Borders: Religious, Political, and Planetary

• Applicant: Gary Slater, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518052714

This project navigates relationships between religious, political, and planetary borders as a work of Christian Social Ethics. In the fluidity of the contemporary global order, such relationships offer lessons on how to reimagine borders more justly and with greater sensitivity to both ecological systems and human communities. Based on the hypothesis that religious, political, and planetary borders exhibit a link that, while rhetorically notable, is not merely rhetorical, the project integrates inquiries into the dynamics of interreligious interaction, territorial sovereignty, and the human relationship with nonhuman nature within planetary systems. With aspirations to deepen and widen Christian social-ethical scholarship on borders, the project asks: how can Christian texts and practices furnish an account of relationship-across-difference that extends into interactions across political borders, and how, in turn, might an enhanced account of political border-crossing generate resources to forestall the transgression of planetary boundaries? Given both the stakes of the challenges involved and the potential for applying theological reflection into public life in a way that inspires cultural creativity and resilience, these questions are of interest to Christians and non-Christians alike. Moreover, in navigating between the rhetoric and the reality of borders, the project draws extensively from the logic and semiotics of the philosopher C.S. Peirce. By showing how terminological links across discourses for multiple borders types indicate relationships beyond rhetoric, Peircean semiotics supports a form of Christian social ethics that reveals, as ‘signs of the times’, ethically relevant entailments for what these relationships might mean in practice. As for Peirce’s logic, his logic of abduction discloses logical principles drawn from Christian texts as a means to diagnose errant practices regarding borders and recommend constructive alternatives whose lessons can be extended from one borders type to another. Christian references are selected on the basis of their roots in foundational theology, relevance to borders, and suitability relative to Peircean logic; a promising example of a Christian reference is the coincidentia oppositorum. As outputs, the project will produce a single-author monograph, a jointly edited collection following an international conference on borders, two academic articles, two popular articles, and a postgraduate conference. In the longer term, the project will raise the profile of borders as an issue for Christian Social Ethics, provide coherence for the intersecting relationships between ethical discourses on migration, ecology, and interreligious dialogue, and support such case studies as the US-Mexico border, the Amazon Watershed, and the Jordan Valley, each of which contributes to a durable framework by which Christians respond to challenges of displacement, ecological degradation, and interfaith conflict.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants