The presenters PhD and subsequent Palgrave book explored “What role did spirituality and religion play in refugees’ flights from their home country and during their resettlement in host countries?” The topic was explored mostly through a qualitative study that used a grounded theory approach. A subsequent framework emerged together with its typologies which is relevant for the nineteen refugees of Christian, Muslim and Animist backgrounds who fled from Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Iraq mostly between the 1990s and the early 2000s, and then settled in Australia. The several spiritual/ religious responses to the refugee experience were: 1 Refugee religious maintainers (a) Intensified religious maintainers 2 Refugee religious shifters (a) Intensified religious shifters (b) Religious switchers (c) Religious questioners 3 Non-religious refugees The presenter will briefly reflect on how such refugees religiously/ spiritually framed the refugee experience and some reasons for shifts in their religiosity. The presentation will conclude by raising the question how relevant this typology is for how some religious/spiritual people will frame and cope with the coming or present climate emergency.

Eleanor Catton’s 832-page award-winning novel The Luminaries (2013), and the six-part television mini-series based upon it (2020), is set in New Zealand in 1865-66. The story moves between the Otago port city of Dunedin and the west-coast gold-mining town of Hokitika. In addition to the various human stories of migration presented in the book, a central part of the plot is the journey of a gold fortune discovered by the character Crosbie Wells. The first part of this presentation will offer a brief account of the book and discuss some of the key journeys it includes, especially the journey of the gold. The second part will reflect on how The Luminaries invites theological reflection on (1) the migration of people, (2) the journeys of objects (including the gold), and (3) the telling of stories which accompany the journeys of both people and objects. One of the hopes of this presentation is that it will encourage people coming (or zooming) to Otago to consider reading (or watching) The Luminaries, and to carry the story from Otago to new places, as both a story and a treasure from the conference.