CITY, SOUL, AND THE NEW IMMIGRATION

Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape. Edited by Robert A. Orsi. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. xi + 402 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Edited by R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. vi + 409 pp. Notes and index. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

James D. Bratt
Calvin College

The 1965 United States Immigration Act opened the doors for a new wave of immigration that now accounts for some 10 percent of the American population and the most obvious facets of its social diversity. That these immigrants have also changed the face of American religion has been well—sometimes sensationally—noted in the media but far less in scholarly literature. The two volumes under review are bravura attempts to fill that gap, giving in the two dozen essays between them a score of close reports from the field plus three synoptic essays. These books must be counted as instant standards in the field and will be particularly valued for their live witness to the first stages of community formation among their subject groups. Historians' regard for them, however, will vary with their estimate of the books' respective cultural studies and sociological methodologies, neither of which comes over-encumbered with considerations of time, the past, or precedent.