Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

In his meditation, “Meaning is Inherent in Life,” Howard Thurman identifies the integrity of meaning, life and the fundamental expression of “aliveness” as “materializing vitality.” This vitality and aliveness is an outpouring of divine agency or power through embodied expression. For Audre Lorde, this generative centering vitality and aliveness is linked to the erotic.  For Lorde the erotic is life-force. It is creative energy and power and an internal assertion of life. This aliveness is fundamental to what it means to work at “full-capacity” with passion and joyfulness. Thurman would identify this as the yes within. This paper argues that aliveness is generated through mystical encounter and engagement in Africana religion, performance and cultural aesthetics and will specifically focus on the uses of material technologies such as adornment to generate vitality and aliveness particularly for members of marginalized communities.

This paper examines Baldwin’s relationship to the sacred, while refusing to place Baldwin within the thought world of Christian theology—theology as that    which attempts to “categorize” and “make sense” of God and the sacred. The primary thesis of this paper is that Baldwin articulates what is more properly described as a mysticism, one committed to the experience/pursuit of a mysterious power, an unnamed something which is always and already sensually present. In other words, Baldwin displaces the sacred from the realm of “belief” to that of feeling or affect—feeling in the sense of a deeply embodied experience, which he clearly locates in the arts and sexual expression. However, this is not an individual experience, for this paper will show, in conversation with the scholarship of Ashon Crawley, that Baldwin’s Black mysticism, like Crawley’s “mysticism otherwise,” is inextricably linked to the social, a kind of radical human connectivity.

This paper uses a case study of Mambo Maude’s temple in Jacmel Haiti to focus on the role of spiritual marriages (the ritual and ceremonial practice of joining a practitioner to a Haitian spirit) in allowing for easier communication between spirits and practitioners. These interactions can take place through possession during marriage ceremonies, as well as within dreams where the ongoing communication can facilitate possible sexual encounters between spirits and practitioners. I also explore the often unspoken realities of same gender desire between spirits and practitioners and how this sometimes challenges the ritual traditions of spiritual marriage within Manbo Maude’s temples. The religious fashion and gender presentation involved in spiritual marriage extends beyond ceremonies into the everyday lives of practitioners, as social and cultural influences impact how the human body is perceived during possession in spiritual marriages.

The offering here is in particular recognition that St. Francis all to the good, historically Christianity has been often dismissive of animal beneficence and agency in its long-time preoccupation with human supremacy—and how much more, such “gift-economy mysteries” when it comes to insect-animals!  They are not noted among the zoomorphic and feral presiders at the crib-epiphany of Bethlehem, but given who was in attendance, would likely have been along for the ride.  And in much indigenous perspicacity, insect-appearance of quite varied kinds shows up in myth and ritual as divine and powerful. In this presentation, flies—and their kindred-ly-two-winged cousins, gnats—will be explored biblically as parodic players referenced in the “finger of God” rhetoric of both Moses and Jesus when engaged in high stakes “throw down” with political opponents, leading to investigation of early Israel as a humano-insectual partnership and raising questions for the insect-apocalypse of our time.  

Benedict XVI warns that “purchasing is always a moral—and not simply economic—act.” This paper argues that food choice is a venue in which Christians can move on from what moral theologian John Berkman calls “abstract concern,” taking effective steps to secure justice—for laborers, for non-human animals, and for the planet. Meals on tables testify, not just about fellowship and hospitality, but about our faith in a benevolent God who cares deeply for the oppressed and marginalized.

The question of whether Christians ought to support industrialized animal agriculture is one that reaches beyond issues of animal welfare into the core of Catholic Social Teaching. It connects with the rights and dignity of workers, a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable, the call to family, community and participation, and care for God’s Creation. I argue that moving beyond abstract concern for the marginalized—human and non-human—requires action.

Aquinas refers to animals in relation to humans as “other animals” and as “without reason”. Some argue that Aquinas fundamentally separates humans and animals according to reason; others highlight the shared sensitive nature. I argue that animal as “other” posits an analogical approach to the relationship between the terms “human” and (other) “animal”. This permits *some* similarity of action without a univocal transference of meaning, and places the realities signified by these terms in relationship. An analogical approach affirms *both* the common genus of animal *and* the human distinction of the *imago Dei*. Therefore, I consider two paradigms of human action where Aquinas uses the example of sheep. While the first shows how human action is *unlike* that of other animals, the second likens imitation of Christ to being *like* sheep, and disposes toward restoration of justice in the created order, including in the relationship between humans and other animals.

The figure of the worm has often been a fruitful site for theological reflection in Christian history, from St. Francis’ Psalm-22-inspired compassion for their vulnerability to St. Teresa and Jonathan Edwards’ descriptions of the silkworm’s transfiguration as an image of Christ’s death and resurrection. This paper looks at a bleaker invocation of the worm: Simone Weil’s description of the “half crushed worm” as a type of the crucified Christ, thrown at an infinite distance from God and sunk into godless affliction. Drawing on Weil’s contemporaries Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar as well as the medieval theologian Hadewijch, the paper explores how for Weil separation and loss are constitutive of the love of God. The figure of the worm serves to reorient theology away from triumph and glory and toward signs of mourning, absence, and longing.

Utilizing research conducted by unRival Network over the past 2 years, this paper explores the importance of conversion stories for communicating mimetic theory to wider audiences. These include conversions brought about by the work of René Girard, but also broader intellectual conversions to nonviolence and/or understanding oneself as capable of scapegoating. This research surveys the testimonies of several professional peacebuilders who have experienced such conversions. It frames them with scientific insights which emphasize the importance of storytelling for reducing bias and changing minds. I ultimately argue for the “conversion story” as a paradigmatic form demanding special attention in further research. These topics should prove relevant for those interested in introducing mimetic theory to classroom settings, as well as in its application to democracy and justice.

This paper uses mimetic theory to question the arguments of philosophers and theologians regarding the human personhood of people with intellectual disabilities. Philosophers have compared people with intellectual disabilities to intelligent animals in their arguments for animal rights. Some have suggested elevating the status of intelligent animals to personhood and demoting people with severe intellectual disability to the status of non-persons. Christian theologians have attempted to define a theological anthropology that ensures the assignment of human personhood to people with intellectual disabilities. Both the philosophical and theological arguments ignore the mimetic dynamics involved in the creation of the category of intellectual disability. This paper presents evidence from Girard and other mimetic theorists showing that the status of human personhood is assumed by the category of “intellectual disability”. The paper claims that mimetic evidence can help to clarify arguments surrounding the status of human personhood of people with intellectual disabilities.

The killing of George Floyd was a traumatic cultural event that has opened up new opportunities for rethinking how police officers are trained. The mimetic theory of Rene Girard breaks down the simplistic dichotomy between the law-abiding citizens and the criminals; it enables us to see that what we call "law and order" is one of the products of the scapegoat mechanism. If new and current police officers were trained (or retrained) using principles derived from mimetic theory, they would be led into reflection on the question "Why are human beings violent?" and they could begin to develop strategies and methods that serve to transform society in the direction of greater civility, restraint, and respect for other persons. This possibility of a new approach to training may seem frightening and disruptive, but there will only be further icidents of police misconduct and more rioting if a dramatic change is not made.

This paper takes up decolonial and liberationist praxis to examine human agency in humanitarian work. Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of the coloniality of being frames the investigation. Humanitarian power, this paper argues, moves along colonial lines: it accrues to professional humanitarians from or trained in the West. I analyze the global humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to argue that this formulation of humanitarian agency is more effective at managing the status quo than it is at preventing harm and relieving suffering. I focus on Wynter’s formulation of decolonial critical reflection and action shaped by a gaze from below. I conclude that liberationist movements and decolonial thought offer possibilities for praxis that provides ways humanitarians to exercise new forms of agency beyond roles prescribed by the coloniality of being.

On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law “An Act to Provide for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for their Removal West of the River Mississippi,” more commonly known as the Indian Removal Act. This law would lead to the often-violent expulsion of over 80,000 Native people from their homes and lands east of the Mississippi River, but it was premised on a problematic humanitarian claim: Native peoples would disappear in the face of White settler expansion and could flourish outside the influence of White Americans. This paper interrogates the policy and practice of “Indian Removal” through the work of Didier Fassin (Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present) and Kathryn Gin Lum (Heathen: Religion and Race in American History) to ask how salvation for the heathen inflects and changes the contours of humanitarian reason.

Over the past three decades, the development sector’s approach to Faith Based Organisations (FBOs) has shifted from active exclusion to embracing them as partners and collaborators. Indeed, in 2015 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established its own ‘Refugee Zakat Fund’ in conjunction with the Tabah foundation, an Islamic FBO based in Abu Dhabi. This development, however, has been rejected by the World Zakat and Waqf Forum (WZWF) as both un-Islamic, as a secular agency should not collect zakat, and as a cynical cash grab. Such accusations beg the question, is the UN partnering in bad faith? To answer this question the paper draws on 20 interviews with aid practitioners from both secular and Islamic multilateral agencies and Islamc charities. In doing so, the paper argues that the shift by secular agencies into overseeing Islamic donations represents a form of neo-colonialism and calls for decolonisation.

During the late-nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, many African American Christians fostered a renewed sense of purpose by committing their lives to the “redemption of Africa.” At missionary gatherings such as Atlanta’s 1895 Congress on Africa, Black Christians insisted that they had a special role to play in uplifting their “heathen” kin across the Atlantic. Drawing upon Didier Fassin’s framework of “humanitarian reason,” this paper analyzes how humanitarian discourses and practices among African American Christians were mobilized to justify American humanitarianism in Africa and to trivialize the value of African religious and social contributions. This paper argues that, for leaders such as Alexander Crummell and M.C.B. Mason, religious concepts such as “providence” became key resources for articulating their perceived religious and racial duty to Africa. By examining the various logics animating the 1895 Congress on Africa, this paper explores the understudied intersection of religion, race, and humanitarianism.

How is it that “the weak,” those who are marginalized by an economic system which produces mass inequality and precariousness, can hold a “deeply paradoxical strength” (xii)? This paper suggests that by exploring interpretative-critical accounting theory, accounting’s unsuspected role as a potent social imaginary can illuminate this foundational paradox at the core of Didier Fassin’s humanitarian reason. By examining an accounting framework in contrast to gift theory, the paper illuminates the distinct spaces of the economy, where actors operate out of self-interest, and humanitarianism or charity, where agents are driven by moral concerns. Accounting logic creates the distinction between otherwise similar actions in these realms. It is this distinction that allows humanitarian actions driven by moral compulsion to flourish while simultaneously preventing those same moral inclinations from being turned toward the very systems creating “the weak” in the first place.

This paper weaves a Kachin feminist eco-theology out of the Kachin women’s experience of coerced displacement and ecological degradation in the Kachin land which is facing the loss of biodiversity at an unprecedented level caused by anthropogenic activities. I pay critical attention to extractive capitalism and militarism because their relationship is symbiotic, where both constitute each other and benefit from the interaction. I argue that the process of ecojustice will be only a spiritual frivolity if it does not attend to the wounds of the bodies of poor women and the body of all creatures. Focusing on poor Kachin women’s experience of coerced displacement, poverty, and environmental blight is the starting point for eco-theology that imagines collaborative survival. I will discuss how environmental blight impacts poor Kachin women differently as well as how they organize and struggle for collaborative survival for all life in the midst of displacement and poverty.

What could we learn from an Asian ecofeminist theology amid the pandemic and ecological crisis? Salim refers to women’s everyday embodied household-tasks. Salim broadly includes all of the diverse ecological activities that enliven our planetary living. The salim movement functions as an ecological movement in saving the economy and ecology as a valuable oikos, our living organism. Salim movements predominantly carried out by Korean women in the everyday practice of caring for their homes. Korean women have actively participated in decolonizing movements throughout the Korean history, e.g., Donghak movements (1894–1895), the March 1st Independence Movement (1919), the Post-Sewol Candlelight protests (2016–2017), and Korean Me Too movements (2018). Salim can be transformed into a healing energy of Life when we participate in holistic eco-caring activities and create therapeutic communities which is missio Dei today. Salim Theology is non-eurocentric and non-patrilinear but all-inclusive and symbiotic as a postcolonial ecofeminist theology.

As impacts of climate change are felt with increasing regularity in everyday life and in climate emergencies, it becomes imperative to build resilient communities that can mitigate and reverse climate change impacts, adapt to local changes, and recover quickly and equitably from climate disasters. This paper considers faith communities as potential participants and partners in hubs for climate resilience to respond to vulnerabilities due to climate change. The paper first defines and discusses the concepts of resilience and climate resilience hubs, then enumerates ways faith communities can contribute to climate resilience and community flourishing. Examples from faith communities in the presenter’s region and network will be offered, including advocacy and community organizing efforts, changes to buildings and grounds, and collaboration with mutual aid groups and community-based organizations toward more local, equitable, and sustainable communities. Theological educators are encouraged to prepare students to engage in this important work of our time.

This paper explores ecological work by Muslim communities in promoting climate change’s mitigation and environmental advocacy in Indonesia. I will specifically examine how Islamic teachings on environment inform Muslim communities to address environmental challenges and to engage with ecological work, especially in a Pesantren (Islamic boarding school) setting. I will use the work by environmental leaders from pesantren institutions, such as al-Imdad, Fadlul Fadlolan, Darut Tawhid, and Darul Arqam. I chose these pesantrens as they fit into what Fachruddin M. Mangunwijaya, an environmentalist activist and author, characterizes as eco-pesantren. The outcome of my research shows (1) how pesantren communities use Islamic teaching on environment to promote eco-action, (2) how they share a common concern for environmental sustainability and advocacy especially by promoting work such as managing garbage, planting trees, and creating an ecological oriented education, and (3) how they train students to care for the environment.

In conversation with Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex, this paper analyzes the developments of substance metaphysics in medieval treatments of Eucharistic transubstantiation and sex difference. Focusing on the distinction between separable and inseparable accidents, I ask how Aristotelian categories that had been adapted into Eucharistic theology to defend insensible change resulting in the real body of Christ on the altar were also being deployed to argue for the metaphysics of binary sex difference. 

This paper overviews the conceptual framings of Christotechtonics, the portmanteau of Christology and dildotechtonics. Drawing from the theories of Paul B. Preciado, Christotechtonics interrogates the biopolitical deployment of Christ to naturalize somatic expressions of sexual difference. Within Preciado’s oeuvre, sexuality is a technology, one that has managed to effectively disappear the arbitrary foundations of sexual difference as normal, thus functioning in a dual necrobiopolitical manner. Following Preciado’s work, Christotechtonics questions the deployment of Christ in contemporary theology that seeks to either reify or confound sexuality and other attendant intersectional analyses. Christ, far from only functioning as a theological category, aligns with sexuality’s necrobiopolitical function, producing theological claims that concretize sexual difference. In relation to sexuality, such framings foreclose any future for trans, queer, and intersex bodies. Christotechtonics, drawing form Preciado’s theories of the dildo, also seeks to short-circuit the logics of heterosexualism that have aligned with theology.

Involuntary celibacy is an acute problem for the men it affects. Gathered on violently hateful websites, “incels” make sense of their unwanted condition in ways that complicate conventional religious understandings of celibacy as a feat of discipline. Theirs is a computational problem, they explain to each other. Drawing on scholarship about neoliberal striving and the idea of the quantified self, this paper uses incel writing to theorize “data fatalism.” Users render their bodies as “metrics” or “data” that women process, and they attribute their fate to features discipline cannot change, such as their faces, heights, and races. Incels trace their sexlessness back first to the strange data of the dispersed and countable self and then to a nebulous ranking and sorting “out there” that definitively separates the sexually elect from the doomed. Inextricable from their misogyny, incel data fatalism reveals both the becoming-computational of social life and its human costs.