The first life story in Finding home in Europe, a HOMInG book edited by L.E. Pérez Murcia and S. Bonfanti (Berghahn, 2022), is about Lucho, “a Peruvian religious minister in Manchester”.  His story, as written by Luis E. Perez Murcia, questions distinctions between different forms of human mobility and the assumption that attachment to a place called home is both a universal need and a never-ending search. By mobilizing his faith, Lucho is not seeking a place in which to create ‘roots’. Instead, he is searching for ‘routes’ to propagate the moral values of his community of faith and, in doing so, support refugees in making Manchester their ‘home’. Home, in the life history of Lucho, has become a mobile space that he experiences as a ‘journey with God’ as long as his family travels with him.

See the editors’ conceptual Introduction to the book here.

On migrant homemaking through religion, see also two more HOMInG studies, on places of worship as spaces of “horizontal” and “vertical” homemaking (Bertolani, Bonfanti and Boccagni, Religion, 2021), and on the domestic practice of religion in diaspora (Bertolani & Boccagni, Ethnicities, 2022).