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 […]
Booklist: Religion and ideas
A Bird in Flight Leaves No Trace: The Zen Teaching of Huangbo with a Modern Commentary
From the publisher’s website: The message of the Tang-dynasty Zen text in this volume seems simple: to gain enlightenment, stop thinking there is something you need to practice. For the Chinese master Huangbo Xiyun (d. 850), the mind is enlightenment itself if we can only let go of our normal way of thinking. The celebrated […]
From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation in Modern Korea
From the publisher’s website: At the start of the twentieth century, the Korean Buddhist tradition was arguably at the lowest point in its 1,500-year history in the peninsula. Discriminatory policies and punitive measures imposed on the monastic community during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) had severely weakened Buddhist institutions. Prior to 1895, monastics were prohibited by […]
Efficacious Underworld: The Evolution of Ten Kings Paintings in Medieval China and Korea
From the publisher’s website: The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, […]
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 […]
Aspiring to Enlightenment: Pure Land Buddhism in Silla Korea
From the publisher’s website: Centered on the practice of seeking rebirth in the Pure Land paradise Sukhāvatī, the Amitābha cult has been the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea since the middle of the Silla period (ca. 300–935). In Aspiring to Enlightenment, Richard McBride combines analyses of scriptural, exegetical, hagiographical, epigraphical, art historical, and literary materials to […]
Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea
From the publisher’s website: Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945)? Questions about religion’s relationship and response to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization lie at the heart of understanding the intersection between […]
The Scriptures of Won Buddhism: A Translation of Wonbulgyo kyojon with Introduction
From the publisher’s website: “Professor Chung has drawn on all the tools in his scholarly arsenal to convey the flavor and meaning of the original Korean texts. Written vernacular Korean was still very much a work in progress during the early twentieth century and the meaning of the Korean texts is not always clear-cut, even […]
South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence
From the publisher’s website: The minjung (people’s) movement stood at the forefront of the June 1987 nationwide tide that swept away the military in South Korea and opened up space for relatively democratic politics, a more responsible economy, and new directions in culture. This volume is the first in English to grapple specifically with the nature of […]
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 […]
Spirituality in Contemporary Art: The Idea of the Numinous
From the publisher’s website: An important contribution to an emerging debate about the use and misuse of spirituality in contemporary aesthetics. Jungu Yoon opens up the discourse between Eastern and Western art and introduces the reader to a discussion of the impact of digital culture on aesthetics. Important reading for artists, practitioners and theorists alike, […]
The Dharma Master Chongsan of Won Buddhism: Analects and Writings
From the publisher’s website: The first English translations of the writings of Chŏngsan (1900–62), who codified the central doctrines of Won Buddhism. Won Buddhism emerged in early twentieth-century Korea after a long period of anti-Buddhist repression. It is a syncretic tradition, a form of Buddhism strongly influenced by the Chŏson dynasty’s Neo-Confucian ethical heritage and […]
Korean Religions in Relation: Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity
From the publisher’s website: Examines Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity in Korea, focusing on their mutual accommodation, exclusion, conflict, and assimilation. Instead of simply being another survey of the three dominant religions in contemporary Korea—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity—this unique book studies them in relation to each other in terms of assimilation, accommodation, conflict, and exclusion. The […]
The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T’Oegye and Yi Yulgok: A Reappraisal of the “Four-Seven Thesis” and Its Practical Implications For Self-Cultivation
From the publisher’s website: This comparative study of Yi T’oegye (1501-1570) and Yi Yulgok (1536-1584), Korea’s two most eminent Neo-Confucian thinkers, is a seminal work on the Four-Seven Debate, the most significant and controversial intellectual event in the Korean Confucian tradition. The Four-Seven thesis, a magnificent example of East Asian Confucian discourse at its best, […]
Alfred North Whitehead and Yi Yulgok: Toward a Process-Confucian Spirituality in Korea
From the publisher’s website: This book explores the Confucian-Christian dialogue in Korea through a comparative study of the cosmologies of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), the founder of process philosophy, and Yi Yulgok (1536-1584), the great scholar of Korean Neo-Confucianism. Although their philosophical traditions are different, Yulgok and Whitehead’s perspectives on the universe were very similar. […]
Toegye and Gobong Write Letters
From the publisher’s website: Toegye and Gobong Write Letters is a unique look into the lives of two prominent Confucius scholars. This special edition of their letters highlights their personal struggles as civil servants and scholars. Set in the backdrop of the Four Seven debate, the greatest philosophical debate in Korean neo-Confucianism, these poignant letters have […]