Journal of the American Academy of Religion: Book Review, Rebecca Y. Kim’s Spirit Moves West

I received a kind note the other day telling me that a book review that I had published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) had been promoted through the JAAR‘s new online book review site, Reading Religion. The book is Pepperdine sociologist Rebecca Y. Kim’s new book, The Spirit Moves West: Korean Missionaries in America.

The themes of this book dovetail well with many of my research themes; when people who do not study Asian American religion tell that I really should be studying Korean American evangelical Protestants because they are all the rage, I often reply that books written on the subject are a dime a dozen. Kim’s very interesting ‘in’ on Korean American evangelicals is to study how one Korean American evangelical Protestant organization, University Bible Fellowship, did not so much found a Korean evangelical community, but sought to evangelize non-Koreans – which usually meant ‘white Americans.’ As a phenomenon, this was very interesting because it bucked the trend of scholarship that simply assumed that religious communities usually serve people of their own ethnicities.

However, my book review focused on the theoretical thrust of the book, which I think is of more interest to people working broadly in religious studies (and thus would read the JAAR). Kim seems to think in ‘ideal types’ – Koreans, white Americans, global Christianity, world Christianity. My review examines both the usefulness and the limits of this kind of sociological analysis and will hopefully show that the study of Asian American religion has broad theoretical implications for the study of religion at a very broad scale.

I want to thank Cynthia Eller for contacting me and Tammi Schneider for accepting the book review. This was a very useful task for me to have done for the JAAR, and I hope that readers of the JAAR will find it equally as useful for their reading. I am also very excited for the new website Reading Religion, and I hope that readers there will enjoy this wonderful guide to all the latest work in religious studies.