Political and Public Theologies A Theology for the US Mexico Borderlands

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.