Introduction

The earliest historical times, religious institutions have supported migrants, and the processes of migration have themselves stimulated the creation of new types of religious organization and identification. The religious traditions have conceptualized migration in diverse spiritual and theological terms. The concept of life as a sacred journey and historical traditions of holy travel to significant religious places sanctified cities shrines, promised lands inflect the different ways in which migrants practise and narrate displacement. This chapter focuses on gender and generation. The consideration of gender in relation to migration and diasporas and the contextualization of the migratory experience through reference to the lifecycle. In debate about the role of religion in the realm of public policy and the conceptualization of civil society, slippages between the descriptive and the normative. The construction of effective social policy and of an ethic of community which can take account of the constructive force of difference. Community has no outside, because the outside is inside.