The Ethics of Migration and Welcome in the Americas

The video above is from the most recent public lecture in this year’s Butler Seminar on Religion in Global Affairs, which featured Miguel A. De La Torre of Iliff School of Theology and John McCullough of Church World Service. I highly recommend De La Torre’s book The U.S. Immigration Crisis: Toward an Ethics of Place in the Cascade Companions series (the same series in which my Theology and Science Fiction is published). It is full of so much information about events along the U.S./Mexico border recent and historical, as well as U.S. involvement in the political and economic happenings in Central and South America, that all U.S. citizens ought to know, and yet very often we do not. We have been happy to forget our history in a manner that we find inexcusable when others do it. Our genocide of Native Americans and our enslavement of people based on skin color (which inspired the Nazis in Germany), and our replacement of democratically-elected leaders with dictators who support our corporate interests, are things that must never be swept under the carpet, precisely because the repercussions of those past actions continue to impact not just our socioeconomic realities but the attitudes of people.

Looking ahead to what’s next in the series, below there’s information about the last of our public lectures, which will actually take the form of a panel. We wanted to include local immigrants, and representatives of local organizations that work with immigrants, and soon realized that there are many individuals who fall into both categories simultaneously, and we thus put together a panel of such individuals.

Please join us for the final seminar of the series Religion, Refugees and Migration:
“Hoosier Hospitality, Refugees and Immigration”
Tuesday, February 27, 7:00 PM
at the Schrott Center for the Arts

The stories of refugees and migration are the stories of people who live in Indianapolis and its vicinity – stories of those who have come here from elsewhere, and stories of those who welcomed them to their new home. Join us for a conversation among local panelists who have done both – arrived here, and worked to help others do so as well.