Welcome to Asian Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies (ACCS).
The Centre is located at Panayur on the shore of the Bay of Bengal, by the side of East Coast Road (ECR) leading to Pondicherry; it is 20 km away from the centre of Chennai city as well as the Airport. The Centre started functioning in full swing with its academic programmes from 20th November 2008.
It is not a teaching or training Centre, rather a Centre for thinking together on issues of public sphere and critical questions in these challenging times which impact on the life of the people. It takes up for reflection issues of culture, ethics, education, art and literature, and so on. The centre intends to promote the mission of public intellectuals.
It wants to serve the Church precisely by taking up the questions and issues of our times in the spirit of Vatican II document on “Church in the Modern World”. The centre is open-ended and broaches a wide variety of issues, as the programmes organised by it testifies (see the list below).
Some Landmark Achievements of ACCS
- ACCS is where The Oxford Handbook of Asian Christianity (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) was prepared during an intense period of four years with the collaboration of 40 scholars across the globe.
- The International Theological Journal Concilium published in six European language was prepared and edited at ACCS during eleven long years with the collaboration of numerous outstanding scholars across the world. This is perhaps the most read Christian theological journal in the world. The journal won the “Herbert Haag Foundation” award from Luzern, Switzerland.
- It is at ACCS that the document “Alternative Education Policy, proposed by The Tamil Nadu Bishop’s Council (TNBC)” was prepared in 2017 in response to the draft document on National Education Policy.
- ACCS took initiative to launch the International Journal of Asian Christianity, an outstanding peer reviewed journal and indexed in SCOPUS and published by the renowned academic publisher BRILL, Leiden, The Netherlands. In editing this journal, ACCS is in touch with scholars in more than sixty universities across the world who serve on its editorial board and a large number of scholars as contributors of research articles and as book reviewers. The journal was officially launched at the American Academy of Religion, Boston in 2017.
- Research Methodology workshops conducted regularly for M.Phil, and Ph.D. students in arts and humanities. Over 300 research students have benefitted from the workshops.