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 outsiders 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.
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<\h2>
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 Lįgrimas: a Metonymic Encounter with the Dead
5 Metonymy in the Scriptural Imaginary
PART
2. Cain & Abel<\h2>
3 Politics Haunted
1 Strangers or Estranged Siblings?
2 Fratricide: a Problem of Beginning
3 Abels 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<\h2>
5 The Samaritans Virtue
1 From Contempt to Compassion
2 Who is my Neighbor?: the Parables 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 Failures 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
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.
