A major catalyst for the growth of Korean Christianity occurred at the turn of the twentieth century when Western missionaries encountered the religious landscape of Korea. These first-generation missionaries have been framed as destroyers of Korean religion and culture. Yet, as Sung-Deuk Oak shows in The Making of Korean Christianity, existing Korean religious tradition also impacted … [Read More]
Booklist: Christianity in Korea (page 3)
Critical Readings on the Colonial Period of Korea 1910-1945 (4 vols)
From the publisher’s website: There has been a rapid accumulation of new scholarship on colonial Korea in particular and comparative colonialism in general within the last ten years. This volume gathers these articles from a variety of venues to allow researchers, students, and readers to access the most important scholarship on colonial Korea published in … [Read More]
The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, and Culture
From the publisher’s website: The residents of the three northern provinces of Korea have long had cultural and linguistic characteristics that have marked them as distinct from their brethren in the central area near the capital and in the southern provinces. The making and legitimating of centralized Korean nation-states over the centuries, however, have marginalized … [Read More]
Cultural Blending In Korean Death Rites: New Interpretive Approaches
Cultural Blending in Korean Death Rites examines the cultural encounter of Confucianism and Christianity with particular reference to death rites in Korea. As its overarching interpretive framework, this book employs the idea of the ‘total social phenomenon’, a concept first introduced by the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950). From the perspective of the total social phenomenon, … [Read More]
A Protestant Theology of Passion: Korean Minjung Theology Revisited
Minjung Theology is introduced here through theological biographical sketches of its main representatives. They formulated a protestant liberation theology under the South Korean military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s. Their strong emphasis on the suffering (han) of the people (minjung) led them to the formulation of a genuine theology of the cross in Asia. … [Read More]
Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Known as Asia’s “evangelical superpower,” South Korea today has some of the largest and most dynamic churches in the world and is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries it dispatches abroad. Understanding its evangelicalism is crucial to grasping the course of its modernization, the rise of … [Read More]
Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways
From the publisher’s website: This book vividly traces the genealogy of modern womanhood in the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century, during Korea’s colonization by Japan. Hyaeweol Choi shows that what it meant to be a “modern” Korean woman was deeply bound up in such diverse themes as Korean … [Read More]
Protestantism and Politics in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Following its introduction to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Protestantism grew rapidly both in numbers of followers and in influence, and remained a dominating social and political force throughout the twentieth century. In Protestantism and Politics in Korea, Chung-shin Park charts this stunning growth and examines the shifting political associations of … [Read More]
Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: South Korea is home to one of the most vibrant evangelical Protestant communities in the world. This book investigates the meanings of—and the reasons behind—an intriguing aspect of contemporary South Korean evangelicalism: the intense involvement of middle-class women. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul that explores the relevance of gender … [Read More]
Religions of Korea in Practice
From the publisher’s website: Korea has one of the most diverse religious cultures in the world today, with a range and breadth of religious practice virtually unrivaled by any other country. This volume in the Princeton Readings in Religions series is the first anthology in any language, including Korean, to bring together a comprehensive set … [Read More]
Christianity in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Despite the significance of Korea in world Christianity and the crucial role Christianity plays in contemporary Korean religious life, the tradition has been little studied in the West. Christianity in Korea seeks to fill this lacuna by providing a wide-ranging overview of the growth and development of Korean Christianity and the implications that … [Read More]
Korea and Christianity
From the publisher’s website: More than two centuries have passed since Catholicism was introduced in Korea. Over a century has passed since the introduction of Protestantism. Membership in the Protestant denomination has grown to over ten million in that period. This volume looks into the development and the rapid rise of Christianity in Korea and … [Read More]
Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple
From the publisher’s website: Challenging Western notions of Buddhism as a self-effacing path to rebirth and enlightenment, Sharon Suh shows how first-generation Korean Americans at Sa Chal Temple in Los Angeles have applied Buddhist doctrines to the project of finding and knowing the self in everyday life. Buddhism, for these Buddhists, serves as a source … [Read More]
The Founding of Catholic Tradition in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Catholicism in Korea has a history of two hundred years. The role it has played in Korea is unique in that many of its initiatives have come from the laity, rather than the clergy or the church administration. After a prolonged period of cultural conflict, the number of Catholics has grown … [Read More]
Syncretism: The Religious Context of Christian Beginnings in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Argues that a syncretic worldview encouraged the remarkable growth of Christianity in Korea. This book explains the explosive growth of Christianity since its introduction into Korea in the eighteenth century. In no other Asian country has Christianity taken root so strongly. Author David Chung argues that it was the syncretic tendency … [Read More]
Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization
In this investigation of the contemporary notion of evil, C. Fred Alford asks what we can learn about this concept, and about ourselves, by examining a society where it is unknown—where language contains no word that equates to the English term “evil.” Does such a society look upon human nature more benignly? Do its members … [Read More]