Based on a Boston College doctoral dissertation done under David Hollenbach, S.J., Gregorian associate professor René Micallef, S.J. fuses his pastoral work with migrants and refugees in Malta, Italy, Spain, Uganda, and the US with a deep grounding in biblical exegesis and philosophical hermeneutics. As someone who has lived, worked and studied in both the Old and New World M. has been in contact with a range of scholarship that often is not featured in just one world or the other.

Reworked dissertations have both assets and drawbacks. There is lots of information, amply referenced, but it also lacks the precision, focus and conciseness of a work that might have started from scratch.  In his Preface M. says he will “focus on a single social ethics issue [our relationship to the stranger] and seek to use Scripture in a way that might shed light on current immigration and asylum debates (p. xx)” but he actually did less of this in the concrete---either in Europe or America—than some might desire.

Structured in two parts of four chapters each, plus an Introduction and a Conclusion, which presents four 4 “Takeaways” to help “deconstruct” that “challenge some aspects of modern ethno-cultural nationalism and of Westphalian sovereignty” (p. 269). Since these might serve as programmatic preface to his overall approach I list them here (pp. 270-1): 

1. Autochthony is mostly a fiction and migration is not a marginal phenomenon in human history
2. Religion is a problematic source of civic national identity
3. National narratives are necessary, but not just any narrative will do
4. Anamnestic solidarity should be a prime shaper of national identity

M. then identifies four verbs---to welcome, protect, promote, and integrate—which “summarize 130 years of official Catholic teaching and human mobility,” in which “Scripture teaches us a lot about hospitality, but its implicit struggles with integrating the ‘other’ are probably even more instructive as we reflect on immigration today” (p. 273).

Part 1: No Longer Stranger: Bridging the Divide between Scripture and Ethics considers both personal, individual reflection on Scripture, as well as communitarian discernment,” both of which involve “preunderstandings” of Scripture. In a more academic approach is what M. describes an “explicit channel [that] is a more rigorous and critical way used in scholarship and serious debate …in a more public setting” (p. 41).

In Chapter 3 Engaging the “World of the Text” and Chapter 4 Bridging Scripture and Ethics Explicitly M. spends considerable time wrestling with just how “Bible” exist as a set of sacred, revelatory texts. Here he brings in hermeneutical authorities such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, as well as theological authors such as  Sandra Schneiders, William Spohn and Waldemar Janzen.

Part 2: A Congregation of Metics and Traveling People: Bridging the Divide between Kin and Stranger, begins with Ch. 5 “Mapping the Concepts” structured by consideration of “what extent our understanding of state, citizenship, nationalism, patriotism, and cosmopolitism are shared by modernity and the system of nation-states formed after the Peace of Westphalia (1648)” (p. 133).   One person cannot do everything, but myself as someone with experience in Asia notes these academic discussions could profit by looking more closely at the other two-thirds of the globe.

Ch. 6 does a deep dive into the biblical exegesis of the Hebrew term: the Ger (the “stranger” or “resident alien”). Others could build on this research to consider more explicitly the pathologies of racist-infused nativism seen in contemporary America, and elsewhere. Ch. 7 Hospitality proposes solidarity as a unifying OT concept. Ch. 8 gives a sustained reflection on “Kinship Building.” This section is particularly helpful to see in a sustained manner M’s approach to Biblical exegesis for ethical application purposes. The long discussion on the dating of the Book of Ruth will be of interest to some, but it is perhaps a bit too long and technical to capture the attention of the general reader. This is not a typical “Paulist Press” type of book, whose approach resembles dissertation published by presses such as Brill. There is more than the usual jargon, even for a (revised) dissertation. He clearly has read widely but his book is encyclopedic in a somewhat problematic way as it is hard to trace just which authors and approaches M. feels would shed the most light on his broad chosen topic. At times it seems we’re trying to follow the weaving of biblical exegetical string theory. Certainly it would difficult to adopt this book as a course text, but certainly it supplements the bibliography of both biblical and social ethics.