May is AAPI Heritage Month

May is AAPI Heritage Month. We need to remember our contributions, understand our history and celebrate our future.  We can learn more by reading books by AAPI authors.

My book series co-edited with Dr. Joseph Cheah, “Asian Christianity in the Diaspora” has 13 books now with more coming out later this year. Our latest is from Dr. Kwok Pui-lan, Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion.  Read hers and read them all.

Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion: Embodying Knowledge

Edited by Kwok Pui-lan

Book Description:

This book presents personal narratives and collective ethnography of the emergence and development of Asian and Asian American women’s scholarship in theology and religious studies. It demonstrates how the authors’ religious scholarship is based on an embodied epistemology influenced by their social locations. Contributors reflect on their understanding of their identity and how this changed over time, the contribution of Asian and Asian American women to the scholarship work that they do, and their hopes for the future of their fields of study. The volume is multireligious and intergenerational, and is divided into four parts: identities and intellectual journeys, expanding knowledge, integrating knowledge and practice, and dialogue across generations.

Review

​“So gracefully shared embodied knowledge and wisdom of the authors in this book, it satisfies the thirst for inspiration, encouragement, solidarity, affirmation, and sisterhood. As this book testifies, we are all evolving and improvising what it means to live in the first-world context in the twenty-first century.”
–Jung Ha Kim, Georgia State University, USA

“The essays inAsian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion: Embodying Knowledge are compelling in their erudition, range, courage, and collective power. Together, they articulate and illustrate the vital role and significance of embodied experience and knowledge in shaping the intellectual, spiritual, and engaged work of Asian and Asian American women. Written by scholars, activists, and public intellectuals working across a variety of contexts, the essays shimmer with the truth of embodied knowledge that has been forged at the nexus of theory, social location, and lived experience, with sustained attention to communities of accountability.”

–Mary Foskett, Wake Forest University, USA

“Reading this work is truly an exhilarating experience! This is how scholarship in religion and theology should be done in the 21^st century: rooted in tradition while firmly engaged in urgent present-day realities, interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and maintaining a good balance between theory and praxis while utilizing traditional and cutting-edge styles of analysis. The voices of this vibrant network of Asian and Asian North American women-scholars (lamentably not often showcased in academia) deserves to be known and read not only by the Asian and Asian North American communities but in the wider world of the academy and the church!”
–Julius-Kei Kato, King’s University College at Western University, Canada

 

About the Author

Kwok Pui-lan is William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and spirituality, emerita, at Episcopal Divinity School and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. An internationally known theologian, she is the author of Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology and Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World.

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Book Series: Asian Christianity in the Diaspora

Asian American theology is still at its nascent stage. It began in the 1980’s with just a handful of scholars who were recent immigrants to the United States. Now with the rise in Asian American population and the rise of Asian American theologians, this new community is an ever-important voice within theological discourse and Asian American cultural studies. This new series seeks to bring to the forefront some of the important, provocative new voices within Asian American Theology. The series aims to provide Asian American theological responses to the complex process of migration and resettlement process of Asian immigrants and refugees.

We will address theoretical works on the meaning of diaspora, exile, and social memory, and the foundational works concerning the ways in which displaced communities remember and narrate their experiences. Such an interdisciplinary approach entails intersectional analysis between Asian American contextual theology and one other factor; be it sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, and/or cultural studies. This series also addresses Christianity from Asian perspectives. We welcome manuscripts that examine the identity and internal coherence of the Christian faith in its encounters with different Asian cultures, with Asian people, the majority of whom are poor, and with non-Christian religions that predominate the landscape of the Asian continent.

Palgrave is embarking on a transformation of discourse within Asian and Asian American theological scholarship as this will be the first of its kind. As we live in a global world in which Christianity has re-centered itself in the Global South and among the racialized minorities in the United States, it behooves us to listen to the rich, diverse and engaging voices of Asian and Asian American theologians.

Book Series Titles:

Please order them for your libraries.

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