Learning to Speak a New Tongue: Imagining a Way That Holds People Together-An Asian American Conversation

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.

Fumitaka Matsuoka is Robert Gordon Sproul Professor of Theology Emeritus at Pacific School of Religion and was Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean and Professor of Theology at PSR and at Bethany Theological Seminary. He also served as the director of the Institute for Leadership Development and the Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion (PANA Institute) at PSR. His books include Out of Silence: Emerging Theological Themes of Asian American Churches (1995), and The Color of Faith: Building Community in a Multiracial Society (1998). He is currently co-editing with Jane Iwamura Encyclopedia of Asian American Cultures & Religions.