Faith on the Move: Toward a Theology of Migration in Asia (review)

In 2006 the conference “Faith on the Move” was held in Quezon City at the Maryhill School of Theology, gathering ten theologians (Lou Aldrich, Agnes Brazal, Victorino Cueto, Emmanuel S. de Guzman, James Kroeger, Anselm Kyongsuk Min, William LaRousse, Felipe Muncada, Anthony Rogers, and Giovanni Zevola) to speak about migration in Asia. The essays gathered in this anthology are revised versions of the papers presented in that conference. While the table of contents shows that the essays are organized according to the progression of topics with the following part headings—“The Migrant Context,” “Ethical Challenges,” “Reimagining the Church, Mission, and Eschaton,” and “Pastoral Challenges”—in the body of the text itself the essays flow from one to another in a succession uninterrupted by part divisions. This suggests that the essays are united more cohesively than the divisions in the table of contents may suggest.

Underlying the essays is the question—a worry?—about the catholicity of the Catholic Church, i.e., the concern about whether the Catholic Church in general and the local churches of Asia in particular are able to respond to the needs of migrants and the challenges raised by the widespread migration of labor brought about by the globalized flow of capital.

Each of the responses to this problematic primarily takes one or a combination of several approaches:

1. 1. Some essays are primarily aimed at seeking or retrieving theological resources from within the tradition—both scriptural and magisterial—reinterpreting these theological concepts to specifically address the experience of displacement and conflict engendered by migration. (Zevola’s chapter on “Migration in the Bible and Our Journey of Faith” is paradigmatic of this approach. From the Old Testament, he explores the notion of election—purifying it from its exclusionary implications—in order to ground the believer’s identity in the experience of foreignness; from the New Testament, he draws from the Emmaus story a spiritual ethic of compassion for the stranger.)

2. 2. Others are more expressly grounded in their author’s pastoral and missionary experiences and give an elaborated account of the economic and political conditions faced by migrant populations in their host countries. These essays are valuable for several reasons: they give their readers an appreciation of the specificity of each migratory experience, and the complexity of the problems arising out of migration. Muncada’s paper, “Japan and Philippines,” for instance, shows how one cannot deal with issues of migration without at the same time recognizing and addressing deeply seated views of Japanese society about gender relations. These essays are also valuable for their concrete suggestions for dealing with and responding to the needs of the migrant faithful. For example, Aldrich, in his paper on the situation of migrants in Taiwan, suggests that religious orders “dedicate [themselves] to creating honest labor-broker organizations” (65–66).

3. 3. Still others turn to the fruits of other fields of inquiry (sociology, political science, philosophy) in order to aid theological reflection in the area of reconceiving fundamental theological notions—such as church (De Guzman), mission (LaRousse), and the Trinity (Brazal)—as well as broader theoretical notions relevant to the question of migration, such as “cultural rights” (Brazal).

In this task of reconceptualization I find De Guzman’s essay, “The Church as ‘Imagined Communities’ among Differentiated Social Bodies,” to be the strongest and most challenging work. It offers an original and fruitful way of thinking about what catholicity means. Without losing his grounding in the faith tradition, in retrieving the traditional metaphor of church as city and revitalizing it with Young’s political theory of urban life, de Guzman grounds his reflection on what “church” means in the fact that the church is part of the secular world. It is through a genuine encounter with the secular realm that the church can genuinely learn from and deal with differences and enter a deeper communal life with others, without merely falling back on facile...