Migration And Religion In East Asia

This book sheds light on North Korean migrants' Christian encounters and conversions throughout the process of migration and settlement. Focusing on churches as primary contact zones, it highlights the ways in which the migrants and their evangelical counterparts both draw on and contest each others' envisioning of a reunified Christianized Korea.

This book sheds light on North Korean migrants' Christian encounters and conversions throughout the process of migration and settlement. Focusing on churches as primary contact zones, it highlights the ways in which the migrants and their evangelical counterparts both draw on and contest each others' envisioning of a reunified Christianized Korea.

While the Asian church has begun to reach out to migrants, this concern for others lacks robust theological foundations. The author adapts their previous work and uses otherness and liminality as a lens to examine the scripture to better understand God's heart for migrants and the responsibility of His people towards them.

The Asian church has begun to respond and reach out to migrants. However, this concern for the other is patchy and lacks robust theological foundations. This work uses otherness and liminality as lenses to examine the scripture in order to understand God's heart for migrants and the responsibility of His people towards them. It ends with some pointers towards concrete action by the church. This book weaves a rich tapestry of historical, sociological, anthropological, biblical and philosophical portraits of migration focusing on East Asia, with a robust theological and missiological response and accompanied by an extensive literature review. Of excellent scholarship, the book is infused with a persuasive exhortation to God's community as a missional entity to fulfil its obligation to obey the ""alien mandate"" - to love the Lord our God and to love the migrant as ourselves. Dr Woods' book is particularly relevant in today's context of an unprecedented global migration phenomenon which provides many open doors for God's community to share the good news of Jesus. As this is faithfully done, migrants may come to believe and belong as they are delivered from spiritual and physical bondage. This is a book that will deeply challenge both our minds and our hearts and should spur us into action. Rev Dr Patrick Fung, General Director, OMF International Sociology and theology meet in a highly productive synthesis as the author tackles one of today's unignorable global challenges - migration. The focus may be East Asia but the lessons to be learned from this outstanding piece of research are relevant for anyone who cares about God's mission in the world today. I found the two chapters of Biblical reflection particularly useful. They provide a centrepiece that adds great value to the analysis and practical recommendations that begin and end the study. Dr Jonathan Ingleby, Formerly Head of Mission Studies, Redcliffe College Paul Woods is a reflective practitioner who has previously ministered among Chinese migrants in the UK. He has moved from engineering, through linguistics, and into theology. His theology PhD is from AGST Alliance in Singapore. He previously taught at Singapore Bible College and is now on the faculty of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

This volume, bringing together work by scholars from Europe, East Asia, North America, and West Africa, investigates transnational religious spaces in a comparative manner by juxtaposing East Asian and African examples. It highlights flows of ideas, actors, and organizations out of, into, or within a given continental space. These flows are patterned mainly by colonialism or migration. The book also examines cases where the transnational space in question encompasses both East Asia and Africa, notably in the development of Japanese new religions in Africa. Most of the studies are located in the present; a few go back to the late nineteenth century. The volume is rounded off by Thomas Tweed’s systematic reflections on categories for the study of transnationalism; his chapter "Flows and Dams" critically weighs the metaphorical language we use to think, speak, and write about transnational religious spaces.

Typically, scholars approach migrants' religions as a safeguard of cultural identity, something that connects migrants to their communities of origin. This ethnographic anthology challenges that position by reframing the religious experiences of migrants as a transformative force capable of refashioning narratives of displacement into journeys of spiritual awakening and missionary calling. These essays explore migrants' motivations in support of an argument that to travel inspires a search for new meaning in religion.

The power of embodied ritual performance to constitute agency and transform subjectivity are increasingly the focus of major debates in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam. They are particularly relevant to understanding the way transnational women migrants from South and South East Asia, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, who migrate to Asia, Europe and the Middle East to work as carers and maids, re-imagine and recreate themselves in moral and ethical terms in the diaspora. This timely collection shows how women international migrants, stereotypically represented as a ‘nation of servants’, reclaim sacralised spaces of sociality in their migration destinations, and actively transform themselves from mere workers into pilgrims and tourists on cosmopolitan journeys. Such women struggle for dignity and respect by re-defining themselves in terms of an ethics of care and sacrifice. As co-worshippers they recreate community through fiestas, feasts, protests, and shared conviviality, while subverting established normativities of gender, marriage and conjugality; they renegotiate their moral selfhood through religious conversion and activism. For migrants the place of the church or mosque becomes a gateway to new intellectual and experiential horizons as well as a locus for religious worship and a haven of humanitarian assistance in a strange land. This book was published as a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Providing a comprehensive treatment of a full range of migrant destinies in East Asia by scholars from both Asia and North America, this volume captures the way migrants are changing the face of Asia, especially in cities, such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Hamamatsu, Osaka, Tokyo, and Singapore. It investigates how the crossing of geographical boundaries should also be recognized as a crossing of cultural and social categories that reveals the extraordinary variation in the migrants' origins and trajectories. These migrants span the spectrum: from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas. Illuminating the ways in which an Asian-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, the contributors provide important new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and innovative methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.