In this election year, immigration has become a major political issue. Some would like you to believe immigration is tantamount to a veritable “invasion” of undesirables or worse. However, since the 1980s, a little-known faith-based movement has taken a very different view. Humanitarian organizations, legal advocates, and religious groups have collaborated to provide advocacy, shelter, and assimilation. Thanks to generous grants and support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement and the American Academy of Religion, Executive Producer Brad Onshi presents a seven-episode podcast that tells the story of “The Sanctuary Movement.” Scholars Lloyd Barba, Ph.D. (Professor, Amherst College) and Sergio Gonzales, Ph.D. (Professor, Marquette University) bring their research to the program with a focus on asylum seekers from Central America. The Sanctuary Movement has been active for hundreds of years - around the world. But it began in earnest in this country in 1982 with a wave of immigrants from war-torn El Salvador and Guatemala. It’s a story of faith as radical hospitality and the tension over “the borders between church and state.” Ken and Dr. Barba talk about the podcast series and how the current political climate distorts and harms both immigrants and Americans. SHOW NOTES
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“History has a disintegrating effect on current prejudices which is as yet scarcely appreciated. It makes both for understanding and for intellectual emancipation as nothing else can.”
James Harvey Robinson, 1911.
What if we told you that one of the biggest movements to protect migrants in the history of the United States was led by people of faith? What if there was a movement that has been cultivated within religious spaces, dedicated to a radical hospitality – to live out the Gospel by welcoming the stranger?
Dr. Lloyd Daniel Barba is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Core Faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of the award-winning book Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford University Press) and editor of Latin American and US Latino Religions in North America (Bloomsbury). His current research on the Sanctuary Movement includes A Refuge of Resistance: A History of the US Sanctuary Movement (under contract with Oxford University Press) and a volume edited with co-host Sergio González, Sacred Refuge: New Histories of the Sanctuary Movement (under contract with New York University Press).
Dr. Sergio M. González is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University. He is the author of Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press) and Mexicans in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society Press) and the co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 (New York University Press) with Felipe Hinojosa and Maggie Elmore. He is a co-founder and former organizer for the Dane Sanctuary Coalition and is currently completing a co-edited volume with co-host Lloyd Barba, Sacred Refuge: New Histories of the US Sanctuary Movement (under contract with New York University Press).
More Pending
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