Osgoode Colloquium on Law, Religion & Social Thought Event: Borders and Borderlessness: The Religious Politics of American Power
Please join us for the next event in the Osgoode Colloquium on Law, Religion & Social Thought. This session is presented in collaboration with the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for the Study of the United States, both at the University of Toronto.
For American borders there is more going on than meets the eye. Drawing on Professor Hurd’s book Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, this lecture explores the paradoxes of creation, enforcement, suspension, and refusal of American borders understood as simultaneously religious and political objects. Americans, argues Hurd, share a bipartisan border religion, complete with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. Through an analysis of the many ways the United States creates, enforces, and ignores borders at home and abroad, Hurd offers a bold new perspective on the ties that bind American religion, politics, and public life.
