Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka

Winner, 2024 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, Society for the Anthropology of Religion

Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred n...