Ethics Across Borders: Reimagining Religious, Political, and Ecological Divides

Ethics Across Borders assembles perspectives from geographers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and scientists to explore ethically relevant connections across multiple types of borders.

The contemporary global order is fluid, increasingly unstable, and riven with borders at countless and complex points. Religious, political, and ecological borders hold particular significance, where interactions carry compounding social and environmental consequences. As the first collected volume to look at these three types of borders, both from an interdisciplinary perspective and as distinct forms, it demonstrates the value of thinking across borders as an ethical project. Taking Simone Weil’s perspective that every separation is a link, it posits that separations within sovereignty, species, and religion become links between political, ecological, and theological perspectives, and that boundaries within human life have taken on ecological significance in the age of the Anthropocene. In this framing, religion interacts with the political and the ecological in three ways: as foundational to sovereignty, as an influence on perspectives on contemporary boundaries, and as morally and philosophically implicated in the human/nonhuman interactions that ground environmental ethics.

Ethics Across Borders offers lessons on how to reimagine borders and how to engage more justly with ecological systems and human communities. It will appeal to readers in environmental and religious ethics, philosophy, and border studies.

Gary Slater is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Christian Social Sciences, University of Münster, and Editor of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy. His research is funded by the German Research Council (DFG), and it focuses on borders, migration, environmental ethics, interreligious theology, and philosophical pragmatism.

Lisa Landoe Hedrick is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, University of Chicago. She is the author of Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality (2021) and contributor to Diversifying the Philosophy of Religion: Critiques, Methods, and Case Studies (2023).