From Homo Sedentarius to Homo Peregrinator: The Nomadic Nature of Humanity in Luke-Acts

Abstract

The choice for this topic depends on many factors that can be summed up in two main streams. On the one hand, there is an overwhelming number of people who are driven to the global North because it supposedly offers them and their families a life of peace and progress, as the migration routes from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and those from Central America to the United States demonstrate. Millions undertake this adventure, even though they are well aware that they are likely to end up stranded in endless purgatories of aggressive attitudes and excessive bureaucracy. On the other hand, the terrible ecological consequences of a sedentary lifestyle in large cities make people weak and dependent, wearing out the environment at an atrocious speed. Luke advocates a non-sedentary lifestyle, promoting an alternative behaviour to what was generally adopted in the well-structured Roman empire of those times. It is not about political changes and mass revolutions, but about an attitude of life in which the human being is the recipient of a new message and at the same time the carrier of that message for all the communities of the earth. But not only that, the behaviour of the recipients of this message is different from those who live in the sedentary system and who do not communicate with them because their lifestyle is both corrupt and sterile. This new movement is particularly linked to the idea of being fruitful and multiplying by disseminating the message and achieving new challenges.