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This paper examines the discourse and practice behind Protestant mission schools for Korean women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is on Ewha, the first and foremost women’s school in Korea. While the mission schools provided new, ground-breaking educational and career opportunities, they also espoused a domestic ideology based on Victorian models of good wives and mothers. Over time, the modern, Western-style education that the students received took on a dynamic of its own that could not be easily contained or controlled through the discourse of domesticity. Many women, in fact, trans-gressed the gender norms and boundaries, breaking out of the designated private spheres of home and family, and entering the prohibited public spheres of society and politics. The domestic ideal of wife and mother, however, persisted in reaction to the revolutionary potential and power of a modern education, and attempted to circumscribe it. The students and graduates of the mission schools navigated and negotiated the tensions and contradictions of their education in different ways. But they shared the transforming experience of the new knowledge and spirit embodied by the schools, and, unlike previous generations of Korean women, they held the keys to their own futures.

This article examines how various Protestant Christian Korean students in the United States understood and utilized the overlapping discourses of Christianity and Wilsonian democracy, which emerged in the decades before World War II as a particular language of Americanism as they struggled for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule. Specifically, this article explores how students used this discourse to articulate an anti-colonial vision grounded in the ideas of modernity, progress, and civilization during the “Wilsonian moment,” with a special focus on the activities and statements of such key figures as George L. Paik, a president of Yonsei University and the first Minister of Education of the Republic of Korea, Syngman Rhee, an overseas independence activist during the colonial period and the first president of the Republic of Korea, Philip Jaisohn, a long-time independence activist in the United States and Helen Kim, an early woman student in the United States and subsequently the dean of Ewha Womans University.

When Catholicism was introduced into Korea in the late Chosŏn dynasty, new scientific knowledge came with it. While Confucian scholars were more interested in the former than the latter, some eventually converted to the new faith, and a Catholic community came into being in Korea. The threat posed by Catholicism to the Chosŏn state led to persecutions that decimated the Church until the 1886 treaty between Korea and France granted it tolerance. This led to a time of rapid growth. However, as Korea came to be increasingly under foreign domination, Protestant Christianity, which had arrived in Korea decades after Catholicism, grew much more quickly. In this article I will argue that the educational policy of the Catholic Church, that is, what the Catholic Church taught and the means it employed to that end, played an important role in its reception, development, growth, and influence in Korea. Furthermore I will contend, focusing on An Chunggŭn’s university proposal, that the Catholic Church’s emphasis on otherworldly religious issues in its educational policy, while enabling it to survive and even grow during times of persecution, was not as appealing to Koreans in general during the closing years of the Chosŏn dynasty. This orientation, when combined with the Catholic Church’s lack of financial resources, led to its stagnation and its eclipse by Protestant Christianity, which followed an educational policy that sought to balance this-worldly and other-worldly concerns and had greater access to financial support.

In 1991 a Korean theologian, Chung Hyun Kyung provoked controversy at the assembly of the World Council of Churches by presenting a theology of the Holy Spirit in the form of a Shamanist exorcism. Korean theology of the Holy Spirit has been significant not only in the growth of Christianity in Korea but also in its contribution to Korea’s national development in the twentieth century. This article offers some background in the religio-cultural traditions which lie behind the distinctive Korean approach to pneumatology. The article goes on to examine three different strands of Korean Christian thinking about the Holy Spirit—the theologies of Suh Nam-dong, Cho Yonggi, Ryu Tong-Shik—which appropriate meanings of ‘spirit’ in traditional Korean culture and religion. Through a dialogue between the Korean theologians, the article highlights distinctive aspects of Korean theology of the Spirit, which represent a constructive Korean contribution to the important global Christian debate about pneumatology.

In this article we examine Korean Protestantism’s intrinsic fundamentalist bent, which has caused both numerous schisms within the Korean Protestant churches and exclusivist approaches toward other religions. First, we study how Korean fundament-alism has occurred in three characteristic theological controversies, and three tragic schisms in the Korean Presbyterian Church. It appears that Korean fundamentalism, as it has appeared in the history of Korean Presbyterian churches, is unique in that it has an intense Biblicism. Then, we scrutinize how Korean fundamentalism has taken on an intense Biblicism. The theology of the American Presbyterian missionaries in Korea, which determined the theological orientation of Korean Protestantism, was “notably conservative.” But unfortunately this conservatism was further strengthened by Korea’s lack of political freedom. Being unable to participate in socio-political matters, the missionaries and their Korean followers could not help but focus on Bible studies, prayer, and evangelism. Furthermore, Korean Presbyterians’ Biblicism was also heightened by revivalism and millennialism, which were especially rampant before and after the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. So it was Korea’s revolutionary socio-political situation, which greatly facilitated revivalism, millennialism, and eventually fundamentalism in Korea. Thus, we find three different factors that have contributed to the development of Korean Protestantism’s Biblicist and fundamentalist leanings: 1) the Western missionaries’ strong conservatism, which emphasized the Bible, significantly due to Korea’s political instability, 2) revivalism, and millennialism, which were again stimulated by Korea’s revolutionary situation, and 3) Korea’s original religious teaching on millennialism. And it was Dr. Pak Hyŏng-yong, who was the most important Korean theologian in establishing Korean Protestant Christianity as a Biblical Christianity. Having gained an insight into the Biblicist nature of Korean Protestant Christianity, Dr. Pak seems to have succeeded in combining it with the pietistic and Protestant orthodox (old Princeton) theology of the American Presbyterian missionaries to Korea, eventually making a unique Korean theology that emphasized the authority of the Bible. His theology, however, has a fundamentalist bent in that it rejects other ways of interpreting the Bible.

This paper aims at tracing trans-pacific historical continuity, as it is demonstrated in the faith of second-generation Korean Christians. Second-generation Korean Christians are the children of Korean immigrants who went to the U.S.A., following the liberalization of the immigration laws in 1965 that removed the national origins quota system and ended the exclusion of Asians from immigration. About eighty percent of them are Protestants or Catholics, which corresponds with the Protestant or Catholic percentage of first generation Koreans. Spending their childhood and adolescence in Korean ethnic churches, second-generation Koreans acquire the evangelical religiosity of their parents which originated from Korea. Furthermore, being born or raised in the U.S.A., they also obtain American evangelical religiosity. Exploring the aforementioned socio-religious reality, this article claims that Korean Christianity, Korean ethnic churches and American evangelical Christianity are not very different from one another, and that, in fact, they are almost identical. While second-generation Korean Christians are socialized into the conservative Christianity of Korean ethnic churches brought from Korea, they identify with and are influenced by American evangelical Christianity. Thus, the faith of second-generation Koreans shows the trans-pacific continuity between Korea and America.

The only significant part of North Korean propaganda that is uncritically accepted in the foreign research community is the regime’s claim to be guided in its policy-making by Kim Il Sung’s Juche Thought. Oddly enough the Western consensus regarding Juche’s crucial importance to Pyongyang has never been accompanied by much research into the doctrine. Usually it is described in a sentence or two as a cult-like ideology of self-reliance. The following article sets out to show that the conventional wisdom is mistaken: Juche Thought exists to be praised and not read, let alone implemented. The little paraphrasable sense that can be extracted from the official sources is not only distinct from, but in many respects incompatible with, the paranoid, race-based nationalism that has always constituted North Korea’s true dominant ideology. In addition, the article seeks to explain how it was that the outside world accepted the Juche myth no less readily than did the North Korean people themselves.