Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

.

.

.

.

In the wake of Asad’s foundational work, scholarship across the humanistic social sciences has been skeptical of the liberal discourse of secularism. Interrogating the Eurocentrism of the concept, several authors have argued that secularism’s roots in Protestant Christianity render it hostile to Muslims in particular, calling Islam the other of secularism. Are there other ways to understand the relationship between secularism and Islam, for instance, in a non-western democracy such as India? As Muslims organize to reclaim the country’s secular foundations endangered by the ruling Hindu majoritarian government, this paper examines how Muslims harness and refashion the Islamic tradition in their articulation of secularism through ethnographic fieldwork with three Muslim civil society organizations in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications this Muslim activism carries for the methodological framework formulated by Asad for the study of Islam.

This paper takes up both Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular to argue that scholars of religion should engage with Talal Asad as a semiotician: the secular on his terms is a new way of structuring the relationship between a real and its representation. I argue that reading the secular in Asad as a semiotics makes salient, through the work of genealogy, that the defining characteristic of the secular isn’t just that concept and practice are inextricable—it’s the insistence on disclosing how they are co-constitutive. Asad reads secularism as a particular way of naming “how the changes in concepts” associated with the secular—new understandings of citizen and power and myth and pain—“articulate changes in practice": metafiction. The secular, in other words, isn’t just a management strategy—it's a management strategy that operates by explicating its own operation.

This paper inaugurates a theoretical dialogue between secularism studies and the emergent discipline of interreligious studies by reading Talal Asad’s theories of embodied discipline and religious tradition as experiments in interreligious thinking. In Formations, Asad imagines the disciplined body as that which distinguishes Islamic tradition from the demands and foreclosures of secular modernity. This essential dichotomy has shaped debates within secular studies for two decades, but it has similarly been central for interreligious theologians who take the body as a site of relationality across (non)religious difference. Reading together recent contributions to both disciplines through their ongoing struggles with the body can further highlight persistent but unresolved questions as well as generate new insights for interdisciplinary collaboration. Particularly, engaging secular studies and interreligious studies together more clearly illuminates the normative stakes implicit in defining secular discipline, better revealing the Asadian struggle with the body and its ongoing afterlives.

Famously, Asad critiqued Geertz for his definition of model that centered on symbols, explaining that this was not the only way religious meaning was made. In the last decade's intractable debates about the niqab and burkini in France, the niqab's detractors have leveled the objection of "symbolic violence" agains those who would wear them, insisting that the niqab should be read not as a garment but rather as an act of aggression. Using French legal archives, I show the way that this perverts the notion of 'symbolic violence' as introduced by Bourdieu and suggest that Asad's _Formations of the Secular_ still has much to teach us. 

Gustavo Gutiérrez and Lisa Dahill offer critiques of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that commend his self-sacrificial witness while questioning whether Bonhoeffer’s account of suffering is sufficiently nuanced or particular. In contrast to these observations, Bonhoeffer, in reflections like “The View from Below,” indicates that his understanding of history is rightly informed by the experience of suffering. With that in mind, I undertake a critical analysis of Bonhoeffer’s account of oppression based on the aforementioned critiques. I first consider how Bonhoeffer’s biography and theological influences both aid and impede a full-blooded understanding of modern injustice. I then consider how those tensions influence Bonhoeffer’s articulation of suffering in his late theology. Finally, I offer methodological recommendations for theologians inspired by Bonhoeffer’s life and witness. These suggestions affirm Bonhoeffer’s example while relying on Christ’s self-revelation through the Spirit towards a better reckoning with the particular blind spots that impede the work of our hands.

Gustavo Gutiérrez argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology offers a critical diagnosis and laudable exemplar of both the possibilities and limitations of modern Protestant theology in its incomplete analysis of the abuses of power, class, and economic exploitation that lie at the heart of the western, capitalistic enterprise. This paper therefore offers a radical, social reading of Bonhoeffer’s 1933 Christology lectures via Gutierrez in order to recontextualise Bonhoeffer’s idea of the “proletariat Christ” in the context of indigenous-settler relations today. Specifically, it takes Gutiérrez's diagnosis of Bonhoeffer as axiomatic for those of us who participate in theology as white settler peoples in the lands now called Australia and New Zealand. Such modern (settler) theology can only go so far when it fails to take seriously the depths of the injustice and violence which such settler societies are built upon within the histories of European colonisation and displacement of First Peoples.

Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s thoughts, once reconstructed via a critical dialogue, can provide much-needed insight into applying religious truth claims to politics. Arendt emphasizes the role of plural voices for free politics. For her, a solution to the spread of misinformation is to establish and maintain a robust public sphere. For Bonhoeffer, though, this method is limited and incomplete. He argues that Christians must see the world as a space of solidarity among the oppressed, and a Christ-reality that resists both theocratic legalism and vulgar voluntarism must guide their actions. However, Arendt’s sharp judgment of the dangers of a modern society suggests that even a modest version of religious practice cannot remain intact in the face of modern socioeconomic forces. Through a novel interpretation of their political theologies, this paper investigates a way for religion to be a conscientious voice in politics yet eschew becoming a tyrannical force itself.

This paper tries to examine if Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s general insights deepen the ethical reflection of political decision-making today – exploring the issue of humanitarian interventions. Therefor one can highlight Bonhoeffer’s ideas as general orientation marks: 1. Identifying a situation to be one of “complimentary culpability”, 2. Failing to realize an ideal, such as a fundamentally pacifist attitude, 3. Taking responsibility for acting unjustified pending only on one’s conscience and 4. Proving the last necessities.

Bonhoeffer's life and his theology are closely interwoven. Therefor Bonhoeffer’s contemporary context and situation need to be considered. Thus, the time immediately before Bonhoeffer's imprisonment can be considered the creative period of his theological insights, which ethically reflect on the aspect of culpability in hopeless situations. These “situations of complementary culpability” can be generalized as situations of ethical dilemmas. Bonhoeffer’s deep theological insights lead to an anti-principled ethical stance.

This paper will articulate an innovative approach to eco-Buddhism in which the key idea of ‘loving-kindness’ (mettā) will be extended to incorporate eco-mettā, an inherently Buddhist response to the climate crises. I will move the debate away from the discussion of whether we can find ideas within Buddhism which directly respond to the climate crises to suggest ways in which Buddhist ideas can be used creatively to alleviate the suffering caused by the eco-crises. Buddhist ethics can be used to tackle ecological issues and can be used innovatively. The foundational Buddhist message to overcome suffering can address the ecological suffering of future generations. There needs to be a greening of compassion and of the precepts, incorporating the notion of rebirth to have compassion for one’s future rebirths. To discover eco-Buddhism there needs to be an innovative interpretation of Buddhist teachings.

First, drawing on theoretical work in environmental pragmatism, urbanism, and agrarianism, I offer a methodological critique of a dominant approach in scholarship on Buddhism and ecology that is shared by many of those who view Buddhism more positively and those who are more critical.  This approach, in my view, overemphasizes the role that metaphysical ideas play in forming material socio-ecological practices.  Second, I suggest some alternative ways to think about the great diversity of socio-ecological practice in Buddhist traditions, emphasizing a more eco-contextualist approach that is rooted in particular Buddhist communities engaged with the lived environment.  Here, I draw on Julia Shaw’s research on the ways in which Buddhist monks developed engineering and administrative expertise to build large scale irrigation systems as well as literature on Buddhist animism and Buddhism and place.

In 1992, the Taiwanese Buddhist nun Shih Chao-hwei and her followers founded the Life Conservationist Association (LCA) and spearheaded the animal protection movement in Taiwan. By 1996, LCA’s collaborators published a Chinese translation of the 1975 book Animal Liberation by the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Singer’s utilitarian ethics are committed to a naturalist ontology that presumes consciousness arises from the complexity of embodied neural networks. On the contrary, Chao-hwei locates consciousness in the constant blending of subject and object as expressed in the concept of no-self. In this presentation, by comparing the philosophy of Chao-hwei to that of Singer, I consider how Chao-hwei uses the concept of dependent origination to arrive at no-self and the ethics of “protecting life” and “equality of life,” concluding with what the non-ontology of no-self and dependent origination may have to contribute to the philosophical discourse on nonhuman welfare.

Despite the promising fact that animals are included within the same moral and ontological sphere as humans, Buddhist doctrine as it has typically been interpreted presents serious barriers to a robust framework for upholding and defending animal rights. Chief among these is the moral hierarchy which dictates that harming animals is significantly less problematic than harming humans, and that only direct, intended killing brings the karmic retribution associated with this act. Drawing on the classical Indian Buddhist textual-philosophical tradition, as well as a contemporary case study of a proposed abattoir in Bhutan, this paper will examine the philosophical arguments marshalled for and against the morality of indirect or unintended harm and killing of animals in order to explore the possible basis for animal rights in Buddhism, and the implications for Buddhist environmental ethics more broadly.

Since their inception, animal ethics and environmental ethics have constantly found themselves at odds with one another. Animal liberation has traditionally centered individual sentient beings in its moral thought whereas environmental ethics has concerned itself with holistic valuations of ecological communities. This tension has created fairly wide rifts between the fields that, in western philosophical settings, have yet to be fully bridged. If, however, we begin from Tibetan Buddhist philosophical principles and articulate a Buddhist approach to the more-than-human world, then this bridge can indeed be built quite naturally. This paper will review this debate and offer a novel way of alleviating the tension between these individualistic and holistic approaches to more-than-human ethics. It will argue that the Buddhist concern for the duḥkha of individual sentient beings necessitates a holistic approach to the environment as a causal factor in pratītyasamutpāda such that environmental ethics emerge out of animal liberation.

The United Methodist Church (UMC) in the United States has become the minority of membership in the world’s largest Wesleyan denomination. In 2022, Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) celebrated 23% international students in its incoming class of Masters students, evidence that American Methodist seminaries are now training clergy from around the world and for service in a diversity of cultural context. Yet the curriculum of Methodist Studies coursework has yet to catch up to the realities of this diverse and globalized church. Through historical case studies and experiences with the diverse student body at BUSTH, this paper considers necessary adjustments to decolonize and diversify Methodist Studies (with a focus on History and Doctrine) in the MDiv curriculum, provides a review of exciting new global sources, and names gaps in research still needed to meet the needs of educating clergy in a diverse and globalized Wesleyan/Methodist church.

Amid the Korean War in 1951, Maoist China initiated the Denunciation Movement among the Protestants – a total denunciation of the churches’ past relationships with the Americans and the missionary enterprise. During the Movement, Methodist Bishop Z. T. Kaung accused his fellow bishops and missionaries of being American imperialists and KMT spies. He also accused the Methodist Church as a tool of American imperialist invasion. Many church members, shocked and frustrated, left the church. Methodism in Red China shrunk and was dismantled in 1958.

This paper studies this so-called anti-imperial and decolonizing Movement and its impact on Chinese Methodism. It argues that such a state-led political movement was spiritually destructive even if framed as part of an indigenization effort, including the structural reform of discontinuing all relations with the sending church. The Movement also hindered organic decolonial reflections and reforms as it left no room for fair historical reassessments.

This study suggests us read Wesleyan and Methodist history from indigenous perspectives and use transnational framework to expand the understanding of Wesleyan and Methodist traditions. Wesleyan and Methodist history has long been dominated by histories told from western perspectives focusing on its history in Europe and North America. However, the focus has limited its history to the West or Methodists from the West overlooking the development of Wesleyan and Methodist traditions in the rest of the world through its encounter with people, culture, and ideologies in the global South. Furthermore, the regional focus on the West not only ignored its history in the global South but multifaceted transnational influences shaped through the friendships, exchanges, negotiations, and tensions between Methodists worldwide. In this paper, I ask how reading history from indigenous perspectives and using transnational framework may help us reconceptualize Wesleyan and Methodist history.

The Islamic tradition has a long history of engagement with the Hindu tradition. However, there are not many sources from the past that contain detailed examinations of Vaiṣṇava theology. This paper explores an important area of comparative theological inquiry in regards to Vaiṣṇava-Muslim dialogue, namely the centrality of the prakṛti-puruṣa divide in Vaiṣṇava theology and its lack of equivalent in Islamic theology. The argument will explore to what extent the cosmological doctrines articulated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa may be incommensurable with Islamic theology. Vaiṣṇava theological arguments for the ontological equivalence of the spiritual world (Vaikuṇṭha) with puruṣa will be contrasted to Islamic eschatological doctrines regarding the ultimately created nature of experience in the Hereafter (al-Ākhira). Possible avenues for reconciliation will be explored, but the focus will be on proper representation of Vaiṣṇava views in conversation with the author's own theological commitments as a Muslim.

Islam’s relationship with other great faiths is perhaps among the most important issues of “modernity” that Muslims in Europe and North America have had to negotiate. Through an exploration of Martin Nguyen’s Muslim theology of prostration, Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī’s expansion of the dār  paradigm, and Fayṣal al-Mawlawī’s emphasis on shahāda (witnessing), I posit the notion of dār al-shahāda  (the abode of witnessing). The presentation concludes with a comparative theological meditation between dār al-shahāda and Christian missiology with implications for Muslim-Christian engagement.

In exploring the potentials of comparative theology as contextual theology, this paper adapts a form of Fr. David Burrell’s method of triangulation, which usually introduces a third individual theological voice from the Abrahamic traditions as a means to illuminate and break impasses that can occur in a two-way dialogue (Burrell 2011). Instead of a third theological tradition, *a contemporary case study of a practice-based theological source, plays the functional role of the third source*, breaking stagnation and creating opportunities for new exchange. Through this case study, the particular–the practical theological insights of contemporary Christian and Muslim peacebuilders–becomes a partner in comparison. The particular provides purpose and recalibration within the comparative theological exercise, and pushes this study on the future oriented virtue of hope and its complementary opposite, fear, to arrive at practical, applicable conclusions on how to cultivate hope oriented to God that persists in the midst of earthly uncertainty.

Both Christian and Islamic theology affirm Christ as prophet. Yet as Kristin Johnston Largen has observed, within Christian discourse Jesus’ prophethood “has been marginalized for centuries in favor of his identity as savior.” In the realm of Christian theology, this lacuna may lead to a christology which is insufficiently prophetic – in other words, an understanding of Jesus Christ which de-emphasizes the apocalyptic role of a prophet in speaking out against injustice. Creatively engaging the concept of embodied prophethood via Michael Muhammad Knight’s work on the prophetic body; Graybill’s description of the queer prophetic body in the Hebrew Bible; and influential descriptions of Jesus’ prophetic role by Calvin and Barth, this exploration of prophetic christology will attempt to find common ground between Christian and Islamic approaches to Jesus’ prophethood in the interest of a shared commitment to justice and social transformation.

Critical Phenomenology opens up space for the return to experience in religious studies. It does so by taking seriously the historical, social, and political constraints that shape our world, without losing sight of the experiences of individual persons living under those constraints. Given the polarized discourse surrounding the role of experience in religious studies—especially in light of the turn to new materialism and affect studies and away from purely structural analyses—critical phenomenology offers us a valuable tool for navigating the theoretical challenges we face. I contend that one of the more controversial subjects in phenomenology (and religious studies), what is called the first-person perspective, remains a necessary tool to understand our own normative engagements with what we study. I critically engage with Saba Mahmood’s normative vision (or lack thereof) in the _Politics of Piety_ in order to demonstrate the ongoing importance of this account of the self.

This paper interprets the film _The Embrace of the Serpent_ (2015) through a critical phenomenological lens and claims that the film exemplifies how “unconscious” or “anaesthetic” experiences might be understood not as defective modalities of experience, but as central aspects of it. The paper uses Cressida Heyes’ (2020) notion of the “anaesthetic” as a useful concept to think through experiences that usually fall outside the scope of traditional phenomenological assumptions about subjectivity and agency. In this case, the “anaesthetic” will be used to reflect on the function of hallucinatory experiences for indigenous peoples in the Colombian Amazon, as represented in the film. In a broader sense, the paper aims to exemplify how recent scholarship in critical phenomenology might offer useful tools to the philosophy of religion and to religious studies in general, especially in relation to questions of agency, experience, perception, and temporality.

If "Critical Phenomenology" is to be taken seriously as a methodology within Religious Studies, it must contend with not only problematic caricatures of Critical Theory and Phenomenology, but also Phenomenology of Religion. This paper explores Philosophy of Religion’s problematic past and its association with either theological projects or grandiose and supposedly universal theories of "Religion." It reflects upon a recent methodological experiment conducted in collaboration with a sociologist to argue that there are _already_ philosophers of religion engaging in phenomenological work that is both thoroughly rooted in particularity and thoroughly compatible with empirical verification. Ultimately, it concludes that Critical Phenomenology of Religion serves to renew—rather than simply dismiss—the history of the discipline.

Does history structure meaningful personal experience? If so, how might scholars carefully study historical events that constitute meaningful human experiences across time and space? This paper thinks through the compatibility of phenomenological and dialectical approaches to the historical study of religion. I argue that a critical, phenomenological approach tempers the historians' natural attitude–a “change-over-time” approach to historical study–by providing a means for criticizing what historians take for granted in the constitution of meaningful experience. Though phenomenology of religion may be contemporarily unfashionable to some, Africana scholars of religion have retooled phenomenological approaches to the study of religion to elucidate both the essential historical conditions constituting Africana religious experience and how these historical factors bear on the personal manufacture of meaning for Africana subjects. I extend lines of thought initiated by Dianne Stewart & Tracey Hucks, Ezra Chitando, and Charles Long regarding the facility of phenomenology to the historical study of Africana religion.

This paper addresses the issue of filial piety in Thai, Lao and Khmer Buddhism through two notions that are the core of the regional religious practice, udissa and guṇ, both borrowed from Pali and Sanskrit lexicons. The first term, udissa (uthit in Thai-Lao, utoeh in Khmer) appears both in ancient local sources and contemporary religious practice at the centre of expressions designating the offering of merit with others, especially deceased relatives. As for the term guṇ, it has the sense of ‘virtue’, ‘benefit’ or ‘merit’. This term has locally been given an additional meaning, as it also refers to the ‘body components’ that progenitors pass on to their offspring during gestation. Here the term guṇ takes, by extrapolation, the meaning of ‘legacy’, or ‘debt’ held by parents towards their child, which he must ‘recollect’ and ‘repay’ in order to be a good Buddhist.

Since at least the sixteenth century, the doctrinal articulation and ritual expression of filial debts and filial gratitude in Theravada contexts have occupied the core of religious motivation and practice for many Buddhists in mainland Southeast Asia and beyond. Recent studies have demonstrated the deeply intertwined approach to expressing and repaying filial debts within Khmer, Lao, and Thai Buddhist cultures, with specific attention given to exegetical Pali commentaries, vernacular manuals drawn from the esoteric meditation tradition in Laos and northern Thailand, and vernacular poems from Cambodia. This paper extends these analyses to the range of chanted poems on gratitude to parents that grew in popularity throughout the twentieth century in Central and Northeast Thailand, situating them as twentieth-century irruptions of older currents across the region, in which the affective dimensions of love, grief, debt, and gratitude between parents and children shape the performance and reception of Buddhist verse.

While some debts in Theravada contexts, such as those to parents, are considered congenital, acts of merit-making can also create new debts of gratitude that in turn produce, reinforce, or rework bonds of kinship. Applying insights from Grégory Kourilsky and Trent Walker into the central place of filial debts and filial gratitude in Buddhist thinking and practice to a 1982 volume of linked biographies of Buddhist nuns in Burma (thilashin), this paper explores how communities form and feel in the exchange of debts of gratitude called in Burmese "kyezu" (kyeḥ jūḥ), an intrinsically relational term that signifies a deed offered in service to others that requires return. Tracing intertextual references and social maps drawn in the biographies, this paper illustrates how acts of kyezu deployed by thilashin are textually prefigured, strategically performed, and affectively textured in service to local formations of religious authority and the communities oriented to it.

This paper examines representations of children’s karmic culpability in medieval Chinese Buddhist miraculous tales from the fourth to tenth centuries CE. By analyzing miraculous tales through an age-critical lens, and with a sensitivity to cultural definitions of children and childhood, this paper argues that children occupied an ethical position distinct from adults in medieval Chinese Buddhism. Miraculous tales evince an age-dependent notion of karmic culpability, according to which children younger than six or seven (seven or eight _sui_ 歲) could not accrue negative karma. Age-dependent karma emerged as medieval Chinese Buddhist adherents reconciled Buddhist ethical principles with Chinese sociocultural ideas of a late-developing moral consciousness. The paper further traces narratological patterns to identify when, why, and how children were held karmically liable for their own actions. I show that an analysis of children forces scholars of Buddhism to reconsider the workings and logic of fundamental Buddhist doctrines like karma.