Writing Tamil Catholicism

Writing Tamil Catholicism
Author: Margherita Trento
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004511628

In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.

The Transformation of Tamil Religion

The Transformation of Tamil Religion
Author: Srilata Raman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 131774473X

This book analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. The book traces the hagiographical and biographical process by which Ramalinga Swamigal is shifted from being considered an exemplary poet-saint of the Tamil Śaivite bhakti tradition to a Dravidian nationalist social reformer. Taking as a starting point Ramalinga’s own writing, the book presents him as inhabiting a border zone between early modernity and modernity, between Hinduism and Christianity, between colonialism and regional nationalism, highlighting the influence of his teachings on politics, particularly within Dravidian cultural and political nationalism. Simultaneously, the book considers the implication of such an hagiographical process for the transformation of Tamil religion in the period between the 19th –mid-20th centuries. The author demonstrates that Ramalinga Swamigal’s ideology of compassion, cīvakāruṇyam, had not only a long genealogy in pre-modern Tamil Śaivism but also that it functioned as a potentially emancipatory ethics of salvation and caste critique not just for him but also for other Tamil and Dalit intellectuals of the 19th century. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity – Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315794518 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Religion Against the Self

Religion Against the Self
Author: Isabelle Clark-Decès
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2000
Genre: Hinduism
ISBN: 0195113640

This study, based on the author's fieldwork among rural Tamil villagers in South India, focuses on the ways in which people in this society interact with the supernatural beings who play such a large role in their personal and corporate lives. Isabelle Navokov looks at a spectrum of ritualized contexts in which the boundaries between the natural and spiritual worlds are penetrated and communication takes place. Throughout, Nabokov's meticulous analysis sheds new light on this hiterto almost unknown domain - and entire range of fascinating phenomena basic to South Indian religion as it is really lived.

Pathways through Early Modern Christianities

Pathways through Early Modern Christianities
Author: Andreea Badea
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2023-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 341252607X

In the midst of a global pandemic, the Frankfurt POLY (Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities) Lectures on "Pathways through Early Modern Christianities" brought together a virtual, global community of scholars and students in the Spring and Summer of 2021 to discuss the fascinating nature of early modern religious life. In this book, eleven pathbreaking scholars from the "four corners" of the early modern world reflect on the analytical tools that structure their field and that they have developed, revised and embraced in their scholarship: from generations to tolerance, from uniformity to publicity, from accommodation to local religion, from polycentrism to connected histories, and from identity to object agency. Together, the chapters of this reference work help both students and advanced researchers alike to appreciate the extent of our current knowledge about early modern christianities in their interconnected global context—and what exciting new travels could lie ahead.

Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints

Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints
Author: Reid B. Locklin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438465068

Finalist for the 2018 Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies presented by the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies At the turn of the twenty-first century, Selva J. Raj (1952–2008) was one of the most important scholars of popular Indian Christianity and South Asian religion in North America. Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints gathers together, for the first time in a single volume, a series of his groundbreaking studies on the distinctively "vernacular" Catholic traditions of Tamil Nadu in southeast India. This collection, which focuses on four rural shrines, highlights ritual variety and ritual transgression in Tamil Catholic practice and offers clues to the ritual exchange, religious hybridity, and dialogue occurring at the grassroots level between Tamil Catholics and their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. Raj also advances a new and alternative paradigm for interreligious dialogue that radically differs from models advocated by theologians, clergy, and other religious elite. In addition, essays by other leading scholars of Indian Christianity and South Asian religions—Michael Amaladoss, Purushottama Bilimoria, Corinne G. Dempsey, Eliza F. Kent, and Vasudha Narayanan—are included that amplify and creatively extend Raj's work.

Christian History, Volume 2

Christian History, Volume 2
Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2024-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1087737028

Thomas S. Kidd presents a global history of the Christian church in the modern age. Christian History, Volume 2: From the Reformation to the Present provides a composite picture of important, influential, and representative Christian beliefs, thinkers, activists, trends, and practices from about 1500 to the present day. In a highly readable style, Kidd covers the events and figures from the Reformation, the Great Awakenings, higher criticism, and the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This volume also covers the global nature of God’s church by examining historical global traditions as well as the recent the demographic shift of active Christian communities to the global South. In addition to the major theologians, movements, and events of the period, Kidd highlights the everyday Christian experience through the centuries, including accounts of ordinary men and women who experience conversion, live sacrificially for the gospel, or endure persecution. A lively, engaging, and readable text, Christian History, Volume 2: From the Reformation to the Present will become a staple text for students and professors alike.

Missionaries in Persia

Missionaries in Persia
Author: Christian Windler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2024-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0755649370

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the “true religion” turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for “a global history on a small scale,” the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.

The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century

The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century
Author: David Hempton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2011-09-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0857735608

David Hempton's history of the vibrant period between 1650 and 1832 engages with a truly global story: that of Christianity not only in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe, India, China, and South-East Asia. Examining eighteenth-century religious thought in its sophisticated national and social contexts, the author relates the narrative of the Church to the rise of religious enthusiasm pioneered by Pietists, Methodists, Evangelicals and Revivalists, and by important leaders like August Hermann Francke, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. He places special emphasis on attempts by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British seaborne powers to export imperial conquest, commerce and Christianity to all corners of the planet. This leads to discussion of the significance of Catholic and Protestant missions, including those of the Jesuits, Moravians and Methodists. Particular attention is given to Christianity's impact on the African slave populations of the Caribbean Islands and the American colonies, which created one of the most enduring religious cultures in the modern world. Throughout the volume changes in Christian belief and practice are related to wider social trends, including rapid urban growth, the early stages of industrialization, the spread of literacy, and the changing social construction of gender, families and identities.

South Asia's Christians

South Asia's Christians
Author: Chandra Mallampalli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190608900

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia's Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians' location between Hindus and Muslims. Mallampalli begins with a discussion of South India's ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia's Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He then underscores efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavours, but rarely succeeded at yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of post-colonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly untouchable) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.