Nice overview of some of the points raised, and debates engaged at the Addressing the Asylum Crisis workshop I took part in two months ago. Reading this overview, I’m again struck by the insights provided by Public Religion Research Institute polling on what language regarding asylum seekers the public responds to positively. Right now we’re seeing an upsurge of news reports on children crossing from Mexico to the US, and of boats full of migrants (and often dead migrants). There’s notable omissions about the context of people’s leaving, as well as – in relation to the points raised in this article – the type of faith in survival; in the future that those crossing might hold.
“Refugees 1987” – original work by Zvi Malnovitzer. Obtained from Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Today is World Refugee Day and if the numbers released by the UNHCR today tell us anything, more action and new approaches are urgently needed to address the needs of the rapidly growing globally displaced population. While religion is often consider marginal in discussions about the displacement crisis, in today’s post Erin Wilson argues that the ways in which we think about the religious and the secular, the public and the private, neutrality and partiality are entangled in and, in part, productive of elements of contemporary approaches to protection.
It’s official. The world is experiencing a crisis of displacement and protection on a scale not seen since World War Two. On World Refugee Day, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees released its annual report, outlining…
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Siobhán McGuirk 