Christian Responses to Discrimination and Violence in India and Sri Lanka: Avoidance, Advocacy, and Interfaith Engagement

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ORCID

Chad M. Bauman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1670-7428

Notes

1. We thank the following for their support of the research from which this article derives: the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame; the Religious Freedom Project, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, Georgetown University; the John Templeton Foundation; the Templeton Religion Trust; the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California; the Desmond Tutu Center for Peace, Reconciliation, and Global Justice at Butler University and Christian Theological Seminary, the American Academy of Religion, and our respective universities. We have presented some of the material in this article more thoroughly in Bauman and Ponniah (2016).

2. See, for example, the testimony of ADF attorney, Tehmina Arora, before the US House of Representatives (available at http://www.adfmedia.org/files/AroraTestimony20140211.pdf, accessed on March 10, 2016).

3. Personal interview (via Skype) on March 7, 2016. Similar criticisms have been made of other prominent Christian figures, like those of Catholic Archbishop Oswald Cardinal Gracias and Julio Ribeiro.

4. The NCEASL, for example, recorded over a hundred such incidents in 2014. Data on the incidents reported can be downloaded from NCEASL’s website: Accessed October 15 2015. https://slchurchattacks.crowdmap.com/reports/download

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chad M. Bauman

Chad M. Bauman is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Classics at Butler University. His earliest research focused on the interaction of low-caste Christians and Hindus in colonial India and culminated in a book, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947, that won the prize for Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 2006–2008, from the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. His most recent book is Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015).

James Ponniah

James Ponniah is Assistant Professor of the Department of Christian Studies at the University of Madras, Chennai. He is the author of a monograph, The Dynamics of Folk Religion in Society: Pericentralisation as Deconstruction of Sanskritisation (2011), and co-editor of Dancing Peacock: Indian Insight into Religion and Redevelopment (2010), Committed to the Church and the Country (2013), and Identity, Difference and Conflict: Postcolonial Critique (2013). His areas of research include folk religions of India, popular Catholicism, and Dalit Christianity.