History of Christianity in Asian American Contexts

3 credits · Divinity School

This course charts a new pathway in the way we think about: history of Christianity in America; Asian-American identity formation, and the role of religion within it. Its trajectory transcends the existing—and both unhelpful and untrue—binaries of “progressive or evangelical” and “white or black” in the way perspectives on histories of Christianity in America are offered. Its trajectory also seeks to revise the perspectival distortion of seeing Christianity and Christian formation as exogenous or alien to the way Asian-American immigrant experiences have been studied and narrated. Students will acquire new appreciation for the complexity of the lived religion of American Christianity which includes Asian-American presence and perspectives, as well as avoidance of ethno-religious essentialism when it comes to Asian and Asian diasporic religiosity. [3]