An important new volume showcasing a wide range of faith-based responses to one of today’s most pressing social issues, challenging us to expand our ways of understanding.
Land of Stark Contrasts brings together the work of social scientists, ethicists, and theologians exploring the profound role of religion in understanding and responding to homelessness and housing insecurity in all corners of the United States—from Seattle, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley to Dallas and San Antonio to Washington, D.C., and Boston.
Together, the essays of Land of Stark Contrasts chart intriguing ways forward for future initiatives to address the root causes of homelessness. In this way they are essential reading for practical theologians, congregational leaders, and faith-based nonprofit organizers exploring how to combine spiritual and material care for homeless individuals and other vulnerable populations. Social workers, nonprofit managers, and policy specialists seeking to understand how to partner better with faith-based organizations will also find the chapters in this volume an invaluable resource.
Contributors include James V. Spickard, Manuel Mejido Costoya and Margaret Breen, Michael R. Fisher Jr., Laura Stivers, Lauren Valk Lawson, Bruce Granville Miller, Nancy A. Khalil, John A. Coleman, S.J., Jeremy Phillip Brown, Paul Houston Blankenship, María Teresa Dávila, Roberto Mata, and Sathianathan Clarke.
Co-published with Seattle University’s Center for Religious Wisdom and World Affairs

Manuel Mejido Costoya has worked for the United Nations in Geneva and Bangkok and has held teaching and research appointments in Chile, Switzerland, and the United States.

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Paul Houston Blankenship has served as an adjunct professor of religion and theology at Fordham University and Seattle University and a visiting scholar at the University of Washington. His doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley) provided an ethnographic account of the spiritual lives of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle. Prior to entering the academy, Blankenship was a social worker in San Diego and Santa Ana, California. His scholarship has appeared in collected volumes like Street Homelessness and Catholic Theological Ethics (Orbis, 2019).

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Margaret Breen is Research and Development Director at the Renton Ecumenical Association of Churches. She has been coordinating faith-based responses to homelessness and housing insecurity in the Puget Sound region for over a decade. Originally from Scotland, Breen is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Her publications include “Faith-Based Responses to Homelessness in Greater Seattle: A Grounded Theory Approach” (Social Compass, 2020).

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Jeremy Phillip Brown is an Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame specializing in medieval Judaism. He has taught at the University of San Francisco and served as Simon and Ethel Flegg Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal. His research focuses on the Zohar, the penitential discourses of Jewish mysticism and pietism, Jewish Christian polemic in medieval Iberia, and the dissemination of Kabbalah in Latin America. Brown’s recent publications include “Gazing into Their Hearts: On the Appearance of Kabbalistic Pietism in Thirteenth-Century Castile” (European Journal of Jewish Studies, 2020); and “From Nacionalista Anti Kabbalistic Polemic to Aryan Kabbalah in the Southern Cone” (Journal of Religion, 2019).

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Sathianathan Clarke is Bishop Sundo Kim Chair in World Christianity and Professor of Theology, Culture, and Mission at Wesley Theological Seminary. A presbyter of the Church of South India, he started his ministry serving as a social worker and priest for the Diocese of Madras among Dalit communities in rural India. Clarke is the author of two books: Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation Theology in India (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Competing Fundamentalisms: Violent Extremism in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism (Westminster John Knox, 2017).

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John A. Coleman, S.J., has been an associate pastor at Saint Ignatius Parish in San Francisco since 2009. Previously, he was the Charles Casassa Professor of Social Values at Loyola Marymount University (1997–2009); Professor of Religion and Society at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (1974–1997); and the Thomas More Chair, The University of Western Australia (2005 and 2007). Coleman has edited, coauthored, or authored eighteen books, including The Evolution of Dutch Catholicism, 1958-1974 (University of California Press, 1978); An American Strategic Theology (Paulist Press, 1982); One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching (Orbis, 1991); and Christian Political Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2007). He has also contributed over seventy chapters to collected volumes such as Civil Society and Government (Princeton University Press, 2002); Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); The True Wealth of Nations (Oxford University Press, 2010); Modern Catholic Social Teaching (Georgetown University Press, 2018); and American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism (Fordham University Press, 2019).

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María Teresa (MT) Dávila is Associate Professor of practice at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School, teaching at the intersection of Christian ethics and public theology. Her publications and courses focus on immigration, racism and racial justice, class and inequality, Catholic social teaching, and the ethics of the use of force. She is coeditor of Living With(out) Borders: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Movement of Peoples (Orbis, 2016). Dávila has served as the president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS).

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Michael R. Fisher Jr. is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the College of Social Sciences at San José State University. He has served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Public Administration and Policy and an Affiliate Scholar at the Metropolitan Policy Center in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He has also served as a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Before his career as an educator, Fisher was a public policy advocate in Washington, D.C. His policy portfolio included immigration reform and federal welfare programs for those struggling in poverty.

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Nancy A. Khalil is an Assistant Professor in Arab and Muslim American Studies at the Department of American Culture of the University of Michigan. Previously, she served as an Instructor of Muslim Ministry at Harvard Divinity School and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. One of Khalil’s recent projects explored the politics of American Islam through in-depth ethnographic research on Islamic higher education institutes and religious clerics—imams—in the United States.

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Lauren Valk Lawson is the Lead for the Community/Public Health Track of the Seattle University College of Nursing’s Graduate Program. Since 2008, Lawson and her nursing students have worked in partnership with Seattle Mennonite Church’s Community Ministry in their provision of services to people experiencing homelessness in Lake City, Washington. She has conducted community-based participatory research to build capacity and design recuperative care services for those experiencing homelessness in the neighborhood. She lives in Seattle with her family and is a member of the Bahá’í Faith. Lawson’s publications include contributions to collected volumes like Nursing Research: Using Participatory Action Research (Springer, 2015).

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Roberto Mata is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University specializing in the book of Revelation and contextual biblical interpretation. He is a recipient of Harvard University’s Derek Bok Center Award for teaching excellence and the prestigious William’s Fellowship. He has also received fellowships from the Hispanic Theological Initiative and the Forum for Theological Exploration. Mata has published in a number of volumes, including Latinx’s, the Bible, and Migration (Palgrave, 2018); and Transforming Graduate Biblical Education: Ethos and Discipline (Society of Biblical Literature, 2010).

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Bruce Granville Miller is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and author of eight books concerning Indigenous peoples, law, culture, and relations to the state, including Invisible Indigenes: The Politics of Nonrecognition (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); The Problem of Justice: Tradition and Law in the Coast Salish World (University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Oral History on Trial: Recognizing Aboriginal Narratives in the Courts (University of British Columbia Press, 2012); and Be of Good Mind: Essays on the Coast Salish (University of British Columbia Press, 2008). Miller has worked with Coast Salish people and communities over the last forty years and has served as an expert witness in courts and human rights tribunals.

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James V. Spickard is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Redlands, where he taught courses on homelessness and social inequality, religion, social theory, and research design. His homelessness course, which won the university’s 2014 Innovative Teaching Award, sent students on analytic internships with local social service agencies. Spickard has published widely on religion in contemporary society, human rights, social research methods, social theory, and the social foundations of ethics. His textbook on research design—Research Basics: Design to Data Analysis inSix Steps (Sage, 2017)—has a chapter on homeless counts. His most recent book, Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes (New York University Press, 2017), reimagines what sociologists might notice about religion if they began from Navajo, Confucian, and Khaldunian starting points rather than from Western Christian ones. He has served as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the Research Committee on the Sociology of Religion of the International Sociological Association.

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Laura Stivers is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Education and Professor of Social Ethics at Dominican University of California. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, her M.Div. from Pacific School of Religion, and her B.A. from Saint Olaf College. Stivers was a past president of the Southeast Commission for the Study of Religion and served on the Board of the Society of Christian Ethics. She is the author of Disrupting Homelessness: Alternative Christian Approaches (Fortress Press, 2011); coauthor of Earth Ethics: A Case Method Approach (Orbis, 2015) and Christian Ethics: A Case Method Approach (Orbis, 2020); and coeditor of Justice in a Global Economy: Strategies for Home, Community, and World (Westminster John Knox, 2006).

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