In our emerging climate future, devastation will not land evenly. “Climate apartheid” names a world where the rich insulate themselves from its most catastrophic effects, while the global poor stand increasingly subject to rising seas, failing crops, intensifying weather events (floods, hurricanes, wildfires) and thus to the necessity of movement: some project a billion climate refugees by 2050. Yet analyses often fail to link climate apartheid to the existing systems mobilized to execute it—policing, prisons, borders—and so fail to connect climate (...) politics to enduring racialized projects of carceral control, as well as to Black, Native, and Latinx struggles against them. A key task is to develop capacious conceptual frameworks for understanding how religious actors are addressing the deep entanglements of political ecology and racial violence. This paper pursues that task in four parts. Part 1 introduces climate apartheid and proposes “cross-border solidarity” as an organizing concept for response, while underscoring that solidarity's chief virtue—its being already in use across diverse moral communities—is also what requires rigorous specification. What is the shape of “solidarity” amid climate futures? Parts 2 and 3 critique two frameworks ethicists might employ in facing that question: anthropocene discourse obscures race, while mestizaje discourse addresses race but risks reproducing its deepest logics. Part 4 proposes an alternative I will call cimarronaje. Of Taíno-Arawak and Spanish origin, the word refers to the historical experience, across slaveholding societies of the Americas, whereby enslaved African people fled plantations, escaped to surrounding hills and swamps, and reimagined forms of life with Indigenous communities, forged new ecologies together and, in the shadows of colonial empire, prefigured the theory and practices of cross-border solidarity we need today. (shrink)

The recent renaissance of Augustinian ethics remains mostly silent about the central place of slavery in Augustine’s thought. Although Augustinians appear confident his insights can be excised from his legitimation of the institution of slavery, two facts challenge this assumption: First, slavery constitutes not simply one moral issue among others for Augustine but an organizing, conceptual metaphor; second, the contemporary scene to which Augustinians apply his thought is itself the afterlife of a slave society. Thus, to bear faithful witness in (...) a racialized world, Augustinians must grapple with slavery as Augustine’s key conceptual metaphor, one that animates his thought and subtly reproduces the moral vantage of the master. (shrink)

In his writings on the conception and the birth of the Son of God, Jacob of Sarug perceives Mary’s perpetual virginity as a mystery intimately linked to that of the Son of God. In fact, the Son of God has taken flesh from the Virgin for us men and for our salvation. Jacob presents two ways to describe the Incarnation : the conception of the Word of God through the ear, and his entrance in the world through the common door (...) of all men. This paper intends to identify the Mariological and Christological challenges of Mary’s virginal motherhood, according to Jacob of Sarug. For this purpose, it proposes to review both ways in the light of the two images of Mary : the sealed letter in which the Divine Word was inscribed, and the closed door of Ezekiel’s vision. (shrink)