Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

In recent decades, *consent* has become a central ethical guideline for navigating sex in a diverse and imperfect world. Increasingly, however, many feminists are charging that consent cannot carry the weight we’ve asked it to carry. A critical legal criterion, consent has fallen short as an *ethic*. But what would a sexual ethics beyond consent look like? This paper suggests that the writings of Martin Luther might have something to offer contemporary feminist debates over consent and desire, and, conversely, that contemporary debates in sexual ethics might have something to offer Luther studies. Part one of this paper turns to Luther's *Bondage of the Will* to offer a theological critique of consent. Part two turns to *Freedom of a Christian* to advocate for an "ethic of attention." This paper then concludes by considering some risks inherent in an ethic of attention.

Religious trauma syndrome is receiving increasing attention. This includes the trauma experienced by LGBTQIA+ persons because of heteronormative theologies and practices. Writing from my perspective as a queer Lutheran, I ask, what resources in Lutheran theology can help LGBTQIA+ persons name, resist, and grow through religious traumas? This trauma-informed theology of Word & water, wine & wafer involves several strands. I employ a Lutheran theology of the cross to name the discursive sins harming LGBTQIA+ Christians. Then Martin Luther’s performative theology of the Word is employed to offer a theory of language that helps trauma survivors tell their stories (if they wish). Next, a Lutheran view of the Lord’s Supper as an experience of embodied communio counters the isolation suffered by many LGBTQIA+ Christians. Finally, Luther’s understanding of baptism into the Body of Christ counters the mischaracterization that queer Christians experience from those closest to them (including family and clergy).

Lutherans are leaving their congregations, and Lutheran congregations are leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over its social teaching that supports legal, safe, accessible, and regulated abortion services. Two major themes anchor ELCA social teaching on abortion—moral agency and flourishing. Dobbs works against both values, yet it also goes against ELCA social teaching that supports legal abortion services as part of reproductive healthcare. A unified ecclesial response is difficult because of the divergent and often divisive positions on women’s moral agency and the ethics of neighbor justice. Nevertheless, as a feminist Lutheran theologian, I will raise questions and possibilities over what an ecclesial response to Dobbs might be. I will also offer constructive critique of Lutheran social teaching as I imagine what the social teaching could hold and what its rhetorical stance could be in order to take up current theological, ethical, and practical challenges in reproductive justice.

Representations of disability are ubiquitous in American life and politics. This paper argues that defenses of disabled personhood have secured the passage of legislation that restricts abortion access by reinforcing associations between human value, social contribution, and a capacity to work. But in contrast to dominant narratives in Disability Studies that attribute such linkage to the Christian heritage of social conservatism, I’ll argue that the Lutheran tradition, surprisingly, contains resources to unhitch ethical visions of human dignity from demands for productivity, contribution, and work. Lutheran emphases on incapacity, the need for God’s help, and the significance of community for illuminating one’s own value all show an affinity with the Disability Justice Movement’s insistence that “people have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity.”

Paul's lament over his "body of death" in Romans 7:24 has often been interpreted throughout history as a bewailing of physical mortality. However, the mysterious, 4th century ascetic, "Macarius," teaches the monks in his care that the apostle speaks of the soul without divine illumination. Despite its unusueal nature, this exegetical choices can be explained by Macarius' associative reading of Romans 7 with other passages of Christian scripture, joined with a view of the text as direct commentary on the interior realities of the soul. Viewing the text this way, the homilist brings a psychological reading to the Pauline phrase which both the temporal indicators of scripture into something like "sacred time," and also demonstrates the richly embodied spirituality which marks this author. The soul's darkness is overcome by the transforming divine light, a light that extends not only to the soul, but the body as well.

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The ecological destruction caused by Western hegemonies of capitalism and consistent disruptions of a Sabbath that calls Christians to be faithful stewards of creation demands our undivided attention. The production-driven globalised context foregrounded on ‘dominance and subduing’ doctrine has resulted in multifaceted ecological damages. Thus, this study asks: are African Knowledge Systems alternatives in addressing this ecological crisis? This study retrieves and argues that concepts within African traditional practices that inform(ed) worldly and spiritual affairs of indigenous Africans are an alternative solution. Using Molefe Asante’s Afrocentrism theory, the study retrieves the Chisi concept (a mandated day of rest and refraining from production focused on ecological and human care in ATR) practiced in Zimbabwe’s antiquity in environmental conservation. The study locates a fundamental relationship between Chisi and the Hebraic descriptions (Genesis 2; Exodus 23) of the Sabbath, arguing for a return to basics in achieving intentional ecological restoration.

Human or earthly rules do not apply in both the Quranic intertexts and in the text itself: In her Mihrab (the sanctuary) Mariam receives the most unexpected gifts of summer fruits in winter and winter fruits in summer; a boy can be born without a father (Isa), or to a very old couple Zakariyya (Maryam’s uncle) and his impotent wife, whereas a very healthy couple (the narrator and her husband) can give birth to a stillborn. It is only the Divine command of Kun fayakūn “Be! then it is”, which has the power to turn non-existence into life. This concept of food and children as Rizq that only God can bestow (whether according to natural laws or in violation of them), is featured in the literary text under study, a text which blends vast geographical, ecological, and spiritual worlds.

Lovefeasts were critical sites of community building and religious fellowship for Methodists in Liberia. But they were also spots to perform, challenge, and reinforce racial, gender, and class boundaries. By looking at the journal of Methodist missionary Walter Jayne through the methods of religious history, literary analysis, and a critical intersectional approach, this paper explores the racial, gender, and national boundaries that American Methodism attempted to establish in Liberia. By focusing in on how Jayne understood lovefeasts to be sites of racial integration, even as we can see moments of separation and delineation, this paper can show how boundaries were structured, shaped, and contested by the worshipping together of white and black American and African peoples around a shared table of food.

This paper views historical interactions of religions from the perspective of a Christian theologian. It focuses on how historical and theological approaches have been changed, in particular, by growing interest in the field of Jewish-Christian relations. The paper asks if singling out a special field of encounters as though they were just a part of the history of Christianity can be sufficient, not only in terms of the fullness of the historical account, but also in terms of theological understanding. Christian theology always included concepts and images of other religions; in particular it has always related itself to Jewish ideas which undeniably stood at the beginning of Christianity, and always continued to be of interest to Christian thinkers. The paper examines how this view can inform historical approaches and change the place of Christianity within the history of religions. even as it changes the theological appraisal of Christianity.

This paper deals with the last and mostly forgotten generation of students, who were trained by representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany, but contributed primarily to Islamic and Arabic studies. In the course of the nineteenth century, Semitic (including Arabic) studies evolved as a discipline of its own, primarily involving scholars who identified as Christians.  However Jewish scholars too began to develop a critical historical approach to Jewish sources that became known as Wissenschaft des Judentums. Although many of the leading Jewish scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (who were equally trained in Jewish and Arabic/Islamic studies) did not occupy the type of academic positions they deserved, they were instrumental in developing the disciplines of Arabic/Islamic/Judaic studies. This later generation often replaced the ideals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums with those of Zionism, and were far more interested in Islamic and Arabic studies than Jewish studies

This paper will present work on the project "Co-produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (carried out by the present author in collaboration with Katharina Heyden). By introducing the term “co-production” to indicate a methodological inclination, my co-author and collaborators emphasize an ongoing process: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have continuously formed, re-formed, and transformed themselves by interacting with or thinking about one another. Co-production, in all the ambivalence it entails, has shaped not only the rituals and teachings of these traditions, but also some of our most enduring forms of prejudice, and has shaped as well the conceptual tools (such as history, philology, and theology) with which we undertake the study of these religions. In this talk I will first offer a definition of co-production and then develop one example—that of the Golden Calf—that illustrates some of the historical and theological insights we think this methodology can yield.

Black Lives Matter has entered the cultural lexicon. The phrase in popular culture now invokes forceful images of chanting and marching, blocking freeways and interrupting traffic, and other demonstrations of kinetic forcefulness. In popular culture it is a movement imagined as without leadership, without political program, and with out theological direction. But, contrary to mischaracterizations, in addition to its kinetic assertiveness there are also rituals in BLM which introduce silence as a part of the Du Boisian “spiritual strivings” of Black politics. Thinking with Joseph Winters and Kevin Quashie I want to explore what silence, absence, “quiet,” in die-in rituals reveals about a certain interiority in this Black political movement. BLM has been characterized as “more secular” than and antithetical to the Civil Rights movement and “Black church” tradition, which, by contrast, are seen as emblematic of a larger tradition of Black religious protest. Contrary to this I locate a politics of the sacred at the heart of #BlackLivesMatter even in the silence. What Charles Long calls “the hiatus” touches something beyond and before the legibility of normative theological structures.

Works in theology and religious studies often remain siloed from each other, with barriers built on charged assumptions about insider vs. outsider perspectives. Our shared affinity for speculative fiction serves as a means to explore how theology and religious studies might more fruitfully engage with one another and with the humanities.  Attending to the galvanizing emotional states provoked by individual and communal experiences of speculative fictions, we argue that we are all, at times, insiders and outsiders when it comes to the performances and observations of culture—a culture that is dynamic, diverse, and that engages our imaginations. Developing theoretical orientations of implicit theology and secular spirituality to speak to the complexities of religion and popular culture in a contemporary era shaped by increasing levels of polarization and religious non-affiliation, we suggest useful deployments of the secular theological and spiritual meaning-making activity already present in engagements with speculative fictions.

According to the ACLU there are at least 336 bills in state legislatures currently that target LGBTQIA+ individuals as of today. Being queer is indeed a marginalized identity. This paper traces marginalization to mystical spaces and explores queer inhabitance of mystical space. By exploring the turn in 1960s spatial theory and its connection with marginalized individuals I hope to draw connections to mystical theory and the impact of combining mystical and spatial theories. In this was understanding how the marginalized can be drawn into liminal and thirdspaces, it is possible to see mystical experiences and their outcomes as highly relational. I will first consider marginalization and its connection to spatial theory through a Foucaultian lense. Then I will look at 1960’s parisian spatial theories. Finally, drawing together what queer mystical space looks like in the 21st century.   

In high mountain communities, global climate change contributes to the extinction of glaciers, threatening water access for rural and Indigenous communities. Through ethnographic research in the Bolivian Andes in 2022, including 45 semi-structured interviews in Indigenous Aymara communities in the Milluni Valley at an elevation of 4300 meters, surrounded by glaciated peaks of up to 6,089 meters, we found a society and landscape in flux in response to glacier extinction. The Milluni Valley has been a contested landscape of conquest, extraction, and tourism in its history since colonialism. New lands are revealed as the glaciers recede, offering new opportunities for grazing, tourism, economic extraction, and religious practice, and exacerbating community tensions around access to these sites. Religions and traditional ecological practices support socio-economic responses to a changing environment.

This paper excavates nuclear dystopian hauntings amidst the Diné as a palimpsest of ecological and cultural devastation, and through the exploration of Coyóte onto-philosophies *as* interdisciplinary assemblages, I seek to enunciate possible futures for human, non-human, and planetary kin. Diné Bikéyah is filled with nuclear ghosts: the result of the first atomic bomb at White Sands Trinity Atomic Testing Site and the subsequent Federal mining of uranium on Navajo land. In the dystopian reality of the 21st century, I follow the Diné narratives of *Ma’ii*’s antics to construe a speculative onto-philosophy of Coyóte activism and resilience amidst ruin to cast a new apocalyptic *of* settler-imperial structures. In this paper, Rez-Dogs—as the modern descendant of Coyóte—are imbued with the potential for traversing spiritual and physical worlds—they are ciphers of imaginative revolution, engaging haunted matters and matter, and instigating new and necessary ends-of-worlds for settler-colonial necro(nuclear)politics.

The Republic of Ecuador and the Plurinational State of Bolivia—the only countries in the world to affirm plurinational identities in their Constitutions—have codified environmental protection and sociobiocentrism. Until now, the contemporary dynamics of Catholics and other major religious actors advancing decolonial possibilities for the protection and survival of ecological cosmologies—including treating Indigenous, ecofeminist, Afro-Descendant, and other communities as dialogue partners to resist mining, violations of ethno-territorial rights, and exploitation of food security—have yet to be researched alongside the recent liberative-theological stances to these cosmologies in Ecuador and Bolivia that have advocated—albeit to differing degrees of potency—the environmental protection and sociobiocentrism that these plurinational states promise in their Constitutions. This essay analyzes these relations, proposing the following question to examine the shaping of decolonial possibilities in plurinationalism: How does a decolonial stance in liberative-theological thinking impact contemporary relationships between lived cosmological spaces and environmental-sociobiocentric liberation?

Analysts, activists, and government agencies increasingly emphasize the value of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for mitigating and adapting to ecological crises. This emphasis merits praise for amplifying Indigenous voices. However, numerous colonialist perils attend such turns to TEK; this paper describes two. Building on the work of Laurelyn Whitt, I argue first that uncritical turns to TEK can enact ecocolonialism through the unjust extraction and commodification of Indigenous knowledge, thereby actively exacerbating the settler-colonial status quo. Second, I argue, following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, that such turns to TEK can cast settlers as Indigenous allies while obfuscating the colonial relationship and Indigenous decolonial goals. If the turn to TEK aims to both help the world to manage ecological crises while supporting climate justice for Indigenous people, then such risks should be explicitly articulated and opposed.

This paper offers a methodological solution to the long-standing skepticism between Islamic and religious studies by drawing on the work of the late Moroccan thinker Fatema Mernissi (1940 – 2015). It returns to the well-trodden Smith-Eliade debate not just because it is a locus classicus of our discipline but also because Smith’s reference to territory revealed religion’s profound connection to contemporary geopolitics. His mention of territory reflected the way that that concept had become a dominant way of structing geopolitics. My reading of Mernissi globalizes this narrative, showing that religion was an important way that thinkers around the world understood changes in orders of territoriality. Debates within religious traditions responded to shared geopolitical events in a way that demonstrated both the specificity of traditions and the way that they partook in the redefinition of the category of religion writ large.

The category of the Islamic modernist has pervaded identity politics throughout the Muslim world for the last century. Normally, Islamic modernists are understood to be influenced — often quite consciously so — by the epistemic norms of western modernity that enforce rational coherence and display, in Thomas Bauer’s language, a very low tolerance of ambiguity. In this paper, I critically examine this notion of modernists’ intolerance of ambiguity based on ethnographic field research among self-identified modernists in Central Java, Indonesia. I focus on my interlocutors’ accounts of their own dreams as a site that is transected by incommensurable understandings of the nature of dreams and their epistemic status. Rather than an inherent limitation of modernist discourse, I argue that my interlocutors make productive use of such tensions and paradoxes normally associated with pre-modern Islam, even as they self-consciously deploy the trope of their own modernist intolerance of ambiguity.

This paper studies the Islamic Society for Spiritual Cultivation (ISSC), a project initiated by Dr. Ousmane Kane of Harvard University and a group of his students to support religious education, spiritual growth, and community service among Muslim (and increasingly, non-Muslim) students navigating the academic study of Islam in Western secular universities in and around Boston today. Through ethnographic and text analysis, I examine the history, curriculum, and programming of the ISSC, which is distinctly rooted in the spiritual and epistemological framework of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse’s *fayḍa tijānīyya* Sufi movement (“the Divine Flood”). By bridging the deepening disconnect between studying Islam in the secular academy versus traditional spaces of sacred learning through its curriculum, it is argued that the ISSC’s program has profound implications for the function of Sufism in the Western academy not merely as object of study but as a pedagogical tool for engaged teaching and learning about Islam.

This paper examines the thought of two important South Asian Muslim thinkers Sayyid Abu'l A'lā Mawdūdī (d. 1979) and Vaḥīduddīn Ḵẖāṉ (d. 2021). Specifically, my paper engages with Mawdūdī’s Qurʼān kī car bunyādī iṣt̤ilāḥeṉ (Four core terms in the Qur’an) and Ḵẖāṉ’s Ta’bīr kī g̲h̲alat̤ī (Error in Interpretation). I propose that there are two major and competing theories of political Islam in twentieth century South Asia. At one end, we have a more “constitutional” and “classical” theory of politics as propounded by Mawdūdī. On the other spectrum, we have the more quietist “apolitical” politics of Vaḥīduddīn Ḵẖāṉ. I argue that these two opposing views lie on a spectrum, whose median is populated by other thinkers like Abu’l-Ḥasan ‘Alī Nadvī, who seek to harmonize the extremes. In arguing this, I make a broader contribution to a conception of the “political” in context of Islamic thought in South Asia.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Appalachians of all racial backgrounds came together to unionize and fight industrial capitalism. During the West Virginia Coal Wars, miners argued that racial divides only benefited industrial capitalists looking to exploit labor. Organizing in local churches before and after services, Appalachian coal miners formed an integrated movement that raised class consciousness in the region. Ultimately, the United States would side with the capitalists and send the army to crush the rebellion. Miners would not be allowed to organize again until the 1930s. During this interim period, widespread poverty and further interference from industrialists stoked racial tensions once again. Looking at the West Virginia Coal Wars nuances how race, religion, and anti-capitalist movements impacted one another leading up to the Civil Rights Movement.

As Black Millennials have been impacted by the violence of an anti-Black, queer and trans-antagonistic, ableist, late-stage capitalistic world, Black Millennials and subsequently Black Generation Zers are highlighting how the Black Church has been complicit in upholding power structures of oppression or at least not fully engaged in liberating politics of the world. The purpose of this proposed study is to explore the impact of religious and spiritual trauma in Black churches among Black Millennials and Gen Z. This presentation will highlight the preliminary results of the mixed-methods dissertation study currently in process that will triangulate the data using digital auto-ethnography, quantitative survey, and interviews from Generation Z and Millennials who report adverse religious experiences within a Black Church Context. 

This paper interprets Adolph Reed Jr's critiques of antiracist and anti-disparitarian pedagogies through the lens of Roger William's "liberty of conscious." Because Reed argues from a historical materialist lens, it is his contention that contemporary racial culture wars are grounded primarily in debates over ideological disputes, not material consequences. Because race exists primarily as a theological and ideological construct, it is nearly impossible to legislate racial wrongdoings without tipping American politics into an abstracted spiritual battle for the "soul" of the nation. I argue that Reed's desire to counter what he sees as "idealistic mystifications" is an evolution of Roger Williams' desire to fight for the "liberty of conscience" in the American politics. This must not deter us from fighting for racial justice. Instead, it should spur activists to confront the material ways in which Black Americans remain economically oppressed.