Religious Responses Research Articles

Religious Responses to Agricultural Crises: Exploring the Diverse Patterns in Garut, Indonesia

This study explores the critical role of religious patterns in shaping responses to agricultural crises, specifically focusing on the failure of the strawberry harvest in Barudua Village, Garut, West Java. The research employs a qualitative case study approach, examining three distinct sub-villages, each with unique religious practices: exclusive-protective, participatory, and progressive. Through interviews, observations, and thematic analysis, the study reveals how these religious patterns influence the community's resilience and adaptability in the face of crisis. The findings indicate that while exclusive-protective patterns tend to foster passivity, participatory and progressive patterns encourage community engagement, innovation, and social cohesion. These results suggest that integrating religious perspectives into agricultural crisis management can enhance community resilience and offer sustainable solutions. This research provides practical insights for policymakers and community leaders, empowering them to develop culturally sensitive and effective strategies for managing agricultural challenges.

Reflections on Religious, Cultural, and Political Dynamics in Contemporary Studies

This issue of Religious: Jurnal Studi Agama-agama dan Lintas Budaya presents a collection of eight articles that examine the intricate intersections of religion, culture, and politics in Indonesia and beyond. The studies explore a range of topics, including the regulation of religious practices, the politicisation of Islamophobia, the influence of social networks on political behaviour, and the use of digital platforms in preserving cultural values. The issue also delves into local religious responses to agricultural crises and the role of religious identity in fostering social cohesion. Together, these articles contribute to broader discussions on how religious and cultural practices adapt to changing societal contexts, providing valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and academics.

Politicization of international aid: Religious responses to criminalizing female genital mutilation in Sudan

International aid to protect women and girls against religiously sanctioned violence in predominantly Muslim countries is prone to politicization and opposition by conservative religious actors. In Sudan religious leaders had varied responses to an internationally funded campaign to criminalize female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in 2009. In the capital Khartoum, this campaign provoked politicization of aid and counter- mobilization by national conservative religious leaders, while in the eastern town of Gedarif local religious leaders supported criminalization. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2008 to 2018, the study suggests that the power based of religious leaders and their inclusion in, or exclusion from, anti- FGM/C efforts accounted for this differential response. Even when successful, the inclusion of religious leaders as “agents of change” strengthened their power and the role of religion in state and society to levels that may endanger the rights of women and girls.

Revolution or Order? Buddhist Responses to the 2021 Military Coup in Myanmar

The military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021 ended a period of semi-civilian rule (2011–2021), bringing the country once again under direct military rule. Recent research into the religious responses to the coup in its early phases indicate that the mass protests were characterised by global internet culture, inter-religious solidarity, and new visions for a plural and democratic Myanmar. The Buddhist Sangha, it is often claimed, remained silent and mainly supportive of the military. Through a multi-method approach to textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and field work, this article seeks to analyse possible shifts in the ways that Buddhism has contributed to both justification of the military’s action and resistance to it. It is argued that Buddhist support for the coup must be understood not only within an instrumentalist framework, but also through what is referred to in this article as a Buddhist Ideology of Order. In opposition to this, a Buddhist revolutionary movement is identified. It envisions radical societal transformations, including of institutional Buddhism itself. Finally, the data show that pro-revolutionary activities go well beyond established monastic revolutionary networks, indicating broader Sangha engagements in the Myanmar Spring Revolution than has often been assumed.

Exploring the Psychological Implications of Aliens in Religion

The research explores how beliefs in aliens impact human psychology and spirituality, examining connections among aliens, religion, and psychology. Through historical analysis and studying religious responses, it uncovers how alien beliefs shape perspectives on the divine, trigger existential questions, and influence spiritual experiences. By analyzing alien encounters, cosmic quests, and scientific-religious interactions, it highlights the interplay of psychology, beliefs, and cosmic connections. This study provides insights into evolving spirituality and human consciousness in the era of cosmic exploration, deepening understanding of extraterrestrial beliefs on the human psyche and the changing dynamics of spirituality with scientific advancements.

Cows, Communities, and Religious Responses to the 1865–66 British Rinderpest Outbreak*

The devastating outbreak of rinderpest in the British Isles in 1865–66 — the so‐called “cattle plague” — was a significant event in Victorian Britain, one that did much to shape British agriculture, animal disease control, and veterinary medicine. This article argues that the cattle plague also had long‐term significance for the relationship between the Church of England and non‐human animals. During eighteenth‐century rinderpest outbreaks, Anglican clergy had rarely considered the suffering animals. In 1865–66 and afterwards, services in Anglican churches increasingly involved animal themes, issues, and presences. From this time, it became usual for Anglicans to mark moments of severe animal disease with special prayers and services. The crisis also encouraged changes in how Church of England clergy, and ministers in other Christian denominations, spoke about animals in sermons. During the outbreak of rinderpest, there was a sharpened awareness of the extent to which cows and humans had common interests and inhabited a shared community. A heightened appreciation of the bonds and interdependencies between people and farmed animals, the article suggests, had much significance for ecological thinking among nineteenth‐century ministers of religion. The article argues for the distinctive status of cattle in modern Christianity.

The Doctrine of Retribution and Religious Responses to the HIV and AIDS Pandemic

Despite many decades of interfacing with the HIV and AIDS pandemic, religious responses to the plight of the affected and infected still border on the doctrine of retribution. Some religious leaders, particularly from the Christian perspective, are still preaching about the intersection between infection and promiscuity in relation to the HIV and AIDS pandemic. Such a message from the pulpit overlooks people born with HIV infection and partners, more particularly women in long term permanent relationships including marriage, who are unknowingly infected with HIV. Additionally, religious doctrines and religious moral positions embody perceptions that regard the infected as deserving due punishment for their sins. Using desktop research and drawing from the Job narrative, our article seeks to explore the influence of religion on HIV and AIDS. It acknowledges the ambivalent interface between sexuality, gender and HIV and AIDS, taking into account how such interwoven issues affect health seeking behavior of people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA). Espousing the Job narrative as wisdom in revolt, the article acknowledges the complexity of HIV infection and negates the doctrine of retribution. It concludes by proffering an alternative, holistic and sensitive theological response in the face of the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

‘Tout frémit au seul nom de cette maladie’: on strategies for (not) naming the plague, Marseille 1720

The last major plague epidemic in France hit Marseille in 1720 and ultimately took the lives of over 120,000 people across the city and Provence. Yet to what degree did the act of naming the plague impact on its deadly dissemination in the city and beyond? This article seeks to answer that question. In the process, it contends that equivocations in designating the disease as ‘la peste’ revived fraught relations between the cosmopolitan sea port and central government in Versailles and Paris; and, more locally, they exposed how power was unevenly exercised economically, socially, and medically in the city. Such discursive choices cost thousands of lives. Naming the plague had a performative power beyond simple diagnosis; and medical and religious responses in particular to the Marseille epidemic suggest how the name of the plague was deployed (or withheld) to gain control over the narrative of the catastrophe.

Too little, too late? Sociological reflections on religious responses to climate crisis

AbstractAre religious communities better advantaged to mobilize for social change than other institutions and communities and other social spaces? If so, how might they do so? What unique resources can religious communities offer to this effort? Even if there is no set formula to generate climate engagement, are there conditions we can recommend? As one of the few social spaces that might systematically compel collective moral engagement, religious communities and organizations hold the potential to play a key role in societal response. Religious teachings, leaders, and communities have provided individuals the moral conviction to do what is right and the courage to act when one is afraid, and they have offered a microcosm of social networks and social norms that supported social engagement. Not only do religious communities provide a rare space for moral vision and call to action, but in many cases religious communities have in fact mobilized significant social movement responses on other issues at both individual and community levels. In this essay, I apply a theory of socially organized denial to specific questions about climate inertia within religious communities posed in this special issue. I also unpack the question of “too little, too late,” pointing to the benefits of a suspension of doubt and engaging in ethics of responsibility in the unfolding present.

Diffracting young people’s perceptions and agency on adaptation to climate change in Bangladesh: through socioecological, posthuman, and postcolonial positioning

ABSTRACT Bangladesh is extremely vulnerable to climate change and Bangladeshi children and young people witness immense changes taking place in their everyday lives due to the catastrophic impacts of climatehood (climate change and childhood). This paper explores Bangladeshi young people's perceptions and agency towards climatehood, and it employs a child and youth framed methodology where young people carry out visual ethnographic research alongside the university researcher. In this research, four young people (aged from 14 to 16) in urban and rural Bangladesh give voice to their knowledge, beliefs, and practices on adaptation to climatehood through interviews, group discussions, photographs, and drawings. The theoretical underpinnings of this study are socioecology, posthumanism, and postcolonialism and analysis involves a diffractive process where it cuts across, past, present, and future Bangladesh. The narratives, drawings, and photos, provide rich insight into young people's ecological, cultural, educational, and religious responses and activities to climatehood, in Bangladesh.

Battles beneath the Sea: Phoenician Votive Offerings as a Possible Religious Response to Extreme Marine Events in the Gulf of Cadiz

ABSTRACT This article reviews the possible cause for the underwater deposition of a series of Phoenician bronze figurines dated between the eighth and seventh centuries BC and discovered on the southwestern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, around the Islet of Sancti Petri (Cadiz) and on the coast near the city of Huelva. These figurines have been interpreted as votive offerings thrown into the waters near the ports of Cadiz and Huelva by Phoenician seafarers and merchants at the end of their voyages as an expression of gratitude to the god Melqart. Instead, I propose that these objects may have been thrown into the waters as part of religious rituals intended to appease the waters of the ocean following the occurrence of catastrophic marine floods, such as those that apparently affected the seaboard of the Gulf of Cadiz in the middle of the first millennium BC.

The Healing Christ in Pandemics: Then and Now

The context of illness, plagues, and healing in early Christianity and late antiquity was a factor in the growth and expansion of early Christianity. The most prominent early images from early Christian art depict Christ healing. This essay will examine the historical context of plagues and the Christian response to show how the healing Christ affected the security of Christian ascendency. From this study, the essay offers insight into our present pandemic context of COVID-19 and evaluates the religious response.

The Ecumenical Conception of Public Life Praxis: The Case of Zimbabwe

This article discusses the ecumenical conception of public life praxis in postcolonial Zimbabwe as well as the church’s actions to salvage the deteriorating national crisis including the leveling of the political field in the early 2000s. The views of the church are derived from the experiences of the union of ecumenical church organizations formed in 2007 called the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD). The ZHOCD, composes of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference, the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, and the Union for the Development of Apostolic (and Zionist) Churches in Zimbabwe, Africa. The study uses literature, augmented by informal discussions that focused on how the church sought the protection of people’s lives. The study found that the ZHOCD intervened at various critical periods when public life began to degenerate due to state-induced corruption, election violence, and crime. In fact, the church built up specialist organizations to provide required humanitarian services as well as provision of advocacy and protection of human lives by confronting political oppression in Zimbabwe. This forced the ruling party to engage in a palace coup to retain political power in 2017. The article recommends that churches use their power to intervene when accountability institutions have failed because their impartiality to the exercise of political power allows them to perceive public life praxis with a neutral eye. It is further recommended that the ZHOCD needs to engage far and wide groups of Christian organizations of all persuasions if a comprehensive Christian and religious response to a good life can be achieved. The study concluded that it is only the church and other religious organizations that can understand and provide solace to people living in difficult conditions. Keywords: Ecumenism, Public Life, Zimbabwe

Religion and Politics in the context of COVID-19 Narratives: A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach

The end of the year 2019 brought to the world a new and problematic coronavirus which has claimed many lives in various parts of the world. The human race is still perplexed by the viciousness of the novel disease since the worldwide death toll continued to rise. This resulted in the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health threat globally and it announced a raft of mitigatory measures to be undertaken by countries across the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated numerous but conflicting conspiracy theories and religious responses which explain the genesis of the disease. It was against this background that the study was motivated to interrogate and problematize the political and religious conceptualization of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is informed by insights from critical discourse analysis to examine the dialogics and semiotics of power embedded in conspiracy theories and debunking religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main contention in this work is that interrogation of political and religious responses is imperative for a more informed conceptualisation of the coronavirus disease. It has been established that the COVID-19 pandemic discourse, just like other discourses, is never neutral since it is a locus laden with attitudes, values, hegemonic practices and power struggles. Interestingly, there is an audible semantic dissonance from both the political and religious understanding of COVID-19 pandemic. The genesis of coronavirus remains in obscurity and it thus demands further academic enquiry.

“Muslim Environmentalisms and Environmental Ethics: Theory and Practice for Rights and Justice”

This presentation was the Biennial Willem A. Bijlefeld Lecture at Hartford International University in 2023. Muslim religious responses to environmental change highlight the importance of multispecies perspectives, rights of nature and environmental justice. These areas are also the most central to the development of current environmental engagement and advocacy. Muslim moral teachings and praxis of the past and present in just these areas are communal in focus, blend law and ethics around rights‐based notions, and they also scale horizons meaningfully in the area of justice. Additionally, relative autonomy from post‐Christian philosophical tradition allows such Muslim perspectives to re‐ground to ethics away from investments in neoliberal and colonial heritage. Islamic theory and practice addressing concerns at the forefront of environmental studies thereby shape the future of environmental ethics beyond the Anthropocene.

The Merits of ‘Moral Ecumenism’: Secularism, Suspicion and Jewish-Christian Relations in Twentieth-Century Britain

This article uses the history of Jewish-Christian relations in twentieth-century Britain to shed light on the theological and political changes which have shaped inter-faith dialogue, and explore religious responses to the perceived acceleration of secularism. In so doing it questions the centrality of antisemitism and the Holocaust as the key drivers of change in Jewish-Christian relations and highlights the importance of broader shifts in religious belief, and a growing perception of ‘common ground’ between faiths. While Jewish-Christian relations in Britain are now frequently presented as a model of inter-faith cooperation, this article argues that longstanding theological and political challenges have continued to problematise this role-model status.

Religious Movements and the Adoption of New Media: The Internet Used by Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia After Disbanded

This paper aims to examine the religious movement of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) when adopting new media in its movement activities in Indonesia. The research in this paper uses a qualitative method with data collection through online observation of the HTI website, Media Umat www.mediaumat.id. This research found that HTI as a religious movement also adopted the internet in its movement activities just like other religious movements, namely NU and Muhammadiyah. HTI's use of the internet also refutes the argument that the internet is incompatible with religion, which is based more on secularization arguments. The internet in fact provides new opportunities that are positively welcomed by the religious community, which makes it part of its culture according to its needs and interests. This religious response can be seen in HTI's use of the internet which can be categorized into three forms: ideological, polemical and contextual. All these forms of internet use show the positive impact of the internet for religion and the ability of religion to become part of modernity for its interests and needs by adapting the internet as a product of modernity.

PANDEMIC OASIS: POPULAR RELIGIOSITIES AS WOMEN’S LIFE-GIVING COMMUNITAS

This article argues and explores how popular Catholic piety can serve as an agent to create life-giving communitas forwomen in Macao, China. This research uses the narratives of six Catholic women about how their immersion in various public and private devotional practices creates solidarity and communities that are inclusive, empowering, and nurturing during the outbreak of COVID-19. Besides petitioning their long-lasting devotional images such as St Roch and Our Lady of Fatima, women learn and move on to a new model of online and live stream religious response and ritual innovations at the time of coronavirus in Macao. The digitisation of gathering strengthens the global connection among women to the rest of the world, shapinga new form of devotional culture and community ties that are not necessarily institutionalised. Devotional practices act as a spiritual oasis, personally and communally, for women coming together and bring hope, strength, and consolation to this unprecedented time.

Religious responses to existential insecurity: Conflict intensity in the region of birth increases praying among refugees

Do violent conflicts increase religiosity? This study draws on evidence from a large-scale survey among refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria in Germany linked with data on time-varying conflict intensity in refugees' birth regions before the survey interview. The results show that the greater the number of conflict-induced fatalities in the period before the interview, the more often refugees pray. The relationship between conflict and praying holds equally across demographic subgroups. Evidence suggests that both short- and long-term cumulative fatalities in refugees' birth regions affect how often they pray. Additionally, the link between conflict and praying is stronger for refugees with family and relatives still living in their country of origin. Finally, we show that the conflicts that matter are those occurring within the refugees’ specific region of birth rather than in other regions in the country. Implications for existential insecurity theory and cultural evolutionary theory are discussed.

Pentecostal Socio-Political Engagement and the Covid-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has raised important questions regarding the correct balance between religious freedom and public health. These questions have become increasingly difficult to address given the diverse reactions within the church to government-imposed restrictions on religious freedom such as limitations on public gatherings in places of worship. Nowhere has this diversity been more prevalent than within Pentecostalism. This article discusses the religious response to the pandemic in the United States within the Pentecostal Movement as gleaned through three sources: public statements, legal action, and other public activity. I suggest that Pentecostalism’s diversity in this area is consistent with its diversity in other areas, while also signaling the need for the Pentecostal Movement to develop a coherent theology of social-political engagement.