Being about Borders offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to theological anthropology. This approach combines theology, ethics, and psychology in order to attend to the cognitive, affective, and corporeal dimensions of being human in relation, captured in the concept of “being about borders,” which for Saracino entails empathetic engagement (14, 16, 21, 78). Saracino blends postcolonial theories of hybridity (14–17), or the plural stories that configure and constitute our personal identities, with postmodern ethical and feminist theories of coming undone (14, 141), or the ability of another to uncreate and redefine us, in order to highlight the range of often-negative emotional responses—fear, entitlement, and numbness—to the inescapably “enmeshed nature of human existence” (15). Beyond fear of difference, which often leads to policing social norms and territorial borders, and beyond entitlement, which prioritizes personal rather than others’ needs, Saracino argues in a creative, convincing way that the original sin of narcissism—understood as a Lonerganian scotoma, or the inability to recognize others’ needs, feelings, and stories—needs to be remedied in order for us to identify and fulfill our ethical responsibilities to others (22, 26–27, 28).
The doctrines of creation and Christology, along with women's experience, catalyze the conversion from narcissism to the incarnation of hybridity (17, 20, 53). Reinterpreting the Genesis creation stories shows that human beings are inherently hybrid, carrying both the divine and other humans within their very nature (29–31). Reinterpreting the Gospel literature underscores the many-storied identity of Jesus, as illustrated by the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in his person, by his navigation of multiple social identities, and by his other-oriented and bodily-based healing ministry (31–34, 49–51). On this reading, “the incarnation sacralizes difference” and the cross clarifies that discipleship demands both “bear[ing] the other's story as their own” (34), and “relinquish[ing] the stories and attachments . . . that obscure the needs, feelings, memories, and stories of others” (33). Moreover, maternity affords one metaphor from women's experience for reflecting on incarnating hybridity in our contemporary pluralistic and globalized society, because “pregnancy replicates this christological tension with otherness,” that is, with bearing another's story (58). Drawing on feminist theory and theology, Saracino observes that maternity highlights “living with the leaky effects of otherness,” foregrounds the embodied and emotional effects of ongoing relationship with another, and resists any idealized cultural or theological stories about mother-child/self-other relations (53, 54, 56, 57).
Paying attention to creation, Christology, and women's experience yields three features of an affective anthropology rooted in alterity: (1) openness to constructive conflict modeled on Jesus’ encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark (36), (2) openness to emotional exposure based on the entire kenotic life, ministry, and death of Jesus, and (3) openness to mourning the loss of “a privileged and singular sense of self, story, or place in relation to another.” Mourning especially provides a penitential and “grace-filled” praxis of moving toward empathetic identities rooted in the other-oriented posture of Jesus (44–46, 66, 67).
Reflecting on both talk and bodily-based trauma therapies, Saracino endorses both discursive and affective means to assess and reintegrate deeply dissonant relations into our self-identities (78). Being about Borders concludes its constructive anthropology with “rules of engagement” denuded of militarist meanings and instead derived from recent work in dialogical ecclesiology and trauma treatment in combination with Saracino's own hybridized Christology. These rules include attending to affect and to the sin of scotoma in daily life; utilizing storytelling as a praxis of mourning; accepting vulnerability as living in and into the imago Dei; and balancing self-care and care for others (140). These rules both emerge from and are applied in creative case studies of Jewish-Catholic relations, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and post-9/11 U.S. international relations.
This text will figure centrally in any advanced undergraduate and graduate courses that deal with theological anthropology, with postmodern theory and theology, or with the theology and ethics of embodiment, difference, and trauma as integral to human identity and to relationality.
