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

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--Back cover.