Massachusetts, October 17–18, 2025.

The Migration Christianity Conference 2025 opened with a Graduate Conference session highlighting emerging scholarship on the intersections of faith and global migration. Among the sixteen presenters was Srdjan Maksimovic, National Endowment for the Humanities Doctoral Fellow at Fordham University and Coordinator for Christian Education in the Eastern American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church. He delivered a paper titled “Exile Remembered: The Patristic and Liturgical Reception of Christ the Refugee as a Theology of Sanctuary.”

Maksimovic reflected on how early Christian communities remembered Christ not as distant from those who wander, but as one who walks with them, forming a theology rooted in shared vulnerability. Drawing on patristic commentary and liturgical memory, he noted a persistent theological pattern in which Christ appears not only as the focus of devotion but as a companion to those who journey under vulnerable conditions. In this tradition, sanctuary is understood less as static refuge than as shared movement toward safety, dignity, and recognition.

The session placed his work within a broader effort among scholars to reassess how experiences of migration have shaped Christian self-understanding across centuries. The topic has gained renewed attention amid contemporary global displacement, which continues to influence how communities negotiate identity, belonging, and moral responsibility.

Conference organizers reported an attendance of more than one hundred scholars, clergy, and policymakers. The strong turnout, they said, reflects a growing commitment to examining how histories of movement inform present-day theological and pastoral conversations.