Sanctuary and Subjectivity

The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s was a movement led by white religious liberals that housed Central Americans fleeing dictatorships supported by the United States government, giving them a platform to speak about the situation in their countries of origin. Until now, much scholarship has focused on the movement’s white activists, but this book centers the experiences of recipients of sanctuary to produce an account of the movement that takes seriously its whiteness, the agential limitations of sanctuary, and the struggles for agency by recipients. Using interviews with participants in the movement, this book situates the movement as site for theological reflection on some of the most pressing issues facing the Church today – the possibilities of testimony, the Holy Spirit, ecclesiology, and mercy. In doing so, it proposes a new theoretical framework for thinking about practice by introducing readers to Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivation and arguing for ethnographically engaged theology that is able to think beyond virtue and excellence towards an understanding of fugitivity.