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Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, edited by R Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1998. 409 pp. $59.95 cloth. ISBN: 1-56639-613-1. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 1-56639-614-X.
This is one reader that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the early 1990s, Stephen Warner became aware of how little was known about the religious practices of America's so-called "new immigrants," largely from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. At the same time, he was promoting what he called a "new paradigm" in the sociology of religion, one emphasizing the consumer-orientation of ordinary people in religious innovations. He stressed the diversity of religious life in the United States, instead of the single overarching sacred canopy that, he suggested, was the norm wrongly assumed by adherents of an older paradigm. With an evidentiary gap to fill and a paradigm to promote, Warner orchestrated the efforts that led to this book. Funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Pew Charitable Trust, he led the New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations Project (NEICP)...