Karma and Grace

Valentina Napolitano, author of Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church:
Karma and Grace is a tour de force that is bound to become a classic in the emerging field of anthropology and political theology. Mahadev aptly charts the interreligious as an everyday, theopolitical, ritual space; a practice and temporality of mushrooming conversions, nationalistic fears, covenant gifts, the Christian miraculous, and Buddhist messianism, with and beyond the Sri Lankan case.

Justin Thomas McDaniel, author of Wayward Distractions: Ornament, Emotion, Zombies, and the Study of Buddhism in Thailand:
Neena Mahadev articulates subtle ethical and social differences between Buddhist and Christian communities in Sri Lanka in this theoretically sophisticated and meticulously researched study. Despite its historical and ethnographic complexity, her engaging and clear writing style makes this book accessible to advanced scholar and beginning student alike. This book should inspire new comparative religious research in South Asia and beyond.

Webb Keane, author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories:
Crisscrossing a landscape fraught with political and religious conflict, Neena Mahadev's ethnographic skill and generosity yield rare insights. Politically alert, theologically informed, and ethically sensitive, she finds not just familiar hostilities but unexpected convergences. This is an exemplary anthropology for a religiously plural world.

Sudipta Kaviraj, author of The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas:
Neena Mahadev’s book is a fascinating, innovative work of religious anthropology that explores the historical co-formation of modernity and religion in Sri Lanka. This remarkable book is not a conventional study of Buddhist and Christian doctrines as tranquil and sequestered in their own spheres, but as inter-religion. It offers an incisively observant critical study of living Buddhism and Christianity in their contestatory common life in modern Sri Lanka.