Borderlands Studies

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Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Francisco Lozada, Jr. talks to Jon Rodríguez about transforming students’ perspectives

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Jon Rodríguez talks to Dr. Francisco Lozada, Jr., who is the Charles Fischer Catholic Associate Professor of New Testament and Latinx Church Studies at Brite Divinity School, about creating opportunities for students to experience social issues first-hand. Through the Borderlands Institute’s intensive travel seminar, Dr. Lozada has been able to take “the classroom into the field” with the hope that witnessing will help students see the “other” in a more humane light.

 
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Francisco Lozada, Jr.

Dr. Francisco Lozada, Jr. is the Charles Fischer Catholic Professor of New Testament and Latinx Studies at the Brite Divinity School. He is also the Director of the Borderlands Institute and the Latinx Church Studies program at Brite. He holds a doctorate in New Testament and Early Christianity from Vanderbilt University. He is a past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, a past steering committee member of the Bible, Indigenous Group of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and past co-chair of the Latino/a and Latin American Biblical Interpretation Consultation (SBL). Besides serving in the past in several leadership capacities with the Society of Biblical Literature, he also serves on the board of directors for the Hispanic Summer Program and mentored several doctoral students with the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI). 

Dr. Lozada’s most recent publications (The Gospel of John: History, Community and Ideology, 2020; Toward a Latino/a Biblical Interpretation, 2017) concern cultural and ideological interpretation while exploring how the Bible is employed and deployed in ethnic/racial communities. As a teacher, he co-led immersion travel seminars to Guatemala to explore colonial/postcolonial issues and, most recently, to El Paso, TX and to Nogales, AZ to study life and society in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In April 2019, Dr. Lozada received The Catherine Saylor Hill Faculty Excellence Award at Brite.  

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Jon Rodríguez

Jon Rodríguez is currently pursuing a MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary. In addition to his work with the Hispanic Theological Initiative, he is the Administrative Editor of the Princeton Theological Review. His research interests include the role of race and ethnicity in the Gospels and American religious history.

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