Course Description

Instructor: Kemal Budak, PhD Student, Emory University

The next fifty years will bring dramatic changes in the ethnic and racial demographics of the United States. According to census projections, almost fifty percent of the country will be non-white with a large part of this change happening through immigration from Latin America, East and South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Immigrants come from a greater variety of countries and bring with them a multitude of new linguistic and cultural forms along with diverse religious practices. In this course, we will explore the religious lives of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu immigrants in the United States and ask the question of what roles religious practice and religious institutions play both at the individual level and in broader communities. We will start with the earlier immigration waves in the United States and main assimilation/ integration theories. Then we will look both at new immigration and more established communities in the United States and Europe through case studies, delving into the multidimensional aspect of immigrant lives including the settlement process, civic engagement, food habits, second generation, and women immigrants.