Dominikus Sukristiono

This paper is intended to contribute to the discussion of the “revitalization (renewal) of catechesis in the digital and social media era,” especially in the context of Millennials and Gen Z in St. Antonius Padua Parish, Kotabaru, Yogyakarta. With the advancement of digital media, the inclusion of digital media in the pastoral care of young people, especially evangelization to Millennials and Gen Z, is an urgent need to be followed up by the Church. This paper focuses on the youth’s involvement in digital catechesis towards a synodal church. The authors conducted qualitative research with a naturalistic descriptive design through a participatory observational literature review to collect data. As the Church today echoes the spirit of synodality, God’s people are invited to participate in the mission of the Church with full faith and joy of love because Christ himself sent us to the world to proclaim the Gospel. The main result of this inquiry is that the spirit of synodality in the Church can be seen in the apostolic spirit that each youth carries out to realize a truly Christian life through various services in cybercatechesis. They are active in peer catechism activities, accompanying initiation sacrament lessons, and coaching young people. Their lay apostolic zeal greatly contributes to the wider spread of the Gospel, even reaching many existing places and touching the daily life of Christian people.

The belief that an eternal-atemporal God is present to temporal beings is at the heart of Christian doctrine. The problem with such belief is that there seems to be a metaphysical barrier between them. Therefore, the doctrine of divine timelessness is incompatible with divine presence. This essay will show that such a contention is false, given that His awareness of the temporal beings will be sufficient to account for His presence. Furthermore, this is also consistent with the view about the existence of deep interaction between God and human beings and of human free will. This philosophical analysis is pertinent to the proper understanding of the doctrine of divine eternity and divine presence. It also has a significant bearing on the provision for the basis of a meaningful conversation with other theological traditions, such as those living in Indonesia.

In addition to novelty and relevance, interdisciplinarity seems to be an imperative predicate in the scientific works carried out in Indonesia. Unfortunately, research on the interdisciplinarity itself, particularly from the perspective of philosophy of science, either descriptive or normative, i.e., what and how interdisciplinary has been (and should be) done is still a desideratum. Through database and normative-philosophical analysis, this article shows that most of the interdisciplinary works hitherto carried out are either additive or interpretative/take-over in nature. Such works would be bad scientific practices. Good interdisciplinary works presuppose the existence of interdisciplinary material objects and their formal ones. These normative requirements, however, lead to a dilemma which should be faced by those who work interdisciplinarily.