ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the major features of Raj's construction of grassroots dialogue as an alternative to and critique of elite, clerical strategies of Christian inculturation. It redescribes the practice of contemporary practice of comparative theology by analogy to, first, the subtle but persistent demarcation of identities in South Asian rituals forms, and second, the practice of sentence collection in the medieval European university. Both examples suggest the mutual implication of the processes of mediating boundaries and bringing them to light. The chapter offers a brief reflection on the pedagogical consequences of strategically denaturalizing the bounded identities that remain part and parcel of the comparative theological project. The task of the comparative theologian, using any or all of postmodern criticism, contemplative pedagogy, is to bring religious difference to light through a disciplined, properly academic practice of mediation, to mark religious boundaries by crossing them in a designedly artificial, scholastic way.
