Season Three, Episode Four is here, featuring Dr. Daisy Vargas, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the U of Arizona (Ph.D. in History, University of California, Riverside; M.A. in Religious Studies, University of Denver), who specializes in Catholicism in the Americas, especially in the borderlands of the American Southwest. She examines race, ethnicity, and religion in the United States, Latina/o religion, and material religion. Please go to her web page to check out her publications, including some that are available online.
She describes her current project as tracing the history of Mexican religion, race, and the law from the nineteenth century into the contemporary moment, positioning current legal debates about Mexican religion within a larger history of anti-Mexican and anti-Catholic attitudes in the United States. In that context we talked about “crimmigration” and how US law enforcement sometimes determines who is a good or bad Catholic on the basis of material artifacts like prayer cards and rosaries.
I found this a challenging and stimulating conversation on a topic I knew little about, but the major question – who decides on whether one’s religion is good or bad? – is a perennial one. And the addition of race and ethnicity in the calculation of who is a good or bad Catholic, for instance, especially in the USA, points to the ongoing power of white supremacy at the American borderlands.
What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation.
Since St. Mark’s Centre for Christian Engagement seeks to enable the creation of a culture of encounter and dialogue, let me invite you into that discussion. Send me questions, send me ideas for guests, send me comments. Please follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter @biblejunkies, or on Facebook, at Biblejunkies, or on Instagram @biblejunkies. Or email me at [email protected]. Let me know what you think.
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John W. Martens