Karma and Grace

Neena Mahadev’s book is a fascinating, innovative work of religious anthropology that explores the historical co-formation of modernity and religion in Sri Lanka. This remarkable book is not a conventional study of Buddhist and Christian doctrines as tranquil and sequestered in their own spheres, but as inter-religion. It offers an incisively observant critical study of living Buddhism and Christianity in their contestatory common life in modern Sri Lanka. – Sudipta Kaviraj, author of The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas
Crisscrossing a landscape fraught with political and religious conflict, Neena Mahadev’s ethnographic skill and generosity yield rare insights. Politically alert, theologically informed, and ethically sensitive, she finds not just familiar hostilities but unexpected convergences. This is an exemplary anthropology for a religiously plural world. – Webb Keane, author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories
Neena Mahadev articulates subtle ethical and social differences between Buddhist and Christian communities in Sri Lanka in this theoretically sophisticated and meticulously researched study. Despite its historical and ethnographic complexity, her engaging and clear writing style makes this book accessible to advanced scholar and beginning student alike. This book should inspire new comparative religious research in South Asia and beyond. – Justin Thomas McDaniel, author of Wayward Distractions: Ornament, Emotion, Zombies, and the Study of Buddhism in Thailand
Karma and Grace is a tour de force that is bound to become a classic in the emerging field of anthropology and political theology. Mahadev aptly charts the interreligious as an everyday, theopolitical, ritual space; a practice and temporality of mushrooming conversions, nationalistic fears, covenant gifts, the Christian miraculous, and Buddhist messianism, with and beyond the Sri Lankan case. – Valentina Napolitano, author of Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church
Karma and Grace explores religious conflict and coexistence amidst the postwar rise of Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism. Mahadev provides a refreshingly complex treatment of religious pluralism, productively exploring the Sri Lankan story with a focus on the everyday experiences of people living in religiously mixed communities. An important account of interreligious accommodation in a context known for violence and intolerance. – Naomi Haynes, author of Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt
A nuanced, theoretically rich, and utterly humane reflection on inter-religiosity in contemporary Sri Lanka….An exemplar of insightful ethnographically grounded research. * Contemporary Buddhism *
Karma and Grace helps us to think through what being “Christian” and “Buddhist” might mean in the twenty-first century, and why changing one’s religious identity can be fraught with significant cultural valences and political ramifications. * Religious Studies Review *
A unique contribution to subfields in religious studies that examine Buddhist modernism or the spread of Evangelicalism. * Journal of Religion *

Neena Mahadev is an assistant professor of religious studies at Duke University.

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