This panel examines how material culture and ritual space function as sources of lived theology in contemporary Asian Catholicism. Drawing on ethnographic research in Asia, the papers explore how devotional objects, ritual gestures, and spatial practices express forms of primary theology (prima theologia)--theology as embodied and enacted in everyday religious life.
Across the four papers, material culture ranging from polymer clay miniatures in columbaria and Chinese New Year offerings of incense, fruit, and flowers to rosaries, handkerchiefs, and digital media in charismatic worship reveals how Catholics in Southeast Asia theologize memory, kinship, migration, and sacred space in practice.
Bringing together Asian scholars of theology and the social sciences based in Asia and the United States, the panel draws on ethnographic fieldwork to offer new perspectives on Asian Catholicism. During the session, selected devotional objects will also be displayed to create a more immersive engagement with the material culture discussed.
In a Singapore state-run columbarium where people of different religions are put to rest, it is common to see dollhouse-sized polymer clay miniatures of foods of local fare and other everyday items attached to the niche plaque or the base of a columbarium niche. While they are present across multiple religious traditions represented the columbarium, these are especially common on Christian niches. While niches in Catholic columbariums in Singapore also contain these polymer clay miniatures, there are significantly fewer of them. Instead, Chinese New Year and Christmas decorations abound. Using photographic documentation as a starting point, this presentation will :1) analyze the semantic complexity of various material objects surrounding and affixed to columbarium niches of Catholics in Singapore with attention to their theological and social dimensions; 2) contrast the ways in which Catholic and state-run columbariums function as ritual spaces that reflect, generate and sustain theologies of ancestors and family differently; and 3) propose that columbariums are overlooked spaces of primary theology (theologia prima) – a source of theology that is lived, embodied, and experienced – through which material expressions of local theologies as “new creations” emerge.
In several Chinese Filipino Catholic parishes in Manila, devotional practices surrounding Chinese New Year extend beyond the liturgy into ritual engagements with ancestors, saints, and sacred objects. On the eve of the feast, parishioners present offerings of incense sticks, flowers, wine, and fruits before ancestral tablets and images of Mary and the saints. These offerings are later brought to family tombs, while an ancestral veneration ritual concludes the Mass. Commonly described as alay (offering), these practices situate Catholic devotion within networks of kinship, memory, and material practice.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in parishes and cemeteries in Manila, this paper examines how such offerings function as material mediators of remembrance in Chinese Filipino Catholic life. Engaging Jayeel Serrano Cornelio’s concept of “creative Catholics” (2016) alongside theological reflections on inculturation by Jonathan Y. Tan (2011), Peter C. Phan (2004), and Aristotle Dy (2005), the paper argues that alay operates as embodied memory through which Catholic identity is transmitted across generations, revealing material devotion as a form of prima theologia.
This paper explores the Malaysian Chinese Catholic re-imagination of the traditional first day of the Chinese New Year ancestor veneration ritual at the parish columbarium of Saint Michael’s Church, the Chinese Catholic parish in Ipoh, Malaysia. It examines how the parish columbarium provides the ritual space to re-imagine the traditional ancestor veneration ritual on the first day of the Chinese New Year in an inculturated Malaysian Chinese Catholic context beyond its official liturgical placement in the authorized Chinese New Year Mass. In doing so, it questions the conventional definition of liturgical space within the architectural confines of a church building, evaluates the interplay between anamnetic memory and ritual experience which remake and remagine liturgical space as the space which is constructed, negotiated, and synthesized through anamnetic ritualization by the ritual participants themselves.
This study examines Catholic charismatic prayer groups of El Shaddai among overseas Filipino workers in Hong Kong and Singapore through an ethnohistorical analysis of migrant devotional practice. It investigates how prayer gatherings function as sites of identity formation and spatial negotiation. Drawing on theories of religion and space by Thomas A. Tweed (2006) and Kim Knott (2005), the study shows how charismatic practices transform shared environments into temporary sacred spaces. Using interviews, participant observation, and historical reconstruction, it analyzes how praise-and-worship and devotional objects such as rosaries, handkerchiefs, and digital media mediate divine presence while blurring distinctions between official liturgy and vernacular devotion. The findings suggest that migrant religiosity provides both spiritual and socio-cultural support while negotiating authority between lay movements and institutional Catholic structures, producing what the study terms “kabayan spirit in place or out of space.”