2 results
1 - Introduction: Human Mobility as Engine of Religious Change
- Edited by Bernardo Brown, Brenda Yeoh
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- Book:
- Asian Migrants and Religious Experience
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 12 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 06 March 2018, pp 11-32
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- Chapter
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Summary
There is a fundamental obstacle that makes the combined study of religion and migration particularly difficult: while migration is perceived as the realm of the mobile and transient, religion is imagined as the province of the spatially fixed and historically enduring. Contemporary efforts to bring both areas of research together within a common field are not rare, yet they tend to privilege the disciplinary background of the authors, relegating either religion or migration to a complementary status from their main focus of research. For example, when scholars of religion engage with migration and transnationalism, mobile religious practices appear as an epiphenomenon of global conditions that give rise to unique dynamics which are worthy of study, but not of intrinsic importance to understand religion itself. Robert Orsi's seminal work in The Madonna of 115th Street (1985) is a preeminent illustration of how scholars of religion have explored migrant religiosity as a space of identity formation and reconnection to the homeland, but where migration only sets the stage for a particular spatiotemporal approach to the study of religious practices amongst migrant communities.
From the opposite perspective, scholars of migration and transnationalism recognize the importance of religion in the lives of migrants as a means to give a community visibility in the host society (Baumann 2009; Sinha 2006), to provide safety nets and networks of employment and solidarity (Hagan 2008; Bautista 2016), and to sustain membership in multiple locations (Levitt & Glick-Schiller 2004). To take one example, Peggy Levitt's work in The Transnational Villagers (2001) accords migrant religion generous treatment, yet the approach remains firmly situated in the field of transnational studies, only marginally engaging with scholars whose research is rooted within a religious studies perspective.
Despite the different aspects of religion in migration that these influential research projects emphasize, there are two premises that they share. Firstly, migrants are seen as having a religious identity that they bring with them to their place of settlement and that they use in different ways to reinforce attachments or highlight boundaries; meanwhile, the ethical and theological underpinnings of religious affiliation itself are never seriously brought into question. Religious attachments thus are thought to remain firmly rooted in the country of origin and the desire of migrant communities to maintain them as intact as possible is usually taken for granted.
9 - A Multicultural Church: Notes on Sri Lankan Transnational Workers and the Migrant Chaplaincy in Italy
- Edited by Bernardo Brown, Brenda Yeoh
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- Book:
- Asian Migrants and Religious Experience
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 12 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 06 March 2018, pp 221-242
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- Chapter
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Summary
Abstract
With the inflow of five million migrants to Italy, the Catholic Church makes special efforts to attend to the pastoral and cultural needs of Christian transnational workers. Ethnic chaplaincies celebrate mass in a variety of languages and encourage migrants to replicate national traditions, festivities, and devotions. While this approach shows a sensibility toward migrant communities and the challenges that they face when trying to observe Asian forms of religiosity far away from home, it also labels these rituals and traditions as cultural practices that are clearly distinct from the orthodoxy determined by European Catholicism. Sri Lankan priests note that although churchgoers value their dedicated pastoral efforts, Italian clergy often marginalize them and treat them as foreign labor. A profound contradiction emerges when migrant clergy attempt to revitalize parish life in Italy but are restrained by local Church authorities who claim to be protecting European Catholic traditions.
Keywords: reverse mission, multiculturalism, vocation crisis, global Catholicism
Introduction
Over the last century, the demographics of the Catholic Church have shifted toward the southern hemisphere where currently 70 percent of Catholics live. More broadly, Christianity has become a world religion of the non-West, as its regional balance continues to shift away from Europe where the shareof Christianity has dropped from 66 percent to only 25 percent in less than 100 years. But the movement of Christianity to the South also needs to be situated in the context of a massive population flow of migrant labor that travels in the opposite direction, bringing millions of Latin American, Asian, and African migrants to Europe and North America (Jenkins 2006; Sanneh 2008). Taken together, these two transformations are dramatically changing the linguistic and ethnic landscapes of national churches in western Europe and the United States, prompting Christian denominations – especially those responsible for the global expansion of Christianity in the last two centuries – to seriously think about the changing shape of their clergy and flock, and take actions that reflect the super-diversity (Vertovec 2007) of their congregations.
The decline in religious participation that had been predicted by secularization theories of the twentieth century only accurately foresaw the growing religious apathy observed amongst western Europeans (Berger 1999; Casanova 1994; Taylor 2007).