Asian Diaspora Theologians

Abstract This chapter critically explores Jung Young Lee’s and Kwok Pui-lan’s theology in Asian North American diasporic context. Although emerging from distinct historical and intellectual contexts, Lee and Kwok share a deep commitment to articulating theology from the margins, grounded in their lived experiences of colonial violence, migration, racism, and resistance to oppression. Focusing on four major themes—autobiographical theology, intercultural and interreligious approaches, marginality as a theological method, and Asian diaspora theology as a vision of peace—the chapter places Lee’s theology of marginality in critical dialogue with Kwok’s postcolonial feminist theology of difference. Lee’s framework, influenced by the I-Ching and minjung consciousness, offers a both-and paradigm that reconceptualizes God, identity, and liberation through the lens of creative marginality. Kwok, engaging postcolonial critique, feminist praxis, and religious pluralism, articulates postcolonial political theology that emphasizes diasporic consciousness, relationality, multiplicity, and decolonial solidarity. Read together, their theologies illuminate the generative potential of the Asian diaspora as a contact zone where histories of trauma and resilience converge. Their theological trajectories invite a reimagining of peace not merely as the absence of violence but as an ethical, political, and spiritual solidarity forged at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and empire. In engaging Lee and Kwok intertextually and intergenerationally, this chapter underscores the ongoing efforts of Asian diasporic theologians to decolonize theological education and to envision a transpacific theology of peace grounded in the epistemologies of the marginalized.