Priests of God: An Enchanted Humanitarianism on the African Migration Route

Abstract

This article examines a prevailing ‘enchanted humanitarianism’ discourse within a faith‐based organisation working with migrants in Morocco that encompassed tensions, contestations and ambiguity, revealing a fundamental ‘identity ambiguity’ in the organisation between evangelism and humanitarianism. This was the source of much tension in the organisation's operations and is indicative of entangling constructions of the sacred and the secular in faith‐based organisations, going against an essentialised or monolithic conception of the role of ‘religion’ in humanitarianism. These entanglements are illustrated through an examination of two organisational issues—the identity of staff and the flexibility of criteria for its beneficiaries. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Neighbourliness, conviviality, and the sacred in Athens’ refugee squats

“…Moving beyond the usual spaces of mosques, churches and temples, scholars have found ample fertile ground in locating religious practice at alternative sites such as museums (Kong, 2005;Buggein, 2012;McCormack, 2017), schools (Kong, 2005;Bobrowicz, 2018;Vince, 2019), development and humanitarian NGOs (Beaumont, 2008;Clarke and Jennings, 2008;Ngo, 2018); roadside shrines (Preston, 2002;Solso, 2015;Osterberg, 2018), media spaces ( Vásquez and Marquardt, 2000;Kong, 2006;De Wildt et al, 2018 ), streetscapes (Ismail, 2006;Jones, 2006), sites of financial practice Samers, 2007, 2013;Bassens et al, 2013) and home spaces (Kong, 2002;Tweed, 2006). A further site of difference recognised by geographers of religion has been embodied experiences of the sacred -drawing attention to emotion and affect.…”