(RNS) — Raised in Iowa, Kristin T. Lee grew up attending her parents’ Asian immigrant evangelical church while being steeped in the white evangelical Christian culture of the Midwest. She was left, however, with a disconnect between her Chinese American identity and the American version of evangelicalism. In her debut book, “We Mend with Gold: An Immigrant Daughter’s Reckoning with American Christianity,” Lee reflects on her experience, and what it means to navigate faith, culture and belonging in the United States.
Using the Japanese art of Kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold — as a metaphor for a faith that acknowledges wounds rather than hiding them, Lee explores the legacy of Western-dominated theology and her own search for a more expansive Christian faith, rooted in solidarity with marginalized communities.
“One of the themes of the book is the fractures in our lives, whether that’s feeling disconnected from the version of Christianity that we grew up with or the fractures in our family life or the fractures in our country of origins’ histories,” said Lee in a recent interview. “Both in some Asian immigrant church spaces and in American evangelicalism, there can be a tendency to want to ignore or paper over or min …
