Intercultural Church: A Utopian Ideal or a Gospel of Hope?

From the end of the 1980s, when foreign workers poured into Korea, until 1995, when there was a significant increase in international marriages, a multicultural situation has slowly been developing in Korea. However, because the traditional emphasis has been on a single-race nation, the Korean Church has not shown much concern for the multicultural situation. Apart from some megachurches and missionary groups, the Korean Church has not been concerned with inviting immigrants and receiving them as full church members. Recently, due to a rapidly aging Korean society and the influx of immigrants entering the workforce, Korea has abruptly changed into a multicultural society. Catching up with this change, the church has started to study building a multicultural church and shifting a congregation to a multicultural church; however, almost all of these studies focus on mission strategy, leadership, or working through conflicts in the church. Currently, there are a lack of studies on worship, specifically, how to facilitate worship among people from different cultural backgrounds and how worship can draw a multicultural congregation together as one body. This chapter will study how a multicultural church can plan its Sunday public worship from a liturgical and theological perspective. Additionally, I will research how a congregation made up of people whose cultural and theological backgrounds are different can become one body in worship. For this purpose, I will examine a multicultural church in Korea, mainly focusing on how the order and elements of worship can develop understanding and unity among the people. Based on this study, I will suggest some liturgical ideas and valuable strategies for multicultural worship in Korea with a sample liturgy of multicultural worship.

The composition of teams is becoming increasingly culturally diverse, foremost as a result of international business and globalisation. We view culture as “;a complex, abstract, and pervasive matrix of social elements which functions as an all-encompassing form or pattern for living by laying out a predictable world in which an individual is firmly oriented”;2. Consequently, when getting in contact with people from a different culture or ethnic background inadequate behaviours may be caused3.

This study examines how cultural communication is occurring in the process of wedding between Korean and Slavic people with heterogeneous cultural backgrounds, and whether multicultural coexistence and multicultural identity are created in Korean society. In this study, Korean-Slavic couples’ weddings will be divided into four types according to the way of expressing identity in their wedding. By discussing whether wedding couples represent the cultural and traditional elements of both sides in balance, and even properly combine the symbols and rituals of both cultures to create a new culture of integration, this study aims to examine the situation of multiculturalism in Korean society.

This article aims to examine how academic memoirs by disabled women exert a specific cultural mediation in contemporary society’s perception of disability. Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2007) and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) are two examples of what G. Thomas Couser has called the “new disability memoir,” as they are so highly self-aware about the issues involved in representation and disability (2009, 164). Moreover, inasmuch these texts focus to a significant degree on the narrator’s professional life, I would like to analyze them also as academic memoirs; in both, we invariably find the academic background as the platform from which they are able to build up a renewed identity. As their academic careers unfold (Linton’s in psychology and Felstiner’s in history), these women try to understand the deep changes their lives and bodies undergo with a severe impairment. In this context, I will look at the identity strategies these authors consciously use in order to become affirmative models of disability, showing the “damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways” (Mintz 2005, 1). Mary Felstiner and Simi Linton live quite parallel lives. Both have Jewish family backgrounds, both are happily married, both are feminists, and both will eventually become university professors. Before all that, they also share a generational time frame. They were born in the 1940s, and it is around 1970 (Felstiner in 1969 and Linton in 1971) when, still in their twenties, they meet

SUMMARY Interethnic and interracial marriages of Latinos and White Americans are on the rise and will continue to reshape the identities of individuals, couples, families, and communities. Clinicians working with these intercultural couples find no systematic training to address what is becoming a significant segment of our society. Couple therapists, however, cannot be culturally competent and effective based solely on knowledge of some dimensions of a couple's cultural backgrounds. Using clinical and theoretical ideas, the author defines clinical work with these couples as an explicit intercultural exchange. Our task as clinicians requires a rethinking of our conversations with these couples. It involves a caring therapeutic approach that is sustained on relational and systemic levels, and intercultural conversational skills inspired by clinical and other literatures that are explicitly dedicated to work with cultural difference and the “other.”

��� ny visitor to the pilgrimage sites of Lourdes in France, Mashhad in Iran, or Varanasi in India is surely impressed by the crowd of pilgrims coming from various places in order to express their devotion and be in close, intimate contact with a source of sacred power. The same visitor is also sure to be overwhelmed by the market activities that take place near or sometimes inside the sacred shrines. Religious commodities of all sorts are sold in shops and bought by the pilgrims, who are usually avid consumers of religious memorabilia. Notwithstanding the fact that the commoditization of the religious tradition periodically attracts the wrath and condemnation of religious reformers, it is a constant feature of the pilgrimage systems that mobilize massive numbers of pilgrims through vast territories. Pilgrimages are a major feature of world religions, for they connect the local and the global—the particular and the universal—in a complex system of practices and beliefs, which allows them to create shared identities in a multiplicity of social and cultural contexts. This article explores the links among pilgrimage, devotional practices, and the consumption of religious commodities in the production and organization of transnational forms of Shi‘i Islam in the pilgrimage shrines in Syria. The general argument is that a connection exists between pilgrimage processes and the emergence of religious markets, meaning arenas of exchange where religious commodities are produced, sold, and consumed. The consumption of religious commodities structures channels of participation and articulates local identities in the translocal religious community created by pilgrimage. 1 Pilgrimage is a central religious practice in the production of “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxy” in Islam, for it brings together members of different Muslim communities, who might be separated by language, culture, political boundaries, and geographic distance, and mobilizes them into one large ritual and devotional activity. 2 The engagement of each pilgrim in the performance of the collective ritual practices that constitute pilgrimage produces the experience of what Victor Turner defi nes as communitas, meaning a diffuse solidarity that transcends social and cultural differences. 3 However, beyond the creation of a shared sense of belonging to the communitas, the gathering of Muslims of different social and cultural backgrounds in the activities that constitute pilgrimage also reveals the doctrinal or ritual differ

The world is really feeling the heat, not only in the form of climate change, but because of fuming farmers’ unrest. Farmers’ suicides have become a common way of expressing their anger and anxiety as no one is there to take heed to their problems. This research paper tries to examine the in-depth analysis of the great agrarian crisis in India and how it was completely mistaken in understanding the real cause. With the comparative studies of the two villages of India, with a completely different technological, economical and cultural background, a deep observation was made possible in finding out that, it is the growing alienation of farmers with new agricultural technologies and the collapsing local natural resource base, which will further uproot the farmers and aggravate the great Indian agrarian crisis. Traditional agricultural knowledge and practices immensely contribute in preserving the identity of farm community and gives them a feeling of pride, which is vital for the reviving and resurrection of farmers’ dignity in India. Agriculture preserves the Indianness of India, and uprooting of farmers is analogous to uprooting our own identity.

This study reports on a longitudinal inquiry into professional identity construction among six novice cross-border English language teachers from mainland China, who completed their pre-service teacher education in Hong Kong (HK) and began their teaching practice in local HK schools. The findings indicate that the participants navigated obstacles in teaching by deploying their own multiple languages as a cultural and linguistic repertoire. The findings also show that the teachers experienced difficulty legitimising their professional identity in the teaching community, where contextual issues and power interplays mediated the process. Furthermore, it is found that the participants’ commitment to teaching was negatively influenced by their non-legitimate position in the teaching community and the discordance between their teaching beliefs and the norms and values of their workplace. This study suggests that complex inter-relationships between marginal status in and legitimate membership of the community, between historical and cultural background, present practice, and future expectations, between social discourse and personal location, are involved in the process of identity construction. Measures to legitimate these teachers’ position and to transform the linguistic and cultural repertories of these teachers into valuable resources of the local schools are suggested. Implications for future research are outlined.

Clinical work with minorities in Japan is a relatively new and rapidly growing field. An influx of migrants from the 1970s has required psychiatrists to work with culturally different patients, yet few are experienced or trained in this area. With an even more radical population change imminent, skills in working with people of diverse cultural backgrounds are becoming a pressing need. While psychiatry in Japan has long been concerned with culture, only very recently has this concern involved differences among Japanese. Psychotherapy with both new migrants and individuals from more traditional minority backgrounds involves issues of acculturation and identity. A clinical approach based on a theoretical orientation of constructivistic narrative therapy can be usefully applied to multicultural situations. A case is presented in which this approach is employed in assisting a Korean-Japanese youth to deal with identity struggles.

The historical influence of English proficiency, way of life, religion and intermarriage on social interactions of contemporary Zimbabwean immigrants in Britain are examined in the chapter. Examination of these social integration indicators not only unravels the impact of historical socialisation on preserving community or individual identity markers in the diaspora, but also assesses the receptiveness of Britain to the influx of twenty-first century immigrants with different cultural backgrounds. Exposure to Western civilisation made most first-generation Zimbabwean immigrants fail to disentangle issues related to language or way of life in their social integration processes. Instead, the chapter establishes how imported identities had both negative or positive influences on intermarriage and interactions with non-Zimbabweans.

This book examines community identity in the post-exilic temple community in Ezra-Nehemiah, and explores the possible influences that the Achaemenids, the ruling Persian dynasty, might have had on its construction. In the book, David Janzen reads Ezra-Nehemiah in dialogue with the Achaemenids’ Old Persian inscriptions, as well as with other media the dynasty used, such as reliefs, seals, coins, architecture, and imperial parks. In addition, he discusses the cultural and religious background of Achaemenid thought, especially its intersections with Zoroastrian beliefs. Ezra-Nehemiah, Janzen argues, accepts Achaemenid claims for the necessity and beneficence of their hegemony. The result is that Ezra-Nehemiah, like the imperial ideology it mimics, claims that divine and royal wills are entirely aligned. Ezra-Nehemiah reflects the Achaemenid assertion that the peoples they have colonized are incapable of living in peace and happiness without the Persian rule that God established to benefit humanity, and that the dynasty rewards the

In a globalized world, differences between individuals are salient as they belong to various social, cultural, and historical backgrounds. This salience is particularly prominent in the United States, wherein mainstream ideologies and socio-political structures that undergird the diversity of a global world, contribute towards the intricacies of individual identity evaluation by encapsulating various ethnic, cultural, migratory, and geopolitical scenarios.

Dreaming Diversity: Second Generation Australians and the Reimagining of Multicultural Australia

Combining insights from transnational anthropology, anthropology of postsocialism, and the narrating identity approach in cultural gerontology, this paper investigates how Russian-speaking migrant women living in Finland account for their ageing. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in an urban-based club for Russian-speaking seniors, including written and oral life stories. The research shows that Russian-speaking women have a very strong sense of collective identity that is anchored in master stories of (post) socialism, their transnational life trajectories, and families. First, women's active participation in the club for seniors generates a site of collective identity, which draws on a shared cultural and linguistic background. Their communal workplace identities continue to nourish their ageing in Finland and their participation in the club. Second, women's family positions, in particular as mothers and grandmothers, specifically in transnational families, forms another type of collective, which defines their ageing. Third, in response to migration, women also construct a transnational collective identity, which manifests in the ways they emphasize their relatedness to both Russia and Finland through their family histories. At the same time, ageing is an intensely individual process, and the paper explores how transnational seniors experience their ageing individually yet in dialogue with these collective identities. These findings call for more recognition of transnational and collective-based accounts of ageing to extend the framework of cultural gerontology.

A family seated round the fireplace Singing and making merry; A sprightly waltz played with grace Noche Buena brings us all the magic of the Christmas season as seen through the eyes of the Hispanic Americans who celebrate it. Christmas is at times a universal story, and many of the images here are recognizable across cultures. We hear and see proud, joyful singing; the adoration of the Infant Jesus; and the peaceful strains of Adeste Fidelis. But here as well are the rich traditions and legends specific to the Hispanic culture, such as the celebration of the posadas for nine nights leading up to Christmas, with candy raining down from colorful swinging piñatas, egg shells filled with confetti, and beautiful paper lanterns crafted to illuminate the town on Christmas Eve. There is the “Legend of the Poinsettia” where a poor child embarrassed by the modesty of his gift for the Christ Child sheds tears on the dull green leaves of the familiar plant, thereby miraculously transforming them to a brilliant red. And here too are hopeful children singing “If You Give Me Meat Pies,” asking for the reward of warm meat pies and rice pudding in return for their sweet caroling. Thirty-six inspiring literary selections comprise this enchanting collection of works from Mexican, Colombian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican writers--writers who represent the range of Hispanic minority groups in the United States. Through these stories, traditional tales, songs, and poetry, readers gain a true understanding of the importance of the Christmas holiday within the Hispanic community, and begin to grasp the issues that inform the Hispanic American creative process--issues such as communal identity, patriotism, poverty, assimilation, and religion. With vivid illustrations and original Spanish text for all poetry, this fascinating anthology will inform readers of all cultural backgrounds, and give them the opportunity to celebrate this cherished time with a newly extended family.