Popular Christianity in India
Riting between the Lines
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Explores the lived experience of Christianity in India.
Description
Popular Christianity in India explores Indian Christianity as crafted and expressed through lived experience, providing an important balance to currently available, typically theological, studies. Drawing from many disciplines, this volume unearths the multifaceted terrain of festivals, rituals, saints, miracle workers, missionaries, and visionaries in Christian India, providing a wonderful glimpse of its richness and complexities. The contributors reveal the ways in which local Christian traditions deftly challenge assumed divisions and power imbalances between East and West, Hindu and Christian, foreign and indigenous, and elite and local expressions. Whether forging complicated religious, caste, and national identities, employing religious hybridity to promote well-being, or asserting autonomy within oppressive social and religious structures, local Christianity provides a crucial means for its participants to manage their earthly needs and desires.
Selva J. Raj, Chair and Associate Professor of Religious Studies, is the Stanley S. Kresge Professor of Religious Studies at Albion College. Corinne G. Dempsey is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the author of Kerala Christian Sainthood: Collisions of Culture and Worldview in South India.
Reviews
"…this is a worthwhile addition to the study of Indian religions. " — Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"The authors draw on their own fresh and original fieldwork and research and give us data and insights that are unlikely to be found elsewhere. A remarkable milestone, this volume fills an important niche in the study of India and will be of great value. " — Francis X. Clooney, S. J. , author of Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Srivaisnava of South India