Efforts to understand and enhance human aging typically have considered aging in relation to ethnicity or spirituality, but not the interaction of all three variables with one another, thus yielding an incomplete view of elders' religious development. This project approaches the intersection of aging, ethnicity, and spirituality by selecting a particular American ethnic group (Japanese Americans) and discerning what religious values seem most central and animating for its older members.
It hypothesizes that four interrelated religious themes or values— hope, relatedness, compassion, and gratitude—influence and shape second-generation (Nisei) Japanese Americans' choices as they age. Further, it assumes that those Nisei who are involved in ethnically-based religious communities negotiate complementary incommensurabilities, creating bridges between and transforming multiple cultural norms and religious values as they grow older within multicultural contexts. This project explores those themes and addresses the negotiation paradigm by reporting on semi-structured ethnographic interviews with seventy Nisei men and women in focus groups conducted by the author in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Chicago during 1997 and 1998. Drawing upon that data, and employing an epistemological paradigm of mutually critical correlation with a comparative analysis of Christian theologies and Mahayana Pure Land (Jodo Shinshu) Buddhist thought, this study will articulate these Nisei's negotiation process constructively and intentionally.
By pursuing this methodology and utilizing the metaphor of the “aging tree of life,” an image inspired by both Christian and Buddhist religious traditions, this project intends to aid aging Japanese Americans' self-understanding and to offer both a methodological example and insights for people engaged in cross-cultural geriatric human services provision, interfaith dialogue, pastoral ministry (or spiritual care), and practical theology, with the latter two terms defined rather broadly. It is hoped that the study will carry implications both for the immediate delivery of care to elderly members of minority population groups, particularly Asian Americans, and for academic research and application to the discipline of practical theology.
