- "Offers its readers an opportunity to witness the fantastic capacity of seemingly marginal people to...carve out a future." - Ella Schmidt, author of The Dream Fields of Florida "Beautifully illustrates the complex intersections of religion and immigration." - Virginia Garrard-Burnett, The University of Texas at Austin
The canyon in central Mexico was ablaze with torches as hundreds of people filed in. So palpable was their shared shock and grief, they later said, that neither pastor nor priest was needed. The event was a memorial service for one of their own who had died during an attempted border passage. Months later a survivor emerged from a coma to tell his story. The accident had provoked a near-death encounter with God that prompted his conversion to Pentecostalism. Today, over half of the local residents of El Alberto, a town in central Mexico, are Pentecostal. Submitting themselves to the authority of a God for whom there are no borders, these Pentecostals today both embrace migration as their right while also praying that their “Mexican Dream”—the dream of a Mexican future with ample employment for all—will one day become a reality. Fire in the Canyon provides one of the first in‑depth looks at the dynamic relationship between religion, migration, and ethnicity across the U.S.-Mexican border. Faced with the choice between life‑threatening danger at the border and life‑sapping poverty in Mexico, residents of El Alberto are drawing on both their religion and their indigenous heritage to demand not only the right to migrate, but also the right to stay home. If we wish to understand people's migration decisions, Sarat argues, we must take religion seriously. It is through religion that people formulate their ideas about life, death, and the limits of government authority.
Study and Practice of Meditation gives a vivid and detailed account of the meditative practices necessary to develop a calm, alert mind that is capable of penetrating the depths of reality. The Buddhist meditative states known as the concentrations and formless absorptions are best known in the West from Theravada scriptures and from Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Manifest Knowledge. In this book the reader is exposed to Tibetan Buddhist views on the mental states attained through meditation as described by three contemporary Tibetan lamas. The book discusses the ways in which certain meditative states act as bases of the spiritual path as well as the nature of meditative calm and the prerequisites for cultivating and attaining it. In addition to reviewing and translating Tibetan sources, the author considers their major Indian antecedents and draws comparisons with Theravadin presentations.
The international refugee regime is fundamentally broken. Designed in the wake of World War II to provide protection and assistance, the system is unable to address the record numbers of persons displaced by conflict and violence today. States have put up fences and adopted policies to deny, deter, and detain asylum seekers. People recognized as refugees are routinely denied rights guaranteed by international law. The results are dismal for the millions of refugees around the world who are left with slender prospects to rebuild their lives or contribute to host communities. T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Leah Zamore lay bare the underlying global crisis of responsibility. The Arc of Protection adopts a revisionist and critical perspective that examines the original premises of the international refugee regime. Aleinikoff and Zamore identify compromises at the founding of the system that attempted to balance humanitarian ideals and sovereign control of their borders by states. This book offers a way out of the current international morass through refocusing on responsibility-sharing, seeing the humanitarian-development divide in a new light, and putting refugee rights front and center.
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