Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Bowie B (2nd Floor) Session ID: A18-234
Papers Session

The Death, Dying, and Beyond Unit invites papers on the topic of “Embodied Death: Understanding Death from an Intersectional Lens” Our primary session will be a selection of papers on the intersection of death and embodied experience, ranging from thinking about how embodied experiences shape the dying narrative, the ways in which disability is or isn’t accounted for in the dying experience, an examination of the dominant able-bodied and primarily white, male narrative on death as one of decline rather than gain, alongside topics interrogating the understanding of death and from an intersectional and layered lens. 

Papers

This paper approaches the exploration of disability, dying, and death through the lens of fatness. As part of a larger commitment to the project, materially and spiritually, of fat liberation, this paper first engages fatness within the hermeneutics of disability. In challenging the limits of a category that often relies on formal medical and/or legal language and enforcement to provide protections and accommodations, placing fatness as both within said category and outside of it. On the inside, fatness is representative of disability in a material sense insofar as many fat people–because of their weight–have accessibility, mobility, and/or general health conditions and comorbidities that qualify under the legal definition of disabled. However, disability is not singularly a category of material or practical concern, but also of socially and culturally relevant corporal deviance. However, on the outside, fatness is not, in and of itself, considered a disability. This reveals quite a bit about the perceived difference, even if the material and social conditions are exactly the same. The social and cultural implications of deviance produce spectacles of fat death which degrade material and spiritual support options for fat people.

Candida R. Moss proposed that according to John the injuries of Jesus were required to properly identify him as not a ghost, or corpse, but as resurrected (Moss, 2011; Moss 2019). Using this understanding of injury as imperative to identification and therefore identity this paper will explore second-century understandings of the injured, disabled and otherwise disfigured after the resurrection. Using literary analysis and emerging methods from Disability Theology, this paper will reveal how imperfections, both lifelong and incurred were understood to exist on the body after the resurrection. The second-century perspectives explored in this paper are the Gospels of Luke and John and 1 Corinthians, communicating some threads of popular thought on the bodily resurrection.

Many who have reflected on death have recognized that it is misguided to try to understand it. In Ghana, death is not only perceived as predestined and a necessary end but as a transition from this world to the asamando ancestral world. Previously, death transitions were culturally the family’s duty in the Akan sense is the extended family and the community. Mourning activities comprising wailing, singing, drumming, and dancing were a family affair; however, in recent times, material culture has subtly taking-over, changing funerals trends drastically and giving way to more individualistic/modern or nuclear celebrations, making mourning fall in the hands of professional mourners. Nowadays, professional women “criers” are paid to cry at the funerals of strangers.

This paper examines the materiality of the funeral, examining three women's professional crying groups-Ami Dokli and the widows, Mame Ode and group, and Linda Opoku Mensah and sisters, and argues that mourning is essential to a good funeral in Ghanaian society. The ethnographic data was collected from funeral organizations in four selected towns and villages in Ghana. 

This paper seeks to construct a theology of human frailty using the thought of Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar and an appropriation of the methodology of Christological anthropology. In it, I argue that the surprising fact that even Christ’s body can be broken, damaged, and dis-integrated illuminates a surprising element of human creatureliness: we are those who are falling into disrepair. In so doing, I appropriate von Balthasar’s insights regarding the death of Christ to delineate three varieties of human frailty: bodily frailty, psychological frailty, and personal frailty.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 217B… Session ID: A18-238
Roundtable Session

After 9/11, Paul Kahn theorized the difference between the criminal and the enemy as involving law and sovereignty: the criminal opposes the law, the enemy opposes the sovereign. Now, Kahn turns to the case of civil war in conversation with Schmitt and Hobbes. Civil war signals a gap between law and popular sovereignty: citizens no longer perceive their collective authorship in the law. This gap is closed when a revolution succeeds in constituting a new state, a new legal order retaining a trace of sovereign presence. Such a movement traverses the categories of criminal and enemy. Rather than the state emerging from “nature,” one state replaces another. Friends become enemies in this process of revolutionary birth, or civil war, generating the force of sovereignty. This dynamic may haunt us as long as we invest our politics with an ultimate meaning.   

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Stars 1 … Session ID: A18-230
Roundtable Session
Hosted by: Women's Caucus

In light of the 2023 AAR/SBL theme “La Labor de Nuestras Manos,” book authors in this session will address the intersection of women’s daily experiences and the academy—asking questions such as how the hierarchical dualism between public and domestic spheres manifests today within the academic contexts. Speakers will reflect on their recent book publications, considering the factors that perpetuate stereotypes and create taboos around the worth of women’s scholarly works. They will explore topics that are often avoided within academic discussions, such as childbearing, surrogacy, parenting, abortion, rape, and disabilities, and address the question if the lack of engagement with such topics contributes to economic injustices and other justice realities.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221A… Session ID: A18-205
Papers Session

This session engages theological spaces between alienation and incarnation, with attention to racism, slavery, and the environmental catastrophe, and within frameworks that explore creaturely finitude, disability, sabbath, ambiguities, uncertainty, exile, and loss. The session also considers the themes of hope, providence, and eschatology.

Papers

Why were we not offered participation in the life of God from creation’s very beginnings? In this paper, my working hypothesis is that there must be a prelapsarian and an eschatological purpose for a life suspended between creation and eschaton, a raison d’être for finitude that needs to be explored beyond the categories of creation and fall. Drawing on Maurice Blondel’s argument that “natural mortification” is woven into the conditions of agency within finitude, I challenge Karen Kilby’s counterhypothesis that suffering and loss are never good, and that theologians should reject all positive valuations of suffering. I argue that mortification within finitude is crucial, first, for the preservation of the real (and not chimerical) agency of human beings, and second, for the articulation of an eschatological vision that can explain how human beings are destined as human beings, not for de-personalizing pantheistic absorption, but for personalizing union with God.

I examine how Nancy Eiesland’s account of Christ becoming “the disabled God” incarnates disability through the cross, ultimately locating the mode for Christ’s becoming disabled through his propitiation for sin. I argue that this location compromises Eiesland’s goal of detaching disability from its historic association as a sign of fallenness. While other modes of embodiment are incarnated through birth for Eiesland, Christ’s disability is incarnated through crucifixion. By reimagining her anthropology through Eastern Orthodox creation narrative, I am able to reposition Christ’s incarnation into disability within his human nature, specifically within Christ’s passibility. I pair Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius’ descriptions of passibility as contingency with critical disability theory’s descriptions of interdependency, specifically Tobin Siebers’ definition of complex embodiment as contingency. In this reconsidered framework, Christ incarnates disability outside sin or fallenness, accomplishing Eiesland’s goals of resymbolizing disability in Christianity as a part of what it means to be human.

In c. 524 CE, after his unjust condemnation and death sentence, Boethius develops one of the most important formulations of the doctrine of the creation in the Middle Ages. The Consolation of Philosphy recounts the comfort he finds in God’s providential ordering of creation. In 1457, the Portugese chronicler Zurara deploys Boethius’ doctrine of creation to both acknowledge the suffering of newly arrived slaves and to justify their enslavement. Nearly 1000 years later, Boethius’ doctrine of creation, which has achieved near-classical status, is transformed from consolation for the captive to consolation for the captor. Can the classical doctrine of creation be saved from this depoloyment as a tool for oppression? In this paper, I will argue for the doctrine’s ongoing usefulness as a doctrine of limits, the kind of limits that might restrain and subvert human evil, not sustain it.

This paper borrows the scriptural and theological theme of exile, which has become prominent in political theology, to explore the suggestion that creation theology also stands in need of an exilic perspective. Such a perspective would make creation faith more truthful and relevant in a situation of environmental crisis. In full awareness of the way in which exile has sometimes subtended quasi-Gnostic tendencies in theology, I shall argue that a rejection of the exilic perspective makes Christian theology naïve and irrelevant, able to speak of the created world only in a voice of glorious affirmation. In contrast, the exilic perspective  rescues creation faith from captivity to the picturesque, giving voice also to the experience of alienation and brokenness; it suggests that a sabbatical celebration of the creation must often take the form of a defiant hope—a desire for a world we cannot yet see.

This paper explores the space between the expected outcome of a process of creation and the disappointment and devastation that emerge when things do not go as planned. To do so, it draws on both traditional and underrepresented voices from within the theological tradition, from ancient to contemporary, and weaves these voices together with personal narratives of experiences of pregnancy loss and infertility from multiple generations of the same family. Reading the etiological narratives in Genesis from the perspective of God as a frustrated artist may help address some of the tension that arises when readers encounter God the Creator as simultaneously God the Destroyer in them. Such a reading of text and tradition may enable greater comfort with the ambiguity, uncertainty, and chaos present in not only these sacred stories but also in our lives, both public and private, today.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007D… Session ID: A18-226
Papers Session

This panel will host graduate students in Islamic studies at various stages in their dissertation processes and will encoruage interactivity among panelists, as well as constructive feedback from a respondent. 

Papers

*Anā majdhūb, māshī majnūn!* “I am *majdhūb*—not mad!” Attributed to the paradigmatic Moroccan mad saint, ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-Majdhūb (d. 1568), this phrase is enshrined in a plaque hanging behind his tomb in the shrine of the ‘Alawite Sultan Mulāy Ismā’īl (d. 1727). Yet, it also circulates, in Sufi treatises, hagiographic narratives, and casual cafe conversations. It is reiterated to explain a male saint donning women’s clothes and a bearded female saint critiquing the reigning sultan. In each iteration, “*anā majdhūb, māshī majnūn*” invokes then dismisses the specter of madness to justify the deviance of these ecstatic saints. In my dissertation, I ask: What do hagiographic representations and oral narratives of the *majdhūb* reveal about the dynamic of madness, gender, and sainthood? I argue that articulations of the *majdhūb* as deviant illuminate the ways in which anxieties over unreason, gender, and excess shaped the discursive formation of Maghribi Sufism.

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of multiethnic U.S. Muslim civic organizations in the city of Detroit and how such organizations encourage Muslims to cross endemic racial boundaries on the basis of Islamic ethics. Organizations like DREAM of Detroit (“Detroit Revival Engaging American Muslims”) stimulate faith-based commitment to civic action and expose participants to diverse ways of being Muslim, prioritizing just works over specific doctrinal or ritual adherences. Drawing on interviews with leaders and participants as well as participant-observation at organizational events, I show how Muslim civic organizations are not only expressions of Islamic values, but more profoundly, sites of religious cultivation in which what it means to be a U.S. Muslim is taught, negotiated, and debated. I encourage scholars of contemporary Islam to expand normative notions of “Islamic space” and ask how the proliferating Muslim non-profit sector is shaping constructions of Islamic authority in the contemporary United States.

My dissertation investigates how a concept of passionate, mad love—‘ishq—became mainstream in precolonial South Asian popular culture through a genre of narrative poem, the ‘ishqiya masnavi (often translated as ‘romance’), written by Sufi initiates in Persian, Urdu and Punjabi. These stories depicted love as a way to access the divine by revealing the divinity inherent in creation. Lovers’ trials and tribulations—from mystical beasts to jealous relatives—were allegories of the Sufi path.

I bring a material approach to the literary analysis of these poems, to show how song, recitation and the use of illustrations served to instruct communities of reader-listener-viewers in how to use earthly love to access God. Over two centuries, the romance tradition gradually moved out of the Sufi lodge and the court into urban coteries, colonial textbooks, and eventually modern print publics—but the Sufi cosmology that underpinned these stories remained a constant.

Marriage is a central social and religious institution that contributes to family formation and socioeconomic attainment. Little is known, however, about the marriage process for Muslims, the largest religious minority group in the U.S. And even less is understood about how marriage formation occurs for U.S. Black Muslim men and women, who form the largest group of U.S. born Muslims (Pew Research Center 2017). Here, I plan to interview 30 U.S. Black Muslims and ask: How do Black Muslim men and women compare in the ways they connect religion and race in making marriage decisions? I examine how Black Muslims living in the United States think about marriage, what qualities make one “marriageable,” the range in experiences of seeking out marriage partners, and what role religion, gender, race, family origin, and skin tone play in the marriage process. By examining this understudied and vitally important case, this research will offer key theoretical implications to advance sociological literatures on religion, race, and gender.

This dissertation argues that across disparate times and spaces, expressions of the Islamic concept of taqwā (piety, godfearingness, consciousness of God) come to index ruptures, shifts, and unexpected continuities in societal orientations towards God. Through textual and ethnographic research that tacks between two distinct temporal moments, the advent of Islam and contemporary Egypt, I examine the bricolage of inherited texts, traditions, sayings, and embodied practices that collectively signify expressions of taqwā. In the first Hijri century, biblical understandings of godfearingness together with taqwā’s pre-Islamic poetic linguistic inheritances coalesced into the internally and externally embodied concept that permeates the earliest Islamic sources. Navigating anxieties that Egyptian society is heading towards two equally threatening types of extremism, atheism and religious-based violence, in contemporary Egypt this early tradition of taqwā is reimagined and redeployed by religious leaders and their constituencies alongside uniquely modern strategies like cinema clubs, YouTube preaching, and psychological counseling.

The account attributed to the Armenian bishop Sebeos (c. 645) is regarded by scholars as the most coherent and complete account recounting the reasons motivating Arabs and Muslims in marching forward against the Byzantine army inside the Levant. The account is important since it offers a clear picture of the seventh-century venture of empire by Arabs and Muslims. However, there are problems in privileging Sebeos’s account. I, therefore, use Sebeos’s account to discuss the problems inherent in the study of Early Islam inside the western academy. In doing so, I argue how the study of early Islam is ensconced in a deep orientalist lens, ignoring the ‘larger picture’ of regional and global dynamics giving way to the Arab Muslim empire.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 205 … Session ID: A18-216
Roundtable Session

The climate crisis is the greatest threat to creatures and creation. Some still deny it; others play it down. Moreover, the most significant problems caused by the world's wealthiest countries are occurring in the global South. Young people from all over the world keep gathering and protesting. And yet little is being done about the climate crisis in politics and society. But many people, including those in the church, also stay out of the discourse, as if the whole thing has nothing to do with their faith, nothing to do with their lives, nothing to do with their children and grandchildren. The climate crisis challenges habits such as nutrition, mobility, attitude towards the earth, etc., and challenges new ways of living. What does practical theology have to say about this? How is the climate crisis addressed in practical theological disciplines and religious practices? This interactive panel will provide impulses from a practical theological perspective, but at the same time, all session participants will be invited to join in the thinking and discussion.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 303C… Session ID: A18-212
Papers Session
Presidential Theme - La Labor de Nuestras Manos

This session considers the provocation “Labor is Not Enough.” Whether we are talking about the violence of the ‘adjunctification’ of the academy ; “right to work” legislation and its affront to full time or unionized labor; the promotion of anti-work or ‘good living’ ideologies; or the varieties of unpaid labor in our institutions and society at large - we are confronted with the reality that labor is not enough. In what ways does our work reflect this reality? In what ways does the religious academy participate in the structures that disenfranchise labor? Where is liberation to be found when labor - as it is hegemonically or counter-hegemonically construed - is not enough to sustain communities and life with dignity? Might there be categories and things that fail to be acknowledged as labor?

Papers

This paper argues that Jesus must be liberated from his alienated relationship to his labours of social reproduction. This alienation is mystified by his romantic essentialisation into the “bread of life,” even in such seminal texts of liberation as Enrique Dussel’s 1982 essay on the Eucharist. Inspired by Marxist-Feminist attention to the death-life dialectic in gestation, I observe a similar dialectic to Dussel’s materialist analysis of the Eucharist. This paper redirects Dussel’s essay away from the material conditions underwriting the Eucharistic offering of a martyr’s body, and towards the possibility of liberating Jesus from his labour of love, as then a paradigmatic liberation of reproductive workers. Jesus must be free to eat the bread of life that he now produces, that he now is. What lives must we stop reproducing for Christ to live among us in this way? What might we eat instead? What could we then be?

All those who labor in higher education are intimately aware that we are living through the slow death of the University system. This long decline comes at the hands of the capitalist corporatization of education where schools increasingly function as businesses. From this bleak context of academia’s pending collapse, this paper argues that a different kind of university is not only urgently need but also imminently possible by turning to Ignacio Ellacuria’s vision of the university as a locus of social critique and consciousness development, we can form universities’ anew as institutions that work for social liberation. Drawing on this vision of a different kind of university and in particular its roots in liberation theology, this paper will conclude by illustrating how the groundwork of such a university, is beginning to form in the movements of academic labor organizing across the country.

Hong Kong and Singapore share several similarities. Both were trade entrepôts colonialized by the British. Their populations are predominantly Chinese. Christianity is practiced mainly by persons of Chinese descent. They are faced with authoritarian governments. Given their similar colonial socializations, this paper explores why Christians in Hong Kong and Singapore choose contrasting approaches to authoritarian governance. Christians in Hong Kong have taken to public demonstrations and the use of creative resistance to contest fascist and authoritarian political oppression. Christians in Singapore do not engage in civil disobedience as it is deemed disruptive to socio-economic progress. Their strategy for social change is based on securing political leverage. These strategies represent two different postcolonial approaches – one overt and the other subversive. They reflect theologies of the multitudes in contesting empires of old and new. This paper will compare the strategies of solidarity, protest, and resistance to draw conclusions towards liberative theologies for the twenty-first century.

This paper explores the emergence of Haitian Liberation theology in the context of the Second Vatican and the failure of the Haitian state or democracy in Haiti. Haitian Liberation Theology arose as a criticism, using insights from both theology and politics, to challenge the history of political oppression, human rights violation, and the bankrupt of democracy in Haiti. In particular, Haitian Liberation Theology began as a movement that resisted the Duvalier regime and the problem of structural violence and the abuse practices of the Catholic Church. However, my paper will focus on the history and emergence of Haitian Liberation theology as a theo-political movement of resistance and a criticism of the undemocratic nature of the Haitian state.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Bowie C (2nd Floor) Session ID: A18-223
Papers Session

The New Directions panel introduces new research in the study of language and religion in South Asia by recently-graduated Ph.D. students and doctoral candidates. This year's papers examine topics ranging from devotion and service to religious literature in Sanskrit and regional languages. In doing so, panelists also consider the intersections of religion with gender, caste, virtue, and politics.

Papers

This paper explores how women ājīvan sevaks (lifelong volunteers) within the transnational devotional Hindu movement known as the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) interpret and utilize the socio-religious practice of sevā (service) in their everyday lives. While these women come from a broad age, educational, and vocational spectrum, they still collectively understand service as the central means to achieve theological ideals and virtues, such as vairāgya (worldly detachment), niṣkāma bhakti (desireless devotion), and saraltā (simplicity). This paper indicates broader implications of this lifelong dedication as being the establishment of spatial and social agency. More specifically, these women eschew established local and regional familial expectations of women and establish female-dominated spaces within BAPS, an organization characterized in academic and public narratives as structurally male-dominated.

In this paper, I study an acerbic public debate around the “true” nature of the deity Jagannātha in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The contention began when pedagogical authorities of both Indology and Odisha suggested that the temple of Jagannātha was a Buddhist shrine that Hindus later appropriated. The Hindu upper caste/class elite boisterously refuted these claims, inundating periodicals and authoring voluminous monographs to disprove the Buddhist past of Jagannātha. The paper asks: Why did the presence of Buddhism in Puri, cause this significant disquiet for upper caste/class authors at the time? I argue that, while most articulations were couched in regional terms (in Bengali and Odia), the debate was symptomatic of a broader concern about the type of religious history writing that could serve the purpose of the “Hindu nation.” Through this debate we notice some of the earliest articulations of  Hindu nationalist claims over contested sacred sites, which later morphed into the Hindutva history writing projects around Babri Masjid. 

In this paper, I analyze the first and second chapters of Madhusūdana Sarasvati's encyclopedic sixteenth-century Sanskrit commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, the Gūḍhārthadīpikā, arguing that the text represents an important intervention in the reception history of the Bhagavad Gītā, from the perspective of Madhusūdana's unusually rich focus on questions of narrative and human conduct. While there is a great deal of scholarship that engages with Madhusūdana's writing in general, much secondary literature has focused on his Advaitin ideas and his novel commitment to bhakti. In this paper, I read sections of Madhusūdana's text with a view to asking how his reading of the Bhagavad Gītā, while drawing from those of his predecessors, extends Advaitin scholastic concerns to more closely considering the place of the text in the epic, drawing out questions of the Gītā's relationship to dharmaśāstra debates that were likely to have been ongoing in sixteenth-century scholastic circles.

Religious biographies are an indispensable part of a religious tradition. These normative texts exhibit exemplary lives that become the blueprints of how a practitioner should act, how they should think, and how they should feel. By examining recent biographies by BAPS, a denomination of the Swaminarayan community, and interviewing living authors, this paper discusses the relationship between virtue and the biographical image and the author’s role in teaching virtue to motivate practice. In other words, I move the discussion from what emulation is to how it can occur. To do this, I engage with applied virtue ethics heuristically to argue that hagiographers make the narratives into action-inducing stories by building the thick conceptual nature of a virtue so that narratives from a saint's life can be applicable to the reader.

The sovereignty debate as it relates to caste in colonial South India is the focus of this essay. The paper focuses on two key conjunctures in order to move beyond the dichotomy of ritual and political in the study of sovereign practices in the South Indian state of Travancore. The first is the debate of state spending on Brahmin feeding in the nineteenth century. The critique of spending, which was sparked by the newly formed coalition between Christian missionaries and lower caste communities, presupposed a "secular poor class" as the condition of its political demands. The second is the debate surrounding the administration of temple charity, which viewed the state as a trust. In both episodes, Brahmins were seen as a "poor class" as a condition for sovereignty, until replaced by "people" later in nineteenth century. The paper inquires the transformative trajectory of sovereignty of Travancore in both of these debates.

 

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Crockett B (4th Floor) Session ID: A18-209
Roundtable Session

This roundtable session features representatives from the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC) and the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab alongside chaplains in training and chaplains working in a variety of institutional settings (military, prisons, hospice, hospitals) in conversation about what chaplaincy is, what chaplains do, and how to become a chaplain. Graduates holding a MDiv or a MA in Religious Studies are eligible for board certification as chaplains through APC.

Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 005 … Session ID: A18-217
Papers Session

This panel will focus on the implications of the significant rise in suicides and suicidality in recent years, including differences among groups of identification and belonging (age, gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, immigration status, etc.). These papers speak on topics including working clinically or pastorally with survivors of attempted suicide or survivors of those who have died by suicide, psychological and religious issues of stigmatization and shame, and the effects on family, friends, and communities.

Papers

As rates of suicide among Black Americans increase, there is an opportunity for Black churches to tailor their pastoral care efforts to be more inclusive of mental health concerns. This study aims to develop recommendations for enhancing pastoral care specifically with Black women who experience suicidality. In so doing, it suggests that formulating witnessing as a process of pastoral care could provide a robust theological foundation on which to ground such ministerial work. Through ethnographic methods and digital storytelling, this project provides a firsthand encounter with Black women suicide attempt survivors who articulate their own mental and spiritual health needs, desires, and priorities. This presentation will situate the topic of Black women’s mental health and suicide within the discipline of practical theology, describe the research methods, and offer preliminary findings and emerging analysis alongside a case study of one digital story.

In this paper I will share my research on the trauma of Black invisibility, how a seemingly the lack of compassion for Black suffering leads to many either bypassing Black pain by imposing embedded theologies that refusing to see it all together believing that black strength and resilience is a protector factor against Black suicide. I argue for a womanist informed practical theology of embodied empathy and compassion integrated with internal family systems to create a culture of seeing in black churches and communities.

Even today, U.S. Christian approaches to suicide still treat it as taboo and often fail to provide healing support. Specifically, U.S. Christian communities remain complacent in their lack of suicide literacy, moralizing judgment against suicide people, and/or medicalizing gaze on suicidal people simply as “sick.” These responses promote an individualistic framework central to U.S. culture that sharply separates suicidal people from the rest of the human community, thereby stigmatizing them. To help redress this, I engage sociological, psychological, and first-person work on suicidality in a social justice framework that centers the needs of suicidal people. Ultimately, U.S. Christians must become lovingly familiar with people’s lived experiences of suicidality and apply an intersectional framework that examines how oppressive forces such as white supremacist heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism spike suicidality. To the extent that suicide is a socially predictable problem, it is, through collective action, also a tractable one.