Search for a topic and join the conversation!
Yii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches the critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to race and gender. She is the author of Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale 2024), which traces Christian apocalyptic thinking from Columbus to the second Trump administration to show how the images, vocabulary, and ideas of Revelation have fueled anti-immigrant movements throughout American history. Lin is also the author of The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford 2016), which examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.
Dr. Lin serves on the executive Council for the Society of Biblical Literature as well as the society’s committees on the Bible in America, and Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Early Christianity, as well as in The Conversation and Religion Dispatches, and she has been interviewed for AXIOS and Rolling Stone.
Her current project continues her work on migration and religion in a books focused on the proliferation of militarized borders and walls globally, and the use of sacred texts to understand them.
Lloyd Barba is a historian of religion in the Americas with training in Latinx history; American race, ethnicity, and immigration; and the American West/Mexico borderlands. His scholarship on Mexican farmworkers in California (1906-1966) is based on oral histories and extensive archival research he has conducted. It also draws from the fields of immigration history, material culture, and scholarship on Pentecostalism and Catholicism. His more recent and ongoing research on the Sanctuary Movement (1980s to present day) brings together questions from religious history and immigration studies to understand the context of social activism and politics.