Six panelists consider the systems, circulations, and managerial practices of devotion and dissent in a hybrid panel of short paper presentations and roundtable-inspired conversation. Case studies vary across geography, tradition, race, gender, and other markers of human distinction and social difference-making. Panelists consider the impacts of highway construction on black spiritual landscapes and remembrance practices, mail-order fundraising networks and shadow economies among the Pallotine Fathers, the entrepreneural practices at a Shinto shrine and among evangelical homemakers, and the un/waged labor embedded in Hindu standardized testing systems and as central to the genre of "speaking bitterness" among Catholic nuns in China. A formal response and Q&A to follow short presentations with a business meeting held immediately after.
When the construction of Interstate 94 in St. Paul, MN, ripped through the African American community of Rondo during the 1950s and 1960s, it spawned resistance campaigns, cultural preservation efforts, and, more recently, restorative agendas funded by local foundations and city governments. Associated with famous residents such as Roy Wilkins and August Wilson, the Rondo community has risen to national notoriety. Animated by thriving professional, athletic, and social clubs, hair salons, newspapers, banks, restaurants, and labor unions, before the implementation of eminent domain under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, Rondo was the Twin Cities' Black Wall Street. In this paper, I employ interviews conducted in the summer of 2022 with members of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in St. Paul, MN – to describe how recollections of the displacement and destruction of Black sacred centers inspire new memory landscapes where religious and business life intertwine as integrated and orienting belief systems.
This paper elucidates what a Shinto shrine is in relation to business enterprise. When I worked in a Shinto shrine for the first time, I was told that a religious organization is different from shoubai (business). Through the language, the shrine was trying to emphasize the difference between a shrine and a commercial enterprise. However, I was bewildered when a kannushi (Shinto priest) called himself a salaryman (corporate employee) and shrine a company. This contradiction led me to reflect on what is the difference between a religious corporation and a business corporation. In this paper, I will explore the interpenetration and tension between religious and economic interest in a Shinto shrine, from the perspective of the insiders. Although seeking economic (secular) gain is not appropriate for a religious (sacred) organization, a shrine cannot operate without economic interest. How does the administration manage the shrine, maintaining the appropriate relationship between them?
In 1995, evangelical financial counselor Larry Burkett published Women Leaving the Workplace, a book dedicated to helping American evangelical women quit their jobs and become homemakers. Placing Women Leaving the Workplace in historical context, this paper examines three moral problems in Burkett’s text: the problem of wage work, which took women from their children and left the home vulnerable; the problem of consumer culture, which depleted wages, distracted the family from spiritual pursuits, and resulted in debt; and the problem of dependency, particularly dependence upon welfare, which threatened the moral fiber of both the family and the nation. Burkett solved these problems by encouraging women to bring the workplace home—to import business practices into homemaking and to start home-based businesses. In contrast to the midcentury ideal of the housewife who depended on her husband’s wages, Burkett praised the female entrepreneur as a moral exemplar for an emerging postindustrial economy.
This presentation analyzes one of the world’s largest Hindu standardized testing systems by comparing the waged and unwaged intellectual labors of its test administrators and test-takers. In the early 1970s, the Swaminarayan Hindu sub-group called BAPS (the Bocasanwasi Akshar-Purushottam Sanstha) inaugurated a standardized testing system, which currently tests around 50,000 devotees annually, from young children to senior citizens. This presentation draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews from 2018 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and Chicago, Illinois, with the salaried devotees who administer the testing system and the transnational, unpaid devotees who study and complete the exams every year. Ultimately, I argue that both waged and unwaged devotees engage in knowledge production labor that is invaluable for BAPS as an institution. The small number of waged administrators produce the officially sanctioned theological and historical knowledge standards of BAPS, while the large numbers of unwaged test-takers generate quantifiable yet intimate data on the organization’s transnational community, which organizes and ranks their massive devotee following.
This paper will use the Pallottine Fathers, an order of Catholic priests, to examine how new forms of fundraising challenged notions of religious “authenticity” in the twentieth-century United States. The Pallottine Fathers were pioneers of direct-mail fundraising in the early 1970s. The order sent out millions of pieces of mail every day, each one containing urgent pleas for money and heart-rending pictures of starving children. Pallottine letters also touted the “Pallottine sweepstakes,” with prizes ranging from dinner sets to new cars. This strategy was fabulously successful; the order raised millions. However, investigations revealed the Pallottines were using this money to build a real estate empire rather than to feed starving children. This paper will show how the “shadow economies” of religious fundraising cast a shadow on the American ideal of religious authenticity.