Agama dan Kebangsaan: Pluralitas, Budaya dan Ruang Virtual

Artikel Pengabdian Kepada Masyarakat ini menggali relasi antara agama dan gereja dengan nasionalisme dalam konteks budaya, pluralitas dan realitas virtual. Kekristenan di Indonesia perlu menggunakan teks politik dan budaya dengan memerhatikan secara serius konteks pluralitas dan cyber untuk mengembangkan konsep teologi lokal yang didasarkan pada dokumen-dokumen politik Indonesia. Berbasis pada teori civil sphere dan virtual space artikel ini mengunakan observasi, penelitian lapangan dan dokumen untuk mengembangkan teologi yang mengarahkan kepada relasi mutual dengan agama-agama lain dan sesama warga bangsa. Memanfaatkan Zoom dan media online kegiatan PkM, menggunakan seminar online, yang dilakukan dalam kerjasama dengan Lakpesdam Nahdlaltul Ulama Sulawesi Tenggara, tanggal 30 Juni 2020. Artikel ini berkesimpulan bahwa dalam konteks Indonesia, teologi Indonesia mengandaikan perlunya teks politik dan budaya untuk membangun lokal teologi yang dapat membangun hubungan saling memahami dengan komunitas agama lain.

“This Ain’t My School!” Criminality, Control, and Contradictions in Institutional Responses to School Truancy

While previous research has explored the causes and consequences of school truancy, few studies have considered the meanings of institutional responses. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of a pilot program promoted as a “progressive” form of truancy intervention. Midvale Truancy Center claimed to focus on education, rather than punishment. In practice, however, the crime control tactics used to capture, isolate, and discipline truants often overshadowed the Center’s educational objectives, locating the Center in a liminal space between school and detention facility. The Center’s competing goals—revenue creation, truancy deterrence, and organizational survival—resulted in rehabilitation being pushed aside in favor of normalization and behavioral control. These findings illustrate a recent larger cultural turn toward control and punishment (Garland 2001), and the encroachment of crime control tactics into the civil sphere.

Fantasy is More Believable: The Shadow Civil Sphere in Chinese Online Fiction

Using online fiction in China, this chapter explores whether there is still space to express civil values in a “subjective” civil sphere when that civil sphere lacks institutionally protected legal and communicative spaces. Based on online observations, interviews with online fiction writers and readers, and content analysis of selected popular works of online fiction, I argue that online fiction has created survivalist and revenge-themed fantasy worlds that act as a shadow civil sphere. On the one hand, shadow refers to the dark side of the civil sphere wherein people use extremely anti-civil online fictions to reject the empty moral values promoted by the state. On the other hand, in the shadow people are still expressing moral ideals through cynicism. By creating a fantasy world that’s more nasty and brutish than reality, they are expressing their cynicism regarding the society, the social system and the pretense of the public world. However, their cynicism actually articulates their belief in those civil values.

Utopian Elements in Porphyry’s De abstinentia

In the long passage of De abstinentia, IV, 2–18, Porphyry mentions a series of “groups” (ἔθνη) as examples of abstinence from animal food: the ancient Greeks of the “golden age”, the Lacedaemonians of Lycurgus’ era, the Egyptian priests, the Essenes among the Jews, the Magi among the Persians and the gymnosophists among the Indians. Such an association does not seem at all accidental, since Porphyry refers to a tradition in which these communities have similar habits of life, including the prohibition of eating meat and drinking wine, sexual abstinence, absence of diseases and wars, separation from the civil sphere, devotion to the sacred. All these elements constitute the specific connotation of a human existence that evokes the “time of the origins”, substantially a paradisiac dimension, far from history. It is a deliberate symbolic shift. This brief research will investigate the reasons and the deep meaning of the connection based on utopian life traits.

The foundational economy and the civil sphere

This chapter focuses on the relationship between FE, citizenship, democracy and social justice. We outline the scope of the Foundational Economy and proceed to focus on the importance of Foundational thinking for critiques of capitalist formations that involve financialization and extraction. We then discuss the relationship between the Foundational Economy and human needs and capabilities before developing an argument for a moral basis to the Foundational Economy and how this links to civil society, citizenship and the commons focusing in particular on the potential for developing democratic governance and public action. We conclude by arguing that Foundational thinking provides a means of linking citizenship to attempts to manage the commons and, if social relations and institutional arrangements vary contextually across space and time, this requires innovative solutions based on experimentation at different scales.