Borderlands

Extract

In its centenary year, the Harvard Theological Review stands at a threshold that reflects Harvard Divinity School's renewed determination to do justice to the cultural and ethnic diversity of our contemporary world, to foster interdisciplinarity, and to enter into dialogue with the social and natural sciences. Davíd Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006 boldly outlined some of the implications of this resolve, and suggested that we adopt the notion of borderlands not only to refer to the expanding U.S.-Mexican borderlands where diverse cultures, languages, politics and religious practices converge, collide and undergo transformation, but as a lens through which to interpret and understand the dramatically changing religious, social, and cultural landscapes in which we are all living today. It is this existential sense of the term borderlands that Carrasco, Jackson and Premawardhana address in their explorations of the new forms of intellectual identity, academic writing, teaching practice, and religious creativity that arise in the destabilized and transgressive lifeworlds we now inhabit.