Because community service and social justice work often provide a foundation for dialogue, the site features a section on the “Shared Values and Visions of Society” between Judaism and Islam, outlining mutual interests of these communities in environmental preservation, immigration reform, and other issues.
Those at the forefront of dialogue work can use the resources found at CMJE's heritage section to enhance the educational component of their programming , to provide follow-up fodder for participants, or simply to answer a lingering question.
The Center for Muslim/Jewish Engagement looks forward to continually growing Heritage as a resource. See what’s posted so far at www.usc.edu/cmje/heritage/.
]]>But all of this raises an interesting question for religious organizations to consider in terms of how they conceive of their current and future mission, namely, how big do they need to be? After all, there is no such thing as a religious organization being “too big to fail,” so how big is big enough? We have previously written of smaller, “innovative” churches that from their founding have organized around what they call an “organic” model of church. By this they mean that they want their churches to have a smaller scale and not try to have a program for every conceivable niche market, instead seeking to meet the needs of their congregants and the surrounding communities. But they also mean that they see their organizations as having a natural life span—birth, life, and yes, death. And maybe that’s what the economic downturn can teach religious leaders. Not every organization can or should be forever, and maybe smaller is better, particularly in a time of scarce resources. Perhaps the new economic realities, rather than being a threat, can encourage new thinking about how people create and organize as religious communities, and that maybe they should include a possible expiration or termination date in their planning.
Prof. Flory also posts his writing at Flory's Story.
]]>We are grateful to the USC ITS Web Services team, especially Ian Hunter, Star Rosencrans, and Tim Wright. They provided outstanding service, project management, planning, and design. We also appreciate the work of Brie Loskota, Tim Sato, and all of the CRCC staff, fellows, and associates who have contributed to the new site.
Please give us your feedback and visit often.
]]>It turns out that teens of different races/ethnicities experience and understand religion and its demands—assuming they think it has any real claim on their lives—in significantly different ways. For example, on issues of religious practice, such as prayer and scripture reading, African American teens tend not only to pray and read more than teens of other race/ethnicities, but the content of their practice is more likely to include an other-directed orientation than teens of other race/ethnicities. Latino teens are the most similar to African American teens in their religious concern for others, although for them, this is understood primarily as a support for their families. Asian teens in contrast, are the most pragmatic in their approach to religious belief and practice, in general employing a “pick and choose” approach, with the intention to please their parents by their choices. White teens are by far the most individualistic and self-oriented in their beliefs and practice. Religion for white teens generally is about them getting something they need, or to make themselves feel better about themselves at particular points in their lives. Prayer, for white teens, is not unlike that pull-cord, seen in old black-and-white movies, that the rich socialite tugs to summon the butler to do her bidding.
So what’s the punch-line? Race matters. Even in things religious.
(Richard Flory also blogs at http://richardflory.blogspot.com.)
]]>I first became aware of these sorts of developments within Christian churches and para-church organizations a few years ago while doing research for our book, Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (2008, Rutgers University Press). We called this expression of Christianity "Appropriators" because they are so good at reading the larger culture and then appropriating the music, sports, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc., and then creating programs and products that look almost identical to that found in popular culture, albeit with a nice Christian gloss. Here's some of what we wrote about Appropriators:
“[Appropriator] programs, music, bookstores, cafes, clothing, and the experiences they produce mirror what is available outside of Christian circles, and despite the Christian content, it all ends up pretty much like everything else in American popular culture. As a result, it becomes both cool and relatively unobtrusive to be a Christian. In this, Appropriators have created a form of consumer Christianity where one can wear their identity through a T-shirt, bumper sticker, or tattoo, have coffee at their church cafe, and have what amounts to Christian vacations, all without really giving up any part of an American middle-class consumer lifestyle.”
Lately some of the groups that we framed as Appropriators have been working on their own designation as “Innovative.” Maybe just another move to appropriate something going on in the larger culture!
But hey, read the article, then read our book and let me know what you think.
]]>Tim Sato recently interviewed Janet Hoskins, professor of anthropology, a member of CRCC’s Academic Advisory Council. She is author/editor of five books, including Fragments from Forests and Libraries (2001), Anthropology as a Search for the Self (1999), and The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (1994). With Macarena Gomez Barris, Prof. Hoskins will convene a CRCC seminar on “Transnational Charisma and Traveling Spirits: How Religion Moves across a Global Landscape” during the 2009-2010 academic year. She is currently engaged in a National Science Foundation project, “Ethnic Resilience and Indigenous Religion: Vietnamese Immigrant Congregations in California.”
Q: Would you please describe your project on Vietnamese indigenous religions?
JH: There are three indigenous religions that are the target of our project, Caodaism, Hoa Hao Buddhism, and Dao Mau. Caodaism, a new religion that was formed when Vietnam was part of French Indochina, is often interpreted as a response to the dislocations of the colonial period. It is a religion that uses the philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, but includes within its pantheon, Jesus, Moses, and Mohammad. Caodaists in the colonial period created a new way of being cosmopolitan, but also being Vietnamese. They were influenced by the writings of Victor Hugo, and Descartes, and Rousseau, but at the same time were worshipping their ancestors and felt linked to a very Vietnamese background. The result is a religion that has some of the external organizational forms of the Catholic Church. It has large elaborate churches that look rather like a gothic church in France except they are much more colorful and they are filled with dragons, lotus flowers, and images of snakes crawling around the throne. There’s a very strong Asian imagery within an external shell that is apparently European and the religious belief is similar to the architecture. We have also been looking at Hoa Hao Buddhism, an ascetic form of Buddhism. In its places of worship, there are no images of the Buddha. Instead, people pray to a piece of brown silk that hangs on a very simple altar. They don’t use the traditional Buddhist sutras, but depend on a series of teachings given in verse by a prophet, Huynh Phu So, who emerged in the 1930s in southwestern Vietnam. The Hoa Hao Buddhists have a simple laymen organized religion. In fact, they don’t have any monks. It’s an approachable Vietnamese kind of Buddhism that differs from the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, [which is] more focused on an intellectual elite.
Q: Would you please describe Dao Mau and some of its rituals?
JH: Dao Mau, which means literally, “The Way of the Mother Goddesses” is a religion whose rituals take the form of spirit possession ceremonies where people are possessed by a sequence of different spirits and they dance, sometimes speak, distribute gifts, and offer advice. Sometimes they will perform traditional healing with traditional oils. These rituals are in some ways shamanic. The participants say that when they put on the red veil, which they do at the beginning of every ceremony, they release control over their bodies and allow a spirit to come into them. They refer to themselves as the seats for the spirit. They are conscious of being the host to another spirit so they have memory of the event and yet they feel that their bodies move, in essence, without their conscious control. At most of the ceremonies they go through a dozen to two dozen different spirits. The ceremonies will last anywhere from two to eight hours. You’ll see men dancing as very coquettish, feminine princesses and handing out flowers, or scarves, or jewelry. You’ll see women being very fierce generals wielding weapons. After these generals, there is a series of ladies, princesses, and the practice ends with the dance of a couple of child spirits. So this is a performance of different options for your identity, sometimes they’re gendered options, sometimes they are about age, sometimes they are simply reflecting experiences, perhaps of anger or of frustration that people might have.
Q: Can you describe the transnational aspect of your research?
JH: We are interested in the transnational connections that are forged by these religions and the fact that each of these religions began as something specific to the Vietnamese people and now it has a broader global reach. We are looking, in a sense, at the early stages of this expansion. For many other religions we don’t have access to that anymore. Buddhism is also a faith born in India, now practiced primarily in Southeast Asia, but we don’t have much access to its early stages. Here we get to see how spirits travel, what travels with them, how people carry important beliefs inside their bodies, even over a period of 10, 20 or 30 years away from the homeland.
Q: As a summary for the generally interested person, why is this research important?
JH: The armchair anthropologists of the late 19th century believed that as we came into the 20th century we would see the dissolution of religion— that it would simply vanish. We would enter into a rational scientific age and this would no longer be a necessary element of human culture. I think that almost everyone would agree that hasn’t happened. What that tells us is that there are great mysteries that we cannot completely solve with scientific methods and that we need to have sensitivity to the different cultural solutions to these mysteries that people have found in different places. I do believe the anthropological adage that you know yourself better if you look deeply into someone else’s life. I think we Americans, already an extremely diverse group, can learn a lot by paying attention to the different cultures that are in fact part of our own culture now. I also think that religion has shown itself to be both supremely traditional and supremely modern. It’s had a new relevance in the changing circumstances of the 21st century and we need to pay attention to that.
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