This book focuses on the Philippines as a powerhouse in the Catholic and global migration landscape. It offers a wide-ranging look at the roles, dynamics, character, and trajectories of Catholic faith and practice in the age of migration through an interdisciplinary, religious, and theological approach to Filipino Catholics’ experience of migration and diaspora both at home and overseas. In so doing, the book introduces the reader to the hallmarks and characteristics of a contextual model of world Christianity and global Catholicism in the twenty-first century.

This book is the first to analyze the impacts of migration and transnationalism on global Catholicism. It explores how migration and transnationalism are producing diverse spaces and encounters that are moulding the Roman Catholic Church as institution and parish, pilgrimage and network, community and people. Bringing together established and emerging scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, history and theology, it examines migrants’ religious transnationalism, but equally the effects of migration-related-diversity on non-migrant Catholics and the Church itself. This timely edited collection is organised around a series of theoretical frameworks for understanding the intersections of migration and Catholicism, with case studies from 17 different countries and contexts. The extent to which migrants’ religiosity transforms Catholicism, and the negotiations of unity in diversity within the Roman Catholic Church, are key themes throughout. This innovative approach will appeal to scholars of migration, transnationalism, religion, theology, and diversity.

This volume takes its title from the first-century Christian catechism called the Didache: “Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills . . . gathered together and became one, so let Your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth.” For Christians today, these words remain relevant in an era of massive human movements (voluntary and coerced), hybrid identities, and wide-ranging cultural interactions. How do modern Christians live as both a “scattered” and “gathered” people? How do they live out the tension between ecclesial universality (catholicity) and particularity (distinctive ways of being church in a given culture and context)? Do Christians today constitute a “diaspora,” a people dispersed across borders and cultures that nonetheless maintains a sense of commonality and mission? Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora explores these questions through the work of fourteen scholars in different fields and from different corners of the world. Whether through reflections on Zimbabweans in Britain, Levantines in North America, or the remote island people of Chiloé now living in other parts of Chile, they guide readers along the winding road of insights and challenges facing many of today’s Christians.

Human beings leave their homelands for many reasons and they are called by many names: illegal aliens, strangers, asylum-seekers, displaced persons, economic migrants, lawful permanent residents, refugees, temporary workers, and victims of trafficking. Some are forced to flee because of violence, persecution, natural disaster, or intense economic privation. Most migrate in search of a better life, many as part of a family survival strategy. The movement of people from one place to another has remained a constant feature of human history. In an era characterized by the fast and cheaper movement of goods and services around the globe, migrants are the face of globalization. The world's two hundred million migrants often find themselves at the center of economic, social, and political debates. This book describes the distinctive way in which Catholic social teaching looks at migrants. It analyzes migration from the legal, social science, and cultural perspectives, and gives special consideration to the lived experience of immigrants themselves and their host communities. The book identifies gaps and opportunities to improve government and non-governmental responses to migration on a local, national, and international level. And You Welcomed Me aims to reframe perspectives on migration by focusing on the human beings at the heart of this phenomenon. It analyzes trade, immigration, labor, national security, and integration policies in light of the core Catholic commitment to the common good, human dignity, authentic development, and solidarity.

The South Asian Christian diaspora is largely invisible in the literature about religion and migration. This is the first comprehensive study of South Asian Christians living in Europe and North America, presenting the main features of these diasporas, their community histories and their religious practices. The South Asian Christian diaspora is pluralistic both in terms of religious adherence, cultural tradition and geographical areas of origin. This book gives justice to such pluralism and presents a multiplicity of cultures and traditions typical of the South Asian Christian diaspora. Issues such as the institutionalization of the religious traditions in new countries, identity, the paradox of belonging both to a minority immigrant group and a majority religion, the social functions of rituals, attitudes to language, generational transfer, and marriage and family life, are all discussed.

This book migrates through continents, regions, nations, and villages, in order to tell the stories of diverse kinds of nomadic dwellers. It departs from Africa, en routes itself toward Asia, Oceania, Europe, and culminates in the Americas, with the territories of Latin America, Canada, and the United States. The volume travels through worn out pathways of migration that continue to be threaded upon today, and theologically reflects on a wide range of migratory aims that result also in diverse forms of indigenization of Christianity. Among the main issues being considered are: How have globalization and migration affected the theological self-understanding of Christianity? In light of globalization and migration, how is the evangelizing mission of Christianity to be understood and carried out? What ecclesiastical reforms if any are required to enable the church to meet present-day challenges?

Many scholars have documented how migration from Latin America to the United States shapes the interconnected spheres of religious participation, political engagement, and civic formation in host countries. What has largely gone unexplored is how the experiences of migration and adaptation to the host country also shape the ecclesiological arrangements, theological imagination, and communal strategies of immigrant religious networks. These communities maintain close ties with their home countries while simultaneously developing a religious life that distinguishes them both from their home countries and from faith communities of the dominant culture in their host countries. João Chaves offers an account of the dynamics that shape the role of immigrant churches in the United States. Migrational Religion acts as a case study of a network formed by communities of Brazilian immigrants who, although affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, formed a distinctive ethnic association. Their churches began to appear in the United States in the 1980s due to Brazilian Baptist missionary activity. As Brazilian migration increased in the last decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of Brazilian evangelical churches were founded to cater to first-generation immigrants. Initially their leaders conceived of these churches as extensions of their denomination in Brazil. However, these church communities were under constant pressure to adapt to their rapidly changing context, and the challenges of immigrant living pushed them in exciting new directions. Brazilian churches in the United States faced a number of issues peculiar to their nature as diasporic communities: undocumented parishioners, membership fluctuation caused by national and international migration patterns, anti-immigrant prejudice, and more. Based on six years of ethnographic work in eleven congregations across the United States, dozens of interviews with Brazilian pastors, and extensive archival history in English and Portuguese, Migrational Religion documents how such churches adapted to unique challenges, and reveals how the diasporic experience fosters incipient theologies in churches of the Latinx diaspora.

This book explores the role of religion in the lives of Brazilian migrants in London and on their return 'back home'. Working with the notion of religion as lived experience, it moves beyond rigid denominational boundaries and examines how and where religion is practiced in migrants' everyday lives.

Gatherings in Diaspora brings together the latest chapters in the long-running chronicle of religion and immigration in the American experience. Today, as in the past, people migrating to the United States bring their religions with them, and their religious identities often mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before. This book explores and analyzes the diverse religious communities of post-1965 diasporas: Christians, Hews, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians, and practitioners of Vodou, from countries such as China, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, and Mexico. The contributors explore how, to a greater or lesser extent, immigrants and their offspring adapt their religious institutions to American conditions, often interacting with religious communities already established. The religious institutions they build, adapt, remodel, and adopt become worlds unto themselves, congregations, where new relations are forged within the community -- between men and women, parents and children, recent arrival and those longer settled.

Patterns of migration for the purpose of religious mission are an unexamined dimension of the immigration narrative. Catholic sisters from many countries around the world come to the United States to minister and to study. Sociologists from Trinity Washington University and CARA at Georgetown University combined forces to document and understand this contemporary and historical phenomenon. Together, they located more than 4,000 "international sisters" who are currently in the United States for formation, studies, or ministry, from 83 countries spread over six continents. Through surveys, focus groups, and interviews, they heard the stories of these sisters and learned of their joys and satisfactions as well as their struggles and challenges. This book examines the experience of these sisters in depth and offers valuable suggestions for religious institutes, Catholic dioceses and parishes, and others who benefit from their contributions. More broadly, this book also raises awareness of immigration issues at a time of great contention in the public policy debate in the United States. Illustrated with instructive graphics and tables, it is an accessible and inviting resource for academics and the media, as well as bishops, and leaders of Catholic health care, social service, education, pastoral, and philanthropic institutions.