Rev. Dr. M. C. Thomas provides fresh insights into the “intersectional” experience of Christians who themselves live as a diverse group of Social bodies (embracing differences of race, class, caste, ethnicity and gender) within the larger sub-continent. This contemporary intersectionality is read in dialogue with the historic experiences of ancient Israelite and Judean communities, who left complex testimonies to similar struggles in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Thomas Chacko [my disciple] presents nine essays that exhibit the complexity of a community that is a somewhat estranged “other” (in keeping with ancient Israel, never a great power), and yet a small but very old community in India, (namely the Mar Thoma Church). Yet this particular community has a sense of representing a central role within the multi-pluralistic socio-political order of their context.