Book discussion with author Kristin T. Lee; We Mend With Gold

Get ready for an inspiring chat with author Kristin T. Lee about her amazing book, We Mend With Gold. This in-person event is perfect for anyone who loves stories about resilience and healing. Come hang out, ask questions, and dive deep into the themes of the book with Kristin herself. Don’t miss out on this chance to connect and explore together!

About We Mend With Gold!

A daughter of the Asian American church wrestles with faith, exile, and belonging.

Being a Christian has nothing to do with being Chinese
American--that's what Kristin T. Lee learned as a child. A
fissure between her identity and what she was told to believe
opened wide. In We Mend with Gold, she asks: What if we
can bridge the divide?

Lee describes both the breaking of her young faith and the
sacred art of repair. She examines how immigrant churches
often assimilate to Western theology, even as they offer
crucial spaces of belonging. Through lyrical storytelling about
her upbringing in Asian immigrant churches as well as in
white evangelicalism, Lee wrestles with history, ancestral
stories, and what it means to follow Jesus. What might it look
like to expand beyond the scripts we've been given and bring
our questions to God--as well as building solidarity with the
marginalized?

Drawing on Black, Asian, and other minoritized theologians,
Lee separates the theology of empire from what Jesus
preached and lived. Writing of the fractures in our families,
churches, and the world, Lee relies on the Japanese art of
kintsugi to describe the resplendence of a faith that repairs but
doesn't paper over. And she offers pieces of the Asian
American experience--such as liminality, displacement, and
exile--that attend to the breaking and the mending, the
wounding and the healing. How might marginality bring us
closer to God and others? What do we lose when we "make
it"? And when we expand our notion of who belongs to our
family, what do we gain?

We can repair the seams between our cultural identities and
our faith, Lee claims. By leaving room for mystery, we
encounter God's love. We mend the fractures--between and
within us--with gold.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristin T. Lee is a writer whose work has appeared in Sojourners and Christianity Today, a primary care physician serving Boston's Chinatown community. She writes about faith, culture, books, and solidarity at The Embers and is a contributing columnist to The Covenant Companion. Her passion is highlighting literature written by Asian and BIPOC authors via book reviews and reading groups on Instagram (@ktlee.writes). Lee's work is informed by her experiences as an adoptive mother, host to refugees, and friend to those affected by incarceration. 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.

Learn more about her at kristintlee.com.

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