On Karma and Grace

We invited several scholars to share their thoughts on Neena Mahadev‘s book Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Mahadev considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace.

The essays in this collection explore themes throughout the book such as the “inter-religion” model to attend to questions of religious difference and the particularities of Buddhist politics in Sri Lanka.

By Paola Pruett-Vergara & Geethika Dharmasinghe & Angie Heo & Justin Henry & Alicia Turner & Neena Mahadev

Geethika Dharmasinghe (PhD., Cornell University) is a senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Colombo and post-doctoral fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

Angie Heo is Associate Professor in the the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2018). In 2027-2029, she will be the Yap Kim Hao Visiting Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at National University of Singapore.

Justin Henry is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (OUP, 2022) as well as articles on Sinhala, Tamil and Pali religious literature.

Alicia Turner is Associate Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University in Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, colonialism and nationalism. Her book Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Hawai’i 2014) explores the fluid nature of the concepts of sāsana, identity and religion through a study of Buddhist lay associations in colonial Burma. She co-authored The Irish Buddhist (OUP 2020) with Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking a biography of an Irish sailor and agitator turned Buddhist monk. She is currently finishing a book on the genealogy of religious difference and conflict in Burma/Myanmar.

Neena Mahadev, a cultural anthropologist, specializes in the anthropology of religion (Buddhism and Christianity), pluralism, politics, ethno-religious nationalism and populism; the study of evangelism, proselytism; religion and the political economy; media and mediation, and South Asian Studies. She is the author of Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2023), for which she was awarded the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2024. The focus of her ethnographic work is the contemporary and historical dynamics of inter-religion and competing Buddhist and Christian sovereignties, in the context of wartime and postwar Sri Lanka. Her inter-disciplinary research draws from and contributes to the fields of Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Political Theory.