Religion Across Borders

Religion Across Borders examines both personal and organizational networks that exist between members in U.S. immigrant religious communities and individuals and religious institutions left behind. Building upon Religion and the New Immigrants (2000)--their previous study of immigrant religious communities in Houston--sociologists Ebaugh and Chafetz ask how religious remittances flow between home and host communities, how these interchanges affect religious practices in both settings, and how influences change over time as new immigrants become settled.

From global missionizing among proselytic faiths to mass migration through religious diasporas, religion has traveled from one side of the world and back again. It continues to play a prominent role in shaping world politics and has been a vital force in the continued emergence, spread, and creation of a transnational civil society. Exploring how religious roots are shaping organizations that seek to aid people across political and geographic boundaries - 'service movements' - this book focuses on how religious movements establish structures to assist people with basic human needs such as food, clothing, shelter, education, and health. Examining a multitude of faith traditions with origins in different parts of the world, seven contributing chapters, with an introduction and conclusions by the senior author, offer a unique discussion of the intersections between religious transnationalism and social movements.

The medieval Islamic world comprised a wide variety of religions. While individuals and communities in this world identified themselves with particular faiths, boundaries between these groups were vague and in some cases nonexistent. Rather than simply borrowing or lending customs, goods, and notions to one another, the peoples of the Mediterranean region interacted within a common culture. Beyond Religious Borders presents sophisticated and often revolutionary studies of the ways Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers drew ideas and inspiration from outside the bounds of their own religious communities. Each essay in this collection covers a key aspect of interreligious relationships in Mediterranean lands during the first six centuries of Islam. These studies focus on the cultural context of exchange, the impact of exchange, and the factors motivating exchange between adherents of different religions. Essays address the influence of the shared Arabic language on the transfer of knowledge, reconsider the restrictions imposed by Muslim rulers on Christian and Jewish subjects, and demonstrate the need to consider both Jewish and Muslim works in the study of Andalusian philosophy. Case studies on the impact of exchange examine specific literary, religious, and philosophical concepts that crossed religious borders. In each case, elements native to one religious group and originally foreign to another became fully at home in both. The volume concludes by considering why certain ideas crossed religious lines while others did not, and how specific figures involved in such processes understood their own roles in the transfer of ideas.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

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.

The new immigrants coming to the United States and establishing ethnic congregations do not abandon religious ties in their home countries. Rather, as they communicate with family and friends left behind in their homelands, they influence religious structures and practices there. Religion Across Borders examines both personal and organizational networks that exist between members in U.S. immigrant religious communities and individuals and religious institutions left behind. Building upon Religion and the New Immigrants (2000)_their previous study of immigrant religious communities in Houston_sociologists Ebaugh and Chafetz ask how religious remittances flow between home and host communities, how these interchanges affect religious practices in both settings, and how influences change over time as new immigrants become settled. The study's unique comparative perspective looks at differing faith groups (Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist) from Argentina, Mexico, Guatamala, Vietnam and China. Data on ways in which historic, geographic, economic and religious factors influence transnational religious ties makes necessary reading for students of immigration, religion and anyone interested in the increasingly global aspects of American religion.

Communities across Borders examines the many ways in which national, ethnic or religious groups, professions, businesses and cultures are becoming increasingly tangled together. It show how this entanglement is the result of the vast flows of people, meanings, goods and money that now migrate between countries and world regions. Now the effectiveness and significance of electronic technologies for interpersonal communication (including cyber-communities and the interconnectedness of the global world economy) simultaneously empowers even the poorest people to forge effective cultures stretching national borders, and compels many to do so to escape injustice and deprivation.