Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Has Ecumenism Made Evangelism Irrelevant?

Below is a link to the full-text of Governor-elect Bobby Jindal's 1993 article (see previous post for excerpts in America. The excerpt on America's website doesn't give a full sense of his thought. In the article, Mr. Jindal engages with the history of evangelization in India, its colonial and racist overtones, with Mahatma Gandhi's attitudes towards conversion, and his own understanding of what the relationship is between evangelization (more accurately, "proclamation") and ecumenism (more accurately, inter-religious dialogue).

I dug out the original article in the library here and scanned it to a pdf.

Permalink for the pdf at Google Base.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi.

Have you posted on your conversion before? I so, please point the way. Conversions from Hinduism seem rare. It would be interesting to read about your journey.

Thanks.

masalai said...

AHEM! "Conversions from Hinduism seem rare"?

Possibly you are befuddled by the mind-boggling population figures of South Asia. Virtually everyone in South Asia who is Christian -- and in absolute numbers they are equal to the populations of any number of western countries combined -- is descended from former Hindus, if one discounts anomalies like Bishop Nazir-Ali, whose family are rare converts from Islam, and many of the Nasrani Christians of southwest India whose ancestors were Jews.

(And the latter stoutly insist that that is a base calumny: they are Brahmins, doncha know.)

Fr. Gaurav Shroff said...

Perhaps the commenter above meant "Conversions from Hinduism nowadays seem to be rare?" They're not, especially if one thinks of Dalits, and that whole category of crypto-Christians. See this story, for instance.

Now conversions of upper caste Hindus (Jindal, yours truly) are rarer, I'm sure. But I'm no expert.

And come to think of it, I haven't actually written about my conversion journey on here. I'll remedy that soon enough. Here's one tidbit though.