In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through an examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikhism recognized multiple identities based in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties. As a result, religious identities were highly blurred and competing definitions of Sikhism were possible. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Singh Sabha, a powerful new Sikh movement, began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with suspicion and hostility. Aided by cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj, the Singh Sabha sought to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of diversity, bringing about the highly codified culture of modern Sikhism. A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

The Author Shows That Early-Period Sikh Tradition Was Not Unduly Concerned With Establishing Distinct Religious Boundaries And That There Was Immense Diversity Within Sikh Society For Much Of The 19Th Century. But By The Closing Decades Of The 19Th Century, Egged On By The Social And Cultural Forces Unleashed By The Raj, The Singh Sabha, Ranging Religions Movement, Viewed The Multiplicity In Sikh Identity With Suspicious And Hostility And Launched A Powerful Project To Recast Sikh Tradition And Purge It Of Its Diversity. Condition Good.

A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves. Taking the reader through several compelling case studies, Patton identifies two trends of the ’80s and ’90s that fueled that rise: the growth of multicultural identity politics, which enabled a form of volatile public debate she terms “eruptive public space,” and the advent of the internet, which offered new ways for religious groups to read scholarship and respond publicly. These controversies, she shows, were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all. Patton’s book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.

The 2015 Missiology Lectures at Fuller Theological Seminary marked the fiftieth anniversary of the School of Intercultural Studies. The papers from that conference explore the developments and transformations in the study and practice of mission, as contributors chart the current shape of mission studies and its prospects in the twenty-first century.

Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywood in multi-ethnic societies. It seeks to trace Bhangra's moves from Punjab and its 'return back' to look at the forces that initiate and regulate global flows of local texts and to ask how their producers and consumers redirect them to produce new definitions of culture, identity and nation. The critical importance of this book lies in understanding the difference between the present globalizing wave and previous trans-local movements. Gera Roy contrasts the frames of cultural imperialism with those of cultural invasion to show how Indian cultures have constantly reinvented themselves by cross-pollinating with 'invading' cultures such as Hellenic, Persian, Arabic and many others in the past. By looking at Bhangra's flows to and from India, the book revises the relation between culture, space and identity and challenges boundaries. It weighs both the uses and costs of visibility provided by global networks to marginalized groups in diverse localities and explores whether collaborations between Bhangra practitioners, largely of working class origin, give ordinary people any control over the circulation of culture in the global village. Finally, the book considers whether cultural practices can alter hierarchies and power structures in the real world.

Grdzelidze’s study evaluates the present state of ecclesiology in the Orthodox Church, focusing on the history of autocephaly and its relationship with the rise of religious nationalism. To date, the Orthodox Church has not sufficiently addressed the pressing problem of religious nationalism. Tamara Grdzelidze’s Ecclesial Boundaries and National Identity in the Orthodox Church fills this lacuna, offering a solution to the ecclesiological problems posed by the rise of group-related sentiment in Orthodox communities. Grdzelidze’s monograph begins with an examination of the history of autocephaly and synodality in the Orthodox Church. As she explains, the political autonomy of local churches in the Eastern Roman Empire, which was later transformed into autocephaly, instinctively carried the kernel of group-related sentiments, whether national or ethnic. Over time, such sentiments have given rise to religious nationalism, which has further resulted in the inability of autocephalous churches to disengage from their national political involvements. Consequently, Orthodox Churches are unable to conduct a conversation on the hermeneutics of authority. After sketching this historical background, Grdzelidze offers a solution to this ecclesiological problem, proposing a eucharistic hermeneutics by which the concepts of autocephaly and synodality might be preserved from misappropriation by religious nationalists. This proposal is centered on the principle that the Church represents the Body of Christ and thus embraces the whole people of God and the whole of God’s creation through the sacramental life. Ultimately, this eucharistic mode of visioning the Church furnishes a solution to the crisis of borders and boundaries in the Orthodox Church.