Immigration and race are contentious issues in North America. For immigrants from Ghana and other countries of West Africa, even as their experiences and accomplishments confound stereotypes about blacks and foreigners, such issues present significant challenges like income inequality andcultural alienation. Religious congregations have often helped immigrants navigate the tricky waters of integration in the past; yet how do these particular black immigrants approach organized religion in light of their identities and aspirations? What are they looking for in religious membership, and how do they find it?In Joining the Choir, Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber takes a deeply personal look at the lives of a few central characters in Accra, Ghana and Chicago, Illinois, examining what religious membership means for them as Christians, transnational Ghanaians, and aspirational migrants. She sheds light on theirsearch for people they can trust and their desires to transcend divisions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the context of Evangelical Christianity. Her characters are complex, motivated, and adaptable people for whom religious membership answers some questions of integration and raises others. Their stories show how racial divides are subtly perpetuated within congregations in spite of hopes for religious assimilation. Yet they also reveal the potential of religious-based personal trust to bridge those divides, as an imaginative and symbolic leap of faith with the unknown stranger. Finally, their stories highlight the continuing role of religion as a portable basis of trust in the modern world, where more and more people live between nations. | Joining the Choir by Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters