Gotong royong is an important Indonesian value, meaning working together. This kind of working together is also found in Dayak Kenyah Tribe in Indonesia. One form of working together is senguyun. Senguyun is a voluntary work group composed of any number of men and youths who feel that they can effectifely join forces for mutual benefit. This practice has been implemented by the Dayak Kenyah tribe before christianity entered and continues to be carried out to this day. This article aims to reveal the value of senguyun as part of the tribe’s local wisdom, and as a way for Christian education for nurturing the faith of church members. The method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative method. Data collection techniques employed are observation, interviews and document analysis. The result of the study shows that senguyun is a form of local wisdom that is in accordance with bibilical principles and should be regarded as a noble cultural heritage that must continue to be preserved.
Research on preventing maternal and child mortality highlights the importance of promoting midwife and nurse competence and confidence through training and continuous medical education. While training is effective, particularly through the use of the “low-dose, high-frequency” training model, there are barriers to implementing continuous medical education. This case study will present outcomes from a midwifery training conducted in Kenema, Sierra Leone. Outcomes include improvements in knowledge, skills, and confidence, and knowledge cascading through continued “low-dose, high-frequency” (LDHF) training in facilities. This case study will also present implications for strengthening future training, including integrating soft skills and increasing facility-based training opportunities, as well as present qualities necessary for organizational collaborative efforts for health systems strengthening.
Public aspects of medicine, Practical religion. The Christian life
Artificiële intelligentie is overal. Dat was al langer zo, maar met de opkomst van en de publiciteit rondom ChatGPT heeft iedereen er ook een mening over. Dit artikel verkent de reacties op Artificial Intelligence en al de daarbij behorende toepassingen binnen de rooms-katholieke kerk en onder (katholieke) theologen.
Diverse biases contribute to how society perceives survivors of sexual violence and domestic violence, and stereotypes often create obstacles for extending support and care. Intersectionality helps explain how all victims of violence are not treated the same way and the complexities of multiple arenas of oppression and privilege in our society. In particular, victims of sexual violence are too often subject to exploitation and harassment within the justice system when due process of law is emphasized over protection of victims. For Dalit women in Indian society, the very systems and movements that should safeguard them have become instruments of their marginalization. These case studies will examine the way intersectional oppression operates within India’s social and legal systems leading to further oppression of Dalit women. It is imperative that stringent provisions and measures addressing gender-based violence, intersectional violence, sexual abuse, caste, race and class-based oppression and other marginalities faced by women feature as essential elements of all our systems, policies and decisions.
Recenzja książki: Kilian Stumpf, The Acta Pekinensia or Historical Records of the Maillard de Tournon Legation: First transcribed edition and English annotated translation. Vol. I: December 1705 – August 1706. Editors Paul Rule, Claudia von Collani. Rome, Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu; Macau, Macau Ricci Institute, 2015 (Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. Nova Series 9).
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Practical Theology
As awareness grows of global warming and ecological degradation, words such as “climate anxiety”, and “eco-anxiety” enter our vocabularies, describing the impact of climate change on human mental health and spiritual wellbeing. Distress over climate change disproportionately impacts children, who also are more susceptible to the broader health, economic, and social effects brought about by environmental harm. In this paper, I explore children’s vulnerability to climate change and climate anxiety through the lens of ecofeminist practical theology. Ecofeminism brings the liberatory concerns of feminist theologies into engagement with those theologies focused on the life of the planet. Drawing on ecofeminism, practical theology must continue and deepen its own ecological conversion, and practical theologies of childhood must take seriously the work of making an ecological home, oikos, in which children are embedded as a part of the wider ecology that includes the more-than-human world. This requires foregrounding religious education with children toward the inhabitance of the earth in good and just ways. However, these theologies also must address children’s lived realities of increased anxiety over planetary changes that endanger life through practices of spiritual care with children that engage and support them in their distress toward participatory empowerment for change.
Syncretism has remained a persistent issue among the Igbo-speaking Christians of Nigeria. This is observed in the double allegiance of faith among many of them who, interestingly, are devotees of both Christian and African traditional beliefs/systems. Besides the belief in ritualistic charms, many Igbo/Igbo-speaking Christians consult diviners for various reasons, including security and prosperity, causes of illness and death, ways of preserving life, as well as to discern the mind of God about one’s future and destiny. Moreover, traditional oath-taking among other African traditional religious practices is common among many Igbo Christians. This article sets out to critically examine the factors that are responsible for the persistence of religious syncretism among the Igbo Christians. The study adopts a qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method for data analysis. Personal interviews and library resources constitute the primary and secondary sources of data, respectively. The findings reveal that lifethreatening factors such as illness, disease, insecurity, and fear are some of the principal causes of religious syncretism among the Igbo Christians.
Christianity, Practical religion. The Christian life
In this paper, the Gospel According to Mark is investigated in search for its ghosts and phantoms. In particular, Mk. 6 and the scene of Jesus walking on water, as well as the story about the empty tomb of Jesus in Mk. 16, are considered as haunted sites. However, rather than finding straight forward ghost stories, following Greco-Roman standards of late antiquity, we are confronted by a different sort of spectrality. In this study the activity of ancient scribes are explicitly thought of as ghostwriters, and connected to their intense hovering around Jesus' tomb, which I see as the production of numerous alternatives to the most original Markan ending (codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and Mk. 16:1–8.) The ghostwriters' unwillingness of letting Jesus remain among the dead is then theorized from Apuleius' De Deo Socratis and the ancient ghost category "the Larva". Jesus can be treated as a "larval Christ", haunting early Christian writers, which thereby opens up a kind of spectral theology in the Gospel According to Mark. The aforementioned obsession of the ghostwriters with Jesus' death highlights how the nomadic tendency of the Markan Jesus can be seen as having a theological valency, and that Jesus' death is as paradoxical and enigmatic as his life. In the end, Jesus' ghostly activity in the Gospel According to Mark is found in the unwillingness of the larval Christ to be fully present and available for the Markan audience to fixate on as a static identity or clear theological position.
Participation is a term often used in the church. The term is part of the ecclesiastical vocabulary, but is also used outside this context, with a mostly positive connotation and meaning. Participation is described as a right, something that should exist, and as a condition that is, or is not, fulfilled under given circumstances. Often it is a normative aspiration. But what does participation mean? Does one become involved by participating? How is participation expressed in the parishes' fourfold task of worshipping, teaching, carrying out welfare work, and spreading the Gospel in accordance with the church order? The purpose of this article is to examine how participation is reflected in some of the parish instructions of the Church of Sweden. The article argues for the importance of a more clear distinction between being present and being involved. The article also argues that the various aspects that a sense of involvement requires must be clarified. A greater awareness of the complexity of the concept participation can be expected to allow future evaluations of more than quantifiable targets in parish activities.
It is evident that the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its consequent findings, together with the dawn of the new South Africa, has not achieved its goal of a unified ‘rainbow nation’. This is because of the fact that South Africans still face racialism and segregation from most quarters of the community. The racialism and marginalising are not only white and black dichotomies, but the fissures are evident in black-on-black and white-on-white anxieties. The infighting in churches and communities represents other contributing factors. The dream of the ‘rainbow’ society, which is raceless, has smothered the vision of peace and harmony of a reconciled society. This smothering has had a divisive impact on the possibilities immanent in South Africa. Despair, the promotion of hatred and polarisation are common anxieties among most South Africans. The race card is used for ‘one’s’ own greediness and personal aggrandisement and there is a need for a solution. This study seeks to establish the theology of the image of God (imago Dei) in relation to fellowship (koinonia). Then, the study highlights the causes of distress in some denominations, especially those that privilege the name of God and thereby making a comparison between the churches and TRC which was a government initiative in the restoration of peace and fellowship process. From that premise, the article argues that despite the inclusive accommodative TRC sessions, racial intolerance and deep infighting are still rife in South Africa. Then, the study concludes by proposing a mission paradigm that advances fellowship and advocates that all people are made in the image of God, thence they are equal. The article brings forth the political era post-1994 in South Africa and links that to the social setting of churches post-1994. In that way, there is a link between politics and the church and how these have influenced the present in South Africa. The question is: Did the TRC usher in a new era of koinonia and brotherhood from a theology of the image of God? This missiological aspect is linked to socialism and politics.
This contribution provides a conceptual analysis of "reconciliation" as one of the guiding concepts in Christian discourse in South Africa. It is abundantly clear from available literature that reconciliation is understood in very different ways. This is observed from publications as early as the 1960s, a period generally referred to as the "church struggle" against apartheid. Since that time, it is often used to offer theological reflection on social conflict in the country. In this paper, I propose a framework in which one can identify, describe, and assess at least three distinct ways in which the reconciliation concept is understood in theological literature emanating from the South African context. I categorize them as: (1) Justice through reconciliation in Jesus Christ; (2) Justice and reconciliation after liberation; and (3) Reconstruction requires national reconciliation. The famous Christus Victor typology of the three main "types" of atonement developed by Gustaf Aulén is used as a background to these approaches. The purpose of this contribution is to aid continued theological reflection on the basis of a conceptual analysis of creative ways in which the reconciliation concept is used in a Christian context.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE:
The aim of the paper is to go into some questionable matters pertaining to “Bildung” and especially religious “Bildung”, and question their political implications.
THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODOLOGY:
Developments in society, especially oeconomical developments have a great influence to the area of “Bildung” as well as to the area of religious “Bildung”. Current concepts should be analysed. Reflections in philosophy of education and in religious education help to work out the failure of current developments.
THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION:
The paper starts with the question about how the concept of “Bildung” occurs in current discourses. Afterwards alternative models of “Bildung” and religious “Bildung” are discussed. It is then put into questions which intentions and implications prevailing concepts contain, who and what they disregard and how they collaborate towards the reproduction of social injustice and processes of exclusion.
RESEARCH RESULTS:
Religious “Bildung” as a part of general education is effected by societal developments und has to be aware of that. Presuppositions of Religious Education and Didactics of Religion has to scrutinize themselves if and in what way they do possibly promote injustice and which conclusions for future concepts could be drawn.
CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATION AND RECOMMENDATIONS:
“Bildung”, especially religious “Bildung” are challenged by societal developments, e.g. migration, but should not just adapt to political or oeconomical desires. Rather they should not waive for their normative requirements so that they can question for social injustice in the societal developments as well as in their own concepts.
La producción intelectual del Dr. Gonzalo Soto Posada, docente e investigador distinguido en el contexto colombiano e internacional, ha sido un referente importante en el abordaje filosófico y teológico de temáticas relacionadas con la medievalidad. En la revista Cuestiones Teológicas de la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana se evidencia de forma particular un corpus considerable que representa su contribución reflexiva sobre esta cuestión; por eso, a través de una selección de algunos de sus artículos publicados en este medio, se pudo constatar una semblanza intelectual en la que este autor parte de un discurso filosófico para establecer su postura en distintos aspectos de la teología. A través de este artículo se evidencia cómo el profesor Soto, sin dejar de reconocer su formación en filosofía y estableciendo un diálogo permanente entre saberes, se aventura al quehacer teológico haciendo un análisis pertinente de algunas concepciones que en la Edad Media fueron objeto de discusión.
In addition to many other activities, the Apostle Paul was involved in a large-scale fund raising project. Following a charge he once had received in Jerusalem to remember the poor (Gl 2:10), Paul tried to convince the predominantly Gentile Christian churches which he had founded to contribute to a collection for the impoverished Jewish Christians of Jerusalem. For the potential donors it was far from obvious that they should be involved in benefaction for people far away and unable to reciprocate to their would-be �patrons�, to name but one obstacle. Whilst Paul is best known as theologian, missionary and pastor, his collection project also indicates his determination and skills as an early Christian leader. In this quest, Paul combined a broad salvation historical perspective, skilful persuasion and rhetoric, the notions of honour and shame, exemplary transparency and other aspects. This article describes what obstacles Paul had to overcome on the side of the Gentile Christian donors, how he did so and how he proceeded in preparing and organising the actual collection, the transport of the funds to Jerusalem and its presentation in Jerusalem. In closing, the article suggests applications for today�s Christian leaders.<br /><br /><strong>Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications:</strong> The article indicates that already in early Christianity Christian leadership involved the use of several skills and was controversial. Far from being able to simply demand a certain course of action, early Christian leaders such as Paul had to convince others to lead by their own example and had to be involved themselves in what they demanded of others. This challenges some contemporary notions of Christian leadership. Following the portrayal of Paul�s leadership as it emerges from his collection project will lead to more effective Christian leadership.