Paper short abstract:

I analyse the work of an Australian interfaith organisation throughout the crises of the past two years. Such organisations are uniquely positioned, providing faith-led responses to crisis while also critiquing religious and governmental views which potentially place communities at risk.

Paper long abstract:

Religions for Peace (RfP) Australia is one of around 90 country chapters that make up the global interfaith organisation of RfP, which relies on local actors to develop productive pathways to peace. As a globally linked but locally maintained organisation, RfP Australia uses the organisational weight and connections of RfP to respond to local challenges faced by Australian communities. The past few years have seen floods, fires, and plague wreak havoc throughout Australia, alongside governmental abandonment and increased community violence and distrust. However, there has also been an emphasis on community and individual resilience, growing pressure on governments for accountability, climate action, and care for vulnerable communities. Faith-based organisations such as RfP Australia work to address and critique the causes, impacts, and responses to such crises, often filling the gap left by the neoliberal retreat of the state. Drawing on 13 months of fieldwork with RfP Australia, I analyse how members of the organisation responded to the (in)action of government and communities, worked to balance the positive and negative elements of crisis, and how this shaped their work towards their overall goal of peace. I demonstrate how individuals navigated their faith communities, global RfP organisation, and individual faith responses to these crises, coalescing into an interfaith response that was curated to address political, health, and environmental turmoil with a purposeful faith-led lens. In analysing interfaith responses to crisis, I highlight how this provided a space of critique and reflection – of their own faith communities, and of the Australian government.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an exploration of gender roles in a traditionalist Catholic sect—the Order of Saint Charbel— and how they play out in everyday life. It draws on the lived experience of the author and subsequent reflection on this and contemporary scholarship on Roman Catholic Traditionalism.

Paper long abstract:

The Order of Saint Charbel is a small religious group which emerged in the late 1980s Australia as part of a wider global enthusiasm for Marian apparitions which has marked sectors of the Roman Catholic Church for the last two hundred years. From the mid-1980s, the Charbelites established themselves as a series of millennialist communities in both Australia and overseas, ostensibly drawing on the experience and practice of both historical Roman Catholic models of communal and religious life and contemporary movements for ecclesial renewal like those called for by Pope John Paul II in several contemporary writings especially Vita Consecrata (1996). While spiritual renewal was the ideal, the reality proved more contested, and the Charbelites found themselves marginalized and sanctioned by the mainstream Church and ridiculed by wider society. This paper will offer s a brief account of the history, beliefs and structure of the Order of Saint Charbel and the eschatological vision of its founder William Kamm (“The Little Pebble”). In drawing on the lived experience of the author, this paper will look at both the ideal and the reality of the Charbelites experience as they attempted to build and maintain a millennial community over the decade of the 1990s, focusing on the roles, expectations, and experiences of women in the Charbelites.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze how religion played a role in the perspectivation of the Covid threat in Portugal, focusing on some minority religious groups and how they reacted to the threat.

Paper long abstract:

Like other crisis, the Covid19 pandemic seems to have been an accelerator of the "re-spiritualization" of secular society, independently of the religious field. How did the various religions interpret the pandemic times, and what memories do individuals keep of two years of lockdowns and prohibitions to attend funerals and religious rituals? What was the real impact of the pandemic in their religiosities and the dynamics of religious communities? This paper will address the situation in Portugal, where most people abide to the State regulations, and vaccination was highly successful. Still, as in many other countries, individuals turned to religion for psychological relief. This paper will analyze how religion played a role in the perspectivation of the Covid threat in Portugal, focusing on some minority religious groups and how they reacted to the threat.

It is based on field work undertaken in the Lisbon area with a diversity of religious groups --Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, other minority new religious groups (Spiritism, New Age, neo-Pagans, Afro-Brazilian religions), and non-religious, representative of present day Portuguese religious scape. We focus on the Lisbon Metropolitan AREA for two reasons: 1) we have the basis of a previous study on religious diversity, undertaken by team members (TEI2019); 2) it is the region of Portugal with the larger religious diversity. We combined qualitative research, based on ethnographic methods and netnography, with a study of media and social networks, as well as a quantitative survey.

Paper short abstract:

Christianity is key to many communities in sub-Saharan Africa and their diasporas. During the Covid-19 lockdowns African communities in Australia engaged with their churches in diverse ways. Our findings suggest that churches became even more significant to communities during the pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

Christianity is key to many communities in sub-Saharan Africa. As migrants from the African continent arrive in Australia, the usual roles of religion (i.e., connecting to the spiritual world and strengthening community) become even more pronounced. In addition, churches in the diaspora become support institutions for settlement and alleviating nostalgia. They offer a site where migrants meet and exchange tips on accommodation, jobs and life in the host country, while at the same time migrants can feel at home connecting with fellow compatriots. For the African diaspora, church pastors and elders arriving from the homeland are more trustworthy than the government settlement apparatus (social workers, migration officials, job agencies, etc.). However, as covid-19 struck, these life support institutions closed down and services were moved online. Here we show how modes of arrival and legal status in Australia meant that the African diaspora in Australia engaged with churches in diverse ways. Migrants and international students were able to connect with their church communities and watch services online and even expanded their engagement by watching services in the homeland and elsewhere. By contrast, many refugees, particularly the older generations, had difficulty accessing the online services as they lacked the necessary skills and devices. Pastors needed to use off-line strategies to keep them involved in the community. Overall, our findings suggest that churches and their communities became more significant as churches closed during the pandemic.

Paper short abstract:

Deprived of the ability to give and receive kin-care due to the disruption of relocation for life-saving treatment, Aboriginal dialysis patients in Central Australia draw on multiple, adaptive forms of care, including Christianity, in pursuit of wellbeing and connection.

Paper long abstract:

Christianity is deeply entwined with the colonial projects of dispossession and assimilation in a place like Australia, and as such it is often viewed as being at odds with Indigenous peoples’ ideas of wellbeing. In apparent conflict with this framing, however, many Anangu and Yapa dialysis patients in Central Australia identify Christian beliefs, practices, and support networks as a major source of strength in maintaining a sense of wellbeing when experiencing kidney failure. Most dialysis patients in Central Australia are from remote Aboriginal communities. Upon diagnosis, they must make the difficult decision to relocate hundreds of kilometres away from their country and kin to access dialysis treatment. Centring Anangu and Yapa accounts, in this paper we investigate how patients maintain wellbeing in spite of major disruption to the relational fabric of their lives. We explore how dislocated patients are able to care and be cared for in several new ways: with kin; through an Aboriginal community-controlled health service; and the social networks and spiritual care found in Christianity. In particular, we examine how patients engage with and reappropriate Christianity, as a way of recreating culturally specific ways of holding and being held. Ultimately, we find that drawing on such diverse and adaptive forms of care provides patients with a sense of support and hope, where biomedicine stops short.