Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

by Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, Josh DeWind

Overview

Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814705049
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2008
Pages:	413
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at City University of New York and is the author of many books, including (with Victor Nee) Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration and Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America.

Albert J. Raboteau is Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of Slave Religion: The ""Invisible Institution"" in the Antebellum South and Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans.

Josh DeWind is Director of the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council. He is the co-editor of The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind

Part I

1. Passages in Piety
   Richard Alba and Robert Orsi

2. Migration and Mexican American Religious Life, 1848–2000
   Roberto Lint Saragossa

3. Whither the Flock?
   David Lopez

Part II

1. Japanese and Korean Migrations
   Lori Pierce, Paul Spickard, and David Yoo

2. Critical Faith
   Jane Naomi Iwamura

6. Buddhism, Rhetoric, and the Korean American Community

Sharon A. Suh

Part III

1. Immigration and the Transformation of American Jews
   Calvin Goldscheider

2. Choosing Chosenness in America
   Arnold Eisen

3. The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States
   Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad

4. Muslim, Arab, and American
   Ann Chih Lin

Part IV

1. Black Migration, Religion, and Civic Life
   James Grossman and Albert Raboteau

2. Catholic, Vodou, and Protestant
   Elizabeth McAlister and Karen Richman
   Integrated Bibliography
   Contributors
   Index

Editorial Reviews

"This path-breaking volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of immigrant religion in America. By adopting a comparative design that examines immigrant groups today and in the past, this well-focused and highly readable collection sheds a bright new light onand provides often surprising insights intothe way religion has operated as belief system, institution, and community for immigrants both then and now."

Nancy Foner

"The volume's findings . . . will certainly compel social scientists to pay greater attention to religion in the context of immigration. Overall, the volume is a significant contribution to the current debates on diaspora."

Finnish Journal of Ethnicity and Migration - P. Pratap Kumar

"This volume benefits from the rigorous format designed by its distinguished editors. What might initially appear to be an overly rigid structure emerges as a format that enables rich and innovative comparisons of a vast diversity of very singular case studies that are only rarely juxtaposed."

Choice

"This book is particularly valuable for its comparative, historical perspective. It reminds us that today's developments have deep roots and that despite differences, there is much that unites the Asian American and Latino experience. An important contribution to the burgeoning literature on religion and immigration."

Peggy Levitt

This volume benefits from the rigorous format designed by its distinguished editors. What might initially appear to be an overly rigid structure emerges as a format that enables rich and innovative comparisons of a vast diversity of very singular case studies that are only rarely juxtaposed.”
-Choice

"This path-breaking volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of immigrant religion in America. By adopting a comparative design that examines immigrant groups today and in the past, this well-focused and highly readable collection sheds a bright new light on—and provides often surprising insights into—the way religion has operated as belief system, institution, and community for immigrants both then and now."
-—Nancy Foner,author of In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration

From the Publisher