Popular Christianity in India: Riting between the Lines

Front Cover
Selva J. Raj, Corinne G. Dempsey
State University of New York Press, Feb 1, 2012 - Social Science - 303 pages
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.
 

Contents

Between Behind and Beyond the Lines
1
Forging Hybrid Christian Identities
9
Riding the Line Between Hindu and Christian
11
The Three Strands of Santal Popular Catholicism1
39
The Ritual Constructionof Identity at a Catholic Festival in India
61
The Pilgrimage Tradition at the Shrine of St John de Britto1
85
Healing Disease and Division
113
Stories of Three Christian Saints1
115
The Life and Workof an Indian Catholic Healer
163
Redefining Religious Authority
189
9 Redemptive Hegemony andthe Ritualization of Reading
191
Delhi 18591884
211
A Transformative LiturgyBy James Theophilus Appavoo
233
Diverse Hindu Responses toDiverse Christianities in India
255
Contributors
269
Index
273

The Challenge of Exorcism
141

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About the author (2012)

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.

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