Review of Spiritual Treasures: Esotericism in the Finnish Art World 1890–1950, edited by Nina Kokkinen and Lotta Nylund (Helsinki: Parvs, 2020).

Review of Per Faxneld's Det ockulta sekelskiftet. Esoteriska strömningar i Hilma af Klints tid (Stockholm: Volante, 2020).

What is hospitality? Who is it addressed to? Hospitality aims at welcoming those who arrive; it demands giving space and time and sharing our own resources with others. In view of the current global migration crisis and in the midst of the social debates and a critique of the failure of affluent countries and Western democracies to respond in solidarity to those in need, this article attempts to re-consider the space for hospitality drawing from the ethical and the political as the two fundamental pillars of social architecture. In an effort to discuss collective grassroots reactions to this general lack of hospitality, I address the Catalan social platform Volem Acollir (2017) in their request to the state to open up the borders for the reception of a larger number of migrants. Far from being an individual choice, or an optional political decision, hospitality confronts us with the moral dilemma of the human response to our cultural others.

Review of Anne Dufourmantelle's In Praise of Risk, trans. with an introduction by Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

This text offers some reflections that stem from my participation in the NSU Winter Symposium ‘Feminism and Hospitality: Religious and critical perspectives in dialogue with a secular age’, held in Turku, Finland, 5–7 March 2020. Drawing from my previous experiences both in my native country and in my country of residence, I first explain why this event represented a welcome novelty to me. I then highlight some of its major positive features. I do not offer a resume of the presentations or a collection of some of them. Rather, I focus on what, according to me, is the main strength of this kind of event. Based on the revision of my own presentation, I conclude by saying it may serve as a laboratory from whence to start the construction of bridges through which the dialogue between religion and secularism can really occur.

This issue of Approaching Religion brings together different voices and disciplines to think in and about hospitality and solidarity through feminist thinking and lived experiences of the contemporary world.

Review of Anne Heith's Laestadius and Laestadianism in the Contested Field of Cultural Heritage: A Study of Contemporary Sámi and Tornedalian Texts (Umeå University, 2018).

In 2017, the Finnish Immigration Service received approximately 1,000 asylum applications and appeals based on conversion from Islam to Christianity. The applications claimed that converted asylum seekers would face mortal danger if returned to their countries of origin. The applications posed an unprecedented dilemma for the Finnish Immigration Service: how was it, as a secular state institution, to evaluate these claims of conversion? This question also became an object of significant public and media debate. In this article, I examine how journalists writing for a religious media publication, Kirkko ja kaupunki, the newspaper of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Helsinki region, sought to intervene in the debate on asylum seekers’ conversions. I focus my analysis on one central line of argument in their reporting: a call for the better- inclusion of and engagement with religious expertise on Christianity by the Finnish Immigration Service when evaluating conversion-based asylum applications and appeals. I show that this call both positioned religious expertise as an antidote to the challenges that efforts to evaluate conversion-based asylum appeals posed to Finnish Immigration Service employees in this time period, and constituted expertise as a site for negotiations over the ‘proper’ relationship between religion and state.

This article examines how free movement and mobility are represented in Finnish upper secondary level EU textbooks. There were three such books in use at the time of writing, published in 2007, 2010 and 2014. My methodology is based on the discourse-historical approach outlined by Ruth Wodak, focusing particularly on the various discursive strategies present in the books. I have divided the groups addressed into four levels of mobility thus; ‘EU movers’, ‘restricted EU movers’, ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’. The EU movers were the most positively viewed group; their mobility was often related to work and studies. ‘Restricted EU movers’ refers to citizens of the countries that joined the EU in the twenty-first century, whose ‘invasion’ was allegedly feared by the older member states. Migrants outside the EU were described, inter alia, as a ‘flow of millions of poor people’ eager to enter Europe. Refugees, in turn, were conflated with people applying for asylum without valid grounds, creating a ‘refugee flow’ dealing with which member states needed to assist each other. Overall, this article concurs with the findings of previous studies: school books tend to present those moving within Europe as more agreeable, with less acceptable stereotypical characteristics being attached to extra-EU migrants and minority groups such as the Roma.


 
 
 
 The editorial presents the fifteenth ETMU Conference, held at Åbo Akademi University in Turku on 15–16 November 2018, dedicated to the theme "Vulnerabil­ity, Resilience and Resistance in Diverse Societies’. The first two articles of the current issue are based on papers presented at the conference.