INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 7 The Wanderers is Lowry’s second collaboration with Lantern Theatre. He was the scenic and lighting designer for the company’s production of The Royale in 2022. His work earned nominations from the Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre. The awards recognize work in Philadelphia theatre. The play itself won Barrymores for best direction and overall production. Embracing the creative journey is an approach that he tries to share with his students. “It’s all about the process,” Lowry emphasizes. “If you think just about the final result, it’s very daunting to create an original idea that answers this theatrical riddle.” religion, culture & society American Influence on Religion in South Korea and Haiti Minjung Noh has a surprising answer when you ask how she began studying Korean women missionaries. Noh, a native of South Korea, is a fan of the Korean popular music K-Pop. When a member of one of her favorite bands, The Wonder Girls, left the group a decade ago, Noh found a connection between the performer—a born-again evangelical Christian—and Haiti, a country Noh was studying in her academic research. “She was at the top of the Korean K-Pop industry, and she just left and got married to a Korean Canadian pastor. That was 10 years ago, and that was shocking,” says Noh, assistant professor of religion, culture and society. “And then she was doing missions in Haiti. I thought, ‘What is happening?’” Her current book project, Transnational Salvations: Korean Women Missionaries in Haiti, uses historical and anthropological data in three areas— race, religion, and gender—to examine the impacts on Haitian culture from both the United States and Korea. “I’m trying to show in my work and in my book, we have this history of different colonizations in South Korea and Haiti, and it has been propelled by religious missions and also by the colonial powers, the political powers.” Noh’s research reveals that the influence of the United States is reflected both in religion and in myriad policy changes introduced during the American occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 and of Korea from 1945-1948. “By connecting Haitian history and Korean religious history, they’re very well connected by U.S. colonialism,” Noh says. “When the U.S. occupied those countries, their constitution was changed. So, it was not just a military occupation, it was an ideological occupation.” The work of Korean missionaries— including Korean American evangelicals—is another example of American influence. “Up until the mid-20th Century, until the end of the Cold War, [American] evangelical leaders and churches claimed their religious identity as [being] opposed to communism,” Noh says. “South Korea became a symbol of this bulwark against communism.” Attitudes about race are a third focus of her research. Tracing historical attitudes toward Asians in different cultures has led her to examine how the issue of race might be reflected in the Korean missionary experience. Although Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries continue to evangelize in Haiti, missionaries have a new focus. Increasingly, Korean American churches recruit pastors from Korea. “Just as they were evangelized by the U.S.in the 20th Century, now it’s their turn to pay forward the gospel. They have to save the U.S.,” Noh says. “Such patterns of conservative evangelical missions from the global south to the Anglo-European world are significant contemporary religious phenomena that need more scholarly attention.” (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5) Over 12,000 Haitians gathered in the Desselins Square to protest the continued occupation by U.S. troops (below). South Korean Christians attend a service in a church in Seoul (right). Bettmann, Patrick Robert / Corbis
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