Journal of Korean Religions: Korean Religions and COVID Restrictions

Several of our editors and journals reflect on the changes in the last three years due to the COVID pandemic and how it has changed the face of life as we know it. Likewise editor Don Baker of Journal of Korean Religions established a special section in this issue to reflect on the changes to culture, finances, and rituals affected by lockdowns and the virus.

In his introduction Baker expresses the following:

In this issue, we have three articles delving into how Korea’s Christian communities-Catholic and Protestant-have dealt with a problem of the present: the COVID-19 pandemic. Christians place a lot of importance on regular weekly meetings for worship. The South Korean government, on the other hand, was concerned about those religious gatherings serving as venues for the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus. Different Christian organizations in Korea responded in different ways to their government’s demand that they prioritize concern for public health and temporarily change the way their congregations gather for ritual expressions of their faith.

Articles featured:

“It Isn’t Just Us”: The Korean Catholic Church’s Responses to Corona-19 as Seen in Diocesan Bulletins
Franklin Rausch

The ceasing of public Catholic Masses just before Ash Wednesday 2020 in response to Corona-19 posed a significant problem as it meant Catholics could no longer easily receive Holy Communion, the center of Catholic faith life. Thus, one might have expected the Korean Catholic Church to oppose the limitation or cancellation of religious gatherings. But in fact, the opposite happened, with the Catholic Church being singled out for its support of such policies. This paper explores this response of Catholic leaders to Corona-19 and the theology that undergirded it through an examination of the bulletins of two archdioceses, Seoul and Daegu. It argues that the bulletins promoted a particular Catholic theology that understood adherence to public health measures as analogous to love of neighbor, and that such acts of love would bring a triumph over the virus.

Four Types of Protestant Responses to South Korean Government Measures to Control COVID-19 Outbreaks in 2020-2021
Timothy S. Lee

How did Korean Protestants respond to these anti-pandemic measures? This study seeks to address this question ­focusing on the period between February 1, 2020, when the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention first announced the discovery of the virus in a Protestant church, to November 1, 2021, when the “Living with COVID-19” policy was initiated. Along the way, the study examines tensions elicited by the measures and responses to them- not only between the government and the Protestant communities but also within the communities themselves. In the main, there were four types of Protestant responses to the government’s anti-pandemic measures, described in terms of their agents: willing compliers, begrudging compliers, amenable noncompliers, and defiant noncompliers.

Mediated Faith Coping with COVID-19: A Case Study of a Megachurch in South Korea
Seung Min Hong

While the Republic of Korea coped well with COVID-19 prior to the development of the vaccines, the major outbreaks of the virus in the country were largely caused and/or facilitated by several controversial Christian groups. There have also been many cases of smaller local churches spreading the virus due to their refusal to follow the government’s guidelines for religious gatherings. Meanwhile, major Korean media outlets have mostly focused on cases of uncooperative churches with the short disclaimer ‘the majority of Protestant churches are following the rules.’ What kind of experiences did those ‘cooperative’ churches have to go through then? This paper is a micro in-depth case study which explores a megachurch in South Korea that has supported the government’s safety measures.


Journal of Korean Religions, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)


Special Section: Korean Religions and COVID Restrictions

Introduction to the Special Section: Korean Religions and COVID Restrictions
Don Baker


“It Isn’t Just Us”: The Korean Catholic Church’s Responses to Corona-19 as Seen in Diocesan Bulletins
Franklin Rausch


Four Types of Protestant Responses to South Korean Government Measures to Control COVID-19 Outbreaks in 2020-2021
Timothy S. Lee


Mediated Faith Coping with COVID-19: A Case Study of a Megachurch in South Korea
Seung Min Hong


Research Articles

The Korean Buddhist Military Chaplaincy and Modern “State-Protection” Buddhism: A Study of the Mass Military Faith Promotion Movement
Jonathan C. Feuer


Religious Meaning-Making Narratives for Reconciliation in the aftermath of State Violence: South Korean Christian Perspectives
Hyukmin Kang


JKR invites contributions from senior and junior scholars researching on any aspects of Korean religions from a wide range of perspectives, including religion, philosophy, theology, literature, folklore, art, anthropology, history, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. Articles submitted for consideration should be under 10,000 words in length (including footnotes: bibliographies and appendices are additional) and should not have appeared elsewhere or be under review for publication elsewhere. JKR also welcomes book reviews (up to 1,000 words) and review articles (up to 3,000 words).

Find Submission Guidelines for the Journal of Korean Religions here.

Journals: Shanghai Fever, Divinatory Practices in Burma, Peculiar Molting Behavior of Hermit Crabs + more

China Review International

Volume 27, Number 2 (2020)

The new issue includes the following feature, “Shanghai between Modernity and Postmodernity.” Author Lei Ping explains in the introduction:

Shanghai, an unequivocally distinctive cosmopolitan city, has been a critical subject of scholarly studies and popular interest since the nineteenth century. “Shanghai fever” (Shanghaire), coupled with Shanghai nostalgia, became a sensational literary, cinematic, and cultural phenomenon in the 1990s and has continued throughout the turn of the twenty-first century as the post-Mao era unfolds. After a few temporarily dormant years following the culmination of the fervor, Shanghai has reemerged in recent global scholarship as a path to understand Chinese modernity and China’s rise to the world’s second largest economy. The question as to what kind of pivotal role Shanghai plays in conjuring the so-called China’s lost modernity causes a resurfacing of intellectual debates about Shanghai—“the other China.”

Find more reviews at Project MUSE.

Journal of Burma Studies

Special Issue: Astrological and Divinatory Practices in Burma

Volume 26, Number 2 (2022)

The new special issue is introduced by editors Aurore Candier and Jane M. Ferguson stating:

This special issue of The Journal of Burma Studies is part of a collective and multidisciplinary project which explores astrological and divinatory knowledge and practices in Burma. These practices include fortune telling, divinatory, and therapeutic techniques, and they serve a broader system for the interpretation of past, present, and future events. In Burma, as elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia, astrology and divination rationales are part of social thinking and are also embedded in religious fields (Vernant 1974:10; Guenzi 2021:9). The collective aim of these four articles is to investigate the articulation between astrology, divination, religion, power, and discourse in Burma.

Find this special section and more at Project MUSE.

Journal of Korean Religions

Special Section: Korean Religions and COVID Restrictions

Volume 13, Number 2 (2022)

The new issue includes a special section, “Korean Religions and COVID Restrictions.” Editor Don Baker introduces the section:

In this issue, we have three articles delving into how Korea’s Christian communities—Catholic and Protestant—have dealt with a problem of the present: the COVID-19 pandemic. Christians place a lot of importance on regular weekly meetings for worship. The South Korean government, on the other hand, was concerned about those religious gatherings serving as venues for the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus. Different Christian organizations in Korea responded in different ways to their government’s demand that they prioritize concern for public health and temporarily change the way their congregations gather for ritual expressions of their faith.

Find this special section and more at Project MUSE.

jwh 33-3
Pacific Science Cover volume 76 number 2 2022 April

Pacific Science

Volume 76, Number 2 (2022)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

Spatial Ecology of Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae, Cetacea-Balaenopteridae) from the Mexican Central Pacific
Christian D. Ortega-Ortiz, Andrea B. Cuevas-Soltero,
Reyna Xóchitl García-Valencia, Astrid Frisch-Jordán, Katherina Audley, Aramis Olivos-Ortiz, and Marco A. Liñán-Cabello

Pacific Hibiscus (Malvaceae) in Sect. Lilibiscus. 1. Hibiscus kokio and Related Species from the Hawaiian Archipelago
Lex A.J. Thomson and Brock Mashburn

Peculiar Molting Behavior of Large Hermit Crabs
Rise Ohashi and Naoki Kamezaki

Efficiency and Efficacy of DOC-200 Versus Tomahawk Traps for Controlling Small Indian Mongoose, Herpestes auropunctatus (Carnivora: Herpestidae) in Wetland Wildlife Sanctuaries
Lisa S. Roerk, Lindsey Nietmann, and Aaron J. Works

Status of Forest Birds on Tinian Island, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, with an Emphasis on the Tinian Monarch (Monarcha takatsukasae) (Passeriformes; Monarchidae)
R. L. Spaulding, Richard J. Camp, Paul C. Banko, Nathan C. Johnson, and Angela D. Anders

Find more research articles at Project MUSE.

USJWJ62

U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal

Special Issue: Girls and Literature

Volume 62 (2022)

Guest Editors Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and Wakako Suzuki present the special issue stating:

We are pleased to present this special issue of the U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal (no. 62) on “Girls and Literature.” This issue evolved from a panel titled “The Shōjo Genre and Gendered Discursive Practices: The Rise and Decline of Girls’ Novels in Japan” at the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS) annual conference held at Emory University in January 2020. Our goal was to discuss issues of genre categorization in literature, particularly as they pertain to shōjo shōsetsu, or girls’ fiction (short stories, novellas, and novels).

Find more articles, discussions, and reviews at Project MUSE.