Author Information Regent University School of Divinity
GETTING SAVED IN AMERICA: TAIWANESE IMMIGRATION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE . By Carolyn Chen . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2008 . Pp . xii + 230 . $38.50 .
摘要
This first book, written initially as a dissertation in the Sociology Department of the University of California at Berkeley, derives from fieldwork among Taiwanese immigrants in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California from 1999 to 2001. Chen's thesis, that Taiwanese immigrants negotiate their transition to America in part by becoming religious, is elaborated against the backdrop of conversions to both evangelical Christianity and a broad form of Mahayana Buddhist teaching and practice. In both cases, however, converts understand their Americanization in terms of breaking with Taiwanese tradition—ironically, from traditional aspects of Confucian culture for Buddhists, on the one hand, and from superstitious forms of Confucian–Daoist–Buddhist religiosity for evangelicals, on the other—and forming new otherworldly narratives that simultaneously enable the cultivation of disciplines and practices that are instrumental for middle‐class survival in the new land. Throughout, Chen applies her sociological craft judiciously, engaging where appropriate the dominant theories and literature in the sociology of religion but always coming back to provide detailed ethnographic data and analysis. Getting Saved in America, while limited in terms of its geographic focus, regional scope, and ethnic sample, is suggestive of the kind of comparative sociological studies that are needed and helpful for illuminating the complex and dynamic forces of globalization, immigration, and transnationalism at work in our time.
