Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka - Author Meets Critics

This roundtable session features a conversation about Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023), by Neena Mahadev. The anthropological and ethno-historical study examines Theravada Buddhist and Christian political-theological entanglements over conversion. While Sri Lankan Pentecostals and other Born-again Christians publicize “the Good News” (Sinhala, Subha Aranchiya), the work interrogates what happens to this “news” when it is propagated among subsets of a population that sharply resists it. Karma and Grace elucidates why questions of religious belonging became a revived source of conflict in a country that had been so long afflicted by ethnic war. The book proposes a “multicameral” methodological and theoretical approach to the study of pluralism. The author and three commentators will discuss how the book contributes to the anthropology of Christianity, the anthropology of Buddhism, religion and media, and debates on pluralism, political theologies, and the politics of religious freedom.