New faiths, old fears : Muslims and other Asian immigrants in American religious life / Bruce B. Lawrence ; designed by Audrey Smith.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

As a result of immigration from Asia in the wake of the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, the fastest-growing religions in America--faster than all Christian groups combined--are Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Now a leading scholar asks how these new faiths have changed or have been changed by the pluralist face of American civil society and by the deep-rooted American ambivalence toward foreign traditions.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. ix)
• New Faiths, Old Fears (p. xvii)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Chapter 1 American Religion as Commodity Culture (p. 23)
• Chapter 2 Civil Society and Immigrants (p. 48)
• Chapter 3 New Immigrants as Pariahs (p. 69)
• Chapter 4 Religious Options for Urban Immigrants (p. 87)
• Chapter 5 Reimagining Religious Pluralism (p. 105)
• Conclusion (p. 133)
• Notes (p. 145)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 179)
• Index (p. 187)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

For a work on the subject of the faiths of Asian immigrants in the US, this book has little to say about what such people believed in the lands they left behind, or what they believe now in their new context. Instead, it speaks at length on the social, political, and religious tensions within American culture today. Lawrence (Duke Univ.) argues and laments that immigrants enter a racially divided culture and take their respective places somewhere in the pecking order that already exists. American culture is white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, though Roman Catholics and Jews belong to it. He advocates that, rather than simply paying lip service to diversity, people should value all cultures. The problem is that American culture is different from the cultures the immigrants call "home," and amalgamation into one "melting pot" is no way to preserve their religious cultures. The challenge for Asian Americans is to understand where they are and where they should be in American society. Lawrence also argues that the 21st-century US needs to learn from these peoples and grant them full acceptance into American culture. It is difficult to fault this diagnosis and proposed remedy. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. P. L. Redditt Georgetown College