Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

In 1819, Anglo-American architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe stumbled upon a public market in New Orleans and observed an “Assembly of Negros” singing, dancing, and drumming. Despite the assembly's sacred and social meaning created via Africana religious acoustemologies, Latrobe described the event with terms such as “noise” and “brutally savage.” This description reflects a white racial logic that emerged in the interstices between sight and sound. Latrobe’s auditory skepticism provides insight into the ways in which power and discipline operate over and against Black religious ways of knowing. His conception of public space opens up possibilities for considering how formations of race and religion function through the sonic landscape. By examining “noise” as a constitutive force in the processes of racialization and construction of secular space, this paper sheds light on sound and argues for its racial and spatial significance in early 19th century New Orleans.

In February 1829, Robert Alexander Young self-published an incendiary pamphlet in Manhattan that prophesied the arrival of a Grenadian messiah who would lead Africans throughout the world in revolt against slavery. While widely celebrated, the pamphlet has long posed a historiographical problem for scholars of Black religious thought, owing largely to difficulties with Young’s life and vocabulary. This talk offers a new historical redescription and conjectural interpretation of Young’s pamphlet, focusing particularly upon his invocation of Psalm 68:31 and the Afro-Jamaican traditions of Obeah and Native Baptism. I argue that Young’s citation of the verse can be said to rely upon certain ritual and linguistic norms associated with these traditions, which inform his attempts to call into existence a worldwide African community. On my interpretation, Young’s textual performances of prophecy constitute an analysis of power relations routed through Africana traditions, by which another world may be imagined and enacted.

This paper is a study of a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cleric, Francis James Grimké, who championed civil rights and challenged racism and discrimination against African Americans. It specifically traces Grimké’s efforts to expose the role of the Presbyterian Church in its historical perpetuation of racism and to advocate for social justice as a means to achieve race elevation. Francis Grimké was known as the Black Puritan, a term that was meant to highlight the strict moral philosophy that guided him as he critiqued classical puritanism in American Christianity.

The study of Hebrew by African-American Christians has a long history that spans much of the Atlantic world. As W.A.S. Wright wrote in a 1906 article in Howard’s University Journal about a campaign to suppress the study of Hebrew on campus, “it is well known that there are students who are “crazy” over Hebrew yet woefully lacking in the other branches.” My paper focuses on three sources I’ve identified to organize and give meaning to this phenomenon in the early 20th century: 1) The annotated Hebrew Bible of Angelina Weld-Grimké, 2) The 1946 study of the Babylonian Talmud by Bishop Charles Lee Russell, and 3) the Hebrew pedagogical notebooks of the early Howard Theology faculty and students. By examining the figural Jew as it emerges in the work of early 20th century “Black Christian Hebraists,” we can better clarify the ubiquitous and ambiguous Jewish figure as it irrupts around the same time in the work of African-American artists and intellectuals. Hurston’s “De Jew” or Langston Hughes “Fine Clothes to the Jew” come to mind, as do figures such as Wentworth Arthur Matthew and “Fern” in Jean Toomer’s Cane.

In this paper I shall discuss three contemporary Christian, Muslim, and Jewish eschatologies and their respective way of relating to the religious Other. However, the inner dynamics of these ‘exclusivistic’ eschatologies have different consequences with regard to the religious Other: the Christian theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg advocating an eschatological exclusivism, the Muslim scholar Ahmad Sakr developing a soteriological exclusivism, and the Jewish thinker Michael Wyschogrod representing a particularistic exclusivism. Comparing the respective sort of exclusivism in these three eschatologies, I will discuss the ways in which each of these eschatologies are not exclusive and map different levels of exclusion in eschatology. It is therefore not enough to ask if there is hope, but it is also of importance to deeper analyze what is the eschatological hope for the Other. Finally, I will highlight three non-exclusivistic traits in these eschatologies, providing challenges and contributions to eschatologies in interreligious contexts.

The application of a fresh lens on eschatology in light of plurality is an extraordinarily important theological question. The question that arises from the Hindu perspective, in light of such an eschatological question arising from Comparative Theology, is whether plurality’s interplay with the law of karma, in such a discourse, renders irrelevant certain aspects of doctrine related to dharma that is specific to age, class, gender, etc., which have traditionally been associated with the souls journey to liberation and eschatology in general. Contemplation on such considerations leaves a path to spiritual liberation—that telos of Hindu life—that is more just, expansive, compassionate, and aware of the interwoven nature of human existence.

This paper will compare the conceptions of the otherworld and of spiritual realization in the teachings of Ibn al-‘Arabī and Shinran Shonin. According to both, paradise or the Pure Land, respectively, are not simply otherworldly because simultaneously, they are immanent in the phenomenal world. This suggests that spiritual realization may take place twice, i.e. in this world and the next, reflected in Ibn al-‘Arabī’s vision of heavenly journeys or spiritual ascensions of the prophets and saints and in Shinran’s teaching of ōjō, birth in the Pure Land. I will further explore how Ibn al-‘Arabī and Shinran approach the prevailing Sufi and Buddhist view of an unsatisfactory physical world that needs to be relinquished. Furthermore, I will examine how the all-encompassing mercy of God or compassion of Amida relate to the denizens of hell or to a possible salvation of icchantikas, those lacking the seed of Buddhahood.

The doctrine of hell is an important contemporary challenge for Comparative Theology. In this paper, I will explore possibilities for overcoming doctrinal problems posed by eternal, punitive, and exclusivist conceptions of hell by comparing two alternative approaches from the Buddhist and Christian traditions. First, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the hells (naraka/niraya) are conceived as temporary saṃsāric sojourns under the salvific influence of the bodhisattvas. Second, the controversial Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria has argued for a purgative interpretation of hell as part of a postmortem spiritual therapy eventually leading to the salvation of all (apokatastasis). Based on Buddhist-Christian comparison, I will argue that comparative eschatology sheds new light on doctrinal alternatives for traditional interpretations of hell, on the one hand suggesting a re-balancing of divine love and justice, on the other hand preparing the ground for an eschatological interpretation of religious plurality beyond the aporia of religious exclusivism.

This paper considers how we might construe the task of Christian theological reflection in light of the created unthinkability of ecological crisis characterized by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement. According to Ghosh, the concealment of nonhuman agencies is both a driver of climate crisis and an obstacle to response. The reception of Ghosh’s work—ranging from how quickly it has become a point of reference to the controversy it has generated around speculative fiction—reflects aspirations toward humanistic inquiry (including theology) that might move us beyond inaction, often through new or better strategies of representation. Noting theological stakes at play in this reception, particularly related to his critique of the literary novel and the questions of mediation and representation it implicates, I ask what it would look like to understand the task of theological reflection as located within, and responsible to, the impasse of unthinkability Ghosh identifies.

In her Chalion novels, speculative fiction writer Lois McMaster Bujold creates a world in which Quintarian (five-god) and Quadrarian (four-god) religions compete against the backdrop of older shamanistic practices. Nevertheless, this world’s human inhabitants share beliefs about the holy that are confirmed in collectively-shared, even empirically-verifiable experiences. Ironically, this homogenizing certainty about the spiritual order may contribute to the appeal of Chalion novels to religious believers and skeptics alike. Why does our own world lack the public verifications of ultimate reality that occur within speculative fiction like Bujold’s (or in speculative fiction that confirms the convictions of “our” world’s religions, like Lewis’s Narnia series)? Tillich’s *Dynamics of Faith* offers conceptual resources for answering this question, and for making sense of how speculative fiction interacts with readers’ hunger for a certainty about sharing religious/metaphysical experience that always eludes us—and must elude us in any authentic religious life, any actual world.

Can certain films not merely depict, but actually _do_ theological reflection through the cinematic form? In answering this question in the affirmative, I wish to present a cinematic theology—or a “theocinematics”—of the Christian doctrine of creation on display in the films of two contemporary American filmmakers, with their recent films as case studies: Terrence Malick’s _The Tree of Life_ (2011) and _A Hidden Life_ (2019), and Noah Aronofsky’s _Noah_ (2014) and _mother!_ (2017). I wish to suggest that these films do not so much present or illustrate a systematic theological viewpoint, but rather invite us into the theological work dynamically occurring within themselves. Indeed, rather than a conceptual, propositional, and systematic approach to the questions of God and creation, theocinematics is an experiential, affective, and imaginative mode of engaging with the activity of the divine in our created world.

My paper engages Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim through the lens of Jacque Derrida’s hauntology as a theological and ethical methodology, analyzing the ethical imperative brought by the ghostly face of colonial, generational and collective trauma. Grass is an antiwar, biographical graphic novel telling the story of Okseon Lee, a Korean girl forced into sexual slavery as a comfort woman for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. In doing so, I slow down the affectively nuanced ethical reactions and disruptions evoked by the oppressed and asks what is the invitation of the oppressed specters when she comes? Taking a cue from Derrida’s analysis of the father ghost Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I analyze Grass story as the visual medium of Okseon’s haunt of colonialism, sexism, and war using Derrida’s hauntological categories regarding haunts, exorcism, and hospitality as well as feminist, trauma-informed, and post-colonial thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty, Mayra Rivera, Shelly Rambo, and Wonhee Anne Joh.

This presentation will address the implications of decolonial thinking for feminist religious ethical inquiry. The postcolonial scholarly enterprise, following an interpretation of Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism, is imbued with value judgments about which forms of knowledge “count,” as well as whose specific assessments of cultural and religious phenomena can be taken as authoritative. In ethical inquiry, this ranking of forms of knowledge often privileges theory above practice, in addition to giving credibility to certain voices as authoritative in the discourse. While approaches in feminist religious ethics are frequently sensitive to these issues, utilizing a more explicit decolonial methodology results in more attention to historicity, narratives of Otherness, and offers the possibility of substantive practices of solidarity.

A feminist prism deepens the responses to the ancient Rabbi Hillel’s interrelated questions (If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? And if not now, when?) and subsequent accounts of political ethics. I focus on Hillel’s formulation because 1) it has proven effective in community organizing intent on building solidarity across groups in order to articulate normative social claims and move power and (2) often the process of building non-chauvinistic forms of solidarity involves religious spaces, institutions, networks, and vocabularies as critical mechanisms for the consolidation of intercommunal solidarity but (3) solidarity here denotes both an intersectional critique of grievances that centers an analysis of power and structures and a sociopolitical normativity that shows the indispensability of a feminist hermeneutic from the margins to not only offer a critique but also a positive emancipatory imagination.

A close look at Buddhist ritual practices and newly established training center at a transnational, pilgrimage site in Bodhgaya, India illuminates the intersections of gender, feminist ethics, and solidarity among religious women. First, I consider whether being a Buddhist pilgrim is shaped in particular ways by gender. Does one’s own perception of identity foster a sense of belonging and cohesion among practitioners who identify as Buddhist women? Second, I account for social solidarity, the shared obligations of observing customs; civic solidarity, mutual commitments to one’s nationality; and political solidarity, the endeavor to strive for a shared common cause and sense of obligation towards a similar political vision. Do Buddhist women’s ritual practices foster a sense of social, civic, or political solidarity? If so, what types of solidarity emerge? Lastly, among these types of solidarity, are they fostered through ritual practices and do they extend within the larger social context of Buddhism and constitute a form of feminist ethics?

This presentation explores the limits of the concept of solidarity in contemporary ethical discourse, highlighting its increasing impotence in enhancing relationality and inspiring social change. Examples of how “solidarity” is deployed in theological, ethical, and political contexts will be used to support the broader claim that our understanding of solidarity facilitates a “monstrous intimacy,” which following the thought of Christina Sharpe, enables the continuation and reproduction of, and the indifference to, violent relations of domination under the logics of coloniality. As a potential corrective, I use my two-fold decolonial feminist method—a hermeneutics of el grito and a hermeneutics of vincularidad—to call for the cultivation of a “critical intimacy.” Ultimately, I argue that the frame of critical intimacy exceeds the frame of solidarity in its potential to realize ethical commitments to resistance, reparation, and re-existence.

Despite centuries of displacement driven by imperial and colonial violence, Hmong Shamanism remains intact, relevant, and practiced across the Hmong Indigenous diaspora. This paper explores how Hmong Shamanism practices have changed over time in response to colonial violence, displacement, and migration. In doing so, I illustrate how Hmong Shamanism has repeatedly shown its ability to operate in different contexts by embracing continuity and change while still remaining relevant and intact even in a globalized world influenced by world religion. I conclude the paper by presenting a case in which Hmong history is Shaman history. Therefore, when we preserve, maintain, and cultivate Hmong Shamanism, we align ourselves with indigenous religious, spiritual, and cultural practices that will equip us to overcome existential threats, such as neocolonialism, white supremacy, and climate change.

How do we comparatively understand the authority of plants within the imaginary of indigenous rituals, Catholic rituals, and capitalist rituals in Sabah, a state in East Malaysia? I examine the usage of plants in a ritual, called momokis, which is traditionally used among the Kadazandusun people -- the largest indigenous group in Sabah who have been Catholic for a few generations -- for cleansing and blessing. I argue that this ritual envisions an world in which plants are kin: They are more-than-human persons to whom we are ethically obligated and who have relational qualities that we humans can attain through touch. I also examine how plants are imagined within the Vatican's authorized liturgy for Palm Sunday and in early 20th century capitalist reports by colonial officers. In both contexts, plants are valued insofar as they point away from themselves towards symbolic “abstraction,” whether that abstraction is money or the liturgical calendar. 

On April 1, 2022, Pope Francis took what some called “a first step” when he delivered a historic apology for residential schools to Indigenous peoples at Maskwacis, Alberta, fulfilling one of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. While responses varied, Nehiyaw scholar Matthew Wildcat suggests that “The Pope’s apology may be just the first step. But perhaps it should be the last.” While Christian institutions played a key role in colonization, they have been superseded by the nation-state. In this paper, I theorize the process and implications of the shift in political authority from Papacy to Crown by mapping a genealogical approach to religion onto the imperial and colonial formation of Canada. In doing so, I excavate how the categories of religion and race are foundational to the colonial secular in Canada, which shapes the conditions of possibility for Indigenous peoples’ strategic acts and discourses.

This paper examines the prevalence of child death at St. Francis Mission School. St. Francis was an on-reservation Catholic boarding school for the Sicangu Lakota children of South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, and was a key participant in Federal Indian Policy’s assimilative education agenda.

In their writings, staff constantly interpreted the death of students as a manifestation of the divine. This resulted in a “landscape of holy sickness and sacred death,” where death itself was a pedagogical exercise and a religious achievement for students, from the perspective of their teachers.

Through administrative and personal materials from the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, this paper examines the culture of religious death as a mode of operation for boarding schools. It also suggests that recognition of the death-centricity of these institutions reframes events of run away and arson as a reinstatement of student agency, through the rejection of missionary authorized death. 

For the Haudenosaunee, orenda is the spiritual energy that inheres in and pervades all things animate and inanimate in the world.  A tree has orenda, a rock has orenda, and a human being possesses orenda.  Any one individual’s portion of orenda is small.  Yet each chief of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy carries the orenda of all those he represents, and the Grand Council of the Six Nations has the orenda of the entire confederacy.

The Cherokee are of the Iroquoian language.  The rough Cherokee equivalent of orenda is Yowa.  Yowa is said to undergird or uphold everything.  The words themselves look nothing alike, but as Christopher Jocks said, they are related at the “big idea” level.

This paper will compare orenda and Yowa, as well as look at the oral tradition of the Cherokee revolt against the ani kutani.

Given the massive anti-Muslim violence in Buddhist majority states it is surprising that Buddhist Islamophobia has escaped the attention of most post-colonial and de-colonial theorizing emerging out of Europe and North America. This paper argues for the relevance of Buddhist forms of Islamophobia for our understanding of Islamophobia as a global and globalizing phenomenon. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to analyse core elements of Buddhist Islamophobia and compare it with other forms of Islamophobia, and second, to theorize Buddhist Islamophobia as part of Global Islamophobia(s). Comparing Buddhist Islamophobia with other forms of Islamophobia help us tease out similarities and particularities of anti-Muslim ideologies and practices across national contexts, thus providing necessary empirical data for a broader theorizing of this particular form of religious identity formation.

Islamophobia is increasingly global in scope, but manifests in local ways, contributing to racialization, control, oppression, and hatred against Islam and Muslims. Much of the literature on Islamophobia focuses on individual nation-states or comparisons across them. While this is a crucial perspective on Islamophobia, it is a phenomenon that is entangled with planetary and subplanetary networks of humans, symbols, interfaces, bits and materials that flow across territorial boundaries. This paper proposes a revised framework for the analysis of Islamophobia, aspiring towards the development of a non-deterministic and non-Eurocentric conception of Islamophobia through the lens of five dimensionsof the phenomenon across which we identify a set of migratory, symbolic, informational, technical, and material flows. Developing this framework, the paper enumerates five dimensions of Islamophobia: control, group-making, racialization, discourse, and movements. In doing so, it argues that Islamophobia is fundamental to the rise of global majoritarian group-making projects.

Since 9/11, western programmatic narratives of the need to reform Islam, undergirded by an Islamophobic vision according to which Islam can only be good if it has been reconciled with modern, western values, have deeply affected Muslims’ self-understandings. Yet, Muslims’s navigation of western pressures to be moderate and tolerant also point to the inherent contradictions of these western demands. Focusing on contemporary Indonesia, this paper discusses how Muslims are faced with the choice to either be moderate or tolerant, as being moderate entails the rejection of all those not deemed sufficiently so. Known in the western political philosophy as the paradox of tolerance, this dilemma divides even groups of Muslims who are committed to a peaceful vision of Islam. Whereas a majority has aligned itself with global Islamophobic discourse, some resist its claims, thereby rejecting the identity politics that have been forced onto Muslim communities since 2001.

Many studies of imagination in classical India focus on the term kalpanā. But David Shulman’s pioneering work More than Real draws attention to the—related, but distinct—concept of bhāvanā as a culturally specific notion of imagination. As an active noun derived from the causative form of the root bhū (“to be”), in its most literal sense the term denotes a process of bringing-into-being or creation. While Shulman focuses upon the Sanskrit poeticians’ understanding of poetic creativity, I submit that it is identifiably the same culturally specific conception of imagination behind two other prominent uses of the term. One, within the Mīmāṃsā school of philosophy, refers to the process of verbal comprehension. (Cf. Maṇḍanamiśra’s Bhāvanāviveka.) The other, which spans the various schools of Indian Buddhism, denotes a range of contemplative spiritual practices. (Cf. Kamalaśīla’s Bhāvanākrama.) The purpose of this talk is to draw out the continuity between these three concepts.

This study aims to explore the role of religious imagination in the Lotus Sutra, one of the most influential Buddhist texts in East Asia. The Lotus Sutra is known for its rich imagery and creative use of language, which have captured the imagination of Buddhist devotees for centuries. In recent years, scholars of religion have increasingly recognized the importance of religious imagination in faith communities and religious literature. Based on Kumarajiva’s Chinese translation of the Lotus Sutra (T 262), this paper will investigate how the Lotus Sutra uses imagination to inspire its readers and encourage them to engage with its teachings. It will demonstrate how the text challenges conventional modes of thought and encourages readers to see the world in new ways. By examining the Lotus Sutra's use of imagination in detail, this study will contribute to our understanding of religious literature and its significance for believers and non-believers alike. 

In this paper, I explore imagination as potentiality and peril within a fifteenth-century debate between two Tibetan scholar monks about a tantric ritual practice called body mandala. Imagination is central to body mandala, in which choreographed acts of vision, sound, and gesture are used to transform the body into a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. For the authors of the body mandala debate, Ngorchen Künga Zangpo (1382-1456) and Khédrupjé Gélek Pelzangpo (1385-1438), imagination can only be “productive” if it is conducive to enlightenment. These thinkers grapple with questions of ritual efficacy deeply tied to their distinct perspectives on the relationship of representation and reality— a relationship troubled by imagination. I illuminate how Ngorchen and Khédrupjé navigate Buddhist skepticism toward mental representations and also extol the properly executed body mandala as “productive” in establishing continuity with Buddhahood, building a proper foundation for practice, and getting at the heart of embodiment.

This presentation focuses on the function of imagination in three early twentieth-century, ritual texts related to Mongolian Kālacakra practices of caring for the dead, reciting the Kālacakratantra, and a text devoted to the quick path to empty form. In these ritual texts, the dividing line between bodily and vocal performance and acts of imagination is diminished. Despite the difference in the modes of ritual activity, they share certain common features, equally involving formalized and stylized forms of interaction and communication with the visualized world. In these rituals, the acts of imagination equally perform, create, and enact new realities. The stylized bodily postures and hand gestures and the modulated tone of reciting the text appear to be just as important as the content of the message to be conveyed or enacted and influence the imagination by animating a mentally created imagery.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about the body’s unique capacity for “double sensations.” When someone presses their hands together, the sensation felt isn’t one of two objects resting side-by-side, wherein one hand monopolizes the role of touching and the other feeling. Instead, the sensation felt is an ambiguous combination with both hands alternating between “touching” and “being touched”. In this paper, I extend Merleau-Ponty’s idea of reciprocal perception to a larger discussion of how perception and experience translate to the creation of culture through the relationship between material objects and cultural bodies using an example of a Civil War cockade badge. I argue that material meaning is something that’s accrued beyond the original intended use, actively creating culture as it extends it. I explore how an approach that intricately pursues this co-constitutive relationship offers a productive framework for the study of material culture, “secular” or “religious”.

In the mid and late nineteenth-century, U.S. American spiritualism flourished; mediums contacted the dead through private seances and public performances, using their bodies to channel and communicate with the spirits. Spiritualists used these communications to glean information about the spirit world, which they believed would allow them to bring their steadily progressing material world into alignment with the perfection of the spiritualist afterlife. In this paper, I suggest that the spiritualist fiction of Elizabeth Phelps (The Gates Ajar) and Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (Bertha and Lily) theorize the senses as a key site of spiritualists’ religious imaginaries. Using the sensorium, white spiritualist women imagined sensory utopias in which their embodied experiences were integrally connected to the flourishing of their communities. I show that these spiritualist utopias were specifically racialized through the sensorium, which allowed spiritualist women to uphold structures of oppression in order to imagine alternative futures for themselves.

This paper explores the racialization of Christianity in interwar America by focusing on ecumenical Protestants' perception of non-Western Christian visual arts. The extant scholarship highlights the ubiquity of whiteness in American religious paintings, including Jesus icons. But the "color of Christ" in the interwar period was far more contested, as American Protestants faced the diversity of "indigenous" Christian arts across the world. This paper examines liberal missiologist Daniel Fleming's 1930s effort to collect non-white Jesus images from Asia and Africa, which he believed would challenge the American conflation of whiteness and Christianity. Despite his progressive intention, Fleming's celebration of non-Western Christian arts was based on romantic racialism, or the idea that each race had its own innate, immutable qualities to be expressed. By characterizing these arts as "indigenous," Fleming further perpetuated asymmetry between white Christianity, which was colorless and universal, and other racial groups' Christianity, which was ethnic and particular.

This position paper engages with selected critiques of Islamic femnimism hermenuetics. My aim is  two-fold: I wish to present some critical reflections to facilitate a discussion about what can be learned from Islamic feminist hermeneutics as an area of knowledge with its contributions and limitations and whose relevance in Islamic studies is not confined to the question of gender I will argue that critics and proponents of Islamic feminism, to better understand, evaluate, and for the latter to contribute to the development of this scholarship, might find it beneficial to adopt an integrated approach that brings different Islamic feminist works in conversation with one another. Second, I wish to unpack through an examination of these critiques some of the hegemonic questions and regimes of thought in Islamic studies- particularly in academia in the global North- which I argue underlie these kinds of critiques.

Much of the scholarship on women in the Qurʾan evades a substantive engagement with tafsīr (Qurʾanic exegesis) as a scholarly genre. This lack of engagement with tafsīr in the field of women in the Qurʾan partially stems from evaluations of the exegetical tradition as consistently patriarchal. I argue that this evaluation requires a critical reassessment. By dismissing the exegetical tradition’s role in contemporary efforts to recover Islam’s broader ethics, we lose sight of the rich ways in which the tafsīr’s inherent pluralism and methodological rigor open up new epistemic channels with which to engage the Qurʾan. Viewed as a springboard into an endless ocean of meaning, the genre of tafsīr created an open discursive space for the continual interpretation of the Qurʾan by generations of exegetes. A serious engagement with tafsīr creates new sites of engagement for Muslims who refuse to concede faith and feminism as mutually exclusive pursuits.  

Mutʿa, temporary marriage has been a source of debate throughout history. The polemical nature of the debate created a liminal space, making it an excellent subject for reconsidering marital and sexual ethics. This position paper posits a reassessing of the conceptualization of such ethics within interpretations of mutʿa in particular and within Islamic law in general. It proposes advancing a four-dimensional approach: 1) taking seriously the works of Muslim feminists and the methodological approaches they have put forth to (re)think Islamic sources; 2) incorporating lived Islam though socio-legal ethnography as a testament to the significance of living Muslims; 3) considering moral questions on the issue of sexual ethics and marriage; and 4) seriously weighing the scientific findings on human sexuality. The analysis presented here, as well as the work that still needs to be done, has serious implications for issues related to modern sexual relationships, marriage, and Islamic sexual ethics. 

The contemporary western academy considers itself to be secular, conducting research through non-religious, objective and reasonable means, yet much of its historical background is routed in Christian modes of thinking. Within this academy exists the field of Islamic feminism, which defines itself as distinctly religious and routed in Islamic ideals. The existence of Islamic feminism within the framework of a secular academy begs the question, what makes Islamic feminism, Islamic, as opposed to feminism? Given the Christian routes of western academic institutions, to what extent can normative secular values be considered non-religious or neutral? Given the questions highlighted above, this paper poses the question, how does the field of Islamic feminism define itself within the western secular academy? In the hopes of facilitating a conversation that addresses secular feminism's privilege in claiming neutrality and non-religion, a prerogative not granted to Islamic feminists, who are forced to justify their theological standing.