This panel brings together four papers exploring religion and social transformation across Southeast Asian contexts. The first paper “Blue Lives Matter: Ocean, New Materialism, and Ecotheology analyzes how “blue” ecotheologies complement “green” environmental movements globally – and particularly in Southeast Asia – by re-centering the ocean as a sacred site that gives and sustains life. The second paper, “Contesting Religious Violence and the Indigenization of Islam in Indonesia,” examines how leaders of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul “Ulama” address the challenge of extremist ideology by appealing to Islam’s virtues of tolerance and grassroots peacemaking initiatives. The third paper “The Dharma Transmission Trope in Medieval Vietnam: Syncretism and Cultic Appropriation in the Invention of a Buddhist Rainmaking Cult,” complicates narratives of how Vietnamese Buddhism has developed historically through a close examination of medieval textual resources. Finally, “Chinatown as a Hybridized Socio-Religious Space for Chinese Christian Diaspora in Southeast Asia: An Indonesian Case,” analyzes how Christianity affects Chinese diaspora experiences in Southeast Asia.
In theology, "Green" is also often used in discourse on environmental issues, but for Elia Maggang, a blue-ecotheologian from Indonesia, believes that Green Christianity still seems landbased and pays little attention to the context of coastal communities and marine life. To what extent does color play an important role in a term? In this proposal, I argue that Blue Ecotheology can be a framework for ecotheological reflection in the context of Southeast Asia. I believe the blueness is not simply a sea color but a sign of life, and this requires a chain reaction of marine microorganisms, photons, water, chemical reaction, and other possibilities towards restoration of ocean value.
This paper will examine the efforts of the leaders of the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ in addressing violence in the name of Islam. As one of the biggest socio-religious organizations, the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ has spearheaded the acculturalization of Islam to meet the social, political, and cultural demands of Indonesia’s multicultural communities. Abdurrahman Wahid pioneered the indigenization of Islam as the key to making Islamic teachings relevant in contemporary Indonesia and paved the way for Muslims to address critical challenges posed by sectarian and violent forms of Islam. After discussing the emerging violent conflicts in the post-Soeharto regime, the paper will examine how the leaders translate Islamic teachings into the vernacular of Indonesian Muslims. In doing so, it will evaluate how the leaders of the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ address the challenge of violent extremist ideology and actions by mainstreaming Islam’s virtues of tolerance, moderation, peace, grassroots peacemaking initiatives, and interfaith talk and walk.
The Vietnamese Buddhist rainmaking cult of the Four Dharma Buddhas (Tứ Pháp) is said to date to the 3rd century CE. There are two extant versions of the story of how a "savage maiden" (Man Nương/A Man) miraculously gave birth to a baby that was transformed into a rock lodged inside of a tree which would eventually be carved into four Buddha images. In this presentation, I focus on the supposedly earliest version of the story, showing how it is in fact the latest. Moreover, l use other medieval Vietnamese textual sources, namely tales of Buddhist deities and wonder-working monks, to shed light on the invented history of the Four Dharma Buddhas cult, showing how the textual making of this cult fit into two larger, medieval Vietnamese patterns of the Buddhist appropriation of local deity cults, one which I call syncretic appropriation, and the other, subordinate appropriation.