Events

This talk is jointly organised by the Asia Research Institute, and the GL Louis Religious Pluralism Research Cluster in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore; with funding support from the Foo Hai Ch’an Monastery Fellowship in Buddhist Studies.

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Jack Meng-Tat Chia, Department of History, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

Through keen observations of media events and vivid ethnography of “inter-religion”, Karma and Grace illuminates disputes over religious pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka since the early 2000s. Mahadev’s anthropological research details how majoritarian Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists engage in duelling efforts to reshape the religious, economic, and political landscapes of wartime and postwar Sri Lanka. In gripping detail, Mahadev considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and samsara, in relation to Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their god’s salvific grace. In a context shaped by oscillations in the postcolonial and neoliberal political economy, the ethnography provides a rich portrait of how mediation and new media reach intensifies charismatic evangelism and ethno-religious nationalism.

While charismatic and evangelical missions endeavoured to spread the Christian “Good News”, subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to prevent new churches from taking root. In exploring the resistances and receptivity to Christianity in a predominantly Buddhist context, Karma and Grace captures tangles of religious perspectivism. Modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks, intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Karma and Grace illustrates how, even amid trenchant conflicts, social proximity between rivals is conducive to experimentation and ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with religious difference.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Neena Mahadev is an anthropologist with expertise in religion, pluralism, media, political economy, with focus on Theravāda Buddhism and Christianities in Asia. Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023) was named the 2024 winner of the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. In 2021, the manuscript won the Claremont Prize in Religion from the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Dr Mahadev has received generous research support from the the National Science Foundation (US), Wenner Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, Yale-NUS, and the Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund. She is presently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College. She is a member of the Religion and Globalization, and Inter-Asian Engagements clusters at the Asia Research Institute, and she holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at National University of Singapore. She serves on the board of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, Journal of Global Buddhism, and New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity book series.

Angie Heo is Associate Professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. After receiving her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, she taught at Barnard College and held fellowships at Emory University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her first book is The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2018). Her current research turns to the history and politics of Protestant Christianity in Korea. 

Alastair Gornall gained his PhD in Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2013. He is currently Associate Professor in History and Religion at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and a research associate in the Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a member of council of the Pali Text Society. His research focuses on the intellectual history of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia and the editing and translation of second-millennium Pali literature. At SUTD, he teaches courses on Asian religions, history, and the digital humanities.