It is my pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to those persons who gave me help and encouragement in writing this book. I am deeply grateful to Don Schweitzer, my former student and now a professor of theology at St. Andrews College, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who willingly has been my conversation partner almost every step of the way in the long process of thinking through the major portions of this book. Mark Lewis Taylor, my colleague in the department of theology at Princeton, never stopped encouraging me to develop the basic thesis of this book. I want to thank Richard Horsley of the University of Massachusetts Boston for many phone conversations about Galilee. Any errors I make about Galilee are mine, however, and not his. Others who gave me encouragement and help include Won Moo Hurh, Roy Sano, Fumitaka Matsuoka, Richard R. Niebuhr, Andrew Sung Park, Wonhee Anne Joh, Dan Migliore, Peter Paris and Rick Osmer, Kevin Park, Adam Eitel, Joseph Kim, and many others. I must mention with gratitude my most recent class on Asian American theology during the fall semester of 2009 (Clayton Chan, Kendrick Jahng, John Kim, Paul Kim, K. C. Kye, Jooho Lee, Nathan Hiroshi Mochizuki, HyeJin Shim, and Wonjae Yu). I benefited from their careful reading of the manuscript and spirited discussion. I owe a special debt to Jooho Lee, who raised several important questions of clarification and helped improve the text.
I am also grateful to Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Fuller Theological Seminary for inviting me to give the Settles Lectures (1991) and the Peyton Lectures (1993), respectively. These lectures gave me an opportunity to try out my earlier formulations of some of the themes developed in this book.
I have been fortunate to have as my editors Michael West and Susan Johnson at Fortress Press. I very much appreciated Michael West’s empathetic reading of what Asian American theologies are trying to say. Finally, I thank my wife, Inn Sook, for her never-failing encouragement and companionship both in this project and in life.