Maintaining and forging religious networks across borders have long been part of migrants' activities. However, due to the wide availability of communication technologies and the reduced costs of transportation, transnational social practices, including religious activities, have witnessed an enormous intensification in the last few decades around the world. Traveling Spirits seeks to understand these processes by investigating how religion goes global. How do religious agents create and maintain transborder connections? In what way are religious practices being transformed, reinforced or newly invented when transported to different places around the world? How are power relations negotiated within transnational religious networks? How are processes of coming and going linked to religious practices and discourses? The book's contributors provide rich ethnographic case studies on mobile evangelists, moving spirit mediums, and traveling believers. They analyze the relationship between global, regional, national, local and individual religious processes by centering on economic activities, media representations, or politics of emplacement. Grounded firmly in cross-cultural comparison, this book contributes significantly to the literature on globalization, migration and transnational religion.

Maintaining and forging religious networks across borders have long been part of migrants' activities. However, due to the wide availability of communication technologies and the reduced costs of transportation, transnational social practices, including religious activities, have witnessed an enormous intensification in the last few decades around the world.

Traveling Spirits seeks to understand these processes by investigating how religion goes global. How do religious agents create and maintain transborder connections? In what way are religious practices being transformed, reinforced or newly invented when transported to different places around the world? How are power relations negotiated within transnational religious networks? How are processes of coming and going linked to religious practices and discourses?

The book's contributors provide rich ethnographic case studies on mobile evangelists, moving spirit mediums, and traveling believers. They analyze the relationship between global, regional, national, local and individual religious processes by centering on economic activities, media representations, or politics of emplacement.

Grounded firmly in cross-cultural comparison, this book contributes significantly to the literature on globalization, migration and transnational religion.

Gender, Religion and Migration is the first multidisciplinary collection on the intersection of gender and religion in the integration of different groups of immigrants, migrant workers, youths, and students in host societies in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. It investigates the linkages and tensions between religion and integration from a gendered perspective. By examining the contemporary significance of religion in the context of global migrations, the fifteen research-based essays provide new insights and perspectives on the often missed link between the differing ways in which male and female immigrants find meanings of faith-beliefs and religious traditions to belong in foreign lands, even residents' faith-based activism involving illegal migrants. While religion provides mechanisms for negotiating immigrant life in the host countries, it also inhibits integration of immigrants especially in countries where the majority religion is different. This dual phenomenon of religion promoting and inhibiting integration is critically examined in the lives of Filipinos, Brazilians, Indians, Polish, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Kenyans, Nigerians, and Middle Eastern peoples. The book also engages various theories on gender, religion and migration and demonstrates the fluidity of gender construction as people cross borders.