How Do You Read It? 4 The Samaritan Moved with Compassion 5 The Works of theNomikos

Conclusion: Political Theology in the US-Mexico Borderlands 1 In Failure’s Wake 2 Sin, Redemption, and the Collectively Self-Determining State 3 Weak Messianic Force & the Law 4 A Case for Hope 5 The Bones in the Valleys

References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Bryan M. Ellrod, Ph.D. (2021), Emory University, is Director of Pre-Law at Wake Forest University and teaches in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. His research and teaching engage the intersection of law and the humanities, with a special interest in ethics.