Introduction: Ecumenism and Translation? Ecumenism as Translation? Ecumenism in Translation?

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• Introduction:Ecumenism and Translation? Ecumenism as Translation? Ecumenism in Translation?
• Aaron T. Hollander

Keywords

ecumenism, borderlands, multilingual, US-Mexico border

The North American Academy of Ecumenists (NAAE) has functioned, for almost seventy years, as a network committed to research into the conditions of conflict and peacemaking in the Christian churches, while fortifying the vital (and increasingly sparse) work of cultivating ecumenical perspective, content expertise, and methodological acumen among students and seminarians. Each year, a theme is selected to focus the attention of the network's established and emerging scholars, typically aligned either with the Annual Meeting's geographical location or with the temporal lens of a meaningful anniversary or pressing contemporary question. This coming September 27–29, 2024, the NAAE will convene at the Toronto School of Theology, returning to Toronto after twenty-five years, for a conference on "Memory, Truth, and Reconciliation." We will reckon especially with the history of displacement, violence, abuse, and genocide toward Indigenous Peoples in which the churches are implicated, as outlined by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission,¹ as well as with other resonant questions around the healing of memories, the encounter of incompatible truths, and the risktaking necessary for sustainable reconciliation.²

Last year, the NAAE's Annual Meeting was held November 16–17, 2023, in collaboration with the Center for Catholic Studies at St. Mary's University, San Antonio, TX, with the theme of "Ecumenism in the Borderlands: [End Page 295] Translating Worlds." It offered an encouraging cross-section of the vibrant and innovative work on ecumenical borders and translation—as both historico-geographical realities and as metaphorical keys—that is underway at universities and seminaries across the United States and beyond. This issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies collects a set of eight articles generated from presentations at the 2023 NAAE meeting. It is my honor, as current President of the NAAE, to introduce the articles following some reflections on the theme that oriented the contributions to this issue.

Our objective in choosing the 2023 theme was twofold. First, as we were meeting in Texas, we wanted to highlight the distinctive conditions of the United States-Mexico borderlands as a geographical and cultural context. Such a context invites scholars invested in global questions of interconfessional and intraconfessional division to attune to more on-the-ground negotiations of Christian difference, in light of (for instance) the multicultural and multilingual entanglement of interchurch relations with the overlapping legacies of two European colonial projects, the varieties of Native American erasure and resistance that have resulted, and the impulses to national articulation and identity (Mexican, U.S., and, indeed, Texan) that have made ecumenical exchange both more difficult and more urgent. Accordingly, we sought to take up some of the key theoretical concepts (mesitzaje, la frontera, and so forth) that would allow us to put these Texas borderlands into productive comparison with other border-laden ecumenical dynamics around North America and around the world. Secondly, as several of the articles in this issue engage in substantial and innovative ways, we took the opportunity to lift up translation itself as a lens through which to view the history, methodology, and enduring challenges of ecumenical encounter.

Why "translation," though? We can appreciate why translation is so fundamental a framework for ecumenics by posing the questions, or question-fragments, with which the organizing committee wrestled while selecting the theme of our conference. Are we interested in exploring "ecumenism and translation"? "Ecumenism as translation"? Or "ecumenism in translation"? Ultimately, we chose not to use any of these formulations as our conference title, not because we despaired of choosing among them, but because we did not want to foreclose on any of them by leaning too heavily on one alone. [End Page 296]

In her graduate seminars at the University of Chicago, referring to the letters of St. Paul, Margaret Mitchell would sometimes say that "the theology is in the prepositions." She meant by this, I think, that Paul's theology is richly metaphorical and full of imaginative play in which spatial, temporal, and analogical relations between and among concepts bear more intellectual weight than we tend to assume. However, the aphorism was also a lesson on the...