Philosophy

Dalam kesempatan ini, sebagai pembicara, saya diharapkan memberi tanggapan terhadap dokumen yang disebut dengan judul A Common Words (ACW). Dalam rangka itu saya mulai dengan beberapa kutipan yang penting dari dokumen itu sendiri. Pada dasarnya dokumen itu mengemukakan satu kebenaran teologis yang sangat penting dan mendasar yaitu bahwa, dengan berlandaskan pada Kitab Sucinya masing-masing, Islam (Qu'ran) dan Kristianitas (Kitab Suci, Bibel), sesungguhnya samasama menganut ajaran perintah 'emas' yang bersisi ganda itu, yakni perintah cinta akan Allah dan perintah cinta akan sesama (ACW, p.7). Kedua agama besar dunia itu sesungguhnya menganut kebenaran fundamental tadi. Atas dasar kenyataan itu, maka dokumen ACW ini mencoba membangun perdamaian dan harmoni antara orang-orang Kristiani dan orang-orang Muslim di seluruh dunia (ACW, p.7), sebab sangat diyakini bahwa kedamaian dunia ini salah satunya ditentukan oleh kedamaian dan harmoni dalam relasi kedua agama besar ini (ACW p.59). Perintah 'ganda' itulah yang kiranya dapat menjadi sebuah landasan bersama untuk membangun sebuah relasi yang tidak terutama berdasarkan benci melainkan terutama berdasarkan cinta dan kasih sayang (ACW, p.9). Jadi, kita semua dipanggil untuk membangun relasi cinta dengan sesama kita walaupun berbeda-beda agama. Dengan cara saya sendiri, saya mencoba menjabarkan pemahaman dasar dari dokumen ACW itu untuk proses pembelajaran kita bersama sekarang dan di sini.

KATA-KATA MEMPUNYAI DAYA KEKUATAN UNTUK MEREKAM SEJARAH MASA SILAM. TERKADANG ADA KATA YANG TIDAK LAGI KITA INGAT ARTINYA. TETAPI LEWAT STUDI PERBANDINGAN BAHASA, ORANG BISA MENEMUKAN KEMBALI MAKNANYA. ADA TETUMBUHAN YANG NAMANYA MASIH DIINGAT TETAPI BENDANYA SENDIRI SUDAH MUSNAH KARENA ULAH MANUSIA.

This dissertation deals with the dynamic encounter between Catholicism and the culture of Manggaraian people, which have brought the transformation upon the life of Manggaraian people. They have shifted from the traditional way of life to a semi modern way of life. Such a shift and transfonnation can be seen in the model and the size of their houses, the way they cultivate their garden or fields, the way they produce and put on the dress, and also the performance of their original-indigenous religious rituals. This dissertation, therefore, tries to answer those following questions: 1). what are the most important myths and rituals in the recorded tradition and are they still influential? 2). Have they been changed through interaction with Catholicism? 3). has Catholicism in Manggarai been affected by these myths and rituals? 4). How theology deals with this cultural encounter? The research project performed in this dissertation is a qualitative research to the life practices and the...

Since the arrival of Christianity together with the colonial rulers, Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia, undergoes physical and spiritual changes. These changes can be explained with theory of intellectual voluntarism (the free will of the repentant) and theory of structural determinism (enforcement by external factor). It appears that the changes in Manggarai happen because of the mixture of both factors in their diverse variants, such as the political-economical, educational, social-services related, and religious-theological factors. There are two horizons in the whole process of encounter and transformation in this area. On the one hand, there is the horizon of European Christian missionaries (supported by government), and on the other hand, the horizon of the Manggarain, with their cultural life in the broadest sense of the word. The two horizons fuse to each other in one drama of cultural encounter throughout the growth of the Church. Following the hermeneutical discourse of Gadamer...

Western philosophers called the idea of “individual-self” a “modern project”. Charles Taylor traced its historical development back to great philosophers of European rationalism (Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, J. G. Herder) with the birth of modern awareness of “individual-self” connected to western-modern individualistic society. Based on a study of “ethical-texts” preserved in Manggaraian oral-tradition, however, I postulate that indigenous tribes have their own way-of-thinking about individual-self, particularly individual-moral-self. Manggaraian people, though mainstream anthropology categorize it communal-traditional society, have some basic knowledge of the idea of moral-self, in the philosophical terminology of Taylor. Strong awareness of moral-self endorses people to have courage to make a personal-individual moral decision (Tillich). Traditional-ethical texts endorse individuals to have their own opinion on important issues of social-moral life, though they will different from the ...

We have reams of ideas about the church. We like to talk about
them, amazed by their resourcefullness. But these are ideas. When it is the ideas that are touched upon, the actors on the stage are not the ordinary people. They are intellectuals; indeed, theologians. It is a church-talk. However, when it comes down to the faithful, the church becomes churches. The ideas become images. The talk becomes imagining. For Christians in Java, togetherness in the circles of friends and families has always been an everydayness. And in this togetherness, what is spoken about is not the idea, but first of all the 'image' of a familial community. These people have a lot of time to share how they can live their lives at each moment. They are not very much 'systematic' in their way of sharing experiences, and they do not want to complicate things, for they already think that things have always been complicated enough in life. Their simple hopes and concerns are always oriented towards the harmony of their community life. They imagine, interpret and evaluate many things, so as to find the relatedness of realities in their togetherness. In this sense, this paper wants to capture those marvelous moments driven by the believers' imagination on the epistemological level of the believers' experience.

This article is a result ofan ecclesiological and catechetical survey conducted among the Catholics of two parishes in Java. Two themes were explored, namely, (1) relationship of the self and the community, and (2) sharing of experiences as an encounter of faith. These were put within the larger project to search for images from within the local cultures that may support catechetical materials about the church. This survey was intended to open the theological discourse of the church to the local cultures without proposing particular models to the believers. It explores the sociocultural realities of the local believers without direct reference to the church. It refers to faith and religious experiences of the believers but only insofar as they are related to the people's understanding of the self and the community. There were traces of how the believers relate themselves as cultural persons to the society as a community. Another presumption behind the themes was that sharing of faith experiences might happen through the daily conversations in the community life. These themes can corroborate the exploration of the community life among the believers in Java, since it is through the sharing of faith experiences that the people may see their community life differently. By considering faith in its broadest sense, this article wants to trace the possible cultural images that may shape the believers' cultural preferences in living their life as church members. An emphasis will be put on the daily matters of the believers' responses in order to collect the cultural images 'from below'.

Reading Schleiermacher's Speeches might give rise to different experience of religion. It appears that the more important issue today is not the identity (being), but the communality and sociality, for communality is a 'space' where one's being is able to move in its 'becoming'. The importance of experience is now considered much more than before. In this article the emphasis on one's experience and its connectedness with that of others is refreshed and further elaborated. Schleiermacher's ideas question the traditional patterns of (Christian) communities, which to some extent have implanted uniformity, dogmatism and oppressions, as being responsible for the emergence ofindifferentism today. Community, as Schleiermacher has pleaded in the Speeches, must be fluid and broadly inclusive. The immediate selfconsciousness is depicted in the moment of 'listening'—the world might have been blinded by appearances and made deafby the voices, but there remains the process of listening. Maybe a time for a 'listening' religion? A 'listening' religious community?

For the Christians in Java, being cultural persons has been taken for granted in their daily life, but being church members is something that they are learning and realising in their participation in the church community. This distinction emerges when the faithful are committing themselves to the church along their journey through the sociocultural reality. In the 'new' community, which in the context ofthis article is the church, they see their being cultural persons in a different way and reimagine their identity in the daily experiences and the encounters with others. This article is an effort to listen to the believers' imagination by considering their sociocultural images in imagining the church from within their local perspectives. Doing ecclesiology in this way is a journey to accompany and to listen to the local believers in search oftheir own 'church'. The author puts the survey among the Catholics in two parishes in West and Central Java and the analysis of its results within the context of doing contextual theology of the church by qualitatively and intuitively exploring the local believers' cultural images.

This article is an endeavour to be 'imagerially present' among the believers in Java, and in this way, could add to the sensitivity to what is happening in the praxis of faith of the Christians in Java. Christian faith may have caused some changes in the believers' imagination. Catechesis on the church in Java can take many advantages from this research, considering that its outcome comprises of the church images which can be used to enhance the catechetical material. The distinction of images appears in four dimensions (the believers' imagerial preferences, the church's relevance, the believers' intentions to participate and their contextual and meaningful images). This
research is an opening towards further reflections about imagerial catechesis' in Java. In this eye, it prepares a necessary path for deepening the conviction that the believers' 'cultural' ways of being church are an essential element in the process of doing theology with images. No less than seventeen images have surfaced during the efforts of re-imagining the church images. These 'cultural' and communal images are correlated with the 'biblical' images of the church in order to unearth the believers' interpretations of the latter within the sociocultural contexts.

This article is an endeavour to be 'imagerially present' among the believers in Java, and in this way, could add to the sensitivity to what is happening in the praxis of faith of the Christians in Java. Christian faith may have caused some changes in the believers' imagination. Catechesis on the church in Java can take many advantages from this research, considering that its outcome comprises of the church images which can be used to enhance the catechetical material. The distinction of images appears in four dimensions (the believers' imagerial preferences, the church's relevance, the believers' intentions to participate and their contextual and meaningful images). This research is an opening towards further reflections about 'imagerial catechesis' in Java. In this eye, it prepares a necessary path for deepening the conviction that the believers' 'cultural' ways of being church are an essential element in the process of doing theology with images. No less than seventeen images have surfaced during the efforts of re-imagining the church images. These 'cultural' and communal images are correlated with the 'biblical' images of the church in order to unearth the believers' interpretations of the latter within the sociocultural contexts.

lmajinasi memang sering keliru ditafsirkan. Daerahnya
dibatasi tak lebih jauh dari fantasi dan khayalan.
Akibatnya, kekuatan imaji sebagai karakter fundamental
pemikiran dan metodologi dikesampingkan dari wilayah
ilmu-ilmu pengetahuan. Buku ini menghadirkan kembali
karakter tersebut, mempertajam pemahaman kita akan
imajinasi, serta membuka sebuah khazanah yang
selama ini tersembunyi di balik pemikiran manusia.

Melalui perspektif postmodern, buku ini mengkaji ulang
pertanyaan-pertanyaan menggelitik seputar proses
pengetahuan manusia. Pengetahuan bukan hanya
dilahirkan oleh rasio. melainkan oleh bayangan imaji-imaji
yang demikian kuat, juga di dalam proses berpikir
manusia. Dengan itu penulis serentak merancang
sebuah sketsa ke arah Filsafat lmajinasi, sebuah
pemikiran yang mengandalkan dan mengolah kolase
imajerial realitas. Bila selama ini lebih sering dilihat
sebagaifaktor sampingan, sudah saatnya kini imajidan
imajinasi kita perhitungkan sebagai titik sentral dalam
ilmu pengetahuan.

Art seems to always deal with subjects, both the artist and the spectator.
The awareness that an image is not a concept may provoke those doing and experiencing art to reposition themselves as appreciators of the image. This article shifts the focus from concept to image. Art event is a sort of lectio imaginem, an experience of reading and not merely interpreting the image. Each artwork is transcendent, since every time it will speak differently when reencountered. Yet it might even frightfully reinterpret the audience differently, recreating the identity as a different figure in its eyes. Phenomenologically, the spectators are looked upon by the image through the works of art. The subject is assessed and transformed from I into me, that it becomes a witness in the presence of an image revealing itself. This article is an invitation to maintain the equilibrium between critical and appreciative atitudes, between theory and image, within the world of art. All individuals, without exception, are assessed by art. Perhaps they only need to forbear, to let themselves deluged in the surface, to become the witnesses fascinated before and moved by the saturation of the image.

Art seems to always deal with subjects, both the artist and the spectator. The awareness that an image is not a concept may provoke those doing and experiencing art to reposition themselves as appreciators of the image. This article shifts the focus from concept to image. Art event is a sort of lectio imaginem, an experience of reading and not merely interpreting the image. Each artwork is transcendent, since every time it will speak differently when reencountered. Yet it might even frightfully reinterpret the audience differently, recreating the identity as a different figure in its eyes. Phenomenologically, the spectators are looked upon by the image through the works of art. The subject is assessed and transformed from I into me, that it becomes a witness in the presence of an image revealing itself. This article is an invitation to maintain the equilibrium between critical and appreciative atitudes, between theory and image, within the world of art. All individuals, without exce...

Givenness is probably an odd term in methodology, but not in phenomenology. The long history of subjectivism in philosophy faces confrontations from Derrida's deconstruction. This history also results in a sort of mutual exclusion between philosophy and theology. The concept of the subject becomes a problem for both, but frequently it is safeguarded for the sake of a more universal 'objectivity'. The phenomenological tendency towards phenomenon, more than towards the experiencing subject and more than anything regarded as object, provokes some philosophical focus on the emancipation of the phenomena. Marion pushes phenomenology to its limits, to the extent that he is suspected of undermining the role of the subject in contemporary philosophical discourse. He reacts to Derrida's deconstruction, which was also criticised for not offering a way out of the labyrinth from the collapse of traditional thoughts. Marion is quite consistent with his phenomenology, namely in of...