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Chapter four explores how the activities and relationships occurring in the spaces where microsystems overlap function as seedbeds of solidarity, generating a shared sense of identity, fostering social cohesion and transforming “other people’s children” into “our children.” The author focuses on interactions among the primary social institutions comprising children’s microsystems: family, faith community, school, peer group, and neighbourhood. Drawing on observations from the villages under study, the author illustrates the dynamic created when these social institutions cooperate, collaborate and even engage in friendly competition in support of the community’s children. The chapter highlights the role of rituals and traditions in building community identity and solidarity in both villages. It explores how village identity can endure across time and distance in migrants’ attachments to their home towns. In closing, it predicts further erosion of community identity due to global economic policies and divisive political movements.

Joshua Z. Gahr and Michael P. Young’s chapter provides a historical analysis of the somewhat counterintuitive, yet central, role that Protestant institutions played in the emergence of the new Left. Through a case study of the Christian Faith-and-Life Community at the University of Texas at Austin from 1955 to 1962, the chapter documents how a group of liberal Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist clergy pushed university students to reconceive the Church’s “mission-in-the-world” and their personal witness to this mission in ways that unleashed a moral “breakthrough.”

This chapter starts by summarising previous definitions and approaches to the contested concept of ‘community’, typically defined in terms of ‘communities of place’, ‘communities of identity’ and ‘communities of shared interests’. Reflecting upon the experiences of communities in response to migration and displacement, the chapter concludes that such previous definitions need to be expanded. They need to take account of the ways in which communities form and re- form, in response to displacement and dispossession. And they need to take account of the multiple ways in which people identify with varying communities simultaneously, both locally and as members of faith communities and transnational communities.

This Chapter builds on the previous one by describing the specific response of the the local public health and social care services provider in Omagh to the bombing, including setting up the Omagh Community Trauma and Recovery Team. The Chapter describes how the Team was established, the principles and philosophy behind its foundation and work, and what it achieved - working in partnership with faith communities and churches, schools and the education system, and civic and political entities in the local community. The development of the early therapeutic services for addressing trauma related disorders is described, along with a description of the trajectory of mental health related needs in the months and years following the bombing. The Chapter also describes the managerial and funding challenges and processes necessary to establish an evidence based service, including occupational health services for emergency and other employees of emergency, health and other services. The importance of a trauma focussed approach to understanding and addressing the needs of conflict affected communities is described, and developed in later chapters.