A Political Theology for the US-Mexico Borderlands

“Can These Bones Live?”

Bryan M. Ellrod (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

224 Seiten

2025
Brill (Verlag)
9789004721517 (ISBN)

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Through a series of readings of biblical texts, that attend political, theological, and ethical questions inspired by the US-Mexico Borderlands, the book presents a political theology that chastens political self-determination with the ethical demand of the outsider it excludes.

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.

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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	27.03.2025
Reihe/Serie	Political and Public Theologies ; 6
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	384 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
ISBN-13	9789004721517 / 9789004721517
Zustand	Neuware