Korean American Evangelicals Ne Models for Civic Life [Paperback]

Studies of religion among our nation's newest immigrants largely focus on how religion serves the immigrant community -- for example by creating job networks and helping retain ethnic identity in the second generation. In this book Ecklund widens the inquiry to look at how Korean Americans use religion to negotiate civic responsibility, as well as to create racial and ethnic identity. She compares the views and activities of second generation Korean Americans in two different congregational settings, one ethnically Korean and the other multi-ethnic. She also conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with Korean American members of these and seven other churches around the country, and draws extensively on the secondary literature on immigrant religion, American civic life, and Korean American religion. Her book is a unique contribution to the literature on religion, race, and ethnicity and on immigration and civic life.

The text is highly accessible for both undergraduate and graduate level scholars as well as for religious activists who utilize social research. In sum, Elaine Howard Ecklund's work provides a helpful set of analytic tools that complicate the picture of second-generation immigrant religious life as well as the complexity of the evangelical subculture (too often viewed as a monolithic white religious group). --Review of Religious Research

Elaine Howard Ecklund's comparative research on second-generation Korean American evangelical churches charts new territory...[F]ruitfully widens our understandings about the religious life of this important 'new' immigrant second generation and contributes significantly to the fields of sociology of religion, culture, and race/ethnicity. --Journal of Religion

Elaine Howard Ecklundis Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rice University, Director of the Program on Religion and Public Life for the Rice University Institute for Urban Research, and Rls¦