About the Book | What People Are Saying | Book Reviews

Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life examines the civic narratives, practices, and identities of second-generation Korean-American evangelicals. The book looks at how Korean Americans use religion to negotiate civic responsibility, as well as to create racial and ethnic identity. The work compares the views and activities of second generation Korean Americans in two different congregational settings, one ethnically Korean and the other multi-ethnic, and includes more than 100 in-depth interviews with Korean American members of these and seven other churches around the country. It also draws extensively on the secondary literature on immigrant religion, American civic life, and Korean American religion.

The book was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

About the Book | What People Are Saying | Book Reviews

"Elaine Howard Ecklund has written a marvelous account of religion's crucial role among one of America's fastest-growing immigrant populations. Based on intensive ethnographic research and grounded in a thorough understanding of the sociological literature, Korean American Evangelicals casts important new light on longstanding questions about assimilation. Given the right circumstances, Ecklund shows, Korean American congregations provide far more than simply a refuge for their members and are poised to facilitate civic engagement that will alter the face of middle-class communities."

--Robert Wuthnow, author of America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity

"Elaine Howard Ecklunds book, Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life, shows that second-generation Korean American evangelicals, unlike Korean immigrant evangelicals, focus on social services to non-Korean and non-Christian communities. More significantly, it reveals that the participants in Korean ethnic congregations and those in multiethnic congregations have established different schema for civic identities, civic practices, and political ideology. As the first book on both second-generation Korean evangelicals and civic participation among the post-1965 immigrant groups, it makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on the new immigrants and their religions. Written in engaging style, it should serve as an ideal reader for classes dealing with Asian American and new immigrant religious experiences."

--Pyong Gap Min, author of Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles

"A richly documented institutional ethnography and narrative of Korean-American civic and religious communities. Cultural sociology is ably linked to the study of assimilation of the second-generation into mainstream civic culture in Elaine Ecklund's probing and insightful book on Korean-American cultural identity."

--Victor Nee, Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology and Director, Center for the Study of Economy and Society, Cornell University

About the Book | What People Are Saying | Book Reviews

"The text is highly accessible for both undergraduate and graduate level scholars as well as for religious activists who utilize social research. In sum, Elaine Howard Ecklund's work provides a helpful set of analytic tools that complicate the picture of second-generation immigrant religious life as well as the complexity of the evangelical subculture (too often viewed as a monolithic white religious group).""

--Review of Religious Research

"Elaine Howard Ecklund's comparative research on second-generation Korean American evangelical churches charts new territory...[F]ruitfully widens our understandings about the religious life of this important 'new' immigrant second generation and contributes significantly to the fields of sociology of religion, culture, and race/ethnicity."

--Journal of Religion