Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (review by Bruno M. Shirley) By Neena Mahadev

https://www.academia.edu/121808809/Karma_and_Grace_Religious_Difference_in_Millennial_Sri_Lanka_review_by_Bruno_M_Shirley_ Karma and Grace provides a nuanced, theoretically rich, and utterly humane reflection on inter-religiosity in contemporary Sri Lanka. As the title suggests, Karma and Grace is a reflection on the tensions between, and mutual coconstitution of, Buddhism and Christianity, in ways which nonetheless provide valuable methodological inspiration for those who are more firmly focused on Buddhism alone. While materials from Mahadev's (2013) doctoral dissertation are at the core of the work, Karma and Grace immediately begins to demonstrate all the benefits that an additional decade of fieldwork and theoretical reflection have wrought. The result is a monograph which could serve as an exemplar of insightful ethnographically grounded research. Karma and Grace comprises six body chapters, along with an introduction and brief epilogue. Chapter One introduces the stakes of Buddhist-Christian tensions in contemporary Sri Lanka, traced through narratives of conspiracy theories, conversions, and economic crises. In this opening chapter, Mahadev establishes her core approach: simultaneously taking seriously the sincerely held beliefs of her actors and interlocutors, and contextualising those beliefs in a broader political economy. Chapter Two provides a detailed study of the titular tension between Karma and Grace, by attending to the incommensurate logics of gift-giving (Buddhist dāna against Christian charity). Chapters Three through Five sharpen our attention yet further on the 'theopolitical' stakes of phenomena specific to individual religious communities: Pentecostal beliefs in the miraculous, everyday divine presence (Chapter Three); Roman interventions in, and attempts to moderate, evangelical Catholicism (Chapter Four); and the eschatological interchanges which particularly suffuse Buddhist reorientations towards the salvific possibilities of the bodhisattva Maitreya (Chapter Five). These chapters are particularly admirable for their attentiveness to tensions within religious communities: we cannot speak here only of divides between 'Buddhists and Christians', or even between 'Catholics and Protestants', but must rather attend to more fine-grained disputes over Sri Lanka's religious futures. Chapter Six provides, perhaps, the most refined essence of Mahadev's approach, tracing 'Ordinary Biographies of Converts, Apostates, and Dual Belongers' in ways which remix and complicate themes introduced in earlier chapters. At the centre of Mahadev's approach is the notion of 'inter-religion'. This term appears in the subtitle of the Introduction, but is only passingly invoked therein; Mahadev prefers, perhaps, that the term unfold throughout the work's rich ethnographic descriptions. This is an effective approach; book reviews, sadly, do CONTEMPORARY BUDDHISM ...