But the gathering at Tuff City Styles, across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, had a scholarly purpose. In keeping with the 2016 theme of the Association of Practical Theology conference, which took place April 8 through 10 at Fordham, the off-campus excursion was meant to exemplify the intersection between migration and theology, said Tom Beaudoin, PhD.

“We live in a world with boundaries and borders, which means we have to pay careful attention to who those borders benefit—who gets to have life and who doesn’t as a result of them,” said Beaudoin, the association’s president and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“Practical theology in particular has a responsibility to be part of the living experiences of the neighborhood—to find out what brings joy and pain in the local environment, and how those are connected to the larger world… This starts with symbolically and literally going outside of the gates.”

Tuff City is an art supply store and tattoo and piercing parlor that also houses a professional recording studio. Street artists from around the world are drawn to its backyard graffiti lot, where they paint over its walls on a daily basis.

“Not engaging with and serving the neighborhood—including the arts—is to all of our detriment,” Beaudoin said. “There are resources to be shared, [and]this is a relationship that could be life-giving on both sides and utterly essential to the mission of this University.”

In addition to giving association scholars from around the country a glimpse of the Bronx, Tuff City provided an apt milieu for a talk by alumna Tamara Henry, PhD, GRE ’14, an assistant professor of religious education at New York Theological Seminary.

Against a backdrop of a graffiti murals and life-sized replicas of subway trains, Henry offered an introduction to the world of hip-hop and how urban art—including rap music, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing—pertains to the world of practical theology.

“Hip-hop is an art form that is hewn out of hardship—specifically, the hardships of young people in the 1970s and 80s living in the throes of postindustrial economic and social distress,” said Henry, who is the youth minister at Lenox Road Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

“These art forms become a way in which young people can ignite resistance to the moral and social ills that are plaguing their community … whether it’s pervasive forms of housing discrimination, racial discrimination, unemployment, or the dwindling quality of education systems.”

Hip-hop can serve as a pedagogical resource to illuminate themes relevant to both theology and hip-hop, such as “speaking from the margins, speaking truth to power, and contesting injustice,” Henry said.

The art form can also provide religious educators a window to their students’ world, Henry said, helping them to better understand how urban adolescents and young adults relate to their social and religious environments.

“Hip-hop has become a grammar of young people all across the nation,” she said. “We can begin to view it as an equally meaningful avenue through which religious identity is being formed and through which a new approach to religious education can be engaged.”

The conference initiated what Beaudoin hopes to become an ongoing partnership with Tuff City.

“They are interested in working with students to teach them about urban art, and I’d like to find ways to support and appreciate the Tuff City artistry within our gates and to deepen the partnership Fordham has with our neighborhood,” he said.

“There is a lot to engage with, not only around religion but also other aspects— art, urban life, racial diversity and justice, and local economic issues.”

“We’re living in a new moment of the history of the city,” said Father Galli, the dean of the theology faculty and director of doctoral studies at the Catholic University of Argentina. “In 1810, only London surpassed one million inhabitants. By 1910, 10 cities did. Today, there are about 500 cities worldwide with populations of larger than one million,” and more than 30 of these cities are “megacities,” with more than 10 million inhabitants.

Father Galli is a member of the International Theological Commission, a group of theologians who serve as advisers to the pope. He collaborated with Pope Francis for the final document of Aparecida, one of the main sources of Pope Francis’s vision.

Father Galli has been a close theological collaborator with the pope since the latter’s days as Jorge Bergoglio, SJ, archbishop of Buenos Aires. He is an expert on Lucio Gera, the father of teología del pueblo, or liberation theology, a school of theology that emphasizes a “preferential option for the poor” and has influenced much of Pope Francis’s pastoral ethos.

“We are called to meet the other—the known and unknown, the similar and the different,” Father Galli said. “Faith promotes a culture of urban encounter, and a Catholic university must be a school of encounter.”

He recalled the Madison Square Garden homily, in which the pope urged the faithful to notice those who go chronically unnoticed.

“Beneath the roar of traffic, beneath the ‘rapid pace of change,’ so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no ‘right’ to be there, no right to be part of the city,” the pope had said.

“They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity. They become part of an urban landscape which is more and more taken for granted, in our eyes, and especially in our hearts.”

The task of city-dwellers, whether in Buenos Aires or in the Bronx, is to draw those who are forgotten from the periphery to the center, Father Galli said. Local parishes can rely on the church’s guidance in going about this daunting task, but they ought to draw also on their own wisdom.

“[The idea is not] to return to centralism,” Father Galli said. “The pope does not want to impose from Rome—or from Latin America—a particular pastoral, urban model for a local church. Rather, the local church should hear his challenge and then find its own creative ways of exercising an urban pastoral ministry.”

The first step for faith communities in including the excluded, Father Galli said, is to “draw near to” them—to meet them at the peripheries.

“Only a church that can gather around the family fire remains able to attract others,” he said.

The March 31 lecture was the last of four discussions that Father Galli led on both campuses over a two-day visit to Fordham.

“I didn’t have that many opportunities myself, so I know firsthand that if we provide education and opportunities for disadvantaged kids, it will make a difference in their lives,” he said.

Whether the cohort is underserved communities of New York City or rural-to-urban migrant families in China, Zhai provides quantitative analysis of survey data in the hopes of affecting policy.

Most of his research has focused on disadvantaged children in the United States. However, the native of China has begun to delve into childcare and education issues in his home country with a focus on migrant workers in Beijing.

Zhai described a country in the midst of extraordinary transformation, but still rooted in some ancient traditions, such as Confucianism, which fosters a preference for sons in a family. He said that traditionally boys, especially eldest sons, have been given more opportunities to succeed. China’s former one-child policy has further influenced the preference.

The one-child policy was implemented differently across the urban-rural divide, with cities strictly enforcing the policy and many rural areas allowed more than one child, especially if the first one was a girl.

Even though the recent phase-out of the one-child policy will free couples from the pressure to have sons, Zhai’s research shows that boys will still be favored compared to their female siblings when it comes to education and opportunities.

Part of the reason, he said, is because China doesn’t have an established pension system; instead the country still largely relies on traditional values where children, especially the eldest son and his spouse, take care of their parents in old age.

“It’s very complicated to shift from the traditional values to a new system,” said Zhai. “That’s why I want to see through data if girls are discriminated of investment in their education and if they are at a disadvantage.”

Zhai’s work also examines the effects of the country’s urban vs. rural services. In the planned economy, urban residents were provided with better services than rural residents, including child education, he said. Even today, Chinese citizens must register with the government as an urban or rural household status.

China’s “Rural” Status

Even as millions of rural residents move to the cities for better opportunities, their “rural” household registration status stands, thereby preventing their children from participating in the city’s formal school system.

“The parents can’t receive several social benefits and their kids can’t go to the public schools,” said Zhai. “It’s a huge problem.”

He said that many of the “rural” migrant communities that live in the cities have started informal schools, but most teachers don’t have proper training. And the problem may intensify, as many expect there to be a baby boom over the next decades now that the one-child policy has lifted.

Zhai said that there are a lot of efforts in China being undertaken to reform the system, and he hopes that his studies will provide solid evidence from data analysis supporting more change.

“The good part of being an outsider is that I can see the system from afar and analyze objectively,” said Zhai.

“But the truth is I know this from both sides, inside and out.”