Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be able to share with you some of my insights on this topic.

When I tell people that, when I tell people that I teach theology and sociology, I often get a puzzled look.

People who don't know much about either field sometimes just ask me, well, what kinds of courses would you teach and who would take those courses?

But for people who know the history of the fields, the question becomes, and know that there's

been a historical separation between sociology and theology. The questions I get are more like,

well, how do you actually integrate those two disciplines?

What does that look like? And how did you, and why did you start doing that?

What I normally tell people is that the kinds of questions that drew me initially to study psychology and sociology

came from a lot of my own experiences growing up where I was witnessed a lot of

suffering in my hometown, watching migrants coming from Central America, my own mother coming

to United States from Cuba. But I also witnessed the tremendous human capacity for resilience.

And I thought by studying the social sciences, I would understand better how it is that people adapt to

and overcome adversity.

The field work, and what I loved about the social sciences,

and in particular sociology as a graduate student

here at Princeton University, I loved immersing myself

in the world and trying to understand cultures and places

and people very different from myself.

My field work experiences took me to former battlefields in Central America,

took me to my own mother's homeland of Cuba,

and I wrote my first book about Haiti and the diaspora, the Haitian diaspora.

And I found myself increasingly drawn to reading

...