This panel brings together ethnographic case studies of Christianities both old and new across the United States of America to examine how people marshal aesthetic resources to create community and mediate their sense of religious belonging. The first paper examines efforts by Hispano (i.e., members of long-standing Latino/a/x communities in the Southwest) artists to resist outright commodification of the woodcarvings they produce which have historically served an important role in their communities’ vernacular Catholic practices, but which are also coveted as secular art objects by outsiders. The second paper analyzes how Korean-American Presbyterians employ various linguistic codes and speech genres to mediate their sense of community in diaspora. The final paper explores how recent converts to Orthodox Christianity in Appalachia are creating a new musical style for their services that speak to both their regional American identity and membership in a translocal religious community.
What does it take for a vernacular Christianity to remain relevant into the 21st century? What is at stake when local religious practices and materialities, seen as vital manifestations of cultural memory, undergo “heritagization” and commodification for the cultural tourism circuit? This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research. I examine vernacular Catholicism and tensions surrounding religious futures in and around Chimayó, a Hispano community in northern New Mexico. This region is awash in the materialities of vernacular Catholicism – carved saints, colonial-era altar screens, ex-votos, and roadside shrines. Material religion is engaged as an anchor for Nuevomexicano identity and supports a flagging economy, yet local people also contest its commodification for cultural outsiders. I argue that the navigation of the line between embracing and resisting heritagization can produce ambivalence but also potentiates a nuanced, active engagement of vernacular religion as a culturally-grounded resource for contemporary and future generations.
This paper examines how Korean immigrant lay believers in diaspora Presbyterian churches destabilize and reinterpret core Christian concepts through dialogical Bible study. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a congregational Bible study group in the United States, it analyzes how participants negotiate the meanings of theological language in relation to their everyday contexts and practical needs. Concepts such as God, blessing, the gospel, faith, sin, and obedience are collectively reworked through dialogue. I describe this process as “dialogical blessing,” in which religious meanings emerge through communal interaction. The study highlights how linguistic practices reshape authority, identity, and belonging in contemporary diaspora Christian communities.
The Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition has long been associated with emphases on conservatism of its liturgical forms, and musical settings are typically no exception. However, the recent growth of Orthodox Christianity in the United States, particularly from converts of Evangelical backgrounds, has begun to challenge the primacy of Orthodox Christian music’s predominantly Russian and Greek origins. This paper will examine recent developments in Orthodox Christian liturgical music in the United States, particularly the emergence of what is sometimes referred to as an “Appalachian” or “American” Orthodox style that melds the textual and liturgical roots of with American folk music by analyzing the role of textual primacy (Seeger 1986) in three English-language hymns that typify various stages of an emergent American Orthodox musical genre. Ultimately, the musical identity that is produced maintains Orthodox Christianity’s distinctiveness from other Christian musical traditions while also satisfying nostalgic desires for authenticity in religious music.
| Hanna H. Kim | hannakim@adelphi.edu | View |