What role does religion play in the lives of the outcast and the desperate among us? Sadly, it can be difficult for such people to find their way into the Church, because there are so many obstacles to their socialisation. But they are often strongly religious, as Chris Arnade has observed in the Guardian. Arnade writes, of one of the many people he met on the streets of New York:
The first addict I met was Takeesha. She was standing near the high wall of the Corpus Christi Monastery. We talked for close to an hour before I took her picture. When we finished, I asked her how she wanted to be described. She said without any pause, 'As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.'
