The Work

Both student research and the staff research team are deeply involved in research at Ecologies of Learning, and community people also contribute through interviews, focus groups, and many kinds of interaction with us.  Our research is mostly “on site”—observing congregations and communities, interviewing leaders and participants, mapping locations where congregation and community interact.

Student Research - Students conduct research as part of their work for seminary courses like Church and Community Analysis and EOL: Research and Evaluation of Urban Religious Communities.  Students from NYTS and other seminaries also conduct research as part of their Field Education or Supervised Ministry.  Most of these students study one particular church and its neighborhood—usually the one in which they are already engaged in ministry.  Our students have studied churches in all the New York boroughs, plus Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Columbia, and Putnam Counties of New York; Essex, Bergen, and Mercer Counties of New Jersey; and southern Connecticut.  Since NYTS is a Christian seminary, the student’s work focuses on churches, but often they examine the churches’ interaction with synagogues and mosques.  The student work becomes part of the EOL data base, and some of the course papers contain “findings,” or scholarly conclusions, that we are pleased to share with others.  To see selections from these papers, click here:

- A Student Speaks: EOL Research is “Educational and Transformative” (by Sharon Carter Jones)

Staff Research - EOL staff conduct research on congregations of all faiths, and plan to do this throughout the New York Metro Area.   

Much of our work now focuses on congregations in Manhattan’s Lower East Side (LES), the area east of the Bowery, from Brooklyn Bridge north to 14th Street.  The LES contains more than 200 religious congregations—mostly churches, but also synagogues, mosques, and temples of various faiths—which have long had a huge impact on this culturally rich, politically contested part of New York.  In recent years, the LES has experienced the impact of globalization, changing immigration, and gentrification - with the result that extremely rich and extremely poor people, new immigrants and lifelong residents, live side by side and (literally) on top of each other.  With gentrification has come a highly commercialized nightlife, and one of our goals is to find out how communities of faith are either challenging or participating in this “Culture of the Night.”

Brooklyn is home to more black churches than anywhere else in Metro New York, and our next major focus will be to understand how these interact with the rest of the complex, diverse ecology that comprises New York’s most populous borough.  While starting with studies of the churches where our students are members and ministers [link to map], or research will examine how communities of different faiths and of diverse immigrant groups affect the economic restructuring and cultural transformation of Brooklyn.

Korean Americans and recent Korean immigrants have founded and support more than 1,000 churches—as well as numerous Buddhist temples—in Metro New York, and account for about one-fifth of NYTS students.  We are therefore launching a research project to understand how these churches—mainly Presbyterian, Methodist, Full Gospel, and Catholic—affect the ability of the Korean population both to preserve their culture and to participate successfully in American economic, cultural, and civic life.  This study begins in Flushing, Queens, and will extend to Bergen County, New Jersey, and other parts of Metro New York where Korean people are concentrated.

We are also planning research in other parts of Metro New York and with the congregations of additional ethnic groups, especially Latinos.  While we will tend to concentrate in areas where our students live and work—Queens, Brooklyn, Harlem, and New Jersey’s industrial cities along the Hudson River—we are always open to new initiatives and welcome proposal from congregations and communities interested in collaborating with us.  Please let us know! Contact us!

Research snapshots

- The Buddha’s Birthday: Live from New York
- Neighborly, Reflective, Committed: New York City’s Muslims (by Matt Weiner)

Reprinted from America, July 31-Aug 7, 2006, with permission of America Press, Inc. © 2006. All rights reserved. For subscription information, call 1-800-627-9533 or visit www.americamagazine.org.

Ongoing Research

- Koreans and Their Churches in the NY Metro-Area: A Survey to Ground Future Discourse (by Keun-joo Christine Pae)
- African Immigrant Congregations in the New York Metro Area: An Overview (by Moses Biney)

Growing Asian presence in Queens

A gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn

First Presbyterian Church- Irvington, NJ Examining how the population of a church can impact a community