Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration

Gatherings in Diaspora brings together the latest chapters in the long-running chronicle of religion and immigration in the American experience. Today, as in the past, people migrating to the United States bring their religions with them, and their religious identities often mean more to them away from home, in their diaspora, than they did before. This book explores and analyzes the diverse religious communities of post-1965 diasporas: Christians, Hews, Muslims, Hindus, Rastafarians, and practitioners of Vodou, from countries such as China, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, and Mexico. The contributors explore how, to a greater or lesser extent, immigrants and their offspring adapt their religious institutions to American conditions, often interacting with religious communities already established. The religious institutions they build, adapt, remodel, and adopt become worlds unto themselves, congregations, where new relations are forged within the community -- between men and women, parents and children, recent arrival and those longer settled.

Table of Contents:
CONTENTS Introduction Immigration and Religious Communities in the United States R. Stephan Warner I Religion and the Negotiation of Identities 1 Becoming American by Becoming Hindu: Indian Americans Take Their Place and the Multicultural Table Prema Kurien 2 From the Rivers of Babylon to the Valleys of Los Angeles: The Exodus and Adaptation of Iranian Jews Shoshanah Feher II Transnational Migrants and Religious Hosts 3 Santa Eulalia's People in Exile: Maya Religion, Culture, and Identity in Los Angeles Nancy J. Wellmeier 4 The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited:L Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism Elizabeth McAlister III Institutional Adaptations 5 Born Again in East LA: The Congregation as Border Space Luis Leon 6 The House That Rasta Built: Church-Building and Fundamentalism Among New York Rastafarians Randal L. Hepner 7 Structural Adaptations in an Immigrant Muslim Congregation in New York Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf IV Internal Differentiation 8 Caroling with the Keralites: The Negotiation of Gendered Space in an Indian Immigrant Church Sheba George 9 Competing for the Second Generation: English-Language Ministry at a Korean Protestant Church Karen J. Chai 10 Tenacious Unity in a Contentious Community: Cultural and Religious Dynamics in a Chinese Christian Church Fenggang Yang Conclusion A Reader Among Fieldworkers Judith G. Wittner Project Director's Acknowledgments About the Contributors and Editors Index

About the Author :
R. Stephan Warner, Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church. Judith G. Wittner is Associate Professor of Sociology and former Director of Women's Studies at Loyola University of Chicago.

Review :
"Historians of a social-scientific bent will appreciate the rhetorical and analytical precision of Gatherings in Diaspora." --Journal of American Ethnic History