Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 25, 2008|Volume 36, Number 27

Conference aims to spark ‘new American conversation’ about immigration

The Yale Divinity School will host a national conference on immigration Thursday-Friday, May 1-2, aimed at moving the debate over the issue from a narrow focus on secure borders and undocumented workers to broader questions about immigration in the context of religion and globalization.

The event, titled “The Challenge of Immigration: Framing a New American Conversation,” is part of an ongoing annual series of conferences on issues of national or international significance hosted by the Divinity School’s board of advisers.

Among the featured participants will be George Rupp, president of the International Rescue Committee and former president of Columbia University; Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life; Bill Ong Hing, professor of law and Asian American studies, University of California at Davis; Rima Salah, deputy special representative of the secretary general for Chad and the Central African Republic, United Nations; and the Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

Rupp, Hing and Salah will conduct a discussion on the question: “How does a global framing of the U.S. immigration debate change the conversation?” That event will take place 3-5:15 p.m. on May 1. The following day 9:45-11:45 a.m., there will be a church leaders roundtable discussion on the question: “With the American religious landscape being reshaped by immigration, how do religious communities better provide leadership in our neighborhoods, and in the national policy debate?” Moderating the roundtable panel, which will include Rodriguez, will be Yale Law School Professor Harlon Dalton, author of the book “Racial Healing.”

“We offer these questions as an invitation to what we believe may contribute toward the framing of a much-needed new American conversation that will aid in moving beyond the inadequate parameters of the current public discourse,” said John Lindner, director of the Department of External Relations at Yale Divinity School. “And, of course, religious institutions have the potential to help shape that moral discourse.”

Both discussions are free and open to the public, and will be held in Marquand Chapel at the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, 409 Prospect St.

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IN MEMORIAM

Dr. Steven Hebert: Discoveries illuminated kidney processes

G.K. Hunter: Was a scholar of Renaissance literature