Men and spirituality: A study on gender and spirituality among second-generation Korean Americans.

摘要

This dissertation studies second-generation Korean American men through the lens of gender, spirituality, and race. It explores how spirituality affects Korean American men and the inverse, how Korean American men affect their spirituality. Using social construction theory and critical feminist critique, a foundational argument is that Korean American men are in part, products of social, historical, and cultural forces. These forces have produced gender, racial, and religious scripts that manifest in their lived experiences and their held beliefs. In order to understand these scripts, the author has situated Korean American men within the larger social and historical context of the United States. The author asserts that Korean American Christian men and their spirituality exist in a mutually shaping relationship. As spirituality provide men alternative scripts with which to live, social forces as witnessed in lived experience also help to form them. Sometimes these scripts are the same. This interdisciplinary study uses a variety of scholarly literature from several disciplines including Asian American studies, gender and men's studies, spirituality, sociology of religion, sociology of sport, and religious education. It also pulls data from qualitative research the author conducted---ethnography with a second-generation Korean American church and semi-structured interviews with second-generation Korean American men.