Borders: Religious, Political, and Planetary

This project, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), is a Christian social-ethical examination of how interreligious interactions, political migration, and ecological devastation interact. The key to the whole project is the notion of borders, which are examined primarily in religious, political, and planetary terms. Religious, political, and planetary borders are bound up in manifold ways with some of the prevailing crises of our times, including forced displacement, rising CO2 levels, xenophobic environmentalism, and international borders as sites of human tragedy and ecological disruption. Into this situation comes the proposed project, which articulates links between religious, political, and planetary borders as a work of Christian Social Ethics. With an aim to explore, integrate, and enlist the three types of borders within a common ethical framework, the three borders types can be defined as follows:

• Religious borders: Points at which the contrasts between religious traditions become explicit and self-conscious to the members of the cultures in question or to third parties, giving rise to narratives that reinforce said contrasts.
• Political borders: Demarcations between neighboring sovereign territories, in which sovereignty is understood in normative terms as mutually recognized, mutually excluded, and uniformly distributed within each territory in question.
• Planetary borders: Ecological thresholds—typically called “planetary boundaries”—concerning human interaction with nonhuman biological and climatic systems, the crossing of which portends irreversible cataclysm.

The project does not aim to map comprehensively the many relationships between these three types of borders. Rather, it advances a more measured, two-part claim, which is, first, that Christian Social Ethicists should consider how attention to religious borders can inform perspectives on political borders, and, second, that insights generated by such attention bear promise in cultivating the cross-border networks necessary to mount an adequate preparation with regard to planetary borders. While the first part of the claim links religious and political borders, the second part of the claim links political and planetary borders. Taken together, the two steps represent a specific and ethically relevant link between religious, political, and planetary borders that anchors the project.

To be clear, the real-world religious, political, and ecological dynamics that are integrated by this two-part claim obtain independently of whether one invokes the word “border.” Yet although there are differences as to how “border” and its associated terms function within the respective discourses, the rhetorical parallels among these discourses nonetheless create a structure by which the various types of borders can be analyzed and compared. Articulating such parallels requires nuance in understanding how border types interact with each other, as well as how borders rhetoric interacts more broadly with what it represents. One must avoid both a false univocity that sees each of the above borders definitions as fixed, separate, and incommensurable and a false equivocity that dissolves distinctions among the three borders types and untethers the language of borders from the reality it represents. Both errors would impair, perhaps fatally, the ethics that the project seeks to develop.

What is needed to go beyond rhetorical parallels is a durable philosophical account of language, truth, and signification. For the proposed project, the key philosophical reference point is the pragmatist thinker C.S. Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce’s thought is an essential referent for the project for three reasons:

Peirce developed an original, highly influential semiotic system that is triadic (in that signification requires an intersection of sign, object, and an apprehending imagination that mediates the sign-object relationship), dynamic, and staunchly realist.

Peirce’s semiotics exists within an intricate logic of relations, one of whose fundamental attributes is that interrogating likeness and alterity—an inescapable task when analyzing borders—is less about determining classes than discerning systems.

Peircean pragmatism is sympathetic to religion and theology, not merely in terms of the theological claims it supports but also in its amenability to appropriation as an instrument for thinking about religious practices and values in multiple social and historical contexts.

Taken together, the intimate links in Peirce’s thought between semiotics, logical distinctions, lived habits, and religious values render Peirce a resource not just for interrogating borders-related logics, but also for Christian Social Ethics projects more broadly. The project thus promises not only to be a prominent Christian Social Ethics project on borders; it also expands the boundaries of the discipline, particularly when it comes to maintaining coherence amidst entangled and transformative social and ecological conditions.

Also fundamental to this project’s grounding within Christian Social Ethics are norms and principles drawn from Christian life and thought. To be considered for this project, there are three selection criteria that such norms and principles must fulfill:

There must be sufficient historical and cultural depth within the tradition so as to present a plausible genealogical link to Christian foundational theology.

There must be a demonstrable relevance to the real-world significance of borders. 

There must be a connection to the project’s theoretical basis in Peirce. This connection need exist not so much in terms of any face-value resemblance to Peirce’s thought as through its potential to serve as an appropriate object of Peirce’s logic of abduction. In this project, abductive logic—the logic of hypothesis—operates by disclosing logical principles drawn from Christian texts as a means to diagnose errant practices regarding borders and recommend constructive alternatives.

On the basis of these three criteria, the selection of Christian norms and principles is oriented toward a relatively simple purpose. This is to build from these elements a Christian account of connection-across-difference that can then be applied, in turn, to interreligious dynamics, political borders, and ecological crisis.

Project methodology

The project combines (a) an ambitious scope and “big” questions concerning borders, with (b) a methodological simplicity, with the method proceeding in five steps:

1. clarify key problems
2. identify Christian norms with the capacity to speak to said problems
3. hypothesize ways of enlisting said norms in response to said problems
4. apply and test hypotheses with respect to ideas
5. apply and test hypotheses with respect to practices.

These steps should be unpacked. In step (1), I draw upon reliable empirical studies, as well as rigorous research in disciplines most relevant to the topic at hand to discern as precisely as possible the problems that need engaging. This step involves attention to public rhetoric, as well as a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning regarding the relationship between rhetoric and real-world problems. With respect to the proposed project, I engage in terminological analysis—with help from Peircean semiotics—to place all border-related language in appropriate etymological context and navigate distinctions among the following linguistic pairs: border-frontier, border-boundary, and boundary-limit. Deductive logic is then employed with respect to the project’s three borders types in considering what types of borders would necessarily follow based on considering current conditions for the religious, the political, and the planetary (e.g., Allen 2016, Van Houtam 2021). This approach stabilizes and distinguishes the categories so that their points of intersection can then be traced inductively. As for inductive logic, although the proposed project is not itself conducting an inductive investigation, inductive scholarship is still engaged regarding real-world connections among borders types. These engagements begin with contemporary empirical research and then diverge from there into, respectively, historical analyses that probe the religious dimensions of contemporary bordering (e.g., Brady 2006) and phenomenological descriptions of current border spaces (e.g., Agier 2016).

For steps (2) and (3), the pragmatism-theology combination is crucial: as theological training provides the fluency and familiarity to understand religious practices, theological inheritances, and normativity on their own terms (step 2), training in pragmatism discloses how such things might interact with pluralistic publics as oriented to given problems (step 3). So framed, the theological ethics of the sort I have developed looks at the applications for religious normativity with respect to pluralistic publics, as well as the sense in which a public problem might occasion a revision of some set of religious norms. The insights generated proceed in multiple directions, in other words: the public benefits from understanding what Christian ethics might have to say about a given problem, just as members of a given religious community benefit from examining how/why their practices might be generating problems.

For steps (4) and (5), there is a helpful typology devised by Willis Jenkins (2013), which distinguishes between “cosmological” and “pragmatic” projects in Christian ethics. Note that “pragmatic” is here being used specifically in relation to Jenkins’s typology rather than the comparatively general references to pragmatism elsewhere in this project description. While the cosmological approach focuses on worldviews as the patterns of meaning behind action, the pragmatic approach focuses on practices as the patterns of action that carry and change meaning (2013, 74). Both of these approaches are taken up in the proposed project, with steps (4) and (5) respectively corresponding to the cosmological and the pragmatic. The cosmological approach (step 4) applies to the potential to reframe how borders are imagined toward a conception that thinks of religious and planetary borders alongside relatively commonsense geographical ones. The pragmatic approach (step 5) applies to the potential to highlight practices that are already ongoing and draw lessons that can be extended from one domain—e.g., interfaith engagement—into others—e.g., combatting xenophobia.

Theopodcast

Podcasts present a valuable opportunity for sharing academic theology with the listening public, and this project is no exception. In conjunction with the Catholic Academy of Berlin and TheoPodcast, which has been an integral part of the Catholic Theological Faculty at the University of Münster since 2020, the insights on borders of four leading scholars have been made available.

Simply follow the links below to listen to each podcast:

• Gary Slater
• Marcia Pally
• John Thatamanil
• Robert Yelle

Project outputs

In addition to various articles, podcasts, and events, there are two primary outputs associated with the project, a monograph and an edited volume.

Monograph

Entitled Borders: Religious, Political, and Planetary, this book is the project’s most representative publication. The book sets for itself three tasks. First, it explores the relationships between interreligious dynamics (represented as religious borders), issues of territoriality and sovereignty (political borders), and human-nonhuman interactions at the planetary level (planetary borders). Second, it demonstrates the how the notion of the border facilitates inquiry into these relationships. Third, it discloses resources from within Christian thought and practice for motivating ethically significant responses to the challenges that these issues represent. Its point of departure is the notion of the watershed, with particular interest in the watersheds of the Jordan, Rio Grande, and Amazon rivers—these typify religious, political, and ecological borders, respectively.

Edited volume

Entitled Thinking Across Borders, this edited volume collects perspectives from commentators across a wide range of disciplines. A collaboration with Lisa Landoe Hedrick, the project comprises contributions drawn primarily from the Annual Meeting of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought that took place at the Catholic Academy in Berlin in June 2023. The volume is organized into three sections, each of which is addressed to a different type of border. In spite of the obvious diversity of perspectives within each border type, the structure demonstrates the insights that emerged when exchanges are facilitated between border types. The overall project attests to the multiplicity of scholarly perspectives on borders that exists today. A draft of the introduction to the volume can be read here:

Edited Volume Intro Essay Draft

Project bibliography

Books

2024. Our Common, Bordered Home: Laudato si’ and the Promise of an Integrated Migration-Ecological Ethics. Leiden: Brill.

2015. C.S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Edited volume

2025. Ethics Across Borders: Reimagining Religious, Political, and Ecological Divides. Edited by Gary Slater and Lisa Landoe Hedrick. London: Routledge. 

Articles

2022. “Integral Ecology as Theosemiotic: A Case for a Pragmatist Theological Ethics,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 43 (1-2), 99-116.

2021."Hearing Earth’s Cry. Rhetoric and Reality in Integral Ecology," Jahrbuch für Christliche Sozialwissenschaften. Band 62, 341-362.

2018. “From Strangers To Neighbors: Toward an Ethics of Sanctuary Cities,” Journal of Moral Theology 7 (2), 57-85.

2017. “Scriptural Reasoning and the Ethics of Public Discourse,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 38 (2), 123-137.

2017. “The Implicit as a Resource for Engaging Normativity in Religious Studies,” Religions, 8 (11).

Chapters

2024. “Theology, migration, and environmental change.” In Oxford Handbook of Religion and Contemporary Migration, edited by Anna Rowlands and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

2021. “Charlottesville Pragmatism: Richard Rorty’s Neo-pragmatism and Peter Ochs’s Rabbinic/Scriptural Pragmatism.” In Rorty and the Prophetic: Jewish Engagements With a Secular Philosopher, edited by Jacob L. Goodson and Brad E. Stone. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 49-64.

2019. “Between Comparison and Normativity: Scriptural Reasoning and Religious Ethics.” In Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics: Normative Dimensions, edited by Bharat Ranganathan and Derek Woodard-Lehman. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 45-66.