Proceedings of the International Conference on Religion and Public Civilization (ICRPC 2018)

Welcome to the official website of International Conference on Religion and Public Civilization held by the Graduate Program of Maluku Indonesian Christian University (UKIM) in Ambon, eastern part of Indonesia. This was the first international conference by UKIM as a challenge for responding about the sustainability of peace building after the terrific socio-religious conflict around five years (1999-2005). The impact of conflict still influences inter-religious relations in Ambon/Maluku even though people had more awareness to keep peace efforts among them. Therefore, efforts to construct discourses on peace and public civilization in Indonesia should be continuously driven so that it becomes positive and progressive learning process, especially among Indonesian/Maluku youth groups.

On the basis of such consideration, this conference aims to analyze the reality of religions on public spheres in Indonesia/Maluku from different scientific perspectives by scholars whose interdisciplinary expertise both from Indonesia and abroad. It is driven by the reality that Indonesian society nowadays is forced by many politicization of religious symbols and the vulnerable position of religion in political games. The main concern of the conference is to present critical analyses about the theme that, in turn, it would be published for wider audiences, discussed by more groups of people and as a document for reconstructing inclusively religious education curriculum to empower capacity building of civil society for managing plurality and potential conflict in the multicultural society of Indonesia.

We have invited scholars and peace activists whose /who have different academic background from some regions in Indonesia and abroad to participate for/by contributing their critical ideas in the conference. We received 70 abstracts and forwarded them to the academic committee to be reviewed. Two reviewers, Prof. Ruard Ganzefoort and Prof. Robert Hefner, had worked on reviewing those abstracts for about four weeks. Then, eventually, we accepted around 40 articles to be presented on the international conference and published as proceeding.

The ICRPC 2018 consisted of some stages: [1] reviewing submitted abstracts by the academic committee; [2] conference with nine keynote speakers from Indonesia, United States, and Netherlands; [3] parallel sessions that were divided into 4 classes in accordance to five minor themes. The presenters, then, were given some times to compose their full papers that appropriate with an official template from the Atlantis Press.

The dates of the conference were May 3rd – 5th 2018 and the venue was Pacific Hotel in Ambon City. This three days international conference succeeded because of supporting of many people and organizations. Therefore, we have to give our deeply gratitude for people and institutions who supported the ICRPC 2018 by giving their concerns on issues about religion and public civilization. We have to thank congregations and priests of the Protestant Church in the Moluccas. Also, thanks for the Graduate Program of UKIM that assigned the organizing committee of ICRPC since the beginning until the end of conference. We realized that there were some inconveniences during the conference as well as within editing works of all submitted papers. We really hope can improve many things by recognizing parameters for better and organized conferences in the future.

To prepare ICRPC 2018, we have received a lot help from a lot of people. We thank all the contributors for their interest and support to ICRPC 2018. We also feel honored to have the support from our international reviewers and committee members. Eventually, the support from the Atlantis Press is also highly appreciated; without their effort, this proceeding will not be able to come into being.

The Organizing Committee of ICRPC 2018