Introduction: The Fugitive Sacred

Following the 2016 US presidential election, the number of churches calling themselves sanctuaries nearly doubled. Restaurants, universities, hospitals, and cities also declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented migrants. The American Friends Service Committee launched a campaign titled “sanctuary everywhere,” insisting that sanctuary could mean harboring someone in a place of worship but might also point to practices that are mobile. Inspired by the call for “sanctuary everywhere,” this introduction embraces a fugitive theory of sanctuary, one that transgresses the prohibitions of the everyday or profane world. Tracing sanctuary to the sacred, it shows how this tradition is inseparable from that which disrupts the ordinary and the routine. This introduction offers various origin stories, or histories, of sanctuary—without settling on any one of them as the beginning or root of the tradition. It proposes a meandering methodology for researching and writing about the fugitive movements of migrants, activists, and others traversing borderlands.