Bücher von Fumitaka Matsuoka

""Most of us are American, yet not fully acknowledged as American. Asian Americans are plagued with this awareness. We have been in the United States in significant numbers for 150 years. . . . Today, we Asian Americans find ourselves in the midst of opposing tides swirling around us. One current carries us across old enmities toward a solidarity of all people of Asian descent, another urges retreat to the nostalgia of our individual cultures and ethnic groups, and yet a third demands a just place in the larger American society, where many of us are still treated as strangers.""--from the Introduction Fumitaka Matsuoka has written a rare and candid theological discussion of Asian Americans, their Christian faith, and racial/ethnic interactions in the United States. Out of Silence probes into particular religious expressions by presenting a description and analysis of the experiences of Asian American Christians of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean ancestry. The response to these challenging experiences - far too long ignored--offers new models and dynamics to the work of reconciling humanity. Matsuoka's eloquent treatment of the Asian American church speaks to all Christians--""the liberation of each group shall be the bond that unites us all.""

Learning to Speak a New Tongue attempts to respond to a timely question facing America today: What holds people together in a fragmented world? The response comes from a religious community that has not been very visible: Asian Americans. The author employs the threefold epistemological scaffold familiar to Asian Americans: (1) translocal value orientation embedded in the experiences of racialization, (2) a heightened sensitivity to pathos arising out of our dissonance with the societal norms and values, and (3) amphibolous spirituality, that is, a co-existence of multiple religious traditions without any resolution of their differences. The angle of vision embedded in this epistemological framework of Asian Americans' lives may well provide a clue to an alternate architectural paradigm in building a new peoplehood and to redefine democratic freedom as the historical paradigm of American peoplehood.