Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Recent posthumanist and "new materialist" critiques have challenged deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the character of moral agency as an individualized, intentional, psychological, uniquely human operation of freedom. The dawn of the Anthropocene has further complicated this picture, producing aporias involving (1) disjunctions between human accountability for environmental destruction and its unintentional character, (2) human biopower and geopower, and (3) images of human exceptionalism or mastery and the ongoing decentering of human agency.  In response to these ethical challenges this paper presents an account of "ecological agency," and explores how this notion might be linked to the "greening" of various religious traditions reflected in today's vibrant field of religion and ecology.  This exercise, I argue, can both sharpen emergent understandings of moral agency and add to the toolkit for comparative religious ethics.

Most scholars agree that CRE has made some progress in addressing ethnocentrism and distinguishing itself from Christian ethics, yet admit that the approach is still not wholly free of these tethers. I argue that one way to mitigate biases in CRE’s methodological norms further is by regularly engaging non-Abrahamic moral-religious groups through interdisciplinary approaches. This paper thus highlights how a grounded, multidisciplinary study of Native American religions, ethics, and movements can helpfully expose remaining Christian and ethnocentric biases within CRE that may otherwise remain hidden or unaddressed. To do so, it first recounts the scholarly consensus regarding how much Christian bias remains in CRE; it then turns to recently published work on CRE and Native American religious groups to show how interdisciplinary approaches can help ethicists mitigate ethnocentrism, gather data more accurately, and move our guild toward greater inclusivity and generative discourse.

This paper examines the reach of ethnocentrism in the field of comparative religious ethics (CRE) and argues that while the discipline has moved beyond explicit forms of “parochialism and Western bias” that plagued earlier studies, it still suffers from implicit forms of ethnocentrism that are most often expressed in putatively “universal” categories of comparison. I suggest that categories of comparison or bridge concepts like virtue, subjectivity, or perhaps even “morality” betray specific conceptual histories that can be indexed to the discourse of modern, Western philosophy. Rather than searching for “thin” concepts with universal aspirations, we should on the one hand “parochialize” the discourse of CRE as irreducibly Western and on the other practice greater methodological charity by privileging the categories of thought that are native to non-Western traditions. This kind of methodological charity would not only complicate the categories of comparison but complicate the project of comparison itself.

Indigenous activist-writer Winona LaDuke posits that relational disruptions constitute an intentional consequence of techno-industrialism’s broad sweep across global ecosystems and multifarious human communities, rendering homelands into natural resources, communities into categorical differences, rooted knowledge into a past-tense progressivism toward the urban skyline, and vulnerable bodies into marketable skills and employable time (1).  This paper grounds in ethics distilled from life-affirming, future-looking traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) rerooted in urban Indigenous restauranteurship.  As climate innovators report that plants with deeper roots equate with a greater capacity to remove harmful greenhouse gas concentrations from the atmosphere, perhaps a similar understanding of human rootedness, as demonstrated in urban-located TEK, may further climate recovery both epistemologically and practically, exerting a Teflon-esque TEK technology against harmful ideologies and deracinating disruptions to place-based community knowledge.

Source:

Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1999, 2.

Rastafari, as a technology of healing for Black women, has been an under-articulated area of analysis in Rastafari Studies and Religious Studies because sistren were often excluded from chalice reasoning rituals that brethren sanctioned and that anthropologists witnessed. Despite such exclusions, Rastafari women have cultivated rituals of healing, which recover them from the triple negation of being Rastafari, Black, and women and achieve justice. This paper explores Rastafari women’s healing justice as central to Rastafari philosophy and integral to innovating healing technologies for more equitable futures.

Following the model of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, this paper examines spiritual practices that might provide grounding necessary for US institutions to aid in the healing of national, historic trauma inflicted by ideologies and practices of White supremacy.  Brave Heart’s model addresses historic trauma through (1) truth-telling (2) understanding the trauma (3) releasing the pain and (4) transcending the trauma. While Brave Heart’s spiraling steps are guided by the centrifugal pull of Return to the Sacred Path for indigenous communities, her model has been adapted by institutions like Jesuit-run Red Cloud Indian Boarding School to address the historic trauma of those who also have been perpetrators and beneficiaries of the sins of White supremacy. Identifying spiritual capital in the archives, this paper presents a grounding that might sustain our efforts to name White supremacy as a national trauma perpetrated through White Christian institutions, and to hold those institutions accountable.

The ways in which the association between religiosity and measures of personal and social well-being differs between groups, in particular for immigrant and indigenous adolescents, needs further investigation in the scholarly literature. Using data from Wave I (n = 14,384) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent and Adult Health, we investigate the impact of religious engagement (religious affiliation and religious participation) on measures of health and well-being (physical, social, and psychological health) for adolescents aged 11-19 in the United States. Using regression techniques, and indigeneity and nativity as moderators, we demonstrate the impact of cultural identity on the relationship between religion and health. While there is a robust overall relationship between religious engagement and perceptions of well-being, it is partially moderated by an individual’s identification as indigenous or foreign born. Thus, the varied dimensions of situated religiosity rooted in social identity frame one’s experience of health and well-being.

 Intersectional perspectives of people within historically marginalized communities are challenging mainstream narratives and the lessons found within Mujerista Theology allow for the contextualization of modern Latina experiences in the United States. Through the case study of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this paper will look at lo cotidiano of the everyday for a Latina in the U.S through Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz’s five main form of injustices: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and systemic violence. Providing examples of how the COVID-19 pandemic and other accompanying crisis support the theological arguments laid out for many decades, this paper hopes to highlight the importance of Mujerista perspectives that advocate for the advancement and protection of Latinas. Mujerista theology will be applied through a lens of policy, economics and health disparities in hopes of both naming and resisting la injustia experienced by Latinas while also celebrating las luchadoras que son las mujeres Latinas.

At present medical decisions made across the spectrum of modern healthcare are obliged to fit a provider’s understanding of idealized human longevity to find support. As witnessed during the depths of the pandemic, the longevity stance crumbles when there is no ideal patient outcome, leading to disproportionate amounts of moral injury, burnout, and disconnection. This paper introduces an alternative philosophical structure into the American healthcare system, something I call relational-hedonism, modeled on the ethical and theological framework of contemporary Paganism. Changing the underlying philosophical motivation that defines America’s medical system will be the most substantial and sustainable intervention we can undertake to combat the inequalities seen today. By prioritizing a relational form of pleasure where patients and workers forge mutual joy instead of longevity or utility within our “post” pandemic era of healthcare we can actively re-invigorate our damaged sense of common humanity and salvage the soul of American medicine.

Theology of the Powers can inform spiritual care at safety net hospitals by providing a framework for understanding the spiritual dimensions of these issues, and for addressing them in a holistic and compassionate manner. This paper reflects on a mixed-methods study conducted at safety net hospitals. Based on findings, strengthening spiritual care at safety net hospitals requires a multidisciplinary approach involving collaboration between healthcare providers, chaplains, social workers, administrators and community organizations to confront gaps in spiritual care provision as well as identify mechanisms to transform challenges and barriers to increasing the resources, capacity, and support for spiritual care services in low-resourced healthcare settings. A Theology of the Powers at safety-net hospitals can provide a powerful and transformative perspective for strengthening spiritual care, helping to support patients and families through the complex social and cultural forces that shape their lives and working to promote healing and justice in our communities.

This paper addresses the nexus between mind, information and mental causality. How is it that the mind—what we think of as a mental entity, with a first-person perspective—how does the mind cause the brain to register particular neuronal states affecting the physical material of the brain and the body? As a way of probing the question of mental causality, we look here at the limit case of yogis using mantras, magical formulas, as a mental mechanism employed not only as a means for transforming a person’s state of mind, but also as a means to effect events outside of a person’s own physical body. This paper draws from a variety of sources, medieval Sanskrit texts, the work of the 20th century yogi scholar-adept Gopinath Kaviraj, contemporary neuroscientific work on the concept of information and mind to tease out the links between mind and the brain in relation

The second-season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man” famously raises the question, “Does Commander Data have a soul?” Commander Data is an android and is one of the most beloved characters in Star Trek. This paper will examine the question, “Could an artificial intelligence, from the perspectives of various Dharma traditions, be possessed of jīva, the soul or essential life force of a living being?” The paper will examine various permutations of this question from the perspectives of different Dharma traditions. The Buddhist conception of ‘self’ as a process, for example, will be considered, along with Jain and Hindu concepts of jīva. The work of Marie Kondo, who recommends that we thank inanimate objects before we recycle them, will also be considered, along with the ethos of reverence for all entities, even those conventionally regarded as inanimate, which Kondo’s approach entails. 

This is a work of philosophical reflection based on my formation in Indian and European philosophy broadly.  My arguments are also based on my lay understanding and use of AI technology, as well as Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of AI:  Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (Harvard University Press, 2021).  Larson argues that AI technology as it exists today and into the foreseeable future is not taking us one step closer to general intelligence, despite its dazzling ability to produce on command various images, prose, and poetry, and to organize data across an increasingly wide range of applications.  The inferences that are required to comprehend a newspaper or hold a conversation with an understanding of its meaning cannot be programmed, learned, or engineered with our current knowledge of AI.  

Critical posthumanism locates the human as a historical construct that is culturally and epistemically bounded. Modernity is a phase of the universalization or globalization of such a construct which has reached its limit. This paper will ask how one can understand dharma under these conditions and if yoga can provide us with new goals of becoming for our time.

This paper explores how the body bereft and body credit work in India's Traditional Dalit Religious Knowledge (TDRK)systems. Conceptualizing body bereft as the social condition of the negative symbolic value of body representations in the casteist society. Dalits are body bereft. By body credit, it is meant the creative reclaiming of symbolic value and agency of the subaltern by discrediting the hegemonic imprints through ritual performativity. To illustrate the body bereft and body credit in the TDRKs,  the paper focuses on two TDRKs in South India, Pottan Theyyam and Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha(PRDS).

The relationship between identity, self-actualization, and religion can be a tumultuous one depending on how closely someone’s body aligns with the expectations of society or their faith. Is there a way to decenter normative constructions of identity so people can live a life being more authentic to themselves and others? Using a qualitative approach to bring together feminist and religious scholars with grassroots queer discourses, the ways people think about gender for oneself and for others can be reimagined to embrace the inherent fluidity of human identities in challenging ways to hegemonic expectations. This antireal gender ontology not only changes individual embodiments in liberative ways by repositioning the body as its own unclassifiable form but can affect religious studies by refocusing how certain gendered doctrines, theologies, and interpretations of sacred texts are understood, hopefully in ways which reduce harmful power dynamics in academia and subvert religious expectations for identity.

Feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz, engagingly probes the various ways in which feminist theory holds the potential to generate concepts that “enable us to surround ourselves with the possibilities for being otherwise” (2012:13-14).[1] The Anthropocene, although a troubling concept in itself – locating humans at the center of being and belonging – denotes our current time of anthropogenic ecological disruption. The Anthropocene requires us to engage critically, think imaginatively and creatively about the study of religion. This paper uses insights from Anthropocene feminism to think creatively about bodies and religion. It explores through empirical material, the various ways in which the bodies we study, embody and perform can hold ‘possibilities for being otherwise’.

[1] Grosz , E. ( 2012 ), “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges”, in H. Gunkel , C. Nigianni, and F. Soderback (eds), Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, 13–22, New York: Palgrave, Macmillan.

Medieval Japanese Buddhists debated the relationship between moral conduct and salvation, widely understood as birth after death in the Buddha Amida’s Pure Land. Some argued that faith rendered rules of proper behavior unnecessary to attain birth in the Pure Land. This paper examines medieval Japanese debates over whether Pure Land teachings license individuals to commit evil. It focuses on Hōnen (1133-1212) and his followers, with whom the discourse of “licensed evil” is closely associated. Hōnen taught that salvation is achieved only by chanting Amida’s name (nenbutsu) and relying totally on his compassion. As his doctrine spread, however, some devotees used it to legitimize the violation of conventions. In this paper, I situate antinomian readings of Hōnen’s doctrine within a broader undercurrent of anxieties over attainment of salvation and show that “licensed evil” became a focal point of debates over how to interpret Hōnen’s doctrine of the exclusive nenbutsu.

In the early twentieth century, militarists eager to dignify violence in service to the modern Japanese state promoted the writings of the Zen priest Takuan Sōhō (1573–1645). To reassess the relationship between Buddhism and violence, as well as Takuan’s role in theorizing that relationship, this paper develops a systematic analysis of the metaphors Takuan used to conceptualize violence. Focusing on Takuan’s works addressing a warrior audience, “The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom” (Fudōchi shimyōroku) and “The Annals of [the Sword] Taia” (Taiaki), I will show that Takuan employed metaphor in three important ways: (1) to explain the ‘non-stopping mind’—his neologism for non-attaching immovable wisdom; (2) to analogize swordsmanship to Buddhist practice; and (3) to liken warriors to bodhisattvas. Based on theories of metaphorical conceptualization and master tropes, I will show that Takuan endorsed swordsmanship practiced with the non-stopping mind as a warrior’s entry into the path towards enlightenment.

From 1870 through 1895, the Maruyamakō movement spread rapidly through eastern Japan. It was characterized by outsiders as a millenarian movement with secret, subversive teachings. It is often described as peaking at 1.38 million members in 1889. Maruyamakō’s charismatic founder Itō Rokurōbei has been interpreted in the past as reviving an early modern popular morality. My research instead emphasizes the prominence of faith healing in the group’s spread, and explains its history using the concept of "doctrinalization" which emerges in the history of Sect Shinto. I look at several documents published between March and September 1885 which attempted to control the Maruyamakō movement by imposing doctrine on them. These attempts proved futile, but greater administrative oversight allowed Maruyama Kyōkai to establish strict control over the production and copying of Itō Rokurōbei’s messages from 1887 until his death in 1894.

This study examines the evolving roles of a faith-based social welfare program, the Maitri Help Service, in providing care services in contemporary Japan. Launched in 1998 by the lay Buddhist group Kōdō Kyōdan in Yokohama, the Maitri Help Service offers a wide range of eldercare services to the public. In light of Japan's aging population and the COVID-19 crisis, this ethnographic study investigates the development of the Maitri Help Service and its interactions with external institutions. It seeks to understand the intricate dynamics that this program navigates with multiple interested parties in the non-profit sector. This study argues that the interrelationships between the Maitri Help Service, its parent religious organization, and external institutions are crucial in shaping the program’s actions and visions of how faith can bridge care and caring in times of crisis and enable opportunities for future development.

Samuel Colt’s revolvers helped create what we now call American gun culture, thanks in large part to his wife Elizabeth’s work after his death in 1862. She actively shaped how Sam was remembered through stone memorials, charitable foundations, and literary works. Most notably, this included building a grand gothic church near his Hartford, Connecticut factories in 1866. While the church is certainly noteworthy for how it incorporates gun iconography into its exterior (including intertwining with crosses), inside, its Memorial Window depicts Joseph of the biblical book, Genesis, complete with a face that resembles Sam Colt. This window reflects Elizabeth’s effort to paint Sam as a Protestant American hero, baptizing the products of Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, and laying the groundwork for the “God and Guns” culture that views Christianity and gun ownership as not only as inseparable, but intrinsic to what it means to be a “true” American.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the attitudes of white evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants toward the regulation of firearms shifted dramatically. Before the 1950s, evangelicals and Fundamentalists—if they discussed firearms at all—generally supported the limited regulation of the private ownership of firearms and rarely considered the theological implications of gun ownership. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these attitudes evolved, with many conservative evangelicals viewing the ownership of firearms, the protection of the second amendment, and the resistance of the regulation of firearms as core aspects of their religious and political identities. This paper traces the evolving views of white conservative evangelicals’ views on the regulation of firearms during the twentieth century. Throughout, the paper attempts to illustrate these changes by comparing how mainline evangelical protestants, Neo-evangelicals, and more conservative Protestant groups began developing competing interpretations of guns and their place in American society.

After yet another mass shooting occurs in the United States, what do religious leaders say to the people in their congregations who come to worship? Using the tools of digital humanities and discourse analysis, I explore the diversity of pastoral discourse around gun violence by examining transcripts of worship services immediately following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022. Religious leaders took many different approaches in addressing their congregations that weekend, but they each articulated a vision of how the congregation should respond to gun violence that was linked to their religious identity. It is my hope that identifying the scripts, core narratives, and themes that emerge from this discourse has the potential to impact the devastation of gun violence in this country.

Why did a Catholic priest translate segments of the Qur'an into his self-made language Volapük? What use is a Qur’an translation into a variant of Tamazight so purified of Arabic expressions that few Tamazight speaker are able to understand it? Most studies of Qur'an translations do not offer answers to these questions because of their focus on the communicative function of translations. Conversely, this paper argues that the production of Qur’an translations has a performative function that makes them no less important than the much better-researched Biblical translations. The paper will center marginalized languages and show how the Qur’an is positioned in attempts to define their status, and how these languages in turn define the status of the Qur’an. While the production of Qur’an translations in such cases has a largely symbolic quality, their mere existence contributes to centering the marginal and making the obscure visible.

This article explores the role of the Muslim World League (MWL) in authorizing translations of the Qur’an. Established in 1962 by Saudi Crown Prince Fayṣal b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl Saʿūd, the MWL aimed to assert moral and political authority over the entire Muslim world. The article argues that Qur’an translation was an important part of the MWL’s strategy for promoting Islam globally. Despite the Qur’an being considered an “untranslatable text,” the MWL successfully completed six translation projects in languages such as Japanese, Yoruba, and Turkish. Through analyzing the history and stories behind these translations, the article shows how the MWL’s experience contributed to the Muslim community worldwide by providing “authorized” translations. This idea of institutional authority in translation, where the role of publisher, reviser, and approving body played a decisive role, went beyond the individual experience of the translator. The article concludes that the MWL’s success in authorizing Qur’an translations played a pivotal role in establishing the King Fahd Glorious Qur'an Printing Complex, which remains the largest Qur’an printing and translation factory today.

Ibn Taymiyya’s "Introduction to the Principles of Qur’anic Hermeneutics," (Muqaddima fi usul al-tafsir) has arguably become one of the most important classical manuals to understand the medieval Qur’anic commentary tradition and its hermeneutic viewed as normative way to understand the Qur’an.  However, in the most recent edition of the Muqaddima, the editor Sami b. Muhammad b. Jad Allah contends that the last two chapters are wrongly attributed to Ibn Taymiyya and are in fact the writings of Ibn Kathir.  Jad Allah makes his argument based on the chapter’s writing style, pre-modern citations and various manuscripts.  I am inclined to Jad Allah’s reasoning but believe more pre-modern and manuscript work needs to be done to conclusively establish the argument.  This discussion is significant because it speaks to the construction of modern exegetical orthodoxy and how the medieval tradition has been transmitted to us.     

This paper examines how, within the ontological framework of the Qur’an, the concept of israf or waste can be understood in not only material terms but also epistemic ones. This paper argues that within this Qur’anic framework, epistemic waste occurs when the meaning-content of an existent entity is unacknowledged or insufficiently apprehended by its recipient. Utilizing Said Nursi’s (d.1960) hermeneutics of approaching the cosmos as scripture or ayat in which divine names are constantly being manifested, this paper examines how israf as conceptualized throughout the Qur’an, looks to the epistemological nature of the world in which all entities are carriers of divine names not to be wasted, materially and epistemically. Understanding israf within the broader theological epistemology of the Qur’an can be a critical step in constructing an Islamic eco-ethic that is not divorced from the broader telos of its scripture.

This paper elucidates a Quranic framework of *shura* as a relational theology of care. Drawing on four references from the Quran this paper highlights what may be considered an implicit norm as encouraging a theology of relationality in interpretation of Revelation and Divine communication between caregiver and careseeker. Engaging with Toshiko Izutsu’s *Revelation as a Linguistic Concept in Islam*, Grau and Wyman’s *What is Constructive Theology?* this paper posits *shura* as a practice of care in Muslim practical theology.  

The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) were a ninth-tenth century Shi’ite philosophical movement from Basra. Most modern scholars have denied that Hermeticism as a distinct school of philosophy ever existed. Due to this, earlier studies have not shown what role Hermetic and Neopythagorean mysticism played in the Treatises of the Brethren of Purity. This paper rejects a theory posed by André-Jean Festugière and Kevin van Bladel that Hermeticism is merely a bricolage of concepts. Instead, as Christian H. Bull and J. Peter Södergård have argued, this paper supports the theory that a distinct form of Hermetic mysticism is present in the Brethren of Purity’s Treatises and that they used magic, theurgy, and numerology to achieve mystical union with the Universal Soul through invoking spirits (angels and jinn). These spirits taught the Brethren empirical sciences and also how to unite with the Universal Soul.

This talk engages in what I argue to be the continuation of the ancient philosophical tradition of the care of the self (epimeleia heautou) as formulated by Michel Foucault in the Islamic context.  While many elements found new life in the Islamic world through the engagement with Hellenistic philosophy following the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, I will focus here on the Platonic notion of recollection (anamnesis) and the echoes of Platonic epistemology in Islamic philosophy, theology, and mysticism. The talk briefly charts the reception of Plato’s theory of recollection in the Islamic context, and posits various afterlives of anamnesis in the Islamic world despite widespread rejection of reincarnation and the pre-existence of the soul.  Specifically, I highlight the mode of recollection in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 1210) developed philosophical theology, which I argue to be an ontological rather than epistemological principle.  

The Andalusian mystic ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq ibn Sab‘īn al-Ghāfiqī (d. 1271 CE) has long been considered a radical monist because of his theology of absolute oneness (al-waḥḍa al-maḥḍa).  In this paper, I will argue that the key to this theology comes from a monotheistic gloss on the metaphysics of Proclus (d. 485 CE), as expressed in his work The Elements of Theology.  Two Arabic translations of portions of Proclus’s Elements were made in the medieval period. The Arab translators of the Elements eliminated the pagan parts and transformed the One, which is beyond being for Proclus, into God as the First Cause and the First Being.  For Ibn Sab‘īn, since God as the First and True Being (al-Awwal al-Ḥaqq) must be present in all forms of multiplicity, He is also present in all things.  The outcome of this logic is his monistic theology of absolute oneness.

What must the world be like, to host natural laws as well as their violations? Must one choose between a scientific worldview and a world with a God with untrammeled power? I lay out an interesting strategy in Ibn Sina that attempts to preserve causal powers of nature as well as the possibility of the divine in overriding them to perform miracles. Ibn Sina introduces into the cosmos an extraordinarily powerful agent, a human nonetheless, who functions as a kind of “soul for the world”. Just as our souls influence our own bodies, the soul of a mystic and prophet is said to influence bodies other than their own. By working miracles into his system in this way, Ibn Sina’s theory of prophecy, I argue, brings together his scientific worldview as expressed in his thoroughgoing philosophical works with his more esoteric views expressed in his mystical works.

This paper proves the substantive role that Twelver Shiʿite sources played in the development of medieval Sufi piety, well beyond what is known to modern scholarship.  Specifically, I show how Sufis as early as the 8th/14th c. expressed devotion to the Twelfth Imam of the Shiʿa as awaited Mahdi and supreme spiritual authority or “Seal of the Saints,” through significant reliance on Shiʿite sources.  After considering this doctrine’s origins in Mongol Iran, I sketch its transmission through Persian Sufi orders until the Safavid period (10th/16th – 12th/18th c.).  Prompting a serious return to the old hypothesis of “Shiʿite influence” on Persian Sufism, these sources suggest that the readiness throughout much of Iranian society to accept Shiʿism under the Safavids may have rested partly on a Sufi, specifically emanationist reinterpretation of Shiʿism’s normative claims – but also that such conceptions were too widespread to guarantee confessional outcomes by themselves.