This is a powerful, first-hand account of a religious ministry that reaches out to console, heal, and build the lives of poor and desperate immigrants who come to the United States in search of a better life. Daniel G. Groody talked with immigration officials, 'coyote' smugglers, and immigrants in detention centers and those working in the fields. The picture that emerges starkly contrasts with the negative stereotypes about Mexican immigrants: Groody discovered insights into God, family, values, suffering, faith, and hope that offer a treasury of spiritual knowledge helpful to anyone, even those who are materially comfortable but spiritually empty. This book has a message that reaches across borders, divisions, and preconceptions; it reaches all the way to the heart.

The practice of Christian hospitality reaches back to the early centuries of Christian life as well as deep into Jewish history, life, and Scripture. This practice is alive today in Christian churches and in parachurch organizations within the United States, but new contextual realities--in particular twenty-first-century global migration patterns--have altered the conditions under which hospitality is practiced. The reality of migration and its effect on human lives disrupts static conceptions of hospitality and challenges ecclesial communities toward contextual appropriation of hospitality practice. This volume explores Christian hospitality practice in light of twenty-first-century U.S. Latino/a migration, and it develops the notion of a journeying hospitality of accompaniment with and among persons migrating, which fosters deeper relationships and formation. The shifting identities of persons "on the move" challenge assumptions about what it means to welcome another in hospitality and, ultimately, what it means to be church from within these new relationships. In turn, the new conceptions and expressions of hospitality offered in this book press how the nature and mission of the church will be oriented toward new ecclesial patterns and alternative forms of residing on earth.

Immigration and Faith is a comprehensive textbook for theology and religious studies courses that addresses migration to and within the United States and beyond.

In an age of global migration, how should Christian theologians and church leaders respond to its various challenges and problems? What is a fundamental theological framework with which we are to engage in them? In this volume, Ilsup Ahn attempts to answer these questions by presenting a “Trinitarian theology of migration.” In doing so, he first provides an overview of recent theological works on migration by introducing their key theological insights. A Trinitarian theology of migration becomes possible as we begin to see that the three Sacred Persons (the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit) are distinctively, yet intrinsically involved with the phenomenon of human migration within God’s grand vision of liberation and redemption. From a Trinitarian theological perspective, in all stages of human migration from taking leave to getting integrated, migrants and citizens are called to join in God’s liberative and redemptive works for all the people of God.

At times, a congregational transition looms so large in a sermon that it becomes the lens through which scripture is interpreted, the congregation is addressed, the preacher is heard, and God is experienced. Homiletics professor and parish pastor Craig Satterlee reflects in this accessible, provocative volume about on how to integrate such significant events in a congregation's life into the preaching ministry of the church. Rather than offering a blueprint for preaching, however, he walks along pastors, seminarians, and other congregational leaders who want to make sure the Gospel, not an agenda, is preached.

Drawing deeply on their own experience of consecrated travel, the Scaperlandas guide readers into the heart of the pilgrim experience. Much of their advice is practical: What are the most promising pilgrimage destinations? How can families go on pilgrimage? How can vacations and tourism be transformed into a journey of pilgrimage? They give special attention to practices and attitudes that can make all travel sacred. Their depth of understanding enables readers to connect the inner and.

The painful reality faced by refugees and migrants is one of the greatest moral challenges of our time, in turn, becoming a focus of significant scholarship. This volume examines the global phenomenon of migration in its theological, historical, and socio-political dimensions and of how churches and faith communities have responded to the challenges of such mass human movement. The contributions reflect global perspectives with contributions from African, Asian, European, North American, and South American scholars and contexts. The essays are interdisciplinary, at the intersection of religion, anthropology, history, political science, gender and post-colonial studies. The volume brings together a variety of perspectives, inter-related by ecclesiological and theological concerns.

Migrant Spirituality makes visible the migration stories of African-born migrants to the USA, analyzes their experiences, and appreciates them as a source for theological reflection. The correlation of these narratives with John of the Cross' narrative of The Dark Night reveals that the dynamic between the concepts of vulnerability, spiritual humility, and God's transformative agency is central to understanding the spiritual dimension of the process of transformation in both narratives. Dorris van Gaal studied theology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. She works in religious education and teaches at Loyola and Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore, MD. Her research interests are in Migration Theology, Spirituality, and World Christianity.

The Wherewithal of Life engages with current developments in the anthropology of ethics and migration studies to explore in empirical depth and detail the life experiences of three young men – a Ugandan migrant in Copenhagen, a Burkina Faso migrant in Amsterdam, and a Mexican migrant in Boston – in ways that significantly broaden our understanding of the existential situations and ethical dilemmas of those migrating from the global south. Michael Jackson offers the first biographically based phenomenological account of migration and mobility, providing new insights into the various motives, tactics, dilemmas, dreams, and disappointments that characterize contemporary migration. It is argued that the quandaries of African or Mexican migrants are not unique to people moving between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ worlds. While more intensely felt by the young, seeking to find a way out of a world of limited opportunity and circumscribed values, the experiences of transition are familiar to us all, whatever our age, gender, ethnicity or social status – namely, the impossibility of calculating what one may lose in leaving a settled life or home place; what one may gain by risking oneself in an alien environment; the difficulty of striking a balance between personal fulfillment and the moral claims of kinship; and the struggle to know the difference between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ utopias (the first reasonable and worth pursuing; the second hopelessly unattainable).

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of key issues in contemporary global migration and considers the theological implications for Christianity, in general, and for Christian faith and practice in various parts of the world, in particular. Migrant Christians, who make up the majority of believers on the move and in diaspora, play an increasingly vital role in world Christianity today. Drawing on cases from across the globe, Gemma Tulud Cruz considers how Christians are faced with immense gifts and tremendous challenges brought by the ever-increasing presence of migrants in their midst and the conditions that characterize contemporary global migration. Migrant Christians themselves face multiple challenges, which have been made more stark by the coronavirus pandemic. The volume will be relevant to scholars of religion and of migration who are interested in a closer examination of what happens to Christians and Christianity, (faith) communities, and nation-states in the age of migration.