Susanna Snyder's study begins from her own extensive engagement with migrants and asylum-seekers. She focuses on the response of the established community, and especially the response of Faith Based Organizations (FBOs), to strangers. Why, she asks, are ‘asylum seekers’ experiences in the UK so awful and why [are] churches engaging with them so extensively?’ (p. 6). To set the scene, she provides an overview of theological approaches to migration and then outlines her own ‘performative and liberative’ method. She then gives an overview – the first, to my knowledge – of the church activities and projects in England in support of people seeking asylum. Her study falls into two parts: first, ‘Flight and Fright: Experiences of Seeking Sanctuary’. Here, she studies forced migration worldwide before she turns to responses, which are often generated by fear, towards in-migrants. Her conclusion is that ‘responses towards strangers can … be grouped broadly into two strands – those made from within an “ecology of fear” and those made from within … an “ecology of faith”‘ (p. 137). This gives her a way into the second part of her book: a study of Ezra-Nehemiah as a fear-ful and ‘separatist’ text in which the returning Israelite exiles call for the remnant of the community that did not go into exile to be purged of its intermingling, particularly by marriage, with the peoples of the land. This she sees as an initiative born out of fear. She then focuses on the Book of Ruth, in which Ruth the Moabite woman (representing ‘the other’), is welcomed by Boaz, and through her marriage with him incorporated into Israel (Ruth 4.11ff.), together with the gospel story of the Syro-Phoenician Woman who approached Jesus because her daughter had ‘an unclean spirit’ (Mk 7.25). Both are examples of an ‘ecology of faith’. In a final chapter, she asks, ‘How do we struggle with rather than struggle for?’ those who come to our society as strangers needing a welcome? (p. 199). She gives the last word to Annette, whom she accompanied to the United Kingdom Border Agency reporting centre in Solihull: ‘If there was not a church in this country, many people would die’ (p. 213).

The importance of this book is that it has been written at all. As Snyder herself notes (p. 77), there has been a tendency to overlook the huge part that faith plays in the experience of many forced migrants, and the importance of FBOs in welcoming and caring for them. She throws new light on a life-giving process of change which has transformed communities and churches in the UK. She challenges churches to reflect on what has been learnt from their extensive engagement with migrants and asylum seekers. She invites her readers to engage with ‘dubious texts’ that can be read in various ways: Ezra-Nehemiah, as she acknowledges, is one of a number of scriptural texts which can be used ‘to justify the exclusion of outsiders’ (p. 143). I wonder, though, whether a concern to focus on the experience of women causes her to downplay some of the other important texts which focus on hospitality and an open welcome for the excluded, which she only mentions in passing, principally (Heb. 13.2-3, ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers … Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them’), but also the healing of the centurion's slave, where Jesus comments, ‘Not even in Israel have I found such faith’ (Lk. 7.9) and Mt. 25.31-46 (‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me … Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’). On ‘justice’ as a social priority (cf. Deut. 16.18-20), she is silent (‘justice’ does not appear in the index). A study of Mt. 2.14-18 (‘Out of Egypt I have called my son’ … ‘Rachel weeping for her children’) would have come close to the experience of many asylum seeking women today. Snyder's chosen texts show the ambivalence of the Jewish attitude towards foreigners and suggest, through a focused study of one new testament pericope, an explicit challenge to the ethnocentricity of Jesus (‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, Mt. 15.24), but an account which explains within the field of migration studies why many Christians have seen welcoming asylum-seekers as a priority would need to attend more closely to a wide range of scriptural texts which are by no means equivocal.

The two halves of this book do not quite come together. The first gives a valuable overview of ‘ecologies’ of fear and faith worldwide, which will hopefully lead to much further discussion. The second reflects on scriptural texts but fails to give an overview of the priority of liberation and justice for the migrant and the asylum-seeker within scripture as a whole. Snyder's book can be seen as a (not uncritical) celebration of the determination of many churches and FBOs within the UK to work for the triumph of an ‘ecology of faith’ over an ‘ecology of fear’. Amongst a wealth of practical insights, I particularly appreciated the emphasis on the contribution that migrants can make to ‘transrupting and renewing our worship’ (p. 208) and the insistence that ‘understanding scripture in its fullness … requires the presence of asylum seekers’ (p. 209). It is encouraging to read that Rabbi Julia Neuberger thinks the Church in the UK has been ‘at its most impressive’ in the area of refugees and asylum seekers because it has taken on a leading ‘prophetic role’ and been unpartisan concerning the faith backgrounds of those seeking sanctuary (p. 202). Just for the record, I didn't dress up as ‘Father Christmas’ in an attempt to deliver gifts to children detained in Yarl's Wood (cf. p. 43). Dressed as a Canon of Westminster, I accompanied ‘St Nicholas’, an altogether more significant figure than ‘Father Christmas’ in a liberative, Christian ‘ecology of faith’.