Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Contemporary scholars of religion have frequently linked mysticism with the desire for and pursuit of experiential knowledge of the divine. The term mystic, derived from the Greek μυω, meaning hidden, secret, or allegorical, is often used to describe a set of texts and devotional techniques oriented around a specific subset of contemplative thought and practice.  However, scholars also recognize that mysticism is a capacious category. Niklaus Largier’s recent text, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses, begins with the premise that mystical practices have been continuously reinvented across the centuries. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic production he explores how mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. This paper places his concept of the ek-static threshold in conversation with contemporary writing on trans spirituality to explore how differential and unrepresentable presences and forms of life might facilitate alternative ways of being. 

This paper explores modern, kabbalistic sacred sexuality as a means of seeking from the body, which is both the vehicle and the destination. By analyzing a series of interviews with its modern teachers, I show how practitioners cultivate physical and emotional limit experiences to achieve powerful, altered modes of embodiment. In their own words, they often describe rituals that combine elements of psychology, bodywork, religious ritual, and kink - theorized as a mode of participation which rearranges and alters self, personal relationships, society, and the cosmos as a form of trans-embodied, transpersonal, empowered psychology. In my analysis, I use modern theories of transpersonal psychology to argue that the limit experiences of kabbalistic sacred sexuality become a mode of participation in psychological and cosmological structures that move and transform in multiple domains at once, while centered in the body. In this way we approach the question of not only who is mystic, but what and where it is.

This paper contextualizes Jung’s early occult investigations through the wider historical landscape of the emerging trans-Atlantic intersection of “psychology and religion” in the early 20th c. After locating Jung’s personal experience and subsequent theoretical model of the unconscious as contingent upon his own “occult origins,” I will then turn toward Jung’s mysticism of “the Dead,” by way of his own “channeled” text, “The Seven Sermons to the Dead.” Comprising the final segment of The Red Book, Jung’s “Seven Sermons” challenge historical notions of “who counts” as a mystic, what mystical praxis entails, and the pivotal role of the imagination (or, “imaginal”) in what can be considered a unique melding of cataphatic and apophatic approaches to mystical consciousness.

Scholars such as Alton Pollard, Rachel Harding and Kofi Opoku have long written about Africana mysticism and mystical culture as a core aspect of Africana religiosity. Within Africana traditions, communion with divinity solidifies practicing communities. This communion is a means of communication, affirmation, healing and wellness, integration, vital union and transformation on individual and collective levels. The body is the primary site for divine visitation or communion between the visible (living human) world and the invisible (spirit) world, but aesthetical practices and material items also support these processes. In this paper, I will explore how structures of Africana mystical culture that are critical to comparative discourses on mysticism permeate Black popular culture and performance in ways that demonstrate the multivocality of divinity, the central role of the body, and the generation/solidification of Black vitality. 

This paper responds to the theoretical recontextualization of the Anthropocene as put forward by Lynne Huffer in her 2017 article, “Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy.” Huffer’s return to the ontological categories of “truth” and “death” to theorize human ethical response to climate change speaks to a burgeoning thaumaturgical attitude, which the Anthropocene carries within contemporary theorization. This attitude finds powerful instantiation and enhancement in contemporary works of climate-fiction (Huffer 84). This paper will provide readings of three such novels: Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (2021), Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), and Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021). Each of these works fronts religious and/or mythographical ritual and praxis as a way of creating a new inerrancy by which its human subjects must grapple with a revolutionized ethical life in the midst of climatic disaster.

Mythologizing climate destruction and action has become a regular undertaking of contemporary literature and cinema. Turning to novels by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Richard Powers and to films and miniseries from Darren Aronofsky, Patrick Somerville, Paul Schrader, and Bong Joon Ho, this paper shows how fantastic and realist climate stories similarly redefine reliable knowledge and meaningful intervention. Focusing on climate fiction’s embodied, messy depictions of scientific research alongside its mystical, uncontainable experiences of enlightenment, the paper suggests how theological and philosophical breakthroughs must now come in the midst of climate destruction and action. Eschewing simple optimism or pessimism, it finds in these tales evolved forms of the uncertain, risk-taking hope pursued by theologian-ethicists like Willis Jenkins, Catherine Keller, Jürgen Moltmann, and Michael Northcott. As our oldest wisdom books also attest, living well in the end-times means making them into beginning-times, too.

Contemporary apocalyptic fiction often relies on nostalgia to construct a dichotomy between the present troubles and an idealized (or at least tolerable) past. That construction assumes that the nostalgia is universally shared — that the present disruption to the status quo is dangerous and that a return to "normalcy" is the desired (if not actual) outcome. In Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), the author inverts nostalgia and apocalypticism to demonstrate how the Anishinaabe were already a post-apocalyptic people when the Internet, satellites and capitalism abruptly end. Many Indigenous thinkers understand the Indigenous peoples of North America to have already survived an apocalypse: From the theft of land to the theft of children, Indigenous communities have survived through multiple ends of the world. Rice’s novel highlights that a return to white settler capitalism is far from desirable since that system represents a continuing apocalypse that began in 1492.

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Roger Walsh’s concept “transconventional” religion emphasizes understanding religion and spirituality primarily as a practice or applied philosophy that can deliver enlightenment and bliss to those who undertake its practice without an emphasis on believing something like a creed. Such a viable “wisdom path” could be attractive and beneficial to people in our secular Western societies, whether they still identify as religious believers, or are part of groups that self-identify as “Spiritual but not Religious,” “Dones” (“I’m done with religion) or “Nones” (I belong to no religion”).
This paper explores the example and teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh’s work in this light. Nhat Hanh who stated that his way to renew and refresh Buddhism is by making it simple and very practical in daily life which can be understood as a contemporary wisdom path or spirituality that can speak deeply to seekers in our secular age.

In 2014 Thich Nhat Hanh spoke about the shock he felt upon learning of Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination. In that statement, Nhat Hanh said that he made a “deep vow” to continue what Martin called “the Beloved Community.” Thich Nhat Hanh first heard the term “Beloved Community,” and the related concept at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland, from King, in 1967. After relating the above I will outline how King’s Beloved Community compares to a Buddhist world view, exemplified in the Indra’s Net metaphor, held by Nhat Hanh. I will also cover the main contributions Nhat Hanh made to the understanding of the Beloved Community.

The Vietnamese monk, spiritual leader, and social activist Thich Nhat Hanh has been one of the most influential contemporary Buddhist protagonists and a famous interpreter of the Christian tradition. However, from both Buddhist and Christian camps, he has been criticized as a shallow popularizer of Buddhism and a simplistic harmonizer in dialogue. In this paper, I will argue that Thich Nhat Hanh was an innovative Buddhist thinker in his own right who integrated Christianity in his global vision of mindful living. Deeply rooted in important strands of East Asian Buddhist traditions, he presented both innovative and challenging reinterpretations of central Christian doctrines such as Christology and Pneumatology. In this way, Thich Nhat Hanh’s work can be appreciated as a lasting contribution to Buddhist-Christian dialogue.

Environmental justice work both considers and addresses the historical and ongoing, disproportionate, negative impacts of climate disruption and environmental degradation on human and natural communities least responsible. The last book Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH) published before his death, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, represents his most comprehensive engagement with these issues. This paper will explore the possibilities and limitations of TNH’s perspective and practice for environmental justice studies and activism.

For Thich Nhat Hanh, a poet and Zen calligrapher, every act no matter how simple or mundane was an act of spiritual art—an embodiment of ritual and a living expression of interbeing. Creative arts were woven into his daily life and teaching. He encouraged practitioners, people from diverse traditions drawn to the simplicity of his teaching, to engage in creative work, to deepen awareness by writing poems and composing songs, to draw and dance. Art-making in his teaching is a path to Awakening, and an act of Awakening itself. It is also an essential and powerful practice to plant seeds of peace wherever there is conflict, war, environmental degradation, and oppression.