Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

A lesser-known aspect of the 1973 majority decision in Roe v Wade is the large role played by history--several histories, in fact--in its finding. I wish to look more closely at the role played by ancient Greek and Roman history in this decision, a role that anticipated subsequent legal reasoning concerning same-sex sexuality and assisted suicide in later decades. In these latter cases, appellate courts continued to make the “Greeks and Romans did, but the early Christians didn’t” style of argument. The US Supreme Court did not take up these arguments, however, preferring to examine a much narrower history limited to the past three centuries. Such a version of constitutional “originalism” was also more subtly embedded in Roe’s arguments, both in Justice Blackmun's majority opinion and in Chief Justice Rehnquist's dissent.

Given that polling shows most Catholics support abortion rights, how can scholars grapple with the discrepancies between perceptions of Catholic theological history and the pro-choice commitments shared by everyday Catholics? This paper challenges the dominant narrative that abortion and Catholicism are incompatible by agitating the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ claim that Church teachings on abortion are “unchanged” and “unchangeable.”

This paper traces the role of ultrasonic imaging in American Christianity. It shows how Christians came to identify the fetus as a kind of proto-citizen, and therefore a killable child, only through the aesthetic registers, affective economies, and subject positions ultrasounds produced. Ultrasounds initially served as a military technology for anti-submarine warfare before becoming a medical surveillance device: both its iterations, though, taught onlookers to visualize and affectively feel the onscreen blips as living things to be either killed or saved. By placing religion within ostensibly “secular” technoscientific histories of violence, Christian opposition to abortion echoes overlooked continuities with warfare and weapons systems. This paper illuminates, then, the intimate and violent relationship between Christian anti-abortion politics and the military technologies that affectively taught them to see life aesthetically rendered as blips on a screen, sonically rendered flesh on bone, a contextless child bathed in God’s life-giving light.

This paper examines a lecture given by Emil Hegg titled, “The So-Called Apostles’ Creed”, which sparked a dispute among ecclesial and civil authorities in Bern, Switzerland, leading to the Reformed Church of Bern becoming confession-free. It provides insights into the lesser-known logic, culture, context of the modern Swiss Reformers in Bern. It demonstrates this logic (the “evangelical freedom of conscience”) as it is employed successfully through his labor with the “Reform-association”, associated with the Tübingen School of Theology, which aimed to enact ecclesial reform, a more expansive Protestant piety, and a more civil relation between the church and the academy. This is mediated through Hegg’s quasi-Hegelian concept of the “evangelical freedom of conscience” and his clear anti-Catholic tendencies, which drive his rhetoric and reform. This paper aims to elucidate the principles behind the reform movement in Bern, particularly due to its distinctive church-state relation and the turmoil surrounding Hegg’s lectures.

In nineteenth-century France, the history of Christian theological reception became a particular history of the reception of Augustine known as Jansenism. Key tenets included irresistible grace, the impossibility of fulfilling some commandments, internal necessity not excusing sinful acts and Jesus Christ suffering and dying for the elect only. Augustine’s later, anti-Pelagian writings were especially important in his Jansenist reception, with the most important dissemination being via the principal manual used in seminaries. Editions of patristic texts and studies of patristic theologians from this period lacked critical edge and their compilers did not usually view them as part of a developmental trajectory in doctrine. Towards the middle of the century, the picture was transformed by a revolution in how theological texts were received and a huge expansion in the number and variety of texts available due to the work of the Abbé Jacques-Paul Migne.

Joseph Turmel (1859­–1943), considered the foremost French Catholic Patristic scholar of his time, was exceptional in putting his erudition to work, though strikingly not to contribute to systematic theology but to undermine it. Convinced, as a result of his exegetical and historical studies, that the church has duped him with a fabricated account of Christian history/theology, he decided to remain within the church while, through his own and, increasingly, pseudonymous publications, working to subvert it.

Matters reached a crisis point when, in 1906 and 1907, Turmel published two series of articles in the Revue d'histoire et de literature religieuses. This paper attends to the first of these, on the dogma of the Trinity in the first three centuries. It examines Turmel’s strategy of subversion, considers orthodox responses to his articles, and briefly touches upon a campaign to identify him as their author. 

This paper seeks to deepen and expand understandings of entanglements between religion, animals, and modernity focusing on immigrant Jews in the United States in the early twentieth century. Explore the role played by horses in immigrant Jews’ everyday lives, the animal welfare activism of a cadre of European-born Reform rabbis, and photographs of Jewish businesses and families featuring animals, it will show how American Jews expressed both ascendancy and kindness - the Jewish ethical approaches to animals delineated by religious studies scholar Aaron Gross – but also operated within a slightly different dialetic, of’ dependence on and defense of animals, born of the rough and tumble of immigrant religious life and Jewish acculturation in modernity.

This paper will explore the religious and ethical questions raised in Rivka Galchen’s short story, “How I Became a Vet.” Narrated by a woman working in emergency veterinary medicine, the story revolves around two plot points: the first, the fact that the narrator keeps receiving scathing online reviews from disgruntled clients; the second, the local dogs keep jumping off the same bridge as though attempting to die by suicide. On the one hand, this story is a commentary on the devastating effects of neoliberal capitalism on the veterinary profession. Should we really be measuring our veterinarians’ abilities through online reviews? Should we humans be reviewing them at all? On the other hand, “Becoming a Vet” makes a case for recognizing the religious, emotional, and physical labor bound up in being a veterinarian, showing that if we continue to neglect these dimensions, we risk the lives of animals and veterinarians alike.

The language of “entanglement” is conspicuous in contemporary analyses of human-animal relations. The framing of these relations as contextually “entangled” can work to immunize the human exploitation of animals from the kinds of ethical critique and social-political intervention applied to problematic human-human relations. In this paper, I underscore how appeals to entanglement, even appeals grounded in genuine and relevant feelings of love and bonding between humans and their animals, nevertheless deflect attention from the critical issue of domestication and the myriad harms it inherently—if variably—demands. I begin with the pioneering work of Donna Haraway and continue through an exploration of the recent texts of Radhika Govindrajan and Muhammed Kavesh. I then pivot to the work of Eva Haifa Giraud, Dinesh Wadiwel, and Paula Arcari to present alternative starting point that validates the significance of affect in human-animal relations while rejecting the preservation of an exploitative anthropocentric speciesism.

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Prison changes people, even people who only visit. For the past seven years, as director of a prison education program, I have spent several hours every week inside the Women’s Therapeutic Residential Center, a medium-security, 1,200 bed facility for women in Henning, Tennessee. This carceral experience has shifted my thinking about the (im)morality of incarceration, the (in)justice of the criminal justice system, and (un)ethical methods of treating the incarcerated. It has also begun to change the way I read and understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As an example of this change, I will explore Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” (1942) in light of my experience at the Women’s Therapeutic Residential Center. Although “After Ten Years” was penned several months before Bonhoeffer himself was arrested and imprisoned, I have found that reading it through my own carceral lens has brought the text alive for me in a new way.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned for two years without trial prior to his execution, the majority at Tegel Prison in Berlin under the care of Chaplain Harald Poelchau. Poelchau did what many prison chaplains do: he worked for life in a system purposed toward death. His navigation of a Nazi prison as an employee and an active member of the resistance movement goes deeper than “code switching” or hiding in plain sight. He remained undiscovered as a resister because he became an active, paid participant in more than 1,000 executions of the regime. He was able to save some people from death because of his participation in other people’s executions. Drawing on a collaborative ethnography of prison chaplaincy, I argue that Poelchau is representative of prison chaplains who learn to hold both horror and holiness within themselves, following the example of Jesus in being “made sin” for the sake of salvation. 

In 2019, I taught a course entitled "Theology Behind Bars" at Cook County Jail in Chicago. Among the texts we examined was Bonhoeffer's *Letters and Papers from Prison.*

In this paper, I will describe and analyze the experience of teaching Bonhoeffer in a prison context, both in terms of how his writing shed light on the experience of my students and in terms of how the students drew on their own experiences to understand and challenge the text. Coming from a wide array of religious backgrounds, students approached the text with a critical, and at times skeptical, eye, and yet were able to discern the ways in which Bonhoeffer's own thought challenged their theological presuppositions and offered a means to understand their experiences. Bonhoeffer's prison theology can offer resources for understanding and challenging the carceral system in the United States, and the contemporary relevance of his thought.

What does it take to be responsible--especially in our era of mass incarceration? I turn to Bonhoeffer's substitution or Stellvertretung, standing in for another, for guidance. The account of substitution and responsibility found in his Ethics has, however, its shortcoming according to critics, in particular, for being theologically presumptuous, ethically paternalistic, and vague. Bonhoeffer’s short story, “Farewell, Comrade,” written shortly after his arrest and incarceration in 1943, offers us an alternative and largely overlooked take on substitution, one that is theologically modest, solidaristic rather than paternalistic, and concrete. In effect, by making the story’s authorities its villains and the socially marginalized characters his heroic responsible substitutes, Bonhoeffer challenges his own earlier implication that responsibility requires substantial authority, power, privilege to enact heroic, history-changing acts. Instead, responsibility—both for and by those who are incarcerated—can and often should be made up of modest acts of reciprocity and mutual recognition.

How do rabbis in the Talmud construe women’s economic independence in marriage and divorce? This paper examines different instances where women claimants in the Talmud seem to merit sympathy or legal protection, yet rabbinic decisions may not protect the women or even penalize them. Women’s claims are often taken in bad faith and their responses seem to lend husbands legal protections against their wives’ hypothetical abuses, ultimately magnifying the existing power imbalance between the genders. How does rabbinic legislation and legal interpretation, even when attempting to assist individual women, reinforce existing structural inequalities and ultimately how does the rabbinic response replicate and institutionalize abusive practices and dynamics in marriage and divorce?  This paper will consider the types of legal arguments employed, either in ways that impede or thwart women’s financial autonomy or benefit it and how these reinforce existing gender dynamics, affecting women’s economic vulnerability during the marriage and divorce. 

This paper will consider how communal discourse describing abuse of the Jewish divorce process as a form of domestic violence has resulted in the creation of new remedies under secular criminal and family law and new responsiveness in rabbinical courts. These changes will be considered in light of legal theorist Robert Cover’s notion of jurisgensis,  a framework that has been adopted by Jews feminist legal theorists to draw a link between changes on the ground in Jewish practice wrought by 20th and 2st century feminists and new, more egalitarian interpretations of Jewish law.  Drawing on the work of Rachel Adler, Tamar Ross, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion Waldoks, I argue that the work of agunah activists in creating and popularizing new ways of understanding Jewish laws of divorce that discriminate against women have paved the ways for the deployment of remedies which were previously viewed as illegitimate.

How does the inherent gendered asymmetry of Jewish divorce contribute to women's experience of Jewish divorce as a violation of their human dignity? What do these experiences reveal about Jewish divorce  as a highly gendered legal process that is both rooted in history and tradition and challenged by contemporary cultural expectations around human dignity? Ethnographic interviews with lay women, men, rabbis, lawyers and activits expose how rabbinic and communal concerns for correct practice (orthopraxy), trouble Jewish divorce across denominations in particular ways which are always pushing and pulling on Jewish religious legal practice within the larger socio-legal context of Jews in Canada.  As a trope that is rich in legal, religious, and popular signification, dignity invites us to explore how concerns for dignity drive Jewish religious practice at the communal level while also providing a conceptual framework for individuals to reflect on their own experience.

Since the 1970s, Buddhist and Buddhism-informed prison outreach programs have flourished in the U.S. Leaders of these efforts often assert that Buddhist teachings, practices, and concepts benefit incarcerated people because they teach them to transform (and reform) themselves ontologically. This paper analyzes such discourses as narratives of Buddhist exceptionalism. It argues that this rhetoric constructs a dichotomy between the so-called angry “criminal” and the compassionate “Buddhist” and gains popularity through racializing discourses attached to each category. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, and memoirs by incarcerated Buddhists, the paper considers the ways rhetoric about the transformative potential of Buddhism behind bars juxtaposes Orientalist stereotypes of Buddhism as passive and feminine with other racial stereotypes—like those about Black and Latino men as criminals—and forms new subjectivities through a process of racialization. It also discusses the relationships between Buddhist exceptionalism, American exceptionalism, and Black exceptionalism in this dynamic.

Responding to Rima Vesley-Flad’s Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, this paper unpacks the imagined and realized forms of solidarity amongst Black and Asian American Buddhisms. I read Vesley-Flad’s work alongside Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge to track these resonances. I reference Comparative Ethnic Studies scholarship that tracks historical and imagined Black-Asian solidarities that are polycultural, internationalist, and anticolonial. Polycultural engagement with Blackness and Asianness broadly understood has shaped theorists in Black Studies and Asian American Studies that express subjectivities that are uncommodifiable and resistant to whiteness. However, American Buddhist scholarship on non-white Buddhist practitioners and communities continues to rely on the centers/periphery model to critique white supremacy in American Buddhism. I urge the field to move away from engaging whiteness to resolve white supremacy and instead explore Black-Asian entanglements in Black Buddhism, Asian religious cultures, and Asian engagements with Blackness as Su’ad Abdul Khabeer analyzed in Muslim Cool.

This paper studies the contents, contexts, and circulations of American author, filmmaker, and practicing Zen Buddhist priestess Ruth Ozeki’s literature among its contemporary audiences through literary analyses of Ozeki’s works, as well as juxtaposition of them with literatures of secondary scholarship in political ecology, new materialism, and political economy. In doing so in conversation with religious and ethnic studies, it points to how religious and economic racialization are tandem forces, and how transpacific Asian American art and literature reveal both the damaging and constructive potentials of these forces.

Eco-reproductive ethics has received renewed attention within humanities disciplines, yet remains relatively unexplored within religious studies. Christian ethicists in particular tend to avoid these concerns by understating the extent to which human population growth exacerbates environmental threats. While such problems may initially appear to undermine Christian commitments (such as the goodness of human creation and procreation), in this paper I explore possibilities for moral response that draw upon Christian inheritances and traditions. Synthesizing insights from long-form interviews, I find that my Christian informants 1) take up kinship alternatives or “kinnovate” and 2) pursue minimally reproductive lives as part a broader religious vocation. I argue that these and other eco-reproductive interventions are significant in light of the underdeveloped literature on these topics; they gesture toward the identification and (re)application of moral resources that seek to address climate threats, especially within the contexts of religious and family life.

In environmental ethics, most attention to catastrophe and the moral life focuses exclusively on the human-wrought catastrophe of climate change or “the Anthropocene.” However, focusing on human-wrought catastrophe gives distorted perspective on what ‘proper moral response’ to catastrophe is. I will defend this through examining a case of moral response to natural catastrophe: I will turn to Job, who raises fundamental questions for Christian ethics. Job’s experience forces us to consider the limits of virtue and suggests the possibility that there may be responses to catastrophe that are good, non-virtuous, and against God. As such, Job should make us question the role and type of spiritual practice that can help people respond to catastrophe and the idea that virtue can help in responding to catastrophe well. I will end this paper by returning to our contemporary moment and what Job adds to the conversation about moral response to environmental catastrophe.

In March 2021, the German climate justice movement celebrated a big success before the German Supreme Court. The so-called “Climate Verdict” (Klimaurteil) forces the German government to establish laws regarding the country’s CO2 reduction goals beyond 2031. The verdict adds a temporal dimension to the legal concept of freedom, expanding it to include the rights of future, unborn citizens. But how can the freedoms of future citizens be anticipated appropriately in the present? Theological concepts by Lutheran and Reformed traditions are well-positioned to bridge this gap between current and future generations. They can address both as equal part of God’s creation – a thought captured in the German term “Mitgeschöpflichkeit” (co-createdness) – and ground the concept of freedom in the belief in God as the creator of life (“Verdanktheit”). 

Climate change and environmental degradation present moral psychological challenges to response, notably the global and intergenerational scope. Because the vulnerabilities at issue involve a certain level of abstraction, representing them in imaginatively potent ways is critical. This project develops the moral aesthetics of human and environmental vulnerability (susceptibility to wounding) as a resource for ethical responsiveness. Criticisms that Christianity has shaped ethical dispositions inclined to passivity (or worse) towards environmental destruction are well-worn tropes at this point. But with regards to representing vulnerability, a theological approach may draw on a long history of reflection on the moral and aesthetic significance of wounds, central to the Christian narrative of crucifixion and redemption. In this paper I will develop aesthetic dimensions of a moral psychology (imagination and affective responses to figurative representation) responsive to environmental vulnerability through the prism of eschatological images of the resurrected wounds of creation.