1 INTRODUCTION

Religious and educational institutions have opportunities to change how we consider the work of social justice and community in response to houselessness and economic injustice. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed intersecting vulnerabilities that leave many across the United States and in our local community unhoused. Even as the pandemic fades from public consciousness, those vulnerabilities remain. Further, calls for reckoning with racial injustice in the United States such as the Movement for Black Lives and protests against anti-Asian hate have highlighted how dispossession and economic inequity reveal disparate and racialized realities. These factors lay bare how understandings of property, rights to land, and the concept of home in American society are shaped by race, class, and geography. Yet these present crises also invite new approaches to the needs of those most vulnerable in our communities. They also invite scholarship and teaching rooted in collaborative labors for radical social change. Houselessness is a topic that offers a relevant and critical consideration of how theological education might teach about intersectional oppression and engage in justice work.

The intersectional vulnerabilities behind the crisis of houselessness reveal immediate needs for service and demand more from theological educators and religious institutions than shallow models of charity or benevolence. We must boldly identify historical and social structures of oppression and challenge hateful systems in our society that disinherit those among us who are poor, non-native born, Black, queer and/or transgender, survivors of abuse, ill, and disabled. I argue for the importance of community-engaged scholarship in theological higher education and offer the Shelter Project as a model for teaching about the crisis of houselessness that used art and oral histories to disrupt traditional academic patterns of scholarship and teaching in favor of community accountability. Our efforts to decenter the voice of the scholar and learn from and with our neighbors, advocates, and artists created a projects-based collaborative community with the potential to move beyond mere social commentary and reshape classrooms, curricula, and institutional life toward transformative participation in local efforts toward justice.

2 SHELTER: DIRECT AID AND COMMUNITY-ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP

This focus on poverty and the housing crisis and my reflections on community-engaged collaborative scholarship in theological institutions and higher education more broadly draw upon the experiences of the Shelter Project, a collaborative direct service, public arts, and humanities project of New Brunswick Theological Seminary (NBTS), Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and coLAB Arts New Brunswick, all based in central New Jersey. This project was generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation through an emergency grant from the program in Theology and Religion. While the project began in response to the COVID-19 pandemic delivering funds to house and provide for the basic needs of the most vulnerable of our neighbors, it has expanded beyond the scope of the original project as we think and teach and publicly advocate using the materials the project generated.

At the height of the pandemic, the Henry Luce Foundation awarded NBTS an Urgent Needs Grant of $150,000 through their Theology and Religion program. The express purpose of the funding was not to advance research on the subject but merely to offer immediate and direct aid (The Henry Luce Foundation, 2022). Other recipients of such grants from the Luce program in Religion and Theology included diverse institutions from across the United States, ranging from universities such as Arizona State, New York University, Brandeis, and Morgan State to graduate theological institutions including Graduate Theological Union, Vanderbilt Divinity School, Brite School of Divinity, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and Chicago Theological Seminary and even one secondary school, the Santa Fe Indian School Leadership Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In web conferences and communications with this cohort of grantees, it was obvious that the task of aid responsive to community needs opened institutions up to providing material support for neighbors. This in turn cultivated thinking and scholarly work that cut against structures of privilege and the sectarian and cultural matrix that too often tend to silo the work of academic institutions.

In our specific case, in talking with our community partners, we soon realized that the so-called housing crisis (itself the product of complex political choices made over many years) was a common thread among our community non-profit partners, regardless of their institutional mission or the clients they served. Accordingly, NBTS passed most of its grant money on to the Reformed Church of Highland Park Affordable Housing Corporation (RCHP-AHC) to provide direct financial assistance to more than 120 people. The grant helped 32 households secure housing and assisted some recipients with case management support, including legal and social services related to domestic violence, early release from prison, and immigration.

Listening to our community partners, we learned that the need for emergency support for housing was most acute when we began the project but that housing and houselessness were also “lenses” through which we could keep in view a broad range of social and economic vulnerabilities. For example, lack of access to long-term housing options impacted domestic violence shelters overcrowded during the pandemic, those caring for survivors of human trafficking, and immigrant and refugee resettlement organizations trying to house recently arrived people or those furloughed from immigrant detention centers due to the high COVID case counts in those prisons. New Jersey’s early release of many incarcerated people from state prisons during the pandemic also exacerbated the channels for supportive housing for these returning citizens. The moratorium on evictions unevenly protected residents of New Jersey, with the most vulnerable, poor, or ill often not receiving adequate protections and being forced out of their housing. The public health crisis also complicated the safety and health of the long-term unhoused population in Central New Jersey, many of whom fell through the cracks of other social benefits or support systems.

Care for the most vulnerable in our community was the project’s first and guiding concern. But linking up with the Affordable Housing Corporation and other community partners doing this work was integral to our second phase of the project as well, in which we considered how we might preserve and interpret these experiences of our unhoused neighbors and cultivate resources for our students and the public to gain awareness of these issues.

To begin with, COVID-19’s early devastation of the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area meant that we conceived of the project while under public health orders to “shelter in place.” It was a common reflection that the concept and the physical spaces of home began to change under these constraints, in new and challenging ways. The project’s central interpretive question was born of the moment but attuned to the experiences of the most vulnerable: In an age of pandemic, what does it mean to shelter in place when you have no shelter? Moreover, the experiences of vulnerability that resulted in the lack of this most basic human need and right continued to open our investigations out toward analysis of broader structural realities. At this point, a second phase of the project began to take shape, in which we were not merely triaging immediate needs. Colin Jager, who directs the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, brought to our leadership experience and contacts in organizing interdisciplinary arts and humanities programming. The interdisciplinary humanities and public arts interventions we subsequently undertook through the project thus marshalled the range of disciplines and approaches represented across our directors and institutions.

Historians on the project worked with students and non-profit case managers to preserve the experiences of housing-insecure members of our community through oral histories. Consistent with the practices of the Rutgers Oral History Archives, this effort did not require internal review board approval and allowed us to develop protocols that worked within the scope of our project. My colleague Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan in the Rutgers History Department drew upon her experiences as a specialist on the history of homelessness and a scholar of the public humanities. She arranged a partnership with the Rutgers Oral History Archive to train Rutgers and seminary students to conduct oral history interviews. For this project, O’Brassill-Kulfan and I decided against a traditional life course oral history model in favor of interviews that deployed a set of open-ended questions asking about the participants’ particular experiences of the pandemic, housing challenges or perspectives, the meaning of shelter or home, their reflections on religious traditions or spiritual practices, and their thoughts on community.

Conducting these interviews while pandemic-era restrictions continued was a significant challenge, since much of the work had to be done virtually. After interviews were conducted, student research assistants provided annotations, linking elements of the individual participants’ personal stories to academic and news sources contextualizing issues like mental health, domestic violence, incarceration, affordable housing, and other key topics discussed in the oral histories. Using individual oral histories as a lens to see broader structural vulnerabilities and injustices created resources for the program that preserved and honored each person’s experience. In addition, annotating those oral histories created complex resources that set individuals’ experiences against a broader social context and at the same time delved deeply into our neighbors’ struggles, laments, resilience, and joys.

Rather than immediately turn to analyze these oral histories within the humanistic disciplines of history, theology, and literature in which our co-directors at NBTS and Rutgers were trained, Dan Swern at coLAB arts facilitated artistic interpretation of these experiences by community-based artists. These submissions featured a range of media that highlighted aspects of our unhoused neighbors’ experiences. Themes included hope for social change, perseverance, and understandings of the ways people and our society at large looks away from the poor and marginalized. Artists also offered art that commented on why people and institutions often fail to intervene in systems of structural vulnerability, exploitation, and disenfranchisement. Artists celebrated and reinterpreted testimonies of meaning, community, spiritual growth, and hope.

Local artists interpreted complex stories of struggle and resilience through various media including poetry, drawing, painting, theater, and movement. Our digital site (www.ShelterNJ.org) housed not only the annotated transcriptions but also artistic interventions that meditated on and interpreted those experiences and perspectives (Figures 1 and 2).

To promote community engagement, the Shelter Project also created a large-scale art installation that exhibited the initial interpretive works drawn from the direct service and participant oral histories. The multimedia installation took up an entire side of the seminary building that faces both the main courtyard of the seminary and the central quad of the university and was on display through December 2021 (Figures 3–5).