Abstract
The EU countries have been inefficiently managing the latest European migrant crisis, among them Poland was particularly unsuccessful. Contemporary discourse on refugees from the Middle East in Poland revolves around the following issues: the danger of altering Polish culture, the increase of the likelihood of terrorism, and the postulate of empathy towards people threatened by war. The religious factor plays a significant role in this discourse, since refugees who come from predominantly Muslim countries from a group of special interest in this Catholic-majority state. Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Adam Anczyk, and Anna M. Maćkowiak have examined, qualitatively, how Poles perceive Islam, and how this image may be associated with attitudes towards refugees. The aim of this study was to analyze narratives about Islam and the religious Other, emerging from partially structured interviews. The questionnaire, containing citations from the Bible, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita served as the trigger for interviews conducted after filling it out.
Speaker
Anna M. Maćkowiak is a doctoral student at the Department of Phenomenology and Anthropology of Religion, Institute for the Study of Religions, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Currently she is beginning to realization of her individual research grant (Preludium) concerning constructing meanings of selected Indonesian religious rituals by hosts, tourists, and travellers. Her academic interests and activities pertain also to inter-religious relations, religious syncretism, and the influence of religions on daily life of Indonesian and Poles.
Look at the full poster of the event here.

Anthon Jason | CRCS | Wednesday Forum Report

In Indonesia, people can be called by their homeland’s name, such as orang Batak, orang Sunda, orang Manado and so on. The Indonesian concepts that are tied tightly to ideas of land, community, and cosmology referred to as adat have a dynamic and complex relationship to people’s religious identification and how they understand their identities. People can be emplaced or displaced in regard to how their religious identity relates to their cultural identification with particular places. While emplacement is the process by which people identify themselves with a place, displacement is a dislocation, removal, expropriation, takeover, or ideological process to refute claims of rights over land, the use of cultural symbols, or the ability of people and groups to self-identify.

Jonathan D Smith | CRCS | Essay

Indonesia is home to many environmental movements, either led by established environmental activists or by groups of indigenous people. The reclamation project in Benoa Bay, cement mining in Kendeng area, Central Java, and the Save Aru movement are just a few recent examples. Does religion play a role in these movements? Are these local movements related to the growing global environmental movement?
The local and global is a crucial element of environmental movements, because environmental problems defy boundaries. Our rapidly-changing climate poses an urgent challenge that is both global and local. As national governments slowly acknowledge their role in reducing carbon emissions (with some exceptions), local communities in Indonesia are living with the problems of rising temperatures and sea levels, increases in natural disasters, and increasing pollution of our air and water.
Local-global connections in religious environmental movements
In 2016 at the climate summit in Morocco, governments met to affirm their adoption of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Signed by 111 countries (as of November 2016), the agreement commits to reducing carbon emissions and recognizes the human impact on climate change. At the same climate summit in Marrakech, hundreds of religious leaders and environmental activists launched the Interfaith Climate Statement.
The Interfaith Climate Statement included these words:

Abstract
One of the most significant ways the Indonesian state plays an active role in the country’s religious life is through education: Muslim students at all levels are required to take Islamic education classes, for which the government writes curricula and employs teachers. Therefore, the state—from the center at the Ministry of Religious Affairs to the periphery at individual teacher at public schools—has considerable power to shape religious perspectives of each new generation. His ongoing research is an ethnographic study of Islamic education in public high schools (Sekolah Menengah Atas Negeri) in the province of Yogyakarta, carried out through classroom observation, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. He will present the characteristics and effects of Islamic education in three fields: (a) perspective of religious diversity within Islam; (b) the valorization of the democratic nation-state as Islamic; and (c) the gender ideologies promoted as normatively Islamic. It is also noted how these phenomena vary in and among schools, noting the influence of socio-economic class, education, gender and religious background.
Speaker
Sawyer Martin French is research fellow at the Institute for International Studies at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Universitas Gadjah Mada. He is currently conducting a yearlong research project on Islamic education in public high schools in Yogyakarta with the support of a grant in socio-cultural anthropology from the National Science Foundation.
Look at the full poster of the event here.

Anang G Alfian | CRCS | Wednesday Forum Report

As a product of the globalized world, social media have created a virtual space of communication and interaction. Many people use it with enthusiasm as it helps humans build communication and connectivity much faster than ever before. On the other hand, many consider this phenomenon a challenge for living ethically and productively.

Dealing with this topic, Wednesday Forum on February 9th 2017 held a discussion on “wefies” (group self-portraits posted on social media) in relation to the Islamic concept of riya’ (showing off piety). The two speakers, Fatimah Husein, currently teaching at CRCS/ICRS as well as UIN Sunan Kalijaga, and Martin Slama of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, presented the emerging phenomenon of online piety in Indonesia, especially on how Muslims rethink riya’ in today’s popular “wefie” culture. The presentation was based on Husein’s article titled “The Revival of Riya’: Displaying Muslim Piety Online in Indonesia” which has been submitted for a virtual issue of American Ethnologist and Slama’s research project on “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia” funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Laine Berman | CRCS | Voices from America
The United States and Indonesia are both plural societies that struggle to understand how to live together in diversity and with the meaning of pluralism itself.  From its beginnings seventeen years ago, CRCS has had strong ties with American academia. Pioneers in inter-religious studies from the U.S., including John Raines, Mahmud Ayoub and Paul Knitter, were present at our founding and have been followed by a number of visiting lecturers who have stayed for a few weeks, months, or years, and by generations of English teachers. In addition, more than thirty CRCS alumni/ae have continued their studies for MA and PhD degrees in American universities. As we followed the news of the U.S. election within the context of the anti-pluralist turns across Asia and Europe, we wanted to know what our American friends are thinking and so we invited them to contribute their reflections to this page. This article, written by Laine Berman, is the second of the Voices from America series. To read the Indonesian translation of this article, click here. To read the first of the series, click here.