Migration Experts Series | Gemma Tulud Cruz
May 3, 2016
In the first of this series, CMS interviews Gemma Tulud Cruz, senior lecturer in the School of Theology at Australian Catholic University. Dr. Cruz was born and raised in the Philippines where she completed an undergraduate degree in Education, concentrating in English and Religious Education, and a Masters degree in Religious Studies. She completed her Ph.D. in Theology, with high distinction, at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands, writing her dissertation on Filipina migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong.
Prior to moving to Australia, Dr. Cruz served as assistant professor in Theology at St. Ambrose University in Iowa, then as a fellow and visiting assistant professor in Catholic Studies at the Centre for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago.
Dr. Cruz’s research expertise is on migration, Catholic social ethics, and on contextual theologies, particularly feminist, liberation, and Asian theologies. She is also interested in research in the area of missiology and intercultural theology, as well as on the topic of globalization. Dr. Cruz also serves as the Coordinator of the Globalization Interest Group at the Catholic Theological Society of America.
In this interview, Dr. Cruz discusses her past scholarship and current project, Faith on the Move: Christianity and the Intercultural Church. Faith on the Move is a theological investigation of the challenges and opportunities that Christianity, in general, and Catholicism, in particular, continues to face in attempting to develop and realize the concept of an intercultural church. Dr. Cruz plans to test and analyze her findings through the experience of the Catholic Church in multicultural Australia.
Dr. Cruz visited CMS in June 2015 to conduct interdisciplinary research on her project, gathering information from CMS’s US Catholic Institutions and Immigrant Integration Initiative, CMS publications on the pastoral care of migrants, and CMS’s archive collections documenting immigration to the US from the mid-19th century to the 21st century.