Christian Ethics and Migration in Germany and the United States

Germany and the United States are the world’s second and first-place destinations for migrants, respectively, and Christian ethicists in both countries have generated robust and growing literatures addressing the issue of migration. Engagement between the German and US-based communities, however, has been comparably meager. This article bridges the two literatures through a set of comparative categories for Christian-ethical projects on migration. These categories take the form of a threefold taxonomy of problems (flaws in the world that require reflection on how best to respond), approaches (ways of generating normative claims), and impulses (direction in which claims tend to move) as anchored in a Christian social-ethical distinction of stranger and neighbor. These categories are divisible into sub-categories: Approaches are divisible into scriptural-hermeneutical, cosmopolitical, and spatial-phenomenological sub-categories, and impulses are divisible into harmonizing and dismantling sub-categories. Presently only a sketch, this taxonomy encompasses German and US-based discourses while revealing characteristics unique to each discourse, thus helping to map points of connection across the German and US-based scholarly communities as a basis for an expanded scholarly exchange.