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Ethics Across Borders assembles perspectives from geographers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and scientists to explore ethically relevant connections across multiple types of borders.
The contemporary global order is fluid, increasingly unstable, and riven with borders at countless and complex points. Religious, political, and ecological borders hold particular significance, where interactions carry compounding social and environmental consequences. As the first collected volume to look at these three types of borders, both from an interdisciplinary perspective and as distinct forms, it demonstrates the value of thinking across borders as an ethical project. Taking Simone Weil's perspective that every separation is a link, it posits that separations within sovereignty, species, and religion become links between political, ecological, and theological perspectives, and that boundaries within human life have taken on ecological significance in the age of the Anthropocene. In this framing, religion interacts with the political and the ecological in three ways: as foundational to sovereignty, as an influence on perspectives on contemporary boundaries, and as morally and philosophically implicated in the human/nonhuman interactions that ground environmental ethics.
Ethics Across Borders offers lessons on how to reimagine borders and how to engage more justly with ecological systems and human communities. It will appeal to readers in environmental and religious ethics, philosophy, and border studies.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Ethics across religious, political, and ecological borders
SECTION I Political 2. Rebordering nature: From geopolitics to geo-politics and a philosophy of
geopower 3. In-between spaces in border regions: Examples in the Middle East 4. The leaky boundaries of man-made states: On the ethical ambivalence of borders 5. Political border crossings: Some normative considerations 6. Politics and its limits: From analytical to ecological borders
SECTION II Ecological 7. Planetary boundaries 8. Boundaries to the more-than-human as creative zones: Resources for a renewal of theological anthropology 9. Migrations of the sacred: Crossing the human border 10. Natural borders: Emergence and values realism 11. Reflections on the modern boundary of value and the possibility of reenchanted science
SECTION III Religious 12. Do good fences make good neighbors? Religious borders, porosity, and the question of appropriation 13. Identity and cultural trespassing: Rabbinic interpretations of cross-border interactions 14. The confessional divide in the post-Westphalian order: Making religious borders flexible 15. The invisible border: The vanishing line of separation between church and state 16. From foundational relationality to populist borders: How did we get here?
Overviews 17. Walls, weather, and the spirit in-between: Exercises in border thinking 18. Conclusion
About the author
Gary Slater is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Christian Social Sciences, University of Münster, and Editor of the
American Journal of Theology and Philosophy. His research is funded by the German Research Council (DFG), and it focuses on borders, migration, environmental ethics, interreligious theology, and philosophical pragmatism.
Lisa Landoe Hedrick is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, University of Chicago. She is the author of
Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality (2021) and contributor to
Diversifying the Philosophy of Religion: Critiques, Methods, and Case Studies (2023).
