EPILOGUE: Currents of convergence—Religious change in Asian contexts

The framework emphasised in this special issue is convergence, a theoretical lens that challenges the dichotomous thinking embedded in the paradigms of rupture and repair. Across the case studies presented, from tantric Śaivism in medieval Kashmir to religious meme culture in the age of digital media, convergence emerges as a helpful framework for considering religious change. As mentioned in Kendall Marchman's introduction to this special issue, the convergence framework recognises that religious change is ‘rarely unilateral but is the result of many different actors and processes colliding and aligning in ways that produce marked differences’. The articles in this issue, each in its own way, powerfully illustrate this process. Taken together, they show portraits of how religions change, not by rupture alone, nor by repair alone, but through crosscurrents of influence and adaptation. This experience adds a new framework to our analytical repertoire and affirms the value of convergence as a generative approach to studying religious change.

To set the intellectual stage, Kendall Marchman's introduction challenges the dominance of rupture–repair models in the study of religious change, particularly within anthropological studies of Christianity. While acknowledging their utility, especially in cases where religious change appears traumatic or dramatic, Marchman critiques their limitations, including an overemphasis on singular events or specific actors. In contrast, convergence foregrounds the multiplicity of agents, temporal layers, and processes that shape transformation. Drawing on Henry Jenkins' notion of convergence culture, also used by Jonathan Johnson in his article, Marchman shows how religious change, like media change, emerges from the interplay of producers and consumers, texts and practices, doctrines and experiences. Religion is not simply shaped from above; instead, individuals co-create it in spaces of interaction and reception.

Gavin Flood's article on tantric religion and social change in medieval Kashmir provides a compelling case study of convergence at work. Flood resists characterisations of tantra as either radical rupture or esoteric outlier, instead presenting it as a product of layered innovation. Drawing on Alexis Sanderson's idea of the ‘Śaiva Age’ and world-systems theory, Flood shows how tantric texts and rituals emerged from socially marginal groups but were rapidly adopted by political elites seeking new forms of sacred authority.

Kendall Marchman's article extends the convergence framework into medieval Chinese Buddhism, where he explores how changes in eschatology, practice, and belief coalesced in the development of Pure Land Buddhism. Marchman identifies four key areas of convergence: belief in Sukhāvatī as a rebirth destination, the sense of decline in the Dharma, the practice of nianfo, and the anxiety surrounding death. These currents meet to generate an ‘ambient anxiety’ that shaped the lived experience of Pure Land practitioners. Through figures like Daochuo, Shandao, and Fazhao, Marchman shows how new theological concerns converge with socio-political realities and ritual needs. His analysis of deathbed practices and mofa rhetoric illustrates how convergence produces not only doctrinal shifts but deep emotional and existential realignments. Pure Land practice was not just a doctrinal innovation; it was a therapeutic response to the fear of spiritual failure.

Wai-Chung Ho's article shifts the focus to modern Thailand and the incorporation of rap music as a religious expression and outreach tool. Drawing on Bourdieu's theories of capital, Ho traces how spiritual and cultural capital converge in new expressions of faith. This is convergence in motion, where youth culture, globalisation, and religious tradition intersect in innovative musical forms. Ho's exploration of Thai Buddhist rap challenges simplistic binaries between the sacred and the secular. Instead, she shows how traditional religious values are re-articulated in new aesthetic registers. Music becomes a form of convergence where generational identity, religious authority, and digital media merge.

Jonathan Johnson's contribution brings the conversation into the digital age by exploring Christian memes in an Asian context as sites of convergence. Juxtaposing early 20th century Chinese Christian posters with contemporary internet memes, Johnson demonstrates how religious meaning is mediated and remade through visual culture. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's analysis of mechanical reproduction, he reveals how memes destabilise yet revitalise religious imagery. Memes, Johnson argues, sit at the nexus of tradition and innovation, satire and sincerity. They are vehicles for theological creativity and critique, often engaging new audiences while reworking familiar symbols. His call for aesthetic and reception-focused analysis opens new methodological horizons for studying religion in digital contexts.

Taken together, these articles reveal three key implications about the convergence framework. First, convergence acknowledges that religious change is rarely driven by a single figure, event, or institution. Instead, it emerges from the interaction of multiple agents, texts, practitioners, political actors, ritual specialists, and technologies, all of which shape, and are shaped by, the traditions and contexts they inhabit. Second, convergence offers an alternative to rupture and repair by emphasising how religious forms often change through gradual, cumulative layering. Even when a particular text or practice appears novel, it is often the product of long-term accretions, reinterpretations, and forgotten precedents. Third, it recognises that change is inevitable, multidirectional, and often messy.

In sum, the articles in this issue invite scholars to embrace convergence as a framework for making sense of religious change. To converge is to come together, but not necessarily to unite. It is to meet, to touch, to cross paths in a dynamic interplay of difference and affinity. The case studies presented in this issue show that religious traditions are not static containers of doctrine but living, flowing assemblages, composed of ritual and text, media and memory, authority and improvisation. Convergence names the process by which these elements coalesce, mutate, and renew. If rupture tells us when things break, and repair tells us how they are mended, then convergence tells us how religions live: in the tangled spaces of encounter, translation, and reinvention. It tells us that to study religion is to study movement, not always visible or dramatic, but always happening. Through convergence, we see that change is not an anomaly in religious life, it is its condition. Ultimately by adding the convergence framework, we hope that scholars find another way to navigate, interpret, and honour the complex currents of religious change.