IMPORTANT DATES

Monday, December 8, 2014

Trans-Pacific Christianities, American Religion and Asian America, Winter 2015

JSIS C 490 C (Special Topics)  Trans-Pacific Christianities, American Religion and Asian America
MW 1:30 - 3:30

This course interrogates two obsessions. First, American religious practitioners have long been obsessed with a Christian encounter with Asia and Asian Americans. Second, Christianity seems to obsessively haunt Asian American history, literature, and sociological scholarship. We will be interrogating these twin obsessions by first examining how Asian Americans have been located in American public discourse about religion through literature and film. We will then trace the history of trans-Pacific missionary encounters. We will finally explore how trans-Pacific Christianities, Catholic and Protestant, are being currently practiced. Two papers are required: one comparative film review and a research paper that will have a revision option.