Over the last twenty-five years, the rural U.S. Midwest has undergone dramatic demographic changes as the population of white people decreased in many areas and the number of Latinos surged. These shifts are especially noteworthy in areas that had stable, relatively homogeneous populations over at least the last half-century. Many Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic, are responding by reaching out to new residents. Such efforts have sometimes led to tension as Anglo Christians seek to reconcile the moral claims of their faith communities with the prejudices and fears they have of Latino immigrants. This article describes how Anglo-majority mainline Protestant congregations and Catholic parishes are responding to these demographic changes, notes key differences between the two groups' responses, and then sketches several possible explanations for the differences, including the underlying theology of their efforts, the prior religious affiliation of Latino newcomers, the organizational structure of church bodies, and varying impetuses for action. The paper concludes with observations about the future of Christian communities in the rural Midwest.
Over the past fifteen years, the Latino population in the Midwest increased substantially and more rapidly than the population of the Midwest as a whole, and much of that growth occurred in rural areas. There is a substantial literature addressing the new immigration, but very little of it explores the effects of immigration on religious communities in rural areas. Intimacy across Borders-part memoir, part philosophical reflection, part observational account of life in communities changed by immigration-is a welcome addition to that bibliography, though it raises more questions than it answers. Emmanuel Levinas' conception of the face-to-face encounter with the Other provides the theoretical framework for Jane Juffer's analysis. Per Levinas, the direct encounter with another, an encounter of pure experience prior to categorization, can lead either to compassion or rage, and Juffer argues we ought to attend to the embodied intimacies of such encounters.The book opens with a description of the Reformed Church of America's delayed approval of the Confession of Belhar, a document written in opposition to South African apartheid but approved by the U.S. church only in 2010, an approval Juffer believes is linked, at least in part, to the encounters that RCA congregants have had with Latino immigrants. That link, in turn, is connected to her own experience of migratory encounter, as her story growing up in the Reformed Church in rural Iowa bumps up against the story of her husband's experience on the receiving end of that same church body's racism in South Africa.The role of the Reformed Church is revisited throughout the book, as when the author analyzes Amistad Cristiana, a Latino-led religious community with a substantial Anglo minority. This joint ministry of the RCA and Christian Reformed Church (CRC) has members from a wide array of denominational backgrounds, and such diversity, Juffer observes, can lead to disagreements among congregants over key doctrines. She notes that, ''as a result of immigration, a shift has occurred, from
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