Active Engagement
Food Evangelism on the Street : Hare Krishnas and Seventh-day Adventists in Action View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tamas Lestar
The Hare Krishna and the Seventh-day Adventist movements are two among the few religious communities who take their messages to the street through community outreach. Both organisations commit to food-related evangelising in the form of exhibitions, cooking classes, literature distribution and food sharing. My presentation has two aims. 1. Compare the approaches to health and outreach methods in the two organisations. 2. Establish links between food evangelising practices and current trends and needs in contemporary society. The main questions to investigate: How does food evangelising in the Hare Krishna and Seventh-day Adventist movements relate to issues of individual and planetary health and well-being? What are the enabling and disabling factors for wider impact?
Ritual and Role-play in the Metaverse: Building Community, Suspending Disbelief View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jean-Paul Lafayette DuQuette
Online rituals occurring in 3D virtual environments have become increasingly commonplace. In Linden Lab’s Second Life, for example, users can utilize their avatars to represent themselves at sermons, weddings or guided meditation sessions. Despite the loss of physical immediacy in these events, there are aspects of online interaction in virtual spaces that provide affordances that bolster their legitimacy as authentic and meaningful. Through ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the author looks at ritual practices in three Second Life communities, groups that integrate Buddhism, Hinduism and new age spirituality with role-play and fan fiction. By observing how these rituals strengthen group cohesion while providing an opening for participants initially averse or ambivalent to spirituality, the author explores the overlap of suspension of disbelief in online role-play and the willingness to believe necessary for religious practice.
Featured Parallel Moral Communities of Welfare: Welfare Regimes and the Prosperity Gospel in Flanders View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lise Dheedene
Pentecostal churches have increasingly filled the gaps in Western welfare regimes. However, due to the secular gaze still predominating welfare scholarship, the intricacies behind this phenomenon remain murky. In this paper, therefore, I shed light on the ways in which two pentecostal churches construct their solidarities in interaction with their local Flemish welfare regimes. I do so from a postsecular perspective which focuses on the interplay between secular and religious discourses, practices and ethics. Based on field work, document analysis and in-depth interviews, I propose to view these churches as ‘parallel moral communities of welfare’, i.e. welfare actors that construct the formal welfare system as their constitutive other without engaging in a direct relationship. Yet, while the first church does so by actively encouraging its members to make their own money rather than relying on welfare state facilities, the other treats successful welfare state interventions as divine miracles. This contrasting way of engaging with the welfare state, I argue, must be ascribed to their different application of the prosperity gospel.
