Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Gender-based violence (GBV) is not a protected ground within the U.S. asylum system. For a victim of GBV to win asylum, they must connect the violence they suffered to persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or particular social group. Typically, legal practitioners propose that GBV is a form of political persecution, citing that all resistance to GBV is a form of feminist politics. Through an examination of asylum documents, I show how the assumption of a feminist subjectivity is an act of violence, that denies their clients’ religious identities and also actual, physical violence against the women when the U.S. deports her back into danger. I demonstrate how asylum-seeking women already utilize religious reasonings to describe their persecution, and thus argue that incorporating religion as a strategy to argue GBV cases could help prevent deportations. 

My paper explores the theological-aesthetic potential of qur’ānic verses that describe, sanction, or call for violence. Passages in the Qur’ān that feature or even revel in violence are commonly viewed as problematic. They are often ignored, essentialized, apologetically explained away, or reduced to their historical contingency. However, a narratively oriented, pre-imperial reading of such verses reveals their hermeneutic depth and opens new possibilities for their literary-aesthetic appreciation. I argue that violence in the Qur’ān serves a particular aesthetic-ethical purpose, that is, to urge believers to critical self-reflection and God-consciousness. Taking the Qur’ān seriously as both a linear text and a speech act aimed at rhetorical effect in particular historical situations directs our attention to the complexity of the reading process and challenges both textual and historical positivism.

The process of attending to the trauma of others is itself “traumagenic”-- that is, it can lead to traumatic overwhelm in the caregiver.  Yet religious practice and spirituality arise as indicators of resilience in the face of secondary traumatic stress and as a means of healing from it.  Spiritual practice is a mark of greater capacity in a trauma caregiver for attending to the trauma of others without folding under the traumatic pressure themselves.  This paper explores the way in which the “sacrifice” of caregivers enduring secondary traumatic stress helps to re-theorize sacrifice. The sacrifice seen in the sacred attention of those helping to heal the trauma of others exemplifies a form of sacrifice which is both nonviolent and oddly self sustaining rather than self depleting.  The re-theorized sacrifice of caregivers experiencing secondary traumatic stress offers a concrete example for theoretical engagements of sacred self sacrifice beyond violence.  

This paper explores how American Muscular Christianity from 1880 to 1920 remade the image of Christ into a celebrity persona, forsaking his divinity and recasting Jesus as the ultimate Nietzschean superman.

In the 1920s, Notre Dame football became a highly visible symbol of Catholic triumphalism in the United States. The successes of the Fighting Irish on the gridiron not only aided in strengthening cultural identity among Catholics, but also inspired American Catholic men and boys to frequently practice their religion. How so? This paper explores this question by examining select writings from John O’Hara, the Prefect of Religion at Notre Dame, who frequently connected the piety of Notre Dame’s football players to the intersections of Catholicism, masculinity, and sports.

It is difficult to overstate the appreciation and reverence that followers show to Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) for his work in improving the lives of people regarded as at the bottom of the caste hierarchy—Dalits or so-called “Untouchables.” Based on a recent year of field research among Ambedkarites in many global locations, exploring what Buddhism and being Buddhist means to them, my presentation focuses on ways in which they memorialize and speak about Ambedkar. While people often rely on religious language to describe this man, they do so in a way that positions him as historically unique and worthy of ultimate respect, without necessarily connoting anything divine or supernatural about him. In this modern, secular, disenchanted use of religious language among his followers, Ambedkar functionally has become a “secular saint” by virtue of his peerless status that seems practically necessary to invoke but nearly impossible to emulate.

This paper explores the relationship between secular saints and political martyrs, and illuminates the various ways by which communities invest death with political significance, consecrate it, and enshrine it in collective memory, where it subsequently resides as a resource for mobilization and identity formation. More particularly, it investigates the way in which a specifically political notion of martyrdom engages with notions of secularity and sainthood, as rival groups lay claim to the sanctified memories of role models of various sorts. A range of historical examples are provided, including King Charles I of England, Bobby Sands and the 1981 Irish hunger strikers, and George Floyd.

This paper explores the career and cultural afterlife of the American stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, who gained notoriety in the 1950s and 1960s for his irreverent satires of organized religion. It will explore how Bruce, despite his comedic irreverence, became hailed as a “prophet,” “evangelist,” “martyr,” and even, in the wake of his untimely death, a “saint.” For his supporters, Bruce embodied a commitment to free expression and authenticity in the face of religious hypocrisy and repression. In the end, the American entertainment industry and the emerging counterculture transformed a controversial comedian into a replacement spiritual authority for a segment of the country increasingly alienated from mainstream institutional religion.

This paper explores the secular hagiographical tradition in early modern China by examining the biographies of Wang Yangming (1472–1529), a Neo-Confucian philosopher who was the most influential “celebrity” of the “School of Mind” during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). While often considered a military leader and secular thinker of the elite, Wang Yangming in fact occupied both the secular and religious spheres. The development of print culture and different religious traditions in the late Ming dynasty resulted in popular biographical texts of various genres featuring Wang, including vernacular stories, illustrated manuals, lineage records, chronicles, plays, and recorded sayings. The author characterizes these texts as “secular Confucian hagiographies” and argues that they served to popularize and elevate Wang as a secular Confucian “saint” admired and idolized by people of different social classes, thus reshaping the history of Neo-Confucianism and popular literature in early modern China.

This paper is an invitation to explore a post-liberation context focusing on the role of the enemy and enmity in the nation-building process driven by political-theological desires. Situating the research in the context of modern and contemporary (South) Korea, a former victim of colonization that has now become one of the neocolonial agents in the 21st century, this paper attends to the development of the theological concept of minjung—the people. In so doing, the lurking presence of the friend-enemy dichotomy will haunt the concept of minjung, which has once served to empower the Korean people in their fight toward liberation but which has also created a problem of racial discrimination and demarcation through the sense of ethnic chosenness. This paper will attempt to exorcise the ghostly presence of the enemy and to re-envision minjung theology to reclaim its spirit that privileges and prioritizes diversity—the true manifestation of minjung.

Chantal Mouffe's agonistic political theory bears a striking resemblance to a form of democratic practice that has attracted significant attention from political theologians in recent years, namely, faith-based community organizing (FBCO) in the tradition of Saul Alinsky. Both agonism and FBCO see the figure of the enemy as ineradicable within democratic life. Yet both also insist that when properly channeled, enmity can be a constructive force, provided it is not absolutized. At the same time, some recent work in political theology has sought to highlight key differences between agonism and FBCO, claiming the latter is better understood as a form of "common life politics." This paper places agonistic theory and FBCO in tensile dialogue with each other, to compare their respective approaches to enmity, and to ask what insights each might have to offer to contemporary political theology about the proper place--and potentially constructive role--of political conflict.

Carl Schmitt’s description of the political world, in which the friend-enemy distinction is foundational to the state, remains influential. For instance, Kelly Brown Douglas fills out this account by exploring the U.S. narrative of exceptionalism. However, while Schmitt asserts that political enmity serves to control the worst of human sinfulness, I argue that a closer look at the current U.S. context illuminates how the friend-enemy distinction in fact bolsters sinful tendencies. In particular, U.S. racialized political enmity relies on notions of essentialized innocence and problematic understandings of rituals of absolution. To explore this challenge, I first engage the work of Judith Gruber and Marika Rose, who examine the problem of white innocence and its maintenance through acts of anti-racist confession. I then look to M. Shawn Copeland and Katie M. Grimes, whose respective work illuminates the complex and demanding nature of sacraments and ultimately disrupts the enmity paradigm.

This paper explores questions of devotion, agency, and subjectivity through a single object: a handsewn prayer book from 20th-century Hungary. Though devotion is often explored through the individual lives, words, and actions of devotees, in this paper I suggest that the study of devotion need not be a study of the devoted. Attending to its content and to the material object itself, I examine the physical and intellectual labor of devotion and argue that devotion demands not subjectivity but multiplicity. Beyond the content of the prayers, the marginalia, handwritten notes, and the stitches themselves attest to the jumble of people and hands and lives that have passed through the life of this book. This prayer book shows how devotion itself is a labor-intensive process. I argue that through conscious, intentional practice, a space comes into being where the devotee encounters the divine and in so doing displaces the self.

This paper explores moral agency under constraint through the metalwork of blacksmiths and sculptors who re-purpose weapons. By transforming objects of destruction into objects with creative purpose, they generate possibilities within the intransigent reality of interlocking systems that produce and distribute guns. They illustrate moral agency under constraint because they claim creative power to pursue a good under conditions that thwart its realization. Through their vision and artistry, these metalworkers generate possibilities within structures of violence that do not change. Metalwork also provides a context for critical reflection on the dangers of normalizing the constraint and romanticizing the moral agent.

This paper enlists Henry More’s view of divine space in order to argue that space is not complex but is rather the meeting place where the metaphysical simplicity of God touches the complexity of matter. For More, space has an asymmetrical relation to matter, whereby it enables and intimately relates to distinctions and parts without itself being rendered distinct nor parted. This view will be defended by re-evaluating analogous language and the temporalizing of space, as well as proposing a new vision of the compatibility More saw between holenmerian simplicity and divine space. Far from creating a problem for simplicity, this Cambridge Platonist’s view of divine space actually reveals creative ways to solve afresh the ancient problem of the one and many. All our complexities, divisions, and squabbles occur among humans who unknowingly live, dwell, sleep, eat, and stride through a space that is simply divine and divinely simple.  

Astell’s account of the one and the many arises in service to her work as spiritual director in _A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I_ (1694). Addressing increasingly secular and materialistic White English gentry and noble women, Astell recommends prayer practices that will allow them to attend to the "divine within” themselves, each other, and their social body. These practices will help the self—which is profoundly relational and porous given its “horizontal” union with a body and its “vertical” union with the divine—prepare to receive the divine grace that will afford it proper vocation, freedom, and friendship.

Origen of Alexandria uses ‘participation’ to reconcile the relationship between the ‘one and the many’ and to justifying the diversity of the cosmos. Like many ancients, Origen adheres to the ‘principle of prior simplicity’; thus, it is incumbent upon him not to justify God’s existence, but, rather, to justify the diverse and contingent nature of being found throughout the cosmos. Origen, thus, employs participation to explain the relationship between contingent (per accidens; κατὰ συμβεβηκός), created being and non-contingent (per se; οὐσιώδης), divine being. Moreover, given Origen’s commitment to the principle that bonum est diffusivum sui, participation emerges as a way not only to justify the cosmos’ existence, but also its goodness. Accordingly, this paper 1) establishes Origen’s distinction between contingent and non-contingent being; 2) demonstrates the Son’s participatory relationship to the Father; 3) shows how Origen uses the Son to mediate the Father’s supremely simple being to the cosmos.

In recent decades, one task analytic philosophers have focused on is the analysis and assessment of certain medieval metaphysical frameworks. This growing body of scholarship has helped clarify and reduce the distortion of medieval and ancient writers. However, contributors to this work frequently express opposing claims or fail to note substantial differences between ancient and medieval figures. This is the case regarding the comparison of Thomas Aquinas to others thinkers. For example, many have considered Thomas’ thought to be essentially reducible to Aristotle’s, while others have proposed a heavier influence from Plato. Arguably, however, each of these claims is inadequate. One area of Thomas thought where this is evident and noteworthy is in Thomas’ accounts of being and unity. Here he relies on but moves beyond both Plato and Aristotle. This makes his work distinctive in a way that is significant for the comparison and assessment of medieval thought.

The Mahābhārata presents itself as a Veda for those excluded from privilege and as a dharmaśāstra. The wisest character is the author’s biological son Vidura, who is born from a śūdra woman. Because of his birth, Vidura is systematically excluded from having a say in dharma and from questioning his standing in life, even though he is the very incarnation of Dharma. Scholars (Kantawala 1995, Goldman 1985, Hiltebeitel 2001) have focused on the episode of Dharma being cursed to be born from a śūdrayoni (MBh 1.57.80d, 81b, and adhyāya 101), but in this paper, in keeping with this year’s Presidential Theme, I focus on the plight of Vidura, the paradigmatic political outsider. I trace the epic’s argument that privilege uses dharma in a legalistic, unethical way and delegitimates those who oppose its abusive power. Vidura the outsider is a witness to how Hāstinapura insiders conducted politics, but also Justice personified.

The Ekalavya episode in the Mahabharata occupies one short chapter in the lengthy epic.  In this brief narrative, Ekalavya is the ambitious son of a Nishada chieftain, who is deeply wronged by the Brahmin Drona and the Kshatriya Arjuna.  Like many portions of the epic, it is a living story that continues to speak in modern India, but it speaks to different audiences in very different ways.  This paper explores the narrative first as it appears in the Sanskrit Mahabharata, and then how three contemporary groups of situated readers have portrayed the story: middle-class Hindus (represented by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar), Dalits, and members of the modern Nishad class.

The Act of Truth is a distinctive type of verbal expression performed in moments of crisis, and the Mahābhārata includes many instances of it. A consistent feature of the Act of Truth is the speaker’s citation of past actions performed well, and the imperative statement that based on that past performance a desired outcome must occur. The verbal formula is used to protect, to heal, to revive the dead, and even to kill. Comparison of the Act of Truth with other related speech acts (the curse, boon, and vow), and a few examples from Buddhist literature, reveals that they are all based on a shared ideology of the power of truthful speech. This paper draws on speech act theory, including its analysis of performative utterances, to examine the religious meanings and uses of the Act of Truth in the Mahābhārata as demonstrations of virtue and power.

Between the coalescence of the Religious Right in 1980 following Roe v. Wade in 1973, and Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022, many progressive evangelicals held a symbolically “pro-life” stand while voting for Democratic candidates. The Roe decision served as a protection against major changes in abortion rights, allowing progressive evangelicals and post-evangelicals to emphasize the need for a “holistically” pro-life position that cared for people including the poor, immigrants, single parents, and children, without interfering with women’s right to choose. However, after the fall of Roe, progressive evangelical and post-evangelical feminists express explicitly pro-choice politics. By examining evangelical women’s public writing and a set of ethnographic interviews I conducted in 2022, I demonstrate the existence of pro-choice politics and moral ambivalence about abortion amongst post-evangelical feminists in the age of Dobbs.

This paper is part of a larger project that complicates the narrative that Christianity and feminism are antithetical to one another. I argue that this perception exists because white feminism and white Christianity are seen as the default forms of each in the United States. In this project, I interview Christian women about their perceptions of womanhood and feminism. One of the emergent themes from this study was the issue of abortion access. Some women who identify as Christian feminists view access to reproductive care, including abortion, as an essential right. Other Christian feminists view abortion as a “tool of the patriarchy” and eschew the mainstream feminist position on reproductive rights. Others still fall in a murky “grey” area on their position on abortion. In all cases, they highlighted structural inequality and lack of access to resources and medical care as a central barrier for women in need of abortions.

This project centers the analysis of works by Christian scholars, theologians, and religious leaders as well as narrative testimony from Christian laypeople to illustrate how a subsect of pro-choice Christians create and further theologies of abortion as responsible Christian motherhood. While the arguments of the Christians featured in this project differ semantically and sometimes even politically, their underlying, unified theme of abortion as a faithful act of responsible motherhood illustrates the capaciousness of what motherhood means for some pro-choice Christians and restores the maternal agency that pro-choice Christians perceive as the Christian Right having taken away by foregrounding fetal personhood.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, when he established Jesuit schools and colleges in the sixteenth century, insisted that no tuition fees be charged to the students in order that the poor might participate with the rich. Today, student fees in some of our Catholic colleges are exceeding $60,000 a year.

Should Catholic education include, as part of its mission, the goal of reducing the gap between the rich and poor?

My thesis deals with the question: Is it time to insist again, as St. Ignatius did, that no tuition fees be charged to the students, or is Catholic education now so expensive that the Church should give up teaching general education (in those countries where the state provides for it) so that the resources could be used for Christian formation? And thus be able to provide “a preferential option for the poor”.

This paper explores the relationship between religious institutions and secular professions by examining how the Catholic Church has articulated its social, ecological, and economic principles within the Canadian agricultural industry. It first provides an overview of Canadian Catholic leadership’s approach to industry and the rights of workers, particularly as features of a global economy. In doing so, it highlights tensions surrounding the local and the global, themes which remain present in recent Catholic documents like Querida Amazonia and Fratelli Tutti. The paper then draws from ethnographic research carried out at three agricultural sites to illustrate the development of secular partnerships and perennial responses to migration, including one monk’s campaign to resettle climate refugees in central Saskatchewan. Such examples call attention to the ways religious institutions respond to rapid economic changes and the heightened public discourse around food security, globalization, and the rights of workers brought about by the global pandemic.

The ‘culture of encounter’ has been one of the recurrent concepts in Pope Francis’ annual addresses for World Communications Day. For the Pope, journalists and the media have a paramount role in making space for dialogue and bringing realities that otherwise would be invisible in contemporary societies; in other words, to encounter ‘the other.’ Nevertheless, journalism is barely seen as a field aiming to promote a culture of encounter. 

This paper explores the discourses through which journalists working for mainstream media in Mexico and Russia make visible ‘the other’ by using visibility as a category for social research. Specifically, it focuses on Catholic Faith-Based Organizations operating in Mexico City and Moscow whose primary mission is to assist people in need. The paper draws from online interviews I conducted in 2022 with journalists in Mexico and Russia to compare notions of social responsibility when religion is involved in seeing ‘the other.’