Keepers of the Grave: Ritual Guides, Ghosts, and Hidden Narratives in Indonesian History

The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state’s enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.

Judaism in the Kitchen: Ritual Space of the Mountain Jewish Women of Dagestan

The article investigates the gender and ritual roles of the Mountain Jewish women of Dagestan. The research is based on fieldwork conducted by the "Sefer" Center in 2018. The author suggests that in the Mountain Jewish communities the central component of ritual life is a collective feast, but not the synagogue as it is in many other Jewish communities. Since traditionally women are responsible for preparing food, they shape and pass on the traditions of the Mountain Jews. They organize community celebrations and rites of passage. During Soviet times, the power over the ritual process transferred from the centralized male system, the synagogue, to the female sphere.

Fiqh Mu’āmalah Content in Friday Sermon: Dialectics of the Mosque as a Ritual Space and the Market as Economic Space

This paper describes fiqh mu’āmalah content in Friday sermons at the Great Mosque of Kauman Semarang to understand the dialectics between the mosque as a ritual space and the market as an economic space. This paper's data are in the form of 51 sermons delivered in 2015 from January 1 to December 31, 2015, and interviews with the foundation, ta’mīr, and the preachers. This paper shows that Friday sermons' characteristics at the mosque are reflected in their preachers' diversity, both in terms of educational background, scientific fields, organizational affiliations, and professions. This paper finds that fiqh mu’āmalah's content has not become the point of attention of the preachers. This finding is proven by the absence of a sermon theme on fiqh mu’āmalah (mu’āmalah madiyah). The topic that appeared in Friday's sermon was related to Islamic economics's ethical principles and business-related to mu’āmalah adabiyah. The minimal content of fiqh mu’āmalah or economic fiqh in the Friday sermon of the mosque reflects the low intensity of the mosque's dialectics as a ritual space with the market as an economic space. The Friday sermon at this mosque still does not pay more attention to the jamā’ah of Johar market seller as the essential segment.

Il respiro corto dello Spirito nelle mega-chiese, ai tempi della pandemia

What effect has the pandemic on Mega-churches? The forced closure or drastic reduction of those present admitted to religious services has in fact called into question both the regime of truth that many of these churches follow, from the theological and spiritual point of view, and the drama-liturgy of hand-to-hand combat between the transmormative force of the Spirit and the prince of all evils, Satan. In this way, Mega-churches moved from the mass event experienced in large auditoriums to an online service, on a domestic scale, for many anonymous and distant faithful, to which a consoling message can be conveyed in a phase of inconvenience and suffering in their daily life. The epidemic has stolen the scene from the great performers of the Mega-churches and from those who, enthusiastic, took their seats in the stalls or moved freely possessed by spirits waiting to be freed, actively participating in the deliverance’s rite. These faithful, probably, now watching from a distance at home, in front of their computer screen, another scene, less involving and, above all, without the parrhesia of the regime of truth, which materialized in the ritual space. The epidemic represents a double contingency for the Mega-churches: on the one hand, it weakens the theological vision of a God who can do everything and of the Spirit who blows triumphantly and defeats all evil, on the other, it dematerializes the presence of the enemy who becomes invisible and intrusive, no longer physically dominable, from which no charismatic leader is more able to delivere the faithful.

Gendered Space

This chapter considers the meeting place of the Therapeutae, described in Philo of Alexandria’s De Vita Contemplativa, as represented by Eusebius of Caesarea. Since Eusebius read Philo’s treatise as indicating an early Christian community, he sees a church here, with gendered space, affirming this is Christian practice. The ministries of Christian women overall then need then to be considered within a gendered construct of space and movement. While the appropriate ‘place’ for women in the earliest congregations depends on how meeting spaces are configured (for meals, charity, teaching, healing, and prayer), the recent work of Edward Adams has contested the ubiquitous house-church model and allowed for more cognitive templates for how gendered space was constructed. The third-century ‘Megiddo church’ seems to suggest a divided dining hall for women and men, in line with gendered dining as a Hellenistic norm, with centralized ritual space.