Border Of Death Valley Of Life

This book is a powerful first-hand account of religious ministry reaching out to heal the lives of desperate people who come to the United States, often illegally, seeking a better life.

This book is a powerful first-hand account of religious ministry reaching out to heal the lives of desperate people who come to the United States, often illegally, seeking a better life.

This is a powerful, first-hand account of a religious ministry that reaches out to console, heal, and build the lives of poor and desperate immigrants who come to the United States in search of a better life. Daniel G. Groody talked with immigration officials, 'coyote' smugglers, and immigrants in detention centers and those working in the fields. The picture that emerges starkly contrasts with the negative stereotypes about Mexican immigrants: Groody discovered insights into God, family, values, suffering, faith, and hope that offer a treasury of spiritual knowledge helpful to anyone, even those who are materially comfortable but spiritually empty. This book has a message that reaches across borders, divisions, and preconceptions; it reaches all the way to the heart.

The practice of Christian hospitality reaches back to the early centuries of Christian life as well as deep into Jewish history, life, and Scripture. This practice is alive today in Christian churches and in parachurch organizations within the United States, but new contextual realities--in particular twenty-first-century global migration patterns--have altered the conditions under which hospitality is practiced. The reality of migration and its effect on human lives disrupts static conceptions of hospitality and challenges ecclesial communities toward contextual appropriation of hospitality practice. This volume explores Christian hospitality practice in light of twenty-first-century U.S. Latino/a migration, and it develops the notion of a journeying hospitality of accompaniment with and among persons migrating, which fosters deeper relationships and formation. The shifting identities of persons "on the move" challenge assumptions about what it means to welcome another in hospitality and, ultimately, what it means to be church from within these new relationships. In turn, the new conceptions and expressions of hospitality offered in this book press how the nature and mission of the church will be oriented toward new ecclesial patterns and alternative forms of residing on earth.

The Southwestern border is one of the most fascinating places in America, a region of rugged beauty and small communities that coexist across the international line. In the past decade, the area has also become deadly as illegal immigration has shifted into some of the harshest territory on the continent, reshaping life on both sides of the border. In Hard Line, Ken Ellingwood, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, captures the heart of this complex and fascinating land, through the dramatic stories of undocumented immigrants and the border agents who track them through the desert, Native Americans divided between two countries, human rights workers aiding the migrants and ranchers taking the law into their own hands. This is a vivid portrait of a place and its people, and a moving story of the West that has major implications for the nation as a whole.

In an age of global migration, what is the fundamental theological framework with which Christian theologians and church leaders are to engage its challenges and problems? In this volume, Ilsup Ahn attempts to answer this question by presenting a Trinitarian theology of migration.

Offering a theology of migration, Cruz reflects on the Christian vision of 'one bread, one body, one people' in view of the gifts and challenges of contemporary migration to Christian spirituality, mission, and inculturation and the need for reform of migration policies based on the experience of refugees, migrant women, and others.

At times, a congregational transition looms so large in a sermon that it becomes the lens through which scripture is interpreted, the congregation is addressed, the preacher is heard, and God is experienced. Homiletics professor and parish pastor Craig Satterlee reflects in this accessible, provocative volume about on how to integrate such significant events in a congregation's life into the preaching ministry of the church. Rather than offering a blueprint for preaching, however, he walks along pastors, seminarians, and other congregational leaders who want to make sure the Gospel, not an agenda, is preached.