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Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience . By Carolyn Chen. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii + 230 pp. $38.50 cloth.

African Instituted Churches in Kenya.” Indications in a number of articles that indigenous forms of Christianity mingle with theologies brought by Americans make the case that Third World Christianity is not purely a Western transplant. The rich content of this volume does not, however, exempt it from some of the usual difficulties faced by edited works: a diffused focus, unbalanced sections, and some arbitrariness in essay topics. The well-developed section on local agency and charismatic and pentecostal transformation presents rich and original essays. But the section on cultural and socio-political dimensions of global process presents the reader with only one essay—a case study at that. The section on ministerial formation includes one article on evangelical universities and another on the North China Theological Seminary in the early 1900s. One wonders why ministerial formation is the topic here and not inter-religious leadership formation, an area more germane to the overall subject matter. Or one might ask why “The Globalizing Impulse in Christianity” section stops after two excellent essays on the period between World War I and World War II and does not include an essay on late twentieth-century or current globalizing issues in contemporary Christianity, the overall topic of the book. Perhaps we ask too much of an edited volume. Bringing together the essays in this book enriches the reader’s knowledge of the interstices of Christianity and globalization. The focus on Third World influences and the input from scholars in those settings demonstrate that Christianity in those contexts does not merely reflect a hegemonic Western influence but includes creative movements that incorporate local traditions. And the essays one might wish to read, plus the questions raised by the essays included, present crucial areas of research that scholars can pursue to further the discussion of global processes and local identities in contemporary Christianity.