Univerzita PardubiceFakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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English

Publikace detail

The curious case of Christianity in India... Where “dogs and trees have the Holy Spirit”

Autoři: Joss Tess

Rok: 2014

Druh publikace: ostatní - konference, koncert

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	The curious case of Christianity in India... Where “dogs and trees have the Holy Spirit”	Religions: fields of research, method and perspectives. This paper explores what has become of the nature of Semitic religions that found homes in Asia. The group in focus is the Syrian and Catholic Christian communities of India that have coexisted with several other communities for many centuries. It shows the kind of work that has been done to study the field so far and how the western framework applied has not produced any productive understanding of the community. The data collected from recent fieldwork portrays a never before seen picture of Christianity. The kind of Christianity where it seems that theology, doctrine and the scriptures lose all their theological meaning and get distorted and seamlessly integrated into Indian philosophy. This can be newly understood if one traces how this community has survived centuries of near alienation from the Christian world, how it reacted to the invasion by Catholicism in the beginning of the Indian colonial era, what caused the conflict between the Syrian and Catholic Church, the interaction with the Protestant churches brought about by the British in the later centuries and the changes it underwent in the process. This research is set within the research programme of Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara, who challenges the notion that religion is a cultural universal and demonstrates that the phenomenon of religion is non-existent in Asia. Through this new framework it comes to light that the supposed “Indianness” of Indian Christianity is not the characteristics of just the Syrian Christians.	Indian christianity, comparison, eastern christianity