Border crossing is a significant experience in the global era when many people cross borders, whether in cultural, geopolitical, relational, or existential terms. Border crossing can provide a great opportunity for spiritual growth, yet it is often a violent and dangerous process. Thus there is a need to explore border-crossing spirituality: to examine how various aspects of border crossing impact human life, analyze why border crossing happens, and explain how the act of border crossing provides transformation. Border crossing is an action undertaken to expand one's own boundaries, and from it emerges the borderland--a third space where one's transformation can occur. This book primarily focuses on various teachings of border crossing and the notion of "being in between." Almost every religious tradition has within it a spiritual teaching of border crossing and the importance of the borderland. This book is, by nature, cross cultural, interreligious, and interspiritual. Through the action of border crossing, transformation occurs in the borderland, and border-crossing spirituality can be crystallized as living a radical hospitality, valuing friendship, remaining in the present, and reclaiming subjectivity.

Boundaries, borders and margins are related concepts and realities, and each of these can be conceptualized and organized in closed or open ways—with degrees of closure or openness. The logics of stasis and closure, as well as cults of exclusivist and exclusionary sovereignty, are reflected and embodied in the closed xenophobic conceptualization and organization of boundaries, borders and margins. But, an open conceptualization of the borderlands, where mixing and hybridity take place at a rapid, even dizzying, pace, gives rise to Creolization—at the threshold of sovereignties, which can also be imagined. At present, our border zones are spaces of anxiety-ridden security arrangements, violence and death. The existing politics of boundary maintenance is wedded to a cult of sovereignty at various levels, which produces bare lives, bodies and lands. We need the new art of border-crossing to be defined by the notion of camaraderie and shared sovereignties and non-sovereignties. Border zones can also be zones of meetings, communication, transcendence and festive celebration of the limits of our identities. Thus, we need a new art and politics of boundary transmutation, transformation and transcendence, in the broadest possible sense, that entails the production of spatial, scalar, somatic, cognitive, affective and spiritual transitions.

How do international encounters in Nicaragua connect spiritual formation and liberation theology to transform communities? Seekers of justice from around the world found inspiration in the Nicaraguan revolution and struggle for freedom. After recognizing the patronizing, neocolonial structure of missionary models of aid, pastor Leslie Penrose founded a nonprofit organization, JustHope, with core values of solidarity, mutuality, collaboration, and sustainability in partnership. Hundreds of participants have joined this quest to enact the compassionate and just ethics of the Hebrew prophets and the liberating power of Jesus. Inspiring stories of Nicaraguan-led creativity exploring a new future with volunteers from the U.S. are told by pastoral theologian and ethicist Kathleen McCallie. Framed as an interdisciplinary case study of seminary students traveling for solidarity to explore social justice with JustHope, the book offers glimpses of one group’s journey. Readers explore possibilities for an international partnership between U.S. volunteers and Nicaraguan community organizers. The Nicaraguan base-community model offers critiques of and alternatives to the church in the U.S. and neoliberal development. McCallie contributes to academic and activist discourses about dismantling abusive theology, racism, sexism, and U.S. hegemony.

Fleshing the Spirit brings together established and new writers to explore the relationships between the physical body, the spirit and spirituality, and social justice activism. The anthology incorporates different genres of writing—such as poetry, testimonials, critical essays, and historical analysis—and stimulates the reader to engage spirituality in a critical, personal, and creative way.

Based on ethnographic research by an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists, Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana illuminates the role that religion plays in the civic and political experiences of new migrants in the United States. By bringing innovative questions and theoretical frameworks to bear on the experiences of Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Vietnamese migrants, the contributors demonstrate how groups and individuals negotiate multiple religious, cultural, and national identities, and how religious faiths are transformed through migration. Taken together, their essays show that migrants’ religious lives are much more than replications of home in a new land. They reflect a process of adaptation to new physical and cultural environments, and an ongoing synthesis of cultural elements from the migrants’ countries of origin and the United States. As they conducted research, the contributors not only visited churches and temples but also single-room-occupancy hotels, brothels, tattoo-removal clinics, and the streets of San Francisco, El Salvador, Mexico, and Vietnam. Their essays include an exploration of how faith-based organizations can help LGBT migrants surmount legal and social complexities, an examination of transgendered sex workers’ relationship with the unofficial saint Santisima Muerte, a comparison of how a Presbyterian mission and a Buddhist temple in San Francisco help Chinese immigrants to acculturate, and an analysis of the transformation of baptismal rites performed by Mayan migrants. The voices of gang members, Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhist nuns, members of Pentecostal churches, and many others animate this collection. In the process of giving voice to these communities, the contributors interrogate theories about acculturation, class, political and social capital, gender and sexuality, the sociology of religion, transnationalism, and globalization. The collection includes twenty-one photographs by Jerry Berndt. Contributors. Luis Enrique Bazan, Kevin M. Chun, Hien Duc Do, Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III, Sarah Horton, Cymene Howe, Mimi Khúc, Jonathan H. X. Lee, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Andrea Maison, Dennis Marzan, Rosalina Mira, Claudine del Rosario, Susanna Zaraysky

Sandra Schneiders commands respect as one of the most significant and influential figures in the emergence of the study of Christian spirituality as an academic discipline, as the focused and disciplined exploration of religious experience. This book honors her contributions to the field by addressing issues that are emerging at the creative "edges" of the discipline. In this volume, colleagues and students of Dr. Schneiders and other collaborators in the academic discipline of Christian spirituality examine crucial issues from their various disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Questions of methodology address the status of spirituality as a discipline, interdisciplinarity, and self-implication. Other essays explore the "edges" of Christian spirituality and biblical spirituality, gender studies, the natural sciences, nature writing, the social sciences, and interfaith issues. This collection of essays will provoke students and scholars of Christian spirituality, as well as practitioners, to continue critically thinking, discussing, writing, and practicing it.

Religious ideas, practices, discourses, institutions, and social expressions are in constant flux. This volume addresses the internal and external dynamics, interactions between individuals, religious communities, and local as well as global society. The contributions concentrate on four areas: 1. Contemporary religion in the public sphere: The Tactics of (In)visibility among Religious Communities in Europe; Religion Intersecting De-nationalization and Re-nationalization in Post-Apartheid South Africa; 2. Religious transformations: Forms of Religious Communities in Global Society; Political Contributions of Ancestral Cosmologies and the Decolonization of Religious Beliefs; Esoteric Tradition as Poetic Invention; 3. Focus on the individual: Religion and Life Trajectories of Islamists; Angels, Animals and Religious Change in Antiquity and Today; Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar in Today’s Religion; Religion between Individuals and Collectives; 4. Narrating religion: Entangled Knowledge Cultures and the Creation of Religions in Mongolia and Europe; Global Intellectual History and the Dynamics of Religion; On Representing Judaism.

Who is to be the primary evangelizer of Asia? What Asian forms of worship and prayer are both authentically Christian and culturally appropriate? In Our Own Tongues is reading for anyone interested in the emergence of "world Christianity" and its future in the 21st century.--From publisher's description

With growing anxiety about American identity fueling debates about the nation’s borders, ethnicities, and languages, Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries provides a timely and important rhetorical exploration of divisionary bounds that divide an Us from a Them. The concept of “border” calls for attention, and the authors in this collection respond by describing it, challenging it, confounding it, and, at times, erasing it. Motivating us to see anew the many lines that unite, divide, and define us, the essays in this volume highlight how discourse at borders and boundaries can create or thwart conditions for establishing identity and admitting difference. Each chapter analyzes how public discourse at the site of physical or metaphorical borders presents or confounds these conditions and, consequently, effective participation—a key criterion for a modern democracy. The settings are various, encompassing vast public spaces such as cities and areas within them; the rhetorical spaces of history books, museum displays, activist events, and media outlets; and the intimate settings of community and classroom conversations. Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries shows how rich communication can be when diverse cultures intersect and create new opportunities for human connection, even while different populations, cultures, age groups, and political parties adopt irreconcilable positions. It will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric and literacy studies and students in rhetorical analysis and public discourse. Contributors include Andrea Alden, Cori Brewster, Robert Brooke, Randolph Cauthen, Jennifer Clifton, Barbara Couture, Vanessa Cozza, Anita C. Hernández, Roberta J. Herter, Judy Holiday, Elenore Long, José A. Montelongo, Karen P. Peirce, Jonathan P. Rossing, Susan A. Schiller, Christopher Schroeder, Tricia C. Serviss, Mónica Torres, Kathryn Valentine, Victor Villanueva, and Patti Wojahn.

This collection of articles explores how a wide range of academics-- diverse in location, rank and discipline-- understand and express how they deal with spirituality in their professional lives and how they integrate spirituality in teaching, research, administration, and advising. The contributors also analyze the culture of academia and its challenges to the spiritual development of those involved. Twenty chapter authors--from a variety of faith traditions--discuss the ways in which their own beliefs have affected their journeys through higher education. By using an autoethnographic, self-analytical lens, this collection shows how various spiritualities have influenced how higher education is understood, taught and performed. The book will stimulate debate and conversations on a topic traditionally ignored in academia