RELIGIOUS MEMORY: Christianity as a Dangerous Religious Memory (original) (raw)
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Religious Memory in a Changing Society: The Case of India and Papua New Guinea
Changing Societies & Personalities , 2021
The study analyzes the place of religion in the national collective memory and the changes that have taken place in the field of religion in connection with the modernization and emergence of modern nationstates in India and Papua New Guinea (PNG). In the case of PNG, we look at the place of Christianization in the process of modernization, while in the case of India, we analyze the use of Hinduism in the process of forming national identity. Both cases are analyzed with the use of selected cases of material culture in specific localities and they show the ongoing struggle for the incorporation or segregation of original religious tradition into national identity. Both cases are analyzed on the basis of field research. In the case of India, we look at Bharat Mata Mandir in Haridwar, and in the case of Papua New Guinea, the tambaran building in the village of Kambot in East Sepik Province. While Bharat Mata Mandir demonstrates the modernization of tradition and the incorporation of religion into modern (originally secular) nationalism, the decline in tambaran houses is a result of Christianization and the modernization of PNG. The study shows that if there is a connection between religious memory and national memory (or national identity), the religious tradition is maintained or strengthened, whereas when religious memory and national memory are disconnected, religious memory is weakened in a modernizing society.
Religion and Social Communication: Journal of the Asian Research Center for Religion and Social Communication, 2022
A momentous occasion during the 500th anniversary of Christianity in the Philippines (2021-2022) was the opening of the doors of churches around the country for the Jubilee. It featured the country’s pilgrimage sites as dynamic sources of Catholicism. However, the pilgrims faced two challenges: the restrictions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and the appreciation of the Jubilee despite these limitations. This researcher gathered testimonies from people from selected shrines in the Philippines in connection with challenges and perspectives on how shrine programs are developed. This was channeled through interviews in a weekly podcast on Marian devotions by Faith Watch of Areopagus Communications with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Media Office. Here, the researcher created focus group discussions concerning the pastoral situation of the shrines to identify a number of pastoral challenges met by shrines during the pandemic while celebrating the Jubilee. Through these, this paper also classifies efforts for evangelization vis-à-vis the endeavors of the shrines despite the pandemic. It also sees the need for pilgrims to return to the shrines for a concrete pilgrimage experience, to go back to the normal celebration of the Holy Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and to appreciate the shrines close to home. On the part of shrine administrators, the perspectives of shrine management today reveal the need for promoters to expand the influence of shrines outside their locality, to improve the use of social communication, and, to establish charity centers in the shrine for those in need.
Filipino Catholicism: Philippine Studies Special Double Issue (2014)
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (Special Issue: Filipino Catholicism), 2014
PSHEV vol 62 no 3–4 (2014) Table of Contents Jayeel S. Cornelio Guest Editor's Introduction (attached here) ARTICLES David T. Buckley Catholicism’s Democratic Dilemma: Varieties of Public Religion in the Philippines Jose Mario C. Francisco, SJ People of God, People of the Nation: Official Catholic Discourse on Nation and Nationalism Coeli Barry Women Religious and Sociopolitical Change in the Philippines, 1930s–1970s Manuel Victor J. Sapitula Marian Piety and Modernity: The Perpetual Help Devotion as Popular Religion in the Philippines Deirdre de la Cruz The Mass Miracle: Public Religion in the Postwar Philippines Josefina Socorro Flores Tondo Sacred Enchantment, Transnational Lives, and Diasporic Identity: Filipina Domestic Workers at St. John Catholic Cathedral in Kuala Lumpur Jayeel S. Cornelio Popular Religion and the Turn to Everyday Authenticity: Reflections on the Contemporary Study of Philippine Catholicism Julius Bautista and Peter J. Bräunlein Ethnography as an Act of Witnessing: Doing Fieldwork on Passion Rituals in the Philippines Paul-François Tremlett Urban Religious Change at the Neoliberal Frontier: Notes toward a Spatial Analysis of a Contemporary Filipino Vernacular Catholicism RESEARCH NOTES Adrian Hermann The Early Periodicals of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (1903–1904) and the Emergence of a Transregional and Transcontinental Indigenous-Christian Public Sphere Victor L. Badillo, SJ American Jesuit Prisoners of War, 1942–1945 BOOK REVIEWS Grace Liza Y. Concepcion Julius J. Bautista's Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu Isabel Consuelo A. Nazareno Romeo B. Galang Jr.'s A Cultural History of Santo Domingo Arjan P. Aguirre Lukas Kaelin's Strong Family, Weak State: Hegel’s Political Philosophy and the Filipino Family
Psychology International, 2024
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The Anthropology of Christianity Editor: Fennella Cannell
Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2012
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Memories as religion: What can the broken continuity of tradition bring about? − Part two
In postmodern societies the symbolic vacuum, a result of the loss of a unified religious tradition, calls for substitutes in the form of fragmentary and isolated memories. By drawing from the reservoir of those memories in an arbitrary and subjective way, privatised (deinstitutionalised) religion creates a kind of symbolic bricolage. Can such a bricolage become more than a mere ‘counterfeit’ of collective meaning that religion once used to provide? Can religious tradition, based on a broken continuity of memory, still bring about a matrix of the ways of expressing one’s faith? If so, how? This twofold study seeks to explore those and similar questions by means of showing, firstly, in what sense religion can be conceived of as memory which produces collective meanings (Part One) and, secondly, what may happen when individualised and absolutised memories alienate themselves from a continuity of tradition, thus beginning to function as a sort of private religion (Part Two). Being the second part of the study in question, this article aims at exploring the postmodern crisis of religious memory, which includes the pluralisation of the channels of the sacred and the differentiation of a total religious memory into a plurality of specialised circles of memory. Firstly, it examines the three main aspects of the current crisis of continuity at large, namely the affirmation of the autonomous individual, the advance of rationalisation, and the process of institutional differentiation. Secondly, the plurality of the channels of the sacred is discussed in light of religion’s apparently unique way of drawing legitimisation from its reference to tradition. This is followed by two illustrations of the reconstruction of religious memory. In the final section of the article, a theological reflection on possible directions that may be taken in the face of the postmodern crisis of religious memory is offered.
On the Anthropology and Theology of Roman Catholic Rituals in the Philippines
International Journal of Asian Christianity, 2018
The topic of this paper is the dynamics of clerical and public attitudes pertaining to the continued performance of Passion rituals of self-mortification among Roman Catholics in the Philippines. I examine discourses of official clerical disavowal of Passion rituals as well as the seemingly contrasting attitudes of accommodation and tacit encouragement from clerics ‘on the ground’. I argue that the diversity of perspectives on Passion rituals are not contradictions per se, but they are facets of the theological notion of inculturation, which espouses cultural porosity and diversity as elements of spiritual formation. In so doing, I discuss how scholars can come to a better appreciation of the analytical utility of inculturation by pursuing the disciplinary convergence between theology and anthropology. I submit that this anthro-theology does not only involve anthropologists expanding their conceptual range to include theological concepts but also making adjustments to the way we thi...
Honolulu, Hawai'i SOUTHEAST ASIA / PHILIPPINES / CHRISTIANITY / ETHNOGRAPHY "Julius Bautista's The Way of the Cross offers an ethnographically rich and elegantly holistic account of the Philippines' most recognized and sensational of Holy Week rituals. Bautista challenges universalized assumptions about the meaning of imitating Christ's suffering, showing how Filipinos transform ritual pain into positive forms of religious selfhood that are first and foremost embedded in the social. Like the best ethnographies, The Way of the Cross both grounds its analysis in diverse scholarly literatures and draws from vernacular concepts to theorize anew, all in the spirit of comparative and cross-cultural studies. It is a welcome contribution to the anthropology of Christianity, Philippine Studies, and much more. " -DEIRDRE DE LA CRUZ, University of Michigan -PAUL-FRANÇOIS TREMLETT, The Open University Julius Bautista is associate professor at