Migrants, Families, and Religion: An Intriguing Research Agenda. Book’s Content and Introduction

This chapter introduces the collection of essays presented in the book,\r\nstarting by describing the challenging and exploratory meaning of the relationship\r\nbetween family, religion, and immigration. In the European landscape, only recently\r\nhas the religion of migrants started to be investigated in new ways, that are careful\r\nto grasp the complexity of the religious experience and to avoid pre-conceived and\r\nstereotyped readings: a sort of “normalisation” in the approach to the topic, fed by\r\nboth migration studies and religion studies. The chapter presents a reading of a\r\nselected sample of recent studies, adopting an approach based on the de-\r\ninstrumentalization of religion and on the re-humanization of migrants, enabling\r\nthem to express their subjective outlook on their own experience and on the\r\nsignificance of religious belonging. Lastly, the contents of the following chapters\r\nare presented and discussed.