In 2006, Brendan Eagan put together an impressive online documentary on the history of Kakure (Hidden) Christians in Japan, based on firsthand interviews and site visits in southern Japan by a team from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Here are links to the Statement of Purpose, Historical Overview, Photographs, and Interview Transcripts.
Category Archives: religion
St. Olaf Website on Hidden Christians in Japan
Uganda’s Abayudaya
Nathanael of Europe Endless recently posted a few fascinating excerpts from a long interview on Afropop about the Jews of Uganda. Here are a few excerpts of his excerpts.
Now, in contrast to [other Jewish] communities [in Africa], the Abayudaya, which means “Jewish people of Uganda,” proudly reference their conversion to Judaism in the 1920s, stating that they were drawn to Jewish practice by the truth of the Torah, the five books of Moses. Their founder, Semei Kakungulu, was a powerful Ganda leader, and he considered Christianity and Islam, and then according to community elders, said, “Why should I follow the shoots when I could have the root.”
Presently, the Abayudaya number of approximately 750 people, and live in villages surrounding Mbale in eastern Uganda. Many members scrupulously follow Jewish ritual, observe the laws of the Sabbath, celebrate Jewish holidays, keep kosher, and pray in Hebrew. Since the community’s original self conversion, and through the difficult period of Idi Amin’s rule in the 1970s, the Abayudaya have been distinguished by their commitment to following mainstream Jewish practice, an approach that’s been amplified since their increased contact with Jews from North America and Israel since the mid-1990s.…
I’ll tell one story. I was with the community in 2002, right before their official conversion, and the discussions in the community were really interesting at that point, because here were people who had practiced as Jews, many for four generations. I was sitting in a meeting of the Abayudaya Leadership Council, and one member said, “I have a question. We are talking about conversion here, but I’m Jewish, my father was Jewish, my grandfather was Jewish. Can you tell me exactly what I am converting to?” And the leadership, Gershom Sizomu and J.J. Keki, were very thoughtful here. They said, “We understand. We are not saying that we’re not Jewish. But there are formalities that need to be practiced in order for us to be recognized by world Jewry.” So the community decided not to call this a “conversion.” Internally, they called it a “confirmation” of their Judaism. They were confirming their Jewish identity, but they felt that they had been Jewish since the initial conversion by Semei Kakungulu in the early 1920s….
In many ways, Kakungulu’s self conversion to Judaism was an act of rejection of the British. A rejection of the British. A rejection of colonialism. It was Kakungulu and his followers saying, “No longer will we followed your directions here. We are going to follow our own spiritual path.” The British didn’t know what to make of Kakungulu’s Judaism. The book to read on this is Michael Twaddle’s book, “Kakungulu and the Creation of Uganda—1868 to 1928.” But basically, Kakungulu’s adoption of Judaism was very much him going off on his own path, not only religiously but politically, asserting his separation from the British, who were totally identified with the Anglican Church.
Hijab vs. Koteka: West Papua Culture Clash
From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 224-225:
From the air, my first view of Wamena was a broad, grassy valley dotted with traditional Dani hamlets surrounded by incredibly neat and extensive sweet potato and vegetable gardens. Then came the town itself: an untidy, rusting conglomeration of tin-roofed buildings whose streets were laid out in a grid pattern. The silver minaret on the mosque gave it a distinctively Javanese appearance, even from above.
In the streets of Wamena, you see an extraordinary mixture of humanity. Proud Dani men, still holding fiercely to their traditional dress of koteka (penis gourd) tied at its base to a protruding testicle, stalk down the street, beards thrust forward and hands clasped behind their backs. Nervous-looking Muslim women, the oval of their face the only flesh visible in a sea of cotton, whisk gracefully by, while military men in immaculate and tight-fitting uniforms swagger confidently down the middle of the road.
Surely it is a perverse twist of fate that has put a nation of mostly Muslim, mostly Javanese, people in control of a place like Irian Jaya. You could not imagine, even if you tried, two more antipathetic cultures. Muslims abhor pigs, while to highland Irianese they are the most highly esteemed of possessions. Javanese have a highly developed sense of modesty. They dress to cover most of their body and are affronted by overt sexuality. For most Irianese, near-nudity is the universally respectable state. Moreover, men from the mountain cultures of western New Guinea wear their sexuality proudly. The long penis gourd often has the erectile crest of the cockatoo attached to its tip, just in case the significance of the upright orange sheath is missed.
Javanese fear the forest and are happiest in towns. They attach much importance to bodily cleanliness, yet pollute their waterways horribly. Irianese treat the forest as their home. Many are indifferent to dirt on the skin, yet, through custom, protect the ecological health of their forests and rivers. Javanese respect of authority is typically Asian in its obsequiousness. Irianese are fiercely intolerant of attempts at domination. No Dani man would ever let another lord it over him as a tuan (prince) does a Javanese petani (peasant).
Filed under Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, religion
Father Pat’s Old-time Syncretic Religion
From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 186-187:
Father Pat is an Irishman for whom Gaelic is a first language. He is one of the new style of Roman Catholic missionaries and is a vital force in the lives of the people of the Torricelli Mountains. As we got to know each other, I began to see what motivated Pat. He told me that his own language and culture had been banned and belittled at the hands of the invading English and that he was certainly not going to see that happen to his Papua New Guinea parishioners. They had, unfortunately, been converted in the 1930s by Catholic missionaries of German extraction who had suppressed the local culture. Pat was determined to redress that.
Under Father Pat, the region had experienced a dramatic cultural revival. The Mass was now said in Olo (the local language) by this Irish priest dressed to a turn in Melanesian finery. His cuscus-fur head-dress and bird-of-paradise plume armlets shook gloriously as he sang. Indeed, hearing Mass said by Father Pat dressed in his full regalia was one of the most moving experiences I have ever had in a church.
It was with some pride that Pat told me that the revival of old traditions had gone so far that, as a special favour to the visiting Bishop of Vanimo, parish women had danced bare-breasted in procession through the church while singing hymns.
But the revival had gone much deeper than ceremonial formalities. Pat had questioned the old men closely concerning their pre-Christian customs and had incorporated traditional elements, where appropriate, into the celebration of the sacraments. Thus, traditional words from birth and initiation ceremonies, many long forgotten by the community, were now said at baptisms and confirmations. Pat also bought ochre for decorative purposes and sponsored festivals on these occasions.
For the first time in decades a haus tambaran (ancestral spirit house) had been built in Wilbeitei village and in it were stored the spirit masks, all newly made, for which the area was formerly famous. But the house now had a double purpose. Though great spirit masks, some five metres tall, were hung around its walls, at its centre was parked the new community truck, the result of an investment and savings scheme instituted by Father Pat.
Pat’s revival of the village traditions had come at a critical moment. The Olo had been influenced by Christianity for the best part of sixty years. They were a lot further down the road to westernisation than even the Telefol. It was dismaying to find that Pidgin was commonly used, even in conversations between the Olo themselves, and that only the very oldest members of the community remembered what traditional clothing looked like. Had Father Pat arrived just a decade later, he may have found precious little to preserve.
Filed under Ireland, language, Papua New Guinea, religion
Tessaku Seikatsu, 7 November 1944
From Life behind Barbed Wire [鉄柵生活 Tessaku Seikatsu]: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawai‘i Issei, by Yasutaro Soga [1873–1957] (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2008), p. 164:
The U.S. presidential election held on November 7, 1944, attracted worldwide attention. On the eighth, it was confirmed that President Roosevelt had been reelected. It would be his fourth term, an unprecedented feat in American history. We now felt that the United States would take it upon itself to end the war. On the afternoon of November 7, the Buddhist and Shinto federations sponsored a memorial service for soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army and for internees who had died in this camp. It was held at the open-air theater, with the Reverend Kogan Yoshizumi officiating. Rev. Enryo Shigefuji of the Fresno Hongwanji Betsuin Mission suggested in his sermon that internees who had pledged loyalty to the United States and had been paroled were disloyal Japanese. Later he found himself in the same difficult position of being condemned when, ironically, he and his wife secretly applied for parole. Christians wanted to join the service, where they intended to pray for all of the war dead, but Buddhists and Shintoists insisted that only Japanese casualties be recognized, so there was no joint service. Even within our little barbed-wire world there were rigid divisions, strong divisive elements, and opposing views.
Tessaku Seikatsu: An Embarrassment of Clerics
From Life behind Barbed Wire [鉄柵生活 Tessaku Seikatsu]: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawai‘i Issei, by Yasutaro Soga [1873–1957] (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2008), pp. 90-93
At Lordsburg there were close to a hundred Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian ministers, pastors, and lecturers—quite an amazing number. Fifty-four Buddhists represented various sects. The twenty-five in the second battalion organized a Buddhist association, and the twenty-nine in the third battalion established a Buddhist ministers’ organization. Each organization held study sessions and a service every Sunday. Among the special events were the Bon Festival, equinoctial service, and Buddhahood attainment service. Twenty-three ministers were from Hawaii, thirty-one from the Mainland. Other Buddhist groups included the Jodoshu Mission, the second battalion’s Sodoshu Mission, the second and third battalion’s Buddhist hymn group, and a Kannon sutra reading group….
Shinto associations in the camp included Daijingu and Konko-kyo. Twelve Shinto ministers hailed from the Mainland, two from Hawaii…. Mr. Miryo Fukuda of the Konko-kyo San Francisco Mission was said to be a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, but he was an ultranationalist and a troublemaker….
Christians from the Mainland and Hawaii organized the United Church of Christian Sects here. Of the eleven pastors, four were from Hawaii. They held Sunday morning and evening services, Wednesday prayer meetings, bible lectures, special meetings, and hymn study meetings. Rev. Kiyoshi Ishikawa, a graduate of Doshisha University, and Rev. Takashi Kamae, a graduate of Aoyama Gakuin University, were devoted scholars. They were both from California….
Whenever a funeral was held in the camp, if the deceased happened to be a Buddhist, dozens of clerics would line up at the service in colorful, beautifully decorated surplices. In the outside world one could never expect to see such an assemblage of ministers in such finery. Upon seeing this spectacle, someone joked, “If you have to die, now is the time.” I had to agree, and I mean no disrespect, but I question the character of some of these religious leaders. Frankly, many of them disappointed me in that they did not know the way of Buddha or God. Most important of all, they did not know the way of Man, since they knew too little about the world. They could not understand the ever-changing international situation. They secluded themselves in their sect or religion and did not know or care to know anything beyond it. It seems perfectly clear to me why they failed to enlighten or inspire others….
At the outbreak of the war between the United States and Japan, a disagreement divided the Hongwanji Mission on the Mainland into two opposing groups: those ministers who sided with the United States and those who sided with Japan. The Reverend Ryotai Matsukage of the Honpa Hongwanji North America Mission issued a statement early on, saying that Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was cowardly and dishonorable. He encouraged other ministers on the Mainland to break off their relations with the head temple in Japan and support the United States. His views were published in English-language newspapers and endorsed by the Reverend Okayama, his successor. Whether or not because of this statement, Rev. Matsukage and his supporters were not interned.
Many Japanese accused Rev. Matsukage’s group of speaking against Japan and the head temple to save themselves. In mid-March 1943, the minister sent thirty dollars to the Hongwanji ministers interned at Lordsburg. After a heated discussion involving diehards and moderates that nearly led to an exchange of blows, the ministers decided to return the money.
There is no one more despicable or troublesome than a hypocrite. I was surprised to discover so many of them among the religious men and teachers in the camp. A man from the Mainland told me the story of a high-ranking monk who supposedly lived according to Buddha’s teachings and was arrested by the FBI. When agents searched him, they found more than a thousand dollars in cash in his coat pockets. Interrogation followed, and when his residence was searched agents discovered a bundle of love letters from a married woman. His followers were shocked by the deception. Here was a man who had gained their sympathy and respect by appearing to embrace poverty and a strict moral code of behavior. He is not an exception among those of his profession.
Like many ministers, a surprising number of teachers fail to comprehend anything beyond their own limited experience. They lack even the simplest and most basic knowledge of international affairs. They hardly have the will to study. Because they have spent so much of their lives teaching, they feel they can educate anyone—even adults—when they have taught only children. They want to help others to learn, which is admirable, but many of them have lost the humility necessary to learn from others and fail to realize that they are behind the times.
Thus wrote a Japan-raised journalist during the 1940s.
Baby Boomer Buddhism Going Bust
Friday’s Opinion Journal carried a column by Clark Strand, contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, on the declining numbers of American Buddhists.
A colleague recently took me to task for consulting Jews and Christians on how to keep American Buddhism alive. He didn’t agree with either premise–that Jews and Christians could offer advice to Buddhists, or that Buddhism was in any danger of decline. But he was wrong on both counts. American Buddhism, which swelled its ranks to accommodate the spiritual enthusiasms of baby boomers in the late 20th century, is now aging. One estimate puts the average age of Buddhist converts (about a third of the American Buddhist population) at upwards of 50. This means that the religion is almost certain to see its numbers reduced over the next generation as boomer Buddhists begin to die off without having passed their faith along to their children. And Jewish and Christian models offer the most logical solution for reversing that decline.
The basic problem is that non-Asian converts tend not to regard what they practice as a religion. From the beginning, Buddhism has been seen in its American incarnation not as an alternative religion, but as an alternative to religion. American converts have long held Buddhism apart from what they see as the inherent messiness of Western religious discourse on such issues as faith and belief, and from the violence that has so often accompanied it….
In the contemporary discourse on religion, it is striking how often Buddhism is privileged over Judaism, Christianity or Islam as a scientifically based or inherently peaceful version of religion. Note that the Dalai Lama (rather than the pope) was asked to provide the inaugural address at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2005, even though, like Catholicism, Tibetan Buddhism includes beliefs (think reincarnation) that are anathema to medical science. Likewise, though Japanese Buddhists melted their temple bells to make bombs during World War II, the idea of Buddhism as a peace-loving religion persists as an enduring fantasy in Western people’s minds. And yet, such fantasies are instructive nonetheless.
Though some of my more devout Buddhist associates may balk at the idea, these days I have increasingly come to see Buddhism in America as an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large–from the serious practitioner who meditates twice daily to the person who remarks in passing, “Well, if I had to be something, I guess I’d be a Buddhist.” The object of that experiment is not to import some “authentic” version of Buddhism from Asia, as some believe, but to imagine a new model for religion altogether–one that is nondogmatic, practice-based and peaceful.
This certainly rings true with me. I flirted with Japanese Buddhism after abandoning the Christianity of my youth, but never became a serious practitioner as did some of my friends, including other missionary kids.
Judt on the British Quagmire in Ulster
From Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt (Penguin, 2005), pp. 466-469:
The Provisional IRA was much like [Basque] ETA in its methods, and in some of its proclaimed objectives. Just as ETA sought to make the Basque provinces ungovernable and thereby secure their exit from Spain, so the Irish Republican Army aimed at making Northern Ireland ungovernable, expelling the British, and uniting the six northern provinces with the rest of Ireland. But there were significant differences. Since an independent Ireland already existed, there was—at least in principle—a practicable national goal for the rebels to hold out to their supporters. On the other hand, there was more than one Northern Irish community, and the distinctions between them went back a very long way.
Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland—Ulster—was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself. When London finally relinquished Ireland to the Irish, in 1922, the UK retained the six northern counties of the island on the reasonable enough grounds that the overwhelmingly Protestant majority there was intensely loyal to Britain and had no desire to be governed from Dublin—and incorporated into a semi-theocratic republic dominated by the Catholic episcopate. Whatever they said in public, the political leaders of the new Republic were themselves not altogether unhappy to forgo the presence of a compact and sizeable community of angrily recalcitrant Protestants. But for a minority of Irish nationalists this abandonment constituted a betrayal, and under the banner of the IRA they continued to demand the unification—by force if need be—of the entire island.
This situation remained largely unchanged for four decades. By the 1960s the official stance in Dublin somewhat resembled that of Bonn: acknowledging the desirability of national re-unification but quietly content to see the matter postponed sine die. Successive British governments, meanwhile, had long chosen to ignore so far as possible the uneasy situation they had inherited in Ulster, where the Protestant majority dominated local Catholics through gerrymandered constituencies, political clientelism, sectarian pressure on employers, and a monopoly of jobs in crucial occupations: civil service, judiciary and above all the police.
If politicians on the British mainland preferred not to know about these matters, it was because the Conservative Party depended on its ‘Unionist’ wing (dating from the nineteenth-century campaign to maintain Ireland united with Britain) for a crucial block of parliamentary seats; it was thus committed to the status quo, with Ulster maintained as an integral part of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party was no less closely identified with the powerful labour unions in Belfast’s shipbuilding and allied industries, where Protestant workers had long received preferential treatment.
As this last observation suggests, the divisions in Northern Ireland were unusually complicated. The religious divide between Protestants and Catholics was real and corresponded to a communal divide replicated at every stage of life: from birth to death, through education, housing, marriage, employment and recreation. And it was ancient—references to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrels and victories might appear to outsiders absurdly ritualistic, but the history behind them was real. But the Catholic/Protestant divide was never a class distinction in the conventional sense, despite the IRA’s efforts to import Marxist categories into its rhetoric. There were workers and priests—and to a lesser extent landowners, businessmen and professionals—on both sides.
Moreover, many Ulster Catholics felt no urgent desire to be ruled from Dublin. In the 1960s Ireland was still a poor and backward country and the standard of living in the North, while below that of most of the rest of the UK, was still considerably above the Irish average. Even for Catholics, Ulster was a better economic bet. Protestants, meanwhile, identified very strongly with the UK. This sentiment was by no means reciprocated by the rest of Britain, which thought little of Northern Ireland (when it thought of it at all) .The old industries of Ulster, like those of the rest of the UK, were in decline by the end of the 1960s, and it was already clear to planners in London that the overwhelmingly Protestant blue-collar workforce there had an uncertain future. But beyond this, it is fair to say that the British authorities had not given Ulster serious thought for many decades.
The IRA had declined to a marginal political sect, denouncing the Irish Republic as illegitimate because incomplete while reiterating its ‘revolutionary’ aspiration to forge a different Ireland, radical and united. The IRA’s wooly, anachronistic rhetoric had little appeal to a younger generation of recruits (including the seventeen-year-old, Belfast-born Gerry Adams, who joined in 1965) more interested in action than doctrine and who formed their own organization, the clandestine, ‘Provisional’ IRA. The ‘Provos’, recruited mainly from Derry and Belfast, emerged just in time to benefit from a wave of civil rights demonstrations across the North, demanding long overdue political and civil rights for Catholics from the Ulster government in Stormont Castle and encountering little but political intransigence and police batons for their efforts.
The ‘Troubles’ that were to take over Northern Irish—and to some extent British—public life for the next three decades were sparked by street battles in Derry following the traditional Apprentice Boys’ March in July 1969, aggressively commemorating the defeat of the Jacobite and Catholic cause 281 years before. Faced with growing public violence and demands from Catholic leaders for London to intervene, the UK government sent in the British Army and took over control of policing functions in the six counties. The army, recruited largely in mainland Britain, was decidedly less partisan and on the whole less brutal than the local police. It is thus ironic that its presence provided the newly formed Provisional IRA with its core demand: that the British authorities and their troops should leave Ulster, as a first stage towards re-uniting the island under Irish rule.
The British did not leave. It is not clear how they could have left. Various efforts through the 1970s to build inter-community confidence and allow the province to run its own affairs fell foul of suspicion and intransigence on both sides. Catholics, even if they had no liking for their own armed extremists, had good precedent for mistrusting promises of power-sharing and civic equality emanating from the Ulster Protestant leadership. The latter, always reluctant to make real concessions to the Catholic minority, were now seriously fearful of the intransigent gunmen of the Provisionals. Without the British military presence the province would have descended still further into open civil war.
The British government was thus trapped. At first London was sympathetic to Catholic pressure for reforms; but following the killing of a British soldier in February 1971 the government introduced internment without trial and the situation deteriorated rapidly. In January 1972, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in the streets of Derry. In that same year 146 members of the security forces and 321 civilians were killed in Ulster, and nearly five thousand people injured. Buoyed up by a new generation of martyrs and the obstinacy of its opponents, the Provisional IRA mounted what was to become a thirty-year campaign, in the course of which it bombed, shot and maimed soldiers and civilians in Ulster and across mainland Britain. It made at least one attempt to assassinate the British Prime Minister. Even if the British authorities had wanted to walk away
from Ulster (as many mainland voters might have wished), they could not. As a referendum of March 1973 showed and later polls confirmed, an overwhelming majority of the people of Ulster wished to maintain their ties to Britain.
The IRA campaign did not unite Ireland. It did not remove the British from Ulster. Nor did it destabilize British politics, though the assassination of politicians and public figures (notably Lord Mountbatten, former Viceroy of India and godfather of the Prince of Wales) genuinely shocked public opinion on both sides of the Irish Sea. But the Irish ‘Troubles’ further darkened an already gloomy decade in British public life and contributed to the ‘ungovernability’ thesis being touted at the time, as well as to the end of the carefree optimism of the 1960s. By the time the Provisional IRA—and the Protestant paramilitary groups that had emerged in its wake—finally came to the negotiating table, to secure constitutional arrangements that the British government might have been pleased to concede almost from the outset, 1,800 people had been killed and one Ulster resident in five had a family member killed or wounded in the fighting.
Khanya on African Anglicans and Homosexuality
Through a pingback to my WordPress blog, which attracts a lot more readers interested in religion than my older mirror site on Blogspot thanks to WordPress’s tag aggregator, I discovered Khanya, a South African blogger who converted from Anglicanism to Orthodoxy, and who remains hard to pigeonhole politically. (That last characteristic I find most refreshing.) Khanya notes a very telling piece of historical perspective on African Anglican attitudes toward homosexuality, a perspective that seems little understood by many Anglicans outside Africa (or anybody else):
I’ve been watching from the sidelines as the Anglican Communion is tearing itself apart over homosexuality. The debate seems to generate more heat than light, and both sides seem to be talking past each other.
It seems to be a war of polemical slogans. The African “intransigence” has provoked a storm of racist bigotry in the Western homosexual lobby, with some bloggers being quite free with racist insults. The West [in turn] is accused of immorality and decadence, but very few have looked at the deeper issues.
An exception to this is a piece by Rod Dreher, St Charles Langa and African homosexuality, which looks at some of the missiological underpinnings of the African attitudes at least. Rod Dreher in turn quotes an article [in TNR] by [noted scholar of religious history] Philip Jenkins, in which he says
The Muslim context helps explain the sensitivity of gay issues in one other key respect. In the region later known as Uganda, Christianity first arrived in the 1870s, when the area was already under Muslim influence and a hunting ground for Arab slave-raiders. The king of Buganda had adopted Arab customs of pederasty, and he expected the young men of his court to submit to his demands. But a growing number of Christian courtiers and pages refused to participate, despite his threats, and an enraged king launched a persecution that resulted in hundreds of martyrdoms: On a single day, some 30 Bugandans were burned alive. Yet the area’s churches flourished, and, eventually, the British expelled the Arab slavers. That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism–both symbolized by sexual deviance. Reinforcing such memories are more recent experiences with Muslim tyrants, such as Idi Amin, whose victims included the head of his country’s Anglican Church. For many Africans, then, sexual unorthodoxy has implications that are at once un-Christian, anti-national, and oppressive….
South African Anglicans seem to have been fairly neutral in the battles being waged elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, and the account above gives a lot less information than that of Philip Jenkins. The protagonists in the Anglican battle, on the African side, seem to be Uganda and Nigeria, both countries on the border of Muslim and Christian Africa. South Africa is far removed from the tensions in those countries.
Interview with the Indonesian Archimandrite
Ever wonder about the Orthodox Church in Indonesia? Yeah, me neither. But I just came across this interview with Archimandrite Daniel D. B. Byantoro of the Gereja Ortodoks Indonesia. Here’s the lead-in (with a few editorial corrections) and one excerpt about the Archimandrite’s theological approach in Indonesia:
Orthodoxy was first established in Indonesia in Batavia, Java, as a parish of the Harbin Diocese in accordance with the Ukase of the Harbin Diocesan Council of November 23, 1934, № 1559. In the late 1940s, the parish was under the omophorion of Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco. Unfortunately, after the Dutch relinquished their powers to the local leadership, many of the Russian parishioners fled during this period of civil unrest, and eventually the parish closed in the early 1950s, when its rector Fr Vasily immigrated to the USA.
The following is an online interview conducted by orthodox.cn with Fr. Dionysios (and his wife Presbytera Artemia Rita), one of the six newly ordained priests in Indonesia….
Theologically speaking, Archimandrite Daniel Byantoro also used the existing thought patterns of Indonesian culture to package Orthodox teaching within the Indonesian mental set up. Just as the Church Fathers had to face Greek paganism, Judaism, and Gnosticism in order to present the Gospel intelligibly to ancient peoples, Orthodox theology faces similar challenges in the context of the Indonesian mission.
Those challenges are:
- The Islamic strand that has similarities with Judaism.
- The Hindu-Buddhistic strand that has similarities with Greek paganism.
- The Javanese-mystical strand called “Kebatinan” (the “Esoteric Belief”) that has similarities to Gnosticism. (It is a blend of ancient shamanistic-animism on the one hand and Hindu-Buddhistic mysticism and Islamic Sufism on the other, and is divided into many mystical denominations and groups, just like Gnosticism was.)
- The secularistic-materialistic strand of the modern world.
The first three strands have made the Indonesian people intensely religious. Into this religious and theological climate, the Patristic approach to ancient Greek paganism, Judaism and Gnosticism has provided, for the present writer, a paradigm to deal with all those strands inherent in Indonesian culture. In this regard, Orthodoxy must build trust among religions in Indonesia before it can have any significant influence. By maintaining a harmonious relationship with other religions existing in the country, Orthodoxy can contribute toward combating the pernicious influence of materialistic secularism.
In term of Orthodox religious practices, there are religious practices that cannot be described as belonging to any particular religion in Indonesian culture. They are practiced all over Indonesia, and although they have many different names and some slight variations in practice, they basically have the same pattern. These practices include fasting, ascetic labor, communal meals, prayer for the dead, and the keeping of relics. Archimandrite Daniel Byantoro had to deal with these cultural religious practices carefully, in order that Orthodoxy be acceptable to the Indonesian people.
For example, the practice of sitting on the floor for religious purposes is adopted in the worship of the Church in Indonesia. “Coned rice” instead of kolyva is used for commemorating the dead, since Indonesians do not eat bread as their main staple and do not grow wheat. The prayer of the Trisagion is used to replace the traditional Indonesian practice of honoring departed ancestors. Women wear veils in the Church, as was traditionally done by Orthodox people, but also conforms to the idea of the pious woman in the Indonesian culture. Icons and relics, with a right Orthodox and biblical understanding, have replaced amulets and heirlooms. Communal meals are usually done during festivities in the Church, as well as during Lent, where everybody breaks their fast together in the Church after Pre-Sanctified Liturgy. Some cultural symbolism has been adopted as well for the usage of the Church, such as the usage of young coconut leaves for decorating the Church building during festivals and feasts.
via Slainte, which looks to be an interesting new blog
Far Outliers 
