Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity - Brossura

Lynch, Gordon

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1472591127 ISBN 13: 9781472591128

Casa editrice: Bloomsbury USA Academic, 2015

Riassunto

Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity explores in more detail than any previous study the moral and religious framing of child migration initiatives, informed by growing research in the anthropology of ethics - how values and ethics come to be enacted in specific social contexts. The book also speaks to issues beyond child migration: understanding the role that moral assumptions and claims play in our lives remains an issue of on-going interest, in particular the ways in which our ethical claims are complex, even contradictory, and can leave us blind to the harmful effects of our social actions.

From 1853 to 1967 an estimated 250,000 children were re-located away from their families or home communities through a range of child migration schemes run by Christian charities and denominations. Children were taken from New York and moved to other parts of the USA, and children from the UK were moved to Canada, Australia, Rhodesia and New Zealand. These schemes were intended not simply as practical welfare responses to the care of poor or displaced children, but as a moral project in which their migration was understood in terms of a move to a new redemptive environment that would enable them to flourish as pious and productive citizens. Whilst some children later regarded these schemes as useful interventions in their lives, many came to regard them as sources of unnecessary suffering and trauma.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

This thoroughly researched comparative study shows how the child migration schemes operated in the past by prestigious charitable organisations in the United States and the United Kingdom, once widely admired, are now seen to have caused considerable damage to many of the deprived and disadvantaged children they were dedicated to rescue and redeem. To explain the long-lasting commitment to such programmes, Professor Lynch focuses especially on the moral culture, particularly derived from Christian ethics, which motivated those managing these operations. It also inspired their marketing as moral projects to attract financial support. But the book also shows how the moral certainty of those responsible made them resistant to criticism and unwilling to consider the harm they could be inflicting on the vulnerable. The book raises profound and disquieting issues about humanitarian piety with which childcare and any other organisations bent on doing good today ought to engage. --Professor Stephen Constantine, Emeritus Professor of History, Lancaster University, UK

L'autore:

Gordon Lynch is Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, USA, and has previously served as co-chair of the Religion, Media and Culture group within the American Academy of Religion and chair of the British Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion study group. His research focuses on the cultural study of religion and the sacred in contemporary Western societies.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Bloomsbury USA Academic
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1472591127
• ISBN 13: 9781472591128
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 175