Negotiating Christian Cultural Heritage

This article shows how Christmas in schools and public service media for children (PSM) involves negotiation and renewal of Christian cultural heritage. Across the studied cases from Norway and Denmark, we find that the institutions involved seek to realize community. However, community is approached differently in different settings. It is either understood restoratively as a process in which children, including immigrant children, become part of an existing societal community, or constructively as establishing an inclusive community across cultural and religious divides. A major finding is that activities associated with Christianity such as school services are framed in a language of ‘museumification’ and not as part of a living religious practice with the capacity to change and transform. Whereas Islam is positioned as a ‘religious other’, Christianity understood as culture facilitates creative heritage making, establishing community across religious divides. Contrary to political rhetoric, Christian cultural heritage in schools and PSM is by and large not dominated by a safeguarding nationalistic discourse. Rather, traditions and activities related to Christianity are negotiated and appropriated for the benefit of an inclusive community. A premise for making this succeed in schools and PSM is to negotiate Christian cultural heritage as culture, not as religion.

(Dis)Enchanted Ufology

This article examines how adherents within the self-styled scientific side of the UFO subculture implicitly challenge the assumed dichotomy between a rationalized disenchanted modern scientific worldview, and a non-rational religious other. After providing background on the origin of the UFO subculture, ufology, and more explicitly religious forms of ufology, the article turns to the largest scientific ufological organization, MUFON, and the way in which participants within that organization engage and delineate social boundaries between religion, science, secularism, and spirituality. I argue that an enchanted ufology lurks just under the surface of this secular, scientific, rational disenchantment.

ASPEK HUKUM WASIAT WAJIBAH UNTUK AHLI WARIS ANAK KANDUNG YANG BERBEDA AGAMA DALAM PUTUSAN MAHKAMAH AGUNG NOMOR 51 K/AG/1999

The barrier to inheritance or mawani 'al-irth is a barrier to the implementation of inheritance between the heir and his heirs. One of the barriers to the implementation of war is religious differences. Religious differences are one of the barriers that can cause a person to not be able to receive inheritance from someone who has died. The existence of these religious differences becomes a barrier to inheritance which has been explained based on a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad SAW: "It is not right for a Muslim to respect an infidel, nor do an infidel respect a Muslim" (HR Bukhari & Muslim). Research Methods in this scientific papers using normative juridical research methods and using data collection techniques carried out using descriptive analysis techniques, with secondary data sources, which include primary legal materials such as laws and regulations relating to the rights of children and wives in divorce cases, sued unseen husbands, as well as secondary legal materials such as books, journals, articles, and other legal doctrines. From the results of the research that has been done, it can be concluded that the position of non-Muslim children on the inheritance of heirs who are Muslim is not as heirs because Islamic Inheritance Law does not recognize the existence of heirs to people of different religions (nonMuslims).However, according to the Panel of Judges and, according to Islamic inheritance law, heirs who are not Muslim, cannot be heirs, but because Islamic inheritance law in Indonesia contains an egalitarian principle, relatives who are religious other than Islam who have blood relations with the heirs can get the share of inheritance by using a mandatory will without exceeding the share of heirs who are equal to it, this is in accordance with the Decision of the Supreme Court.

Higher Education, Exclusion, and Belonging

Generations of migrants from Asia since the 1800s have endured challenges in locating their place and belonging in Australia due to systemic racism and discrimination against the cultural and religious ‘other’. These persistent issues have intensified during the pandemic, especially towards Chinese communities, including international students. This paper investigates the impact of the pandemic on Chinese, Indian and Russian international students in Australia. It reveals how, throughout the first year of the pandemic, international student, ethnic and religious community organizations implemented multiple and overlapping coping strategies to assist international students in Australia, who had been left vulnerable by a lack of government support and escalating geopolitical tensions in the Asia-Pacific region. By highlighting the religious dimensions of these strategies of connectedness and belonging, it contributes new insights in an under-explored aspect in studies on international students in Australia, pointing the way for further investigation.

“What Is Truth?” Negotiating Christian Convert Asylum Seekers’ Credibility

The arrival of more than five million refugees in Europe since 2015 has led to increasing investigations into Europe’s management of multiculturalism and religious pluralism. Studies to date have chiefly focused on the integration of the cultural and religious “other,” but we take a different approach by analyzing asylum proceedings in Germany, based on conversions from Islam to Christianity. Negotiations of credibility of newly converted Christian asylum seekers help to show how European legal authorities conceive of their own historically Christian identity and their expectations of newcomers. We show how these negotiations are influenced by the power dynamics in the courts, understandings of cultural and religious contexts, and assumptions about conversion and Christianity. Our interdisciplinary approach provides insights into how European legal authorities navigate the challenge of cultural and religious others to Europe’s cultural cohesion, “values,” and secularism.

People are obsessed with religion: The definitional dissonance of evangelical encounters in Myanmar

This article responds to recent calls to consider how religion is defined and deployed in and about Myanmar. Discussing local Pentecostal efforts to evangelise to Buddhists in contemporary Yangon, it presents the encounter with the religious other as one ground from which definitions of religion might emerge. I show that, by taking up new opportunities to share the gospel, believers entered into a long conversation between Christianity and Buddhism dating back to the colonial period. Tracing the different definitions of religion that this conversation generates, and attuning to the dissonances between them, might offer alternate ways for approaching what gets termed the religious and the secular in the study of Myanmar.