ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the multiple layers of aesthetics in Korean Protestant Christianity, moving among South Korea, the United States, and Haiti, where Korean Protestant Christians have established mission fields in the late twentieth century. It identifies two distinctive but not exclusive orientations of Korean Protestant aesthetics. The first is an aesthetic of progress, which has been prominent since the inception of Protestant Christianity in Korea. The second is an aesthetic of Koreanness, which has been employed to acknowledge indigenous Korean identity and which responds to the imagined authentic Korean past. The chapter also identifies the aesthetics of progress and Koreanness through an analysis of the history of Korean and Korean American Protestant Christianity and their theological commitments. The aesthetics of a society is produced socially and constitutes its sensus communis. This mutual relationship between a community and its aesthetic forms leads to the idea of embodied aesthetics, or habitus.
