Teaching Borderlands Conference

This year's Teaching Borderlands Conference will be hosted at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, located at 100 E. 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705

Click to view in Google Maps here.

As the Live Music Capital of the World, Austin is a dynamic city and offers a wide variety of good hotels. Although the dates of the conference coincide with other tourist attracting events, if you book early, you can find very reasonable accommodation prices.

Interested in volunteering or getting involved with the Teaching Borderlands Conference, email sarah.rutherford@student.austinseminary.edu.

On Monday, April 24, beginning at 3:00 p.m. in the Wright Learning and Information Center there will be an exhibition of Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project until 5:00 p.m.. For more information about Arte de Lágrimas, please visit www.artedelagrimas.org or view a short documentary below.

For questions about registration and logistics, please contact sarah.rutherford@student.austinseminary.edu.

For other questions, comments, and concerns, please contact the Rev. Dr. Gregory L. Cuéllar at gcuellar@austinseminary.edu

This conference is generously supported by a grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion.

Other than teaching classes in missiology and Latino theology and ministry at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, Dr. Fernández publishes, gives workshops and retreats, and assists at local parishes.  He has taught high school and worked in university campus ministry.  A native of El Paso, Texas, he earned a Masters in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a doctorate in theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.  Among his published works are Mexican American Catholics, awarded a 2008 Catholic Press Association Book Award in the category of pastoral ministry, as well as his co-authored La Vida Sacra: Contemporary Hispanic Sacramental Theology (with James Empereur), Culture-Senstitive Ministry: Helpful Strategies for Pastoral Ministers (with Kenneth McGuire, CSP and Anne Hansen) and his latest, Doing Theology as If People Mattered: Encounters in Contextual Theology (with Deborah Ross and Stephen Bevans).  He was recently chosen to give the Graduate Theological Union Distinguished Faculty Lecture in November of 2020.

Daisy L. Machado serves as the Executive Director of the Hispanic Summer Program, a unique program of theological education founded in 1989,  and is Professor Emerita of American Religious History at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Machado, a native of Cuba, came to New York City when she was three years old.  She has also served as academic dean of Lexington Theological Seminary (Lexington, KY) and Union Theological Seminary, the first Latina to hold this position in both institutions. Dr. Machado was also the first director of the Hispanic Theological Initiative when it opened its doors in 1996.

Dr. Machado has lectured in many seminaries and conferences both in the United States and abroad. She is the  author of several published works related to borderlands history and theology. Her latest publication is Borderland Religion: Ambiguous Practices of Difference and Hope an anthology published in 2019 which she co-edited with Dr. Trygve Wyller (Norway) and Dr. Bryan Turner (Australia) containing essays by a group of international scholars. In this anthology she also has an essay titled “Santa Muerte: A Transgressing Saint Transgresses Borders.” In addition, Dr. Machado has also authored other book chapters on the borderlands, among them: the chapter “History and Latino Identity: Mapping A Past That Leads to Our Future” in the book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology; “Borderlife and the Religious Imagination” in the anthology Religion and Politics; and “The Southern U.S. Border: Immigration, the Historical Imagination, and Globalization” in Rethinking Economic Globalization. She is also co-editor of the volume, A Reader in Critical Latina Feminist Theology which contains her essay “The Unamed Woman: Justice, Feminists, and the Unamed Woman”. Her first monograph on the issue of the borderlands was Of Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in Texas, 1888-1945.

Dr. Efraín Agosto is the Visiting Professor in Latinx Studies and Religion at Williams College. A Puerto Rican, Dr. Agosto was born and raised in New York City. Among his published works are Servant Leadership: Jesus and Paul (2005) and Preaching in the Interim: Transitional Leadership in the Latino/a Church (2018). The volume that he co-edited with Jacqueline Hidalgo, Latinx, the Bible and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan), was published in 2018. Efrain’s teaching and research expertise focus on the New Testament letters of Paul and the issues of empire, ekklesia, leadership and ministry that they reflect. Efrain lives with his wife Olga Gisela in West Hartford, Connecticut, and they have two adult children, Joel and Jasmin.