Religion Across Borders ─ Transnational Immigrant Networks

Religion Across Borders examines both personal and organizational networks that exist between members in U.S. immigrant religious communities and individuals and religious institutions left behind. Building upon Religion and the New Immigrants (2000)—their previous study of immigrant religious communities in Houston—sociologists Ebaugh and Chafetz ask how religious remittances flow between home and host communities, how these interchanges affect religious practices in both settings, and how influences change over time as new immigrants become settled.

Helen Rose Ebaugh, Sociology Professor, University of Houston, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975 with specialties in organizational sociology and the sociology of religion. In addition to four books, she has published numerous articles in scholarly journals. She has been a faculty member at the University of Houston since 1973 and routinely teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in sociological theory, the sociology of religion and world religions. Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Professor of Sociology, has been at the University of Houston since 1971. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1969. Her most recent publications include an edited Handbook on the Sociology of Gender (1999), a review of feminist theories in Annual Review of Sociology (1997), and a paper on feminist theory and social change in Current Perspectives in Social Theory (1999). A life-long interest in immigrants occasioned by the fact that all of her grandparents immigrated to the U.S., has finally found professional expression through joining Professor Ebaugh on this project.