Community empowerment based on religious ecology leading to sustainable agricultural development (A case study of Isy Karima Islamic boarding school in Karanganyar, Central Java)

A community is a collection of human beings in which humanity can be built through understanding and progressive religious awareness of their social structure. The purpose of this research was to describe the community empowerment carried out by Isy Karima Islamic Boarding School based on religious ecology. The research method was qualitative descriptive, and the data were people’s written or spoken words and observed behavior. The research approach was based on sociological and anthropological paradigms. The data analysis begins by arranging the data and organizing it into patterns, categories, and basic units of description. The data were reduced using a coding analysis in the conceptualization form or assigning new names to the informants’ explanations. A coding analysis was used to explain the implementation of Isy Karima Islamic Boarding School in empowering the local community. The results show that the religious ecology developed by the Islamic boarding school was successful in inspiring community members to develop their self-potential. The presence of Islamic boarding, which plays a central role as an agent of change, can provide (economic, social-cultural, psychological, and political) empowerment for the community. This community empowerment is important as a prerequisite for achieving sustainable development.

The Mobility of Protestant Dissent

Chapter 5 examines the establishment of non-conformist Protestantism in Early Modern Ireland, concentrating principally but not exclusively on Ulster Presbyterianism, by far and away the most significant of these groupings in terms of numbers and permanence within the religious ecology of the island. It demonstrates the almost entirely migrant provenance of these non-conformist communities and the transnational dimension of their ministerial provision. It also examines how traditions of mobility relating to Covenant-swearing and interparochial communion helped to sustain a distinctive religious identity and the manner in which the mobility of largely Scottish migrants provided the vector for the spread of Presbyterianism. The Interregnum proved a hinge point in the establishment of other forms of non-conformist Protestantism, but their importance largely diminished in the course of the Restoration, although a distinctive Irish Quaker community managed to spread in the island during this period.

Religious ecology in sustainable development in the world and Vietnam

Religious ecology is a new approach to the research of religions from the angle of ecological issues. The purpose of this approach is to find in the scriptures, theological theories and hermeneutic texts of different religions the values relating to ecology from the perspective of religious cognition, worldview, outlook on life, ethical principles, norms, rituals. Thus, religious ecology considers the ways religious organizations guide their followers’ behavior in relation to the environment around, evaluates their roles in dealing with the present environmental problems, thence proposes ways to put the ecological dimension of religions into practice. The paper focuses on the theoretical and practical issues of religious ecology in the word and Vietnam, towards the sustainable development goals.

A Century of Saints

This chapter chronicles the emergence of Santa Ana’s distinct Latinx majority religious ecology. The diversity of Latinx religious communities significantly shapes Santa Ana as an ethnic space. The author delineates how the religious ecology navigated today by Santaneros is tied to histories of local religious institutions and to patterns of racialized, ethnic exclusion. Ethnic identities that residents have had to contend with today are rooted in patterns of negotiations and struggles that Mexican-identified individuals have long contended with. Religion, the author argues, has often been used by whites in the construction of exclusionary boundary markers against Latinxs. Likewise, religious differences among co-ethnics have been salient points of in-group distinction. Nevertheless, Latinx majority religious communities have provided Mexican immigrants in Santa Ana with opportunities to exercise agency and leadership.

Intergenerational Ties in Latinx Protestant Congregations: Sustaining Ethnicity through Organizational and Affective Connections

This paper examines the persistence of intergenerational ties within Latinx Protestant Congregations (LPCs) and the implications these ties have for the persistence of LPCs as distinctly ethnic institutions. Though studies of generational transitions within ethnic congregations tend to emphasize intergenerational discontinuity, this paper uncovers ways that Latinx Protestants maintain intergenerational ties through LPC involvement, both within and across institutional settings. Rather than focusing on the content of intergenerational transmission, such as cultural practices, ethnic material, or explicit identity labels, this paper is concerned with a more preliminary matter of ethnic identity maintenance—the persistence of channels of transmission across generations. In particular, this paper examines how LPC organizational structures sustain cross-generational links, and how later generation Latinxs express affective ties to earlier generation Latinxs. Taking a religious ecology approach, findings are based on in-depth qualitative research conducted within six LPCs, and an informal survey of eleven additional LPCs, all located in the city of Santa Ana, California, a Latinx majority city. Findings suggest that LPCs are successfully cultivating intergenerational ties among a select group of later generation Latinxs, and that later generation Latinxs who stay connected to LPCs value these ties.

Study on the Sustainable Development of Human Settlement Space Environment in Traditional Villages

The sustainability of the human settlement space environment is an eternal subject of human exploration. There hides the idea of human settlement space in an externally displayed material environment. This paper takes Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan as the research object. Dai villages are the place where the ancestors of Dai people live, produce, and collectively construct human settlement, production, and spirit. Taking field investigation data and maps of Dai settlement areas as data sources, this paper explores Dai people’s view of human settlement space, analyzes the spatial cultural connotation of Dai villages, and the concept of sustainable human settlements ecology through the analysis of the factors of the villages’ spatial form. The survey results are as follows: (1) the villages are usually located at river valleys and basin areas, which are characteristic of facing the sun and near the water, embodying the persevering ecological concept of “adapting to local conditions and coexisting with nature”. (2) Dai people are one of the earliest “rice-growing nationalities”. Dai people’s settlements have formed a sustainable human settlement ecological space and the spatial pattern of “water-forest-field-village” is an organic whole. (3) The combination of Dai’s primitive religious ecology and Southern Buddhist culture has formed the characteristic of “advocating nature and Buddhism” and a unique concept of settlement space.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

This essay sketches the current state of fieldwork-based studies of Christianity in China, focusing on monographs published from 2008 to 2018. It discusses strengths and gaps in research paradigms (religious economy or market theory; rational-actor bargaining; institutional theory; religious ecology), levels of analysis (macro- or national level; meso- or regional level; micro- or congregational level), and modes of interaction (resistance-domination; negotiation; cooperation) in an effort to point out areas rich for future research: the impact of theologies and denominations, the existence of regional models of Christianity, and the study of money, real estate, social service, syncretism, and religious decline.

Eco-casteism

This chapter examines some of the significant lines of environmental conceptions in India since the 1980s. It pays critical attention to caste and its expression or marginalization in environmental discourses. It attempts to show how Brahmanical religious traditions and their arguments have had a powerful resonance in India’s dominant environmental leanings. It intermeshes these with some of the recent criticisms made by Dalit scholars regarding India’s environmental thought. Through the particular case study of Sulabh International (founded by Bindeshwar Pathak), a prominent organization working on sanitation and rural development, the chapter further shows how a noteworthy, well-intentioned, and much celebrated environmental initiative for the abolition of scavenging (which is deeply related to the Hindu caste system) in India assumes a Hindu religious ecology.