APARRI 2005

Rooted and Reaching: Contextualizing Pacific and Asian North American Religion

 

Negotiating Hybridity: Being Asian and Being American

  • Kei Kato: Talking Back to Our Parents: How Asian American Theology Can Shed Light on Asian Christianity's Hybrid Identity
  • Grace Kim and Jean Kim: Hybrid Theology
  • Jerry Park: Religious Discrimination and Dialogue: Comparative Asian American Second Generation Experiences
  • Jannette Wei-Ting Gutierrez: How Asian/Asian North American Women Theological Educators Negotiate Power Dynamics

Present-Day Dynamics of Being Muslim in America

  • Ismail Acar, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago: Turkish Muslims in the United States
  • Sylvia W. Chan: Race-ing Islam in Asian America 
  • Mahruq Khan: Muslims in the U.S.: Culture, Gender, and Reform

Expressing Faith in Asian Contexts

  • Kelly Chong: Negotiating Patriarchy: Evangelical Conversion and the Politics of Gender among South Korean Evangelical Women
  • Naoko Frances Hioki: "Interfaith" as Our Spiritual Context: Reflection on the Religious Art of Wu Li, S.J. (1632-1718)
  • Wan-Li Ho: Buddhism in Action: Two Approaches to Ecofeminism

Panels/Forums:

Abstracts:

Talking Back to Our Parents: How Asian American Theology Can Shed Light on Asian Christianity's Hybrid Identity

This paper is an exercise in cross-cultural theological conversation. Its premise is that the burgeoning theological reflection rooted in Asian American experience is pregnant with potential for shedding light on what is happening in religious and theological spheres in other parts of the world.

The background for this study is the recent tensions between the Roman Catholic central authority in Rome and the different local Catholic churches in Asia. The Vatican declaration Dominus Iesus (published in August of 2000) emphasized that Catholic identity is linked with affirming vis-à-vis other confessional communities and religions that the fullness of salvation is found only in Jesus Christ and in the Catholic Church. This seemed diametrically opposed to the basic stance which the different local Catholic churches in Asia have taken since the 1970s. It is a stance which has continually emphasized dialogue and appreciation for all Asian realities. What dynamics are involved in this tensive relation between Rome and Asia?

The paper attempts to show how Asian American theology, with its distinguishing mark of seeing reality from an interstitial space, betwixt and between different "worlds," can be a tremendous help in understanding better the hybrid identity of Asian Catholic Christianity which clashes with the essentialist optics of Catholicism's central authority.

Hybrid Theology

Recognizing that we are living in a “global” world in a postcolonial context, this paper proposes a “Hybrid Theology” – a dialogic theology between Shamanism and Christianity that can help build and nourish new creative communities in the globalizing world. As a biblical constructive theology, our hybrid theological engagement with the New Testament and Hebrew Bible will focus on two socio-historical contexts (the 1st and 21st centuries) with an additional purpose to mediate the deep gap between the historical aspect of the New Testament and doctrinal theology.

We will claim that shamanic aspects of Jesus Christ’s ministry as shown in his healing and prophecy were the impetus for the inauguration of Christianity. However, these aspects were ignored and distorted during the conceptual shifts accompanying the establishment of Christianity as the religion of Empire. Through a re-evaluation of Shamanism and charismatic Christianity, Hybrid Theology will re-examine nascent Christianity by focusing on its similarity to Shamanism in a postcolonial context. By reclaiming Jesus as Shamanic Mediator and Han Healer for the marginalized, this paper will emphasize that our hybrid theology can be pivotal for diasporic communities seeking hope and inspiration for resistance, healing, and empowerment within the ongoing imbalances of economic and political globalization.

Religious Discrimination and Dialogue: Comparative Asian American Second Generation Experiences

This paper explores the dynamics of religious engagement in two particular forms: perceived religious discrimination and religious dialogue. This paper uses interview responses taken in 2000-2001 among a group of student leaders (N = 99) and a survey sample of undergraduate students (N = 330) of Asian descent across four national public universities in four states who identify as Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, or Protestant. I present the variations and similarities in that religious Asian Americans make between these forms of engagement and the significance of that engagement on their own understanding of their religious identities.

How Asian/Asian North American Women Theological Educators Negotiate Power Dynamics

The purpose of this study is to understand how Asian and Asian North American women negotiate race and gender in the patriarchal context of Christian theological education. Two research questions guide this study: 1) What are the power dynamics within Asian/Asian North American women theologians' learning and teaching environment? 2) What strategies do they use when encountering power dynamics in their teaching and learning in which patriarchal ideologies dominate?

The sample for this qualitative study was comprised of eight Asian/Asian North American women theological educators who taught or are teaching in theological institutions. Participants include one Chinese American, two Chinese immigrants, one Korean American, one Japanese immigrant, one Japanese American, and two Korean immigrants. Their ages ranged from 38 to 62.
Analysis of the data revealed that participants, as learners and teachers, experienced power dynamics and utilized a variety of strategies to negotiate in the context of theological education. The power dynamics in their learning and teaching were characterized by four themes: mastery, voice, authority, and positionality. Categories under mastery were "downgraded academic performance as students" and "resisted, challenged and dishonored as teachers." "Nonexistence of role models" and "invisibility to students and colleagues" were categories of the theme of voice. "Authority was usurped, undermined, and questioned," "authority was weakened due to their race, gender, and age" and "secured and reinforced authority" were categories under the theme of authority. Categories such as "being stereotyped," "androcentrism" and "white privilege and tokenism" emerged under the theme of positionality. The data also showed that participants developed and utilized internal and external resources or strategies to negotiate their power when they encountered race and gender discrimination in the context of theological education. Internal resources included teaching philosophy, faith and theology, sense of accomplishment from teaching, acculturation/absorbing/adjustment. Additionally, the participants also drew upon external resources to negotiate power dynamics such as engaged feminist and critical pedagogy, authenticating their authority as teachers, pronouncing and asserting their positionality, and alignment with and getting support from communities and allies.

Three conclusions were drawn from this study. First, Asian/Asian North American women theological educators are invisible and silenced in the construction of knowledge in the patriarchal context of theological education. Second, the positionality of Asian/Asian North American women impacts power dynamics in their classrooms, and the women negotiated with a variety of strategies. Third, perpetuated racism and sexism was experienced by Asian/Asian North American women theological educators in the institutional context of theological education.

Race-ing Islam in Asian America

In recent years, Asian American Studies has become a site of both political and discursive disjuncture, with discourses of cultural nationalism, postcolonialism, panethnicity, diaspora, globalization, transnationalism, oppositionality, resistance, and complicity (just to name a few) vying for ideological and institutional space within the field. At the same time, much of its scholarship has invoked the discourse of orientalism to examine how those named "oriental" (especially within the U.S. nation-state) have been made subject to racist scrutiny, exploitation, and misrepresentation. Yet the prime "object" of the most intense orientalist otherings right now-both at home and abroad- is not a group marked by race per se, but by religion-Islam.

This begs a myriad of questions. What does it mean to be race-d by Islam? How does Islam "fit" in to existing rubrics of race, especially "Blackness" and "Asian-ness"? How are histories of race and racism articulated in the nation's distortions of a faith shared by nearly 2 billion worldwide? Moustafa Bayoumi suggests: "(M)aybe religion…carries a lot of racial characteristics at any given time in any particular moment, which actually reveals a lot about the constructions of both religion and race as they relate to political exigencies at any given moment." What are these political exigencies? And what precisely do they reveal? Finally, how does analysis of Islam "fit" into Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies and how should our field respond to these Orientalist otherings? Might those in Asian American Studies-with the careful and precise attention paid to the pasts which have produced race-d oriental Others who have been excluded, interned, demonized, ostracized, assimilated, middleman-ed, model minority-ed, etc.-have added insight to offer in analysis of our nation's latest enemy "Orientals"--Muslims? This paper explore such queries by proposing an expansive framework of "comparative orientalisms," one in which moments of orientalism- called "orientalist instances"-provide the impetus for telling post-Cold War stories of race in American through popular and political culture in which Islam has always held sway, hobbled together at the interstices of national racialized tropes of Blackness and Asian-ness.

Muslims in the U.S.: Culture, Gender, and Reform

One of the most crucial elements in the history and development of a social group is the maintenance of its identity. American Muslims find themselves in a country where identification is defined politically, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically (Nyang 1991). Although American social scientists speak much about the civic religion that now dominates the larger American society, the cultural and political pluralism it gives rise to does not necessarily put an end to the feelings and perceptions of religious identity and affiliation.

The American formulation of Islam takes place in a variety of institutions and environments, be it campus, home, the workplace, or mosque. It underlines in what strata of the Muslim community the dynamics of interpretation takes place: among the educated and the young (and, it should be added, the females). It further underscores what these interpreters attempt to accomplish: a rediscovery of Islam according to what we may see as powerful social paradigms in America (Schmidt 1998). It underlines what sets this interpretation into motion: the placement in the American "laboratory for a re-examination of their faith," an environment that calls for a reconsideration and objectification of the Self as defense against the Other and its stereotypes.

This paper begins by exploring the diversity of American Muslims, followed by the correlation between their level of social integration and their positions on a variety of social issues such as banking, caring for the elderly, dating, drinking, and (inter-cultural/religious) marriage. Next, I bring to light the variety of institutions established by Muslims in America and the way they negotiate their identity through these institutions. Finally, I argue that American Muslim youth and women, in particular, are increasingly asserting their own formulations of Muslim identity. They urge their fellow Muslims to adopt the rhetoric of "rights" from both American and Islamic texts to fight for more cultural freedoms in relation to traditional, patriarchal interpretations brought to the West from the East. In turn, "reformers" of Islam reject the "clash of civilizations" discourse and simultaneously work to overcome the derogatory portrayal of Muslims in the U.S. media.

Negotiating Patriarchy: Evangelical Conversion and the Politics of Gender among South Korean Evangelical Women

Based on a year and a half of ethnographic research in Seoul, South Korea, this paper explores the meaning and impact of women's participation in, and conversion to, Protestant evangelicalism in contemporary South Korea. Although evangelicalism has exploded in South Korea since the 1960s, there has been very little research in the English language about this phenomenon, particularly regarding the participation of women and their contribution to the growth and maintenance of Korean evangelicalism. This paper examines the motivations behind middle-class women's overwhelming but "paradoxical" support of this highly patriarchal religion within the context of recent, dislocating social transformations of South Korean society, and the role it plays in the lives of these women in their attempts to negotiate changing gender and family relations. By revealing the ways in which evangelical faith is meaningful for women both spiritually and institutionally, the paper argues that evangelicalism plays a major role in helping women cope with, even resist, the injuries and contradictions of the contemporary patriarchal family system. The consequences of women's evangelical involvement, however, are highly contradictory; while serving as an important "emancipatory" resource in women's gender struggles, Korean evangelicalism, at the same time, serves to effectively re-domesticate women for the family system, ensuring the perpetuation of current gender/family arrangements and the conditions of women's subordination within the family.

"Interfaith" as Our Spiritual Context: Reflection on the Religious Art of Wu Li, S.J. (1632-1718)

This paper presents the life of the Chinese Jesuit painter Wu Li, and the formation of his Christian identity in the dramatic intersection of faiths in 17th-century China. I will reconstruct Wu's spiritual biography through the examination of his paintings, "listen to" what his art has to say, and discuss contextualizing "Interfaith" in relation to Asian/Asian American search for the Self.

Wu was baptized as Catholic at birth, but in his first career as a successful painter, he was also involved in multiple faiths that co-existed in China for many centuries: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Finally at the mature age of 50, he entered the Society of Jesus, was ordained a priest at 56, and committed the rest of his life to the apostolic work in Shanghai. What is puzzling, however, is the fact that he continued painting in pure Chinese style with a strong Daoist flavor. With regard to his painting style, some art historians have speculated that he possessed some kind of dual spiritual identity.

While previous studies have seen Wu's life as if he had multiple personalities, each colored with the faith, with which he was involved at the time, I will instead demonstrate that "Interfaith" was the locus of his life-long search for vocation. In one of his "Buddhist" paintings, for example, we find the threads of different faiths interwoven together, which, in its fusion, testify to his journey in between lifestyles (monastic and apostolic) and cultures (Chinese and western). In this study, I will explore his artistic corpus as source of reflection and present "Interfaith" - the creative interaction of faiths - as a significant spiritual environment in the formation of Asian/Asian American Christian identity. 

Buddhism in Action: Two Approaches to Ecofeminism

This paper examines environmental activism conducted by Taiwanese religious women during the 1990s and recent years. The approach is primarily empirical rather than theoretical, drawing upon case studies that illustrate the women's environmental protection movement. The paper will attempt to show how religious women, especially Buddhists, have served as a catalyst for both environmentalism and gender transformations and how a non-Western perspective within specific national, historical, and multi-cultural contexts has opened another vision for eco-feminism.

The two organizations that I examine here are both rooted in the Buddhist tradition. They are the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu-Chi Foundation and the Life Conservationist Association. The result of the research provides another ecofeminist vision on family ties and interreligious cooperation. Again we see that ecofeminism needs to be shaped by specific concerns, religious influences, and cultural patterns.

Scholars of Color and Positions of Work

This session with explore in both practical and theoretical terms the politics of our scholarly location. Issues will include (but not be limited to):

  • the challenges of doing religious studies work in a seminary setting -or- theological work within the walls of the secular university
  • commitments to disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity
  • the role of teaching, service, and community activism in shaping our theoretical and theological agendas
  • the ethics of researching Asian American faith communities
  • the expectations--good and bad--that befall those who study religion in the Asian American context.

Staunching the Reemergence of White Supremacy

  • Joseph Cheah, St. Joseph's College, West Hartford, CT
    |jpcheah@aol.com
  • Jonathan Diaz, Franciscan School of Theology, Berkeley, CA
    jdiaz@fst.edu

This panel will examine the ways in which the ideology of white supremacy has reemerged in political and religious discourses in the United States. We will interrogate the construction of the notions of whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy and situate their meanings in the context of race and religion in the United States. We will, together, consider some ways of dismantling the ideology of white supremacy in Pacific Islander and Asian American religious contexts.

The Politics of Sex in Asian American Religious Fields: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

This session results from the stimulating conversation sparked by the 2004 APARRI plenary presentation by David Mura. His cultural, racial, gender, and sexuality critiques from an Asian American perspective were found to be relevant to the professional fields of this workshop's leaders. In this year's session, the panelists will discuss their own unique and complex experiences at the intersection of racial, gender, and sexual boundaries within their professional fields in higher education. The session will begin with a presentation of vignettes by the panelists, which will then lead them to theorizing how race and, in particular, gender and sexuality, as personal and political parts of identity, must be carefully negotiated. Often, such negotiation involves careful attention to place of teaching, potential job promotions, publications and other areas that determine professional trajectory. In short, navigating scenarios similar to Charles Mill's in The Racial Contract and to Carol Patemann's Sexual Contract, this panel will examine the various ways by which sexual and racial contracts are implicitly present within the academy.

Speaking Truth to Power: the How's and Why's of Asian American Social Criticism

This session is a forum that will explore the work and possibilities of Asian American social criticism. Taking the lead of a set of influential social critics of color -- namely, Maria Pilar Aquino, George Cotkin, Daisy Machado, Jeanette Rodrigues, Emilie Townes, Amina Wadud, and Cornel West -- the workshop will collaboratively pursue the following set of questions:

What ends and aims drive Asian American social criticism? How does it differ in intent and motivation from the social critical work generated by black, Latina/o, queer, and other critics working out of and through the politics of difference? Is it either fair or accurate to suggest that Asian American social criticism will necessarily reflect progressive politics and a liberal inflection of "the religious traditions"? If not, then what are some of the political trajectories and religious directions Asian American social criticism might take? For Asian American activists and communities, are there symbiotic relationships between social critics and religious communities that are similar to those found between black and Latina/o critics and their respective religious communities? In other words, how does racial and ethnic identity figure in the work of the racialized social critic? What are the conditions for the possibility of engaging in critiques of one's religious tradition while remaining a part of that tradition? Is it possible to identify an Asian American social critical voice?

Participants of the workshop should read the following essays (found in pdf links below) as preparation for the session:

 Demythologizing Queerness--Intersections and Complexities

This workshop will engage participants in an interactive dialogue that seeks to deconstruct/demythologize queerness in order to uncover its importance as a discipline for religious studies. Of especial interest is its implications for Asian/Asian-American academic and religious scholars/religious communities and the intersection of queerness with other categories, namely, class, ethnicity, and nationality. From being a term of homophobic abuse, "queer" has been reappropriated to describe an emerging theoretical model that seeks to relate gender/sexuality to political, economic, and cultural processes. Queer theory, which has developed as a relatively new discipline from mainstream gay and lesbian studies, is a critical lens not only for re-reading religious texts and reinterpreting them and their dogmas, but also for questioning traditional/normative constructions of gender and sexuality among communities of faith. Its emergence in academic studies has provoked different reactions in the religious field. Polarization has been the more prevalent reaction. While some theologians/religious scholars have developed bridges for dialogue, the vast majority has remained reticent about the contributions of queer theory.

Hugo Córdova Quero, Argentinean theologian and a United Church of Christ candidate for ministry, graduated from Instituto Superior Evangélico de Estudios Teológicos, the ecumenical School of Theology in Buenos Aires. After receiving his M.A. degree in systematic theology from the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, he is currently enrolled in the GTU PhD program, concentrating in Theology and Ethnic Studies/Post-Colonial Studies and Queer Theory.

Israel Alvaran, United Methodist minister and advocate for worker justice from the Philippines, graduated from the Southeast Asia Graduate School of Theology and Union Theological Seminary in Manila. He is currently enrolled in the Graduate Theological Union's PhD program concentrating in Ethics and Social Theory.

Ken Russell Coelho, an immigrant and ethnic minority health advocate and community organizer, graduated from UC Berkeley in spring 2005. Ken's life experiences have taken him across the Middle East, India and Romania. His research interests include nonverbal communication, emotional intelligence, multicultural health, and the application of these theories to the study of western medical practices and cultural sensitivity towards ethnic minority health in the U.S. Ken also works as a mentor to disadvantaged youth in Oakland, California.

Participants of the workshop should read the following essays/outline (found online at the links below) as preparation for the session:

  1. Anna Marie Jagose, "Queer Theory"
    http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html
  2. On Judith Butler's Works
    http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm
  3. Michel Foucault, "History of Sexuality" vol 1 (outline)
    Note: Outline no longer available online.