This book highlights the transformative potential of democratic Church and Christian community in India. In the light of both ongoing and, also to some extent, foregone sociopolitical and theological challenges confronting Indian Christianity, this book invokes the need to democratize Indian Christianity in terms of its theology, liturgy, teachings, practices, resources, leadership roles, and institutional power relations/sharing by keeping contemporary “social realities” of Indian Christians at the core of its approach and discourse. It explores internal challenges – of caste, class, gender, and regional contestations – and external forces of communalism and majoritarianism confronting Indian Christianity today. Further, it underlines the importance of dignity, equality, fraternity, freedom, and responsibility emerging at an organizational level through strong mechanisms of deliberation, decision-making, and execution. A major contribution to religious studies in India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of religion, especially Christian theology, South Asian studies, politics, and sociology.
Ashok Kumar Mocherla is a Yang Scholar (2022-23) in World Christianity at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA. He is Associate professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore. His academic interests include sociology of religion, caste, Indian Christianity, missionary medicine, public health, and minority studies. He is the author of Dalit Christians in South India: Caste, Ideology and Lived Religion (Routledge 2020). His research has been funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), UK; ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research); and INSA (Indian National Science Academy), New Delhi.
James Ponniah is Assistant Professor and Head i/c of Christian Studies at the University of Madras, India. He was formerly the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Jnana Deepa, Pontifical Institute of Philosophy and Religion, Pune. He has authored, edited, or coedited several books: The Dynamics of Folk Religion in Society: Pericentralisation as Deconstruction of Sanskritisation (2011), Dancing Peacock: Indian Insight into Religion and Redevelopment (2010), Identity, Difference and Conflict: Postcolonial Critique (2013), Committed to the Church and the Country (2013), Psycho-Spiritual Mentoring of Adolescents (2019), and Culture, Religion and Home-Making in and beyond South Asia (2020).
