“The vocal anxieties we hear from some quarters about the survival of ‘British identity’ in the face of migrants and refugees betrays a lack of proper confidence in the capacity and commitment of our society both to learn and to teach. It suggests a confusion about what matters to us and why.

“… The presence of the ’stranger’ is a gift rather than a threat in this context, because the stranger helps us see who we are - hopefully not as an ‘us’ over against a ‘them’, but as an ‘us’ always in process of formation.

“One of the mainsprings of Christian self-understanding in the formative years of the Church’s life was the idea that the believer was essentially a ‘migrant’, someone who was in any and every situation poised between being at home and being a stranger….

“… And this suggests that, if it is the case that the stranger is always necessary to make any society think about itself critically and hopefully, the believer’s role is always, in modern societies, going to show some intriguing parallels with that of the refugee intellectual.