Voices from the Borderland demonstrates how interdisciplinarity is a necessary and efficient tool for a new urban theology. While it is an important reading to anyone engaged in the task of urban theology, it will be most interesting to scholars who explore the foundations, hermeneutics, and methods of the emerging theology of this globalized century.
You see, there is a history in this picture—a racialized, classed, gendered narrative in US history. As I tell my students in my feminist theory classes, the task is to analyze these “cultural artifacts” for what they reveal about constructions of race, gender, and class (and we could also talk about age, sexuality, idealized body types, and ableism).
It seems that the mission of the book is to tease, to challenge, and perhaps to constructively irritate—in other words, to make readers impatient for more, or at least unable to forget one’s vexation. Even if this extremely accessible volume ends up among the exotic florilegia of a bread-and-butter mainline liturgical theology course at the end of a semester, the odds are high that it will change the way how people in the Euro-American theological orbit look at the lectionary, pray in their Sunday liturgies, and sing their favorite hymns.
"As a person with no fixed nation state, is my identity as fluid as people’s relationship with any one of the nations I exist in? I am Arab American in the US because my relationship with the Arab world, and my fellow Americans relationship with the Arab world seem to have some consensus. In Copenhagen everything shifted. Because I didn’t fit into people’s conception of an Arab, I was no longer one, neither to outside groups or inside groups. Out of my own context, I was a blank slate for people to project onto. And I did the same to others."
