Harshbarger Lecture – Yii-Jan Lin (Yale Divinity School)

This annual lectureship is made possible by a generous donation in honor of Luther H. Harshbarger, former professor and head of the Religious Studies Department at Penn State. Past Harshbarger Lecturers include Melissa Wilde (University of Pennsylvania), Khyati Joshi (Farleigh Dickinson), Tinu Ruparell (University of Calgary), Elaine Howard Ecklund (Rice University), Jon Butler (Yale University), and Carolyn Chen (University of California, Berkeley).

“Immigration and Apocalypse: Trapped within the Walls of the New Jerusalem”

America appeared on the European horizon at a moment of apocalyptic expectation and ambition. Within that kind of beginning, explorers, colonizers, and politicians have imagined the land to be paradise, God’s country, and the New Jerusalem of the Bible’s Book of Revelation. But while the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with walls and gates, it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples. This lecture demonstrates the influence of Revelation's violent and extreme language on American immigration, and how the nation needs to break out of such apocalyptic thinking.

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 University Press, 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 University Press, 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.

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 book focused on the proliferation of militarized borders and walls globally, and the use of sacred texts to understand them.