The State of Asylum Representation: Ideas for Change

The plight of refugees-those who flee persecution-touches a chord with Americans, who have supported both a substantial overseas resettlement program and a fair system for asylum seekers. U.S. laws provide a seemingly full opportunity for asylum applicants to explain their fear or actual experience of persecution. In fact, the U.S. offers an extensive process of interviews, hearings, and appeals to ensure that bona fide refugees are not sent back to their persecutors. The substantive law, too, has been developed considerably through administrative and judicial precedents. But how meaningful is a process that, no matter how extensive and developed, leaves asylum seekers on their own to present their claims when only experts understand how the process works and what the case law means? Asylum applicants often have escaped life threatening situations in their home countries and have overcome financial and physical obstacles to reach the United States, only to be faced with a daunting and confusing asylum application process. Legal assistance is permitted, but it must be at no expense to the government. While some asylum seekers find competent representation, many do not. Most of the key players in the U.S. asylum process-the representatives, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ( INS ) trial attorneys, the Asylum Officers and the Immigration Judges– believe that representation makes a difference for those seeking relief and for the effectiveness of the system. Immigration Court data indicates that represented asylum cases are four to six times more likely to succeed than pro se ones. The time has come to develop ways for all asylum seekers to have the type of legal assistance needed to more fully ensure that bona fide refugees receive the protection that the U.S. public wants to give them and that our laws require. Despite the importance of legal representation, there has yet to be a systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of the current delivery mechanisms in place to aid those in need of legal services and the effect of representation on the asylum system in general. This paper examines the state of affairs with regard to asylum representation and attempts to understand better the barriers to representation. It also begins to assess the effects of representation on asylum seekers and the asylum system itself, and to analyze the various ways in which the representation system can be improved

The Remains of the Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Ancient Holy Land

The Remains of the Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Ancient Holy Lan

The Disorder of Books: Priscillian's Canonical Defense of Apocrypha

The Disorder of Books: Priscillian's Canonical Defense of Apocryph

"Let Him Guard Pietas": Early Christian Exegesis and the Ascetic Family

Often those Church Fathers most concerned to press the new ascetic elitism of the fourth and fifth centuries might also produce surprisingly “profamily” interpretations of biblical texts that otherwise supported an ascetic agenda. Through analysis of patristic interpretation of Luke 14.26 (an arguably “antifamily” passage of the New Testament), this article seeks to explore the intersection of ascetic and family values in the scriptural interpretation of ascetic late antiquity. Through exegetical strategies (intertext and context) that emphasized at once the multiplicity and the unity of biblical meaning, the most ascetic of Church Fathers might also become the most productive proponents of particularly distinctive notions of Christian family life

'Gospel Thrillers'

Decades before the publishing phenomenon The Da Vinci Code turned millions of readers on to the excitement and glamour of early Christian history and biblical studies, a steady stream of novels—some obscure, some bestsellers were teaching the popular reading public about the thrills and chills of the academic study of Scriptures. These ‘gospel thrillers’ share a common plot: a recently discovered gospel (often a first-person account of Jesus’ ministry by one of his disciples) threatens to turn our understanding of Christianity on its head. In a race against time (and the occasional Vatican assassin) the hero must find out if the new, shocking gospel is real. Of particular interest for the post-Da Vinci Code scholar is the portrayal of academics and academic work in these early ‘gospel thrillers’: from bronzed heroes to bumbling misanthropes to sinister tools of global conspiracies, the scholars of the ‘gospel thrillers’ instructed readers on what to love, and what to mistrust, about the academic project of biblical studies

'What Has Rome to do with Bethlehem?' Cultural Capital(s) and Religious Imperialism in Late Ancient Christianity

The re-evaluation of classical education (paideia) recurred throughout the Roman period, reaching a particularly fevered pitch during the late fourth century, as the empire became Christian. The political consequences of Christian learning become particularly clear in the debate between two learned, Latin-speaking Christians who translated Greek works: Jerome and Rufinus. In the course of their acrimonious conflict over the theological legacy of Origen, these two prominent intellectuals resorted to name-calling: Jerome accused Rufinus of being unlearned, and Rufinus claimed that Jerome’s erudition signalled impiety. These accusations over education, culture, and linguistic expertise convey a deeper anxiety over the nature of knowledge and power at the dawn of the Christian Roman Empire. To what extent can Christians appropriate and transform the knowledge of ‘others’? When is translation an act of piety and when it is an act of hubris? What kinds of cultural capital will be valued in a newly Christian world, where classical paideia is valued and held suspect at the same time

A Family Affair: Marriage, Class, and Ethics in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles

In this essay I juxtapose a dominant culture discourse of the family, one which aims to construct an ethical center out of the marital union, with a deconstructive effort on the part of certain early Christian groups, in order to suggest that this particular Christian "antifamilial" rhetoric associated its family ethics with issues of class and social status. The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles oppose the morally inferior upper-class family, oriented around conjugal concordia, with a status-negating Christian "family" organized around apostolic potestas

A Jew’s Jew: Paul and the Early Christian Problem of Jewish Origins

A Jew’s Jew: Paul and the Early Christian Problem of Jewish Origin