Alumni and friends of Regent College in Vancouver, Canada are invited to connect with one another over a light breakfast, and to hear updates on life in the Regent College community. Questions about this fellowship time? Email alumni@regent-college.edu.
Come connect/reconnect with fellow Fuller alumni and Friends of Fuller! Hear from President David Emmanuel Goatley, Interim dean Sabastian Kim and associate dean Kutter Callaway while catching up with colleagues. Registration required.[contact bert@thefullerfoundation.org]
Please join us for a Union Presbyterian Seminary Alumni Breakfast. You are invited to hear what's new at Union while enjoying table fellowship with seminary faculty and friends. Alumni Director Clay Macaulay (D.Min.'85) will be there to welcome you, eager to hear about your ministry and scholarly pursuits. See seminary website for pre-registration at www.upsem.edu
Program Unit Chairs are invited to a breakfast featuring information on upcoming program initiatives and celebrating their contributions to the AAR Annual Meeting.
As the world recovers from the COVID pandemic but new challenges emerge, we recognize that spirituality has been more critical than ever to get us through these difficult times. Fresh data from the Fetzer Institute’s innovative study What Does Spirituality Mean to Us? reminds us that our spiritual lives connect us to our values, each other, and something greater than ourselves. Join Institute staff and research advisors for this insightful session that explores the latest trends in the understanding, practices, and benefits of spirituality and how spiritual resiliency emerged in reaction to the Pandemic. Reflecting on cutting-edge methods such as artificial intelligence and visual sociology, presenters will also share the ways religion and spirituality offer personal, social, and transcendent experiences and connections. Join us for an interactive and experiential session with opportunities to engage in activities and methods used in the study as well as small group discussion and Q&A.
Join the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago Divinity School, along with current faculty members, for a discussion about the School, the application process, and degree programs offered. An opportunity will be presented for participants to ask any questions they might have about the School. Breakfast will be served.
This panel showcases new research on religion in contemporary Southeast Asia. With particular attention to identity formation, these papers explore previously unexamined religious phenomena in mainland, insular, and diaspora communities. The first paper draws on ethnographic research into post-COVID mortuary practices among the Toraja ethnic group in the highlands of South Sulawesi, Indonesia to consider how they are being changed by and changing Christianity. A second paper investigates Buddhist responses to the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and the resultant resistance movements. A third paper questions the formation of Filipino transnational belonging through a study of Couples for Christ (CFC), a Catholic Charismatic organization active in Canada. And the final paper elucidates a constructive queer Christology for political-theological contestations in Indonesia. Together these papers invite a consideration of present patterns of religious concerns and creations in Southeast Asia.
This paper examines Christianity as it is found in the under-represented region of Southeast Asia; specifically, Christianity that is practiced by the Toraja ethnic group situated in the highlands of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and how they have expressed their faith indigenously. This paper will zoom in on the Toraja mortuary practices, which are heavily intertwined with the complexities of identity, traditional beliefs (Aluk to dolo), and ancestral cosmology, and how it plays a central role in understanding Toraja Christianity and what it means to be a Toraja Christian. Utilizing ethnographic research methods and encompassing participant observation, this paper presents a unique case study of a Toraja Christian family’s journey of funeral worship, traditional mortuary ritual, and the relocating of the deceased body post COVID-19 pandemic. This paper seeks to address questions such as: “How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Toraja mortuary rituals?” “How did interaction with Christianity change Toraja mortuary practices, and how did their mortuary practices change Christianity?”
The military coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 provoked massive resistance across the country. This resistance was soon conceptualized as the “Myanmar Spring Revolution”, envisioning a radically new political order in Myanmar. In the context of a deeply religious country, this paper seeks to answer two interrelated research questions. First, it seeks to understand the ways in which leading Buddhist monks have been supportive of the military coup, following what we define as a “Buddhist ideology of Order”. Second, it seeks to analyze the role of Buddhist revolutionary politics, asking what does “revolution” mean from a Buddhist point of view? Can we speak of a “Buddhist Revolution”, and if so, does that entail a radical transformation of Buddhism itself? The paper also raises ethical and methodological issues with regard to doing research on an unfolding “revolutionary situation”, with open-ended futures.
My research focuses on “servant subjectivity” and its role in the formation of a Filipino notion of “good” citizenship that revolves around service and sacrifice. While a few studies have been undertaken on Filipinos in Canada, particularly on the function of religion in migrant assimilation and settlement, such research does not consider how Filipinos’ religious link to their homeland continues to shape their citizenship and belonging in their new country. This oversight is surprising as Catholicism historically occupies an important role in the sociopolitical life in the Philippines, including citizen formation, social engagement, and migration. Addressing this gap, I undertake a case study on Couples for Christ (CFC), a Catholic Charismatic organization to explore how religion and politics link together to form subjects whose acts and dispositions support the moral and/or economic aim of their sending or receiving countries.
The existence of LGBTQ has been politicized, suppressed, and marginalized by the government of the Republic of Indonesia. Although queer people have been parts of Indonesia before the Dutch colonialization, in which gender and sexuality were seen in non-binary ways, people today see that queer people as abnormal and dangerous for the security of the country. In this presentation, I shall elucidate a constructive queer Christology for the political-theological contestations in Indonesia. By offering the Indonesian word lela, a person’s habitus to feel naturally joyful, to translate “queer,” I shall argue for a lela theology, a queer Indonesian theology wherein queerness is the meeting principle and a site of struggle for dignity and equity among the queer amid the rise of religious conservatism in the largest Muslim population in the world. Lela theology is essentially interreligious and queer.
The film adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar premiered in 1973, fifty years ago. In their reflections on JCS, the papers on this panel engage with scholarship in the study of religion and popular culture, as well as with scholarship on religion and film as visual – and aural – culture. Our panel focuses on engagements with the following questions: What does the important moment of intersection between religion and popular culture that JCS represents look like in retrospect? How have those lines shifted, blurred, or re-entrenched since? The film is one version in a constellation of adaptations, but how has the popularity of the film shaped the American imagination of Jesus and the Jesus story? How can talking about JCS and its legacy help us theorize the relationship between religion and popular culture?
Proponents of interfaith reconciliation were less than happy with the screening of Jesus Christ Superstar. The 1960s were years of huge developments in interfaith relations. Most Catholics, Protestants, and members of other faiths too, became more accepting of each other’s religious traditions and more careful when relating to members of other faiths, including Jews.
Many saw JCS as a following in a tradition of medieval passion plays that portrayed Jews as the slayers of Jesus or as the motivating cause behind his death. For some Jewish observers, the film served as a proof that while Christian leaders had changed their theological standings, older accusations against Jews did not disappear in popular culture.
The proposed presentation will analyze the text of the film, its messages, and atmosphere, and point to lack of anti-Semitic agenda. It will also explore and explain Jewish (and at times Christian) objections and responses to the film.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Jesus Christ Superstar, this paper turns to the actor who plays the titular character. While scholars have given attention to the character of Jesus internal to the film, I argue that Neely’s performance and his involvement with the film and stage production after 1973 offers a case study for exploring religion and celebrity in the United States. The popularity of Neely’s performance has made it possible for Neely’s career to be defined by Superstar; as this panel convenes he is leading a 50th anniversary screening tour of the film around the United States. While Neely says in many interviews that Superstar, on stage or screen, is new every time, his continued involvement relies upon the very lack of novelty that he insists upon. Rather than simple novelty, I suggest that Neely’s comments are best understood as a theological and liturgical claim.
In the 50 years since Jesus Christ Superstar made its debut, it has been remounted onstage in at least 11 major productions and re-filmed three times. The initial setting of the 1970’s, combined with a seemingly timeless rock score made JCS easy to reenvision in new eras. This paper will argue that the cultural longevity of JCS is due not solely to the popularity of the 1973 film, but rather its lasting influence can be traced to how the show can be molded to fit various generational contexts. This paper will look at the shifting of cultural references within three film adaptations of JCS: the original 1973 version starring Ted Neely, the 2001 version starring Glenn Carter, and the 2018 version starring John Legend. This paper will pay particular attention to how elements such as the costuming and Temple depictions shift to accommodate new times and places.
The portrait of Pontius Pilate in Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) is an ambivalent one at best, conveyed memorably to viewers in his first extended scene, the singing of “Pilate’s Dream.” Barry Dennen had been cast for both the stage and film productions because he was a seasoned professional who could modulate his voice effectively for the difficult role. Beyond its lyrics, “Pilate’s Dream” conveys by its sound—the half-sung, half-spoken style of recitative—the prefect’s uneasy frame of mind, quite at odds with the histrionics of the trial sequences. The cinematography Jewison employs for “Pilate’s Dream” underscores this sense of vagueness. Unlike the rest of Dennen’s scenes, which take place before a crowd in the unattractive glare of the burning Israeli sun, “Pilate’s Dream” is filmed at the golden hour of dawn—in this first sight of Pilate, we look upon him in an more uncertain light.
