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Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 2012 Christianity and Hinduism: An Annotated Bibliography Chad M. Bauman Butler University, cbauman@butler.edu Arun Jones Brian Pennington Joseph Prabhakar Dayam Michelie Voss Roberts Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers Part of the Religion Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact fgaede@butler.edu. Recommended Citation Bauman, Chad M.; Jones, Arun; Pennington, Brian; Prabhakar Dayam, Joseph; and Voss Roberts, Michelie, "Christianity and Hinduism: An Annotated Bibliography" / (2012): -. Available at http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/268 9780195399318/ b 9780195399318 0042 l? k N l9FQ& l 1& [6/4/2012 1 59 48 PM] Hinduism and Christianity Chad Bauman, Arun Jones, Brian Pennington, Joseph Prabhakar Dayam, Michelle Voss Roberts Introduction Christian communities have existed in India since at least the 4th century CE, the likely result of relatively well-established trade connections between India and the Near East in the early centuries of the Common Era. While Christians maintained a lively and well-documented existence in the centuries after that, particularly in southern India, the size of the Christian population, as well as its geographical spread, began to increase dramatically after the arrival of European traders and missionaries in the late 15th century. European contact with India through trade and then, later, colonization led to greater European interest in Indian cultures and religions. While for some that interest was scholarly and dispassionate, for others it grew out of the evangelical impulse, that is, the desire to promote Christianity and “convert the heathen.” That said, some of the most useful ethnographic data and analyses on Indian culture and religion in this era of Indo-European interaction comes from missionary figures, many of whom took at least a quasi-scholarly interest in the people with whom they interacted, most of whom documented religio-cultural beliefs, practices, and events that passed away, or were significantly altered, in the centuries that followed. The relationship between Christian missionaries and the study of India/Indian Christianity is therefore important to keep in mind because of the way it has complicated (and to some degree still does) academic work on the topic. In the bibliography that follows, readers will discover resources about Indian Christianity and its relationship to Indian culture and religion written both from an assumed scholarly distance and from a more committed stance (e.g., by foreign missionaries and/or Indian Christians writing self-consciously as Christians, or by Hindus writing appreciatively of or critically against Christianity). Nevertheless, while the resources listed here emerge from a range of disciplines—history, ethnography, sociology, cultural studies, missiology, and theology—one theme that pervades them all is how India’s Christians have interacted (or should interact) with Hinduism and India’s other religious and cultural traditions. Journals While many journals occasionally include articles of relevance to this topic, three do so consistently, and with consistently high quality. Two of them, Religion and Society and Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection, are edited in India and publish work primarily (though not exclusively) from Indian scholars. Both of these journals also emphasize articles from an explicitly Christian point of view. The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is published at Notre Dame University, and is the youngest journal of the three. It features articles by scholars from around the world, working from a variety of academic and religious perspectives. Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » Supported by the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies, the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies publishes contributions from many of the most respected scholars in the field, especially from those located in India and North America. Back issues are available online. A helpful index of previously published articles appears in Volume 22 (2009), pp. 69–88. Religion and Society. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » Established in 1954 by the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society in Bangalore as the Bulletin of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, Religion and Society continues to publish multiple issues a year. Though somewhat hard to come by outside of India, the pages of Religion and Society feature articles by prominent Indian and Western scholars working primarily from an openly Christian perspective. Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » Founded in 1938 as The Clergy Monthly, and assuming the current title in 1975, this high-profile Indian journal features articles on Christian theological, ethical, and social concerns, and on interreligious dialogue. The journal is produced by Vidyajyoti College of Theology, a premier Jesuit seminary in Delhi. Indian Christian Histories, General There are several factors that make it very difficult to write a history of Christianity in India. The first is the long time span: at least sixteen centuries and quite possibly more. The second is the spectrum of Christian traditions—everything from Syrian Orthodoxy to Pentecostalism—that have found a home on the subcontinent. The third is the vast expanse and geographical variability of the Indian subcontinent to which Christian communities have adapted in various ways. The fourth is the great ethnic and cultural variety of Indian Christian communities. The fifth is the multinational nature of the church in India, beginning with its links to the church in Persia. Finally, we must emphasize the extremely uneven nature of the historical evidence for Christianity in India. For almost three- quarters of the long history of the faith in India, the historian is forced to rely on oral tradition; on scanty physical evidence such as art, architecture, and inscriptions; and on fragmentary documentary evidence produced by foreigners visiting India. The written evidence regarding Christianity in India becomes rich and plentiful from about 1500 onward, but here most of the evidence is produced by foreigners, notably European ecclesiastical officials and missionaries. Find this resource: Find this resource: Find this resource: While such writings are certainly useful, the absence of Indian voices provides the historian with a significantly truncated and often prejudiced view of the situation of the Indian Christian communities. Despite these immense difficulties, several authors have written, and continue to write, general histories of Christianity in India. One of the most important current projects is that of the Church History Association of India, which is slowly producing a multivolume history that is ecumenical in scope and authorship, and views this history as “an integral part of the socio-cultural history of the Indian people rather than as separate from it” (Mundadan 1984, p. vii). Mundadan 1984, Thekkedath 1982, and Hambye 1997 are part of that series. Still, it is difficult for these authors to trace the interactions between Christians and their neighbors of other faiths, since so much of the documentary evidence pertains to the internal workings of the Christian communities. Other histories take various approaches. Firth 1976 is aimed toward a Christian audience, while Fernando and Gispert-Sauch 2004 is aimed toward Indians of other faiths. The two-volume set of Neill 1984 and Neill 1985 employs the lens of Christian mission until 1857, and Frykenberg 2009 attempts to cover all of the major Indian Christian traditions in depth. Fernando, Leonard, and G. Gispert-Sauch. Christianity in India: Two Thousand Years of Faith. New Delhi: Viking, 2004. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » The authors, both Roman Catholics, aim to describe Indian Christianity to Indians who do not know much about the faith. They therefore discuss Christian worship, the Bible, and the figure of Jesus particularly in the Indian context before moving to history, and end with a sociological description of Indian Christians. Firth, Cyril Bruce. An Introduction to Indian Church History. 3d ed. New Delhi: ISPCK, 1976. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » First published in 1961, the third edition (which is the last revision) has additional material on Indian church union and Christianity in the Northeast. While dated in its approach, the book is still highly popular in Indian theological institutions because it is both brief and comprehensive. Frykenberg, Robert Eric. Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » A recent one-volume history of Christianity in India by a distinguished and prolific historian. Its great strength lies in the coverage of South Indian Christianity until the mid-19th century. After the 18th century, history is approached topically rather than chronologically. Hambye, E. R. History of Christianity in India. Vol. 3, The Eighteenth Century. Bangalore, India: Church History Association of India, 1997. Save Citation » Export Citation » E-mail Citation » As in the previous volumes of the series, the history of Christianity is related region by region. Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and various Protestant traditions are treated individually. There is a great deal of fresh research here based on primary materials, along with welcome chapters uploads/Litterature/ christianity-and-hinduism-an-annotated-b.pdf