Theologies of Migration: Embodiment, Race, and Journeys at the Margins

Racism erases Black and Brown bodies, making them invisible to the eyes of the privileged, thus, opening the door to exploit and dehumanize their sense of personhood. Immigrants in the U.S. are also faced with the challenge of establishing their own personhood within a land that operates within a black and white binary. Chaplains in the United States serve at the margins of institutions, as they often provide spiritual care to those left behind by the very institutions they work in. While it is vital that chaplains must have their gaze trained to adopt a divine standard of dignity bent towards the people most impacted by a racialized society, the field of chaplaincy must also make opportunities available to ensure that more BIPOC chaplains have the opportunities to become certified caregivers without barriers. An exegesis of the Genesis story between Cain’s brother Abel, whose name in Hebrew translates to ‘nothingness,’ will ground realities of race, privilege, power and invisibility in terms of Black and Brown immigrants who come to the U.S. and the chaplains working to, with and among these populations.

Migration continues to stir up controversies across Europe. Religion is cited as a reason to welcome or not to welcome migrants. In this paper, I analyze and assess the comparative theology operative in “A World of Neighbours” (AWoN), the largest multi-faith refugee relief network in Europe. At the core of AWoN is a grassroots network of practitioners from the Abrahamic religions who work with migrants across the continent. Drawing on three years of fieldwork, I argue that these practitioners embody a postmigrant ethics that revolves around a comparative theology of care. Through references to theological themes from the Abrahamic religions, they blur the boundaries between “refugees” and “receivers,” so crucial to classic and contemporary approaches to migration. Exploring AWoN’s everyday ethics, I advocate for the significance of a comparative theology of care for addressing the intersection of race and religion in contexts of forced migration today.

This presentation examines how migration experiences form Asian American theology in Journeys at the Margin—the first autographical theology book from the Asian-American perspective. In particular, the presentation engages with two leading Korean American theologians: Jung Young Lee (Methodist theologian) and Anselm Min (Jesuit theologian). Comparing their different migration experiences, the presentation finds that there cannot be one common category to summarize different migration experiences, while different in-between migration experiences lead these theologians to have a similar theological end: the breaking of particularism and binarism in Christian theology. In analyzing Lee’s “both-and theology” and Min’s “solidarity of others theology,” the presentation reflects on how the authors’ different migration experiences influenced their Asian-American theology. Having done so, the presentation will suggest a post-Asian American theology that sublates particular ethnic/racial identities through starting theology from God instead of particular experiences, while criticizing the danger of essentialism in racialized theology.