Rethinking Religion in Asylum: Theological and Political Dimensions with Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Religion in Praxis Conversation Series

While offering important perspectives on the myriad evidentiary assessment challenges facing adjudicators, the legal and social scientific literature bypasses the political theological questions that interest me here. What are the theological and political conditions that sustain practices of political and religious asylum seeking despite the persistent limitations and limits surrounding legal adjudication involving religion? Given the instability of the category of religion, why do the authorities persist in trying to establish whether a person, action, belief, or practice is credibly subject to religious persecution? How might we understand religion anew in this context?

To address these questions, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd approaches the question of religion in asylum seeking and claiming through the prism of theology, understood in this context as a mode of inquiry that takes the human as a question rather than as a given, and acknowledges the significance of human finitude rather than an assertion of human mastery. We situate the argument in the context of ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the migration crisis cause by this war.