Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

This paper analyzes the “karmic retribution by proxy” trope in medieval Chinese Buddhist literature from the mid-third to mid-tenth century. In Chinese Buddhist miraculous tales, karma generated by an actor may not manifest upon themselves, but rather through the body of their child. This paper surveys surviving miraculous tales to determine why and how children assumed the role of proxies for their parents’ karmic retribution. By situating this trope within wider medieval Chinese repertoires of collective retribution, I illustrate that karma in medieval China reflected socio-cultural assumptions of collective or familial responsibility. I further place this trope alongside other concepts of collective or shared karmas in Buddhist thought, as well as examine medieval Chinese debates over the veracity of familial karmas. This paper contributes to scholarly conversations on collective karma in Buddhist traditions, underscoring the necessity to reevaluate conventional definitions of karma in light of noncanonical texts and lived contexts.

This presentation argues that Vietnamese tales composed in Literay Sinitic can shed light on the imagination of social karma in premodern Vietnam. First, I show how the hagiography of the magic-working monk, Từ Đạo Hạnh, synthesizes two karmic strands, his own life and that of Emperor Lý Thần Tông. The second story, focused on the vengeful rebirth of Lady Đào, illustrates how a past life karmic grievance can sometimes explain inexplicable hatred between people. I call this narrative process, "retrospective projection," the imputing of past-life events as causes for present social calamity or interpersonal conflicts. In short, read closely, heretofore unstudied Vietnamese tales composed in Literay Sinitic can shed light on how, in premodern Vietnamese religious culture, karma was not just individual, but also, social, a kind of moral metaphysics which was used to imagine enduring love, miraculous re-births, and also, sometimes, inexplicable hate.

This interdisciplinary study reopens Tianyan lun—the Chinese translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and the single most influential book in initiating late Qing intellectuals into social Darwinism—as a site for Buddhist global exchange and translingual practice, when the notion of “karma” offered Huxley and his Chinese translator and readers at once a ground of convergence and a point of departure. The term this study places in the spotlight is zhongye, literally “seeds-karma,” the heading of a chapter in Tianyan lun. Notably, “seeds-karma” is not a canonical configuration, but the term has left an indelible impression on some progressive-minded intellectuals, including Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zuoren. The notion of karma and the notion of “seeds”—which, in Chinese, also means species, race, and offspring—struck unusual chemistry when the Yogācāra revival and the pressing task of national salvation became two simultaneous events in fin-de-siècle China.

This paper explores an unlikely heroine—a 19th-century Persian woman who, despite living in a patriarchal society, wrote poetry, educated girls, and became well-known as a writer, reformer, and Bábí. Fatimah Baraghání, who became known as Tahirih, was from a well-known family in the city of Qazvin, Iran. Her father, Mulla Salih, was a Mujtahid who ran a school with students as far away as India and all over Persia. Mulla Salih gave all his daughters something unusual: an education. This paper examines Tahirih’s understanding of Persian literature, poetry, religious jurisprudence, Islamic tradition and Qur'anic commentary.  It also examines her ways of subverting gender norms, her involvement with the new Bábí movement, and her eventual martyrdom. 

The Arabic prayer “From the Sweet-Scented Streams of Thine Eternity,” by Bahá’u’lláh recenters Qur’anic motifs, language, and imagery of the pleasures of paradise (janna) from quotidian comforts to a dynamic relationship of intimacy with God. Each verse of this prayer, employing the metaphorical genitive, contains a structure of supplicating God for a symbolic blissful joy (e.g., “sweet-scented streams”) as the paradise of intimacy with Him (e.g., “of Thine eternity”), followed by proclaiming one of God’s attributes or actions. I identify this exegetical and poetic move of Bahá’u’lláh in this prayer as foreshadowed in the Islamic tradition, even while its richness and clarity by Bahá’u’lláh raises to new heights this vision of the experience of paradise as an expression of divine reality.    

Tahirih, also known as Qurratu’l-‘Ayn (18---1852), was one of the leading disciples of the Bab (1819-1844), Sayyid ‘Ali-Muhammad of Shiraz, the founder of Babism.  She was formally educated in Islamic learning and theology, but relied heavily on inspiration for some of her most radical doctrines.  Her poems contain radical theological pronouncements that would propel the Babi movement beyond Islam.

     By no means typical or representative of other Babi scholars, her theology seems to be filled with a woman’s sensibility, with its inclination towards peace, justice, and reconciliation.  At certain moments, Tahirih anticipates developments in Babi/Baha’i teachings that would not take place until decades later.  Tahirih’s poetic voice offers a unique Babi theology understood, perhaps, only by her few (women?) followers at the time. 

This paper examines the Torah’s understanding of qdš with specific attention to Yahweh’s self-revelation and call to His people to be “qdš” with a reflection on implications for a Wesleyan understanding of holiness. The holiness of God is widely attested in Scripture and upheld in the Wesleyan theological tradition. But what is the background and context to this Hebrew word “qdš”? David Clines demonstrated that whilst the verb (qdš) is presented frequently in Hebrew lexicons with the basic meaning of “to separate,” this is an inadequate rendering based on the textual evidence. The root “qdš” is directly related to the deity and that which belongs to the deity rather than primarily “to be separated” or “to be clean.” The context of this term will be explored with a brief reflection on the theological implications. 

This presentation examines the mother and milieu contributing to John Wesley’s sense of a calling or vocation to a single life. In the absence of formal monastic communities to provide accountability to vows of celibacy in eighteenth-century England, Susanna Wesley raised young John and his siblings as a kind of miniature monastic community with a rule of life all its own in a literal backwater on the formerly isolated Isle of Axholme. This research draws on previously unpublished evidences of everyday life in the Epworth Rectory from the John Rylands Library. It is part of a larger, co-authored project exploring the foundation, evolution, and implications of John Wesley’s commitment to celibacy across a life the majority of which he lived as a single person in communities.

This paper examines the teaching of British Wesleyan minister Maynard James on the second coming of Christ before, during, and following World War II. James interpreted the second coming of Christ through the lens of current national and world events, often engaging prophetic discourse and scriptural reference. James wrote articles and editorials interpreting current events in Britain and elsewhere in the world through the lens this view of Christ’s second coming. The imminence of Christ’s return and prophetic interpretation intensified for James during World War II. As the twentieth century progressed and James aligned with the Church of the Nazarene and changed his view. Reflecting the Nazarene Articles of Faith, he came to teach the essential aspects of the doctrine of Christ’s return and the rapture of the saints: the second coming of Christ and resurrection, judgment, and destiny.

Neoliberalism operates not only as a set of economic policies characterized by globalization and free markets, but also a coercive rationality that has profoundly shaped our collective work ethic. Building on affective political theologian Karen Bray's Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, the purpose of this paper is to examine the explicit goals - the teleological ends - of neoliberalism, to articulate how the exploitation of our free time through unpaid labor is crucial in neoliberalism's telos, and to articulate the affective toll living under such conditions engender.

Neoliberal regimes of commodification have wed the task of credentialing students for work to the labor of contingent faculty and graduate workers who function, from their employer’s point of view, as specialized credentialers of students toward market work. Drawing from experience simultaneously teaching religion to undergraduates and organizing fellow academic workers, this paper argues that the practices of academic labor organizing and labor-based grading can work in tandem to resist the institutional imperative of credentialing and thereby teach “against the grain of capitalism.” They do this precisely by emphasizing “labor” as a relevant category and “worker” as a relevant identity—for students and teachers both. 

This paper examines how Christian theology became enmeshed with capitalist ideologies of patriarchal white supremacy through the emergence of the Lost Cause in the years after the Civil War. Following the war, the United States faced a reality that was both a challenge and an opportunity: for the first time, legalized chattel slavery would no longer form one of the key pillars of U.S. economic life. How would the United States structure its economy when it could no longer unapologetically exploit the stolen labor of enslaved people? Populists and union organizers, industrial capitalists, and southern planters all had different visions of the future of economic life in the United States after the Civil War, and they all invoked Christian theology to support their positions. This paper explores how these debates might inform a Christian theological defense of economic democracy against the exploitative conditions of racial capitalism today.

This paper is a close reading of the metaphors of gestation and childbirth that deployed in Rubem Alves' A Theology of Human Hope, and its negative view of abortion in particular, which grows out of Alves' failure to recognise gestation as work in its full, alienated condition. This unrealised possibility is still more prominent as a result of the text’s Marxian analysis of labour, which is offered in contrast, set apart from Alves’ gestational metaphors as if the two do not interact. I aim ultimately to miscarry Alves’ metaphors towards what I argue is something closer to their fruition, for an understanding of abortion as generative, by amplifying the moments of internal contradiction in the text, and applying his analysis of labour to his own metaphors. I find in Alves’ work the timely hope for a politics of the child severed from the politics of reproduction in/of the family.

This paper revisits a canonical text of queer theory, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and argues that this book has been misunderstood insofar as it has not been received as theorizing the secular. Taking No Future as a work of philosophy of religion in the sense that, like much work in philosophy of religions over the past two decades, it attempts to expose the religious genealogy of Western secular modernity, the paper puts this book into conversation with philosophy of religion and religious studies more broadly. This conversation affords a fresh reading of Edelman’s familiar critique of “reproductive futurism” alert to its intersections with such themes and discourses of philosophy of religion as political theology, aura, the post-secular turn, and messianism/messianicity.

This paper will ask to what extent queer temporalities and critiques of colonial time converge in overlapping or complementary reconfigurations of time and history. Using Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chronormativity, it will demonstrate how multiple theorists with divergent methods destabilize a unified and universal sense of time as a precondition for critiquing colonial capitalism. It will conclude by asking whether versions of teleological or messianic thinking—however abstract or indeterminate—recur across these critical discourses. It asks, in particular, what Freeman’s queer erotics and Bliss Cua Lim’s notion of “the fantastic” might have to do with conceptions of justice.

In response to the critique that “religion” is a Protestant category, privileging (individual) belief over (collective) practice, philosophers of religion working out of modern Christian sources have rightly sought to nuance this claim by showing that Christian philosophers like Kant or Schleiermacher also care about moral action or social cohesion. By contrast, modern Jewish philosophy, which frames dialogical ethics, sociality, intersubjectivity, and obligation to the other as its foundational contribution, has not had to contend with this same challenge. Yet for all the ways modern Jewish philosophy prizes the ethical import of its “originary” sociality, its ethical import, I suggest, may just be in forms of sociality illegible to philosophy’s so-called “social turn.” I turn to queer sociality to develop this claim and to ask whether sociality can do the kind of ethical and political work in philosophy that it is called upon to do.

Abstract

This paper challenges the view of Quakers as middle-class by examining the spread of eighteenth-century English Quakers in the labour markets.    The data from the marriage records shows that the largest sector of economic activity for Quakers was as artisans, with another significant activity in retail.    Together these covered 41% of Quakers declaring an occupation.   In modern terms these sectors could be argued as lower or middle class.    A second challenge to the middle-class view is the possibility of an unrecorded coterie of agricultural labourers in regions remote from London.    This group is postulated because of the observation of a clear pattern of reduced levels of occupational recording in the marriage records as distance from London increases.    The regions where these lower recording levels occur are often economically poorer and significantly agricultural.     Thus, while Quakers cannot be described as lower-class, neither should they be taken as wholly middle-class.  

The role of young adults as a specific, coherent identity group in North American religious communities remains understudied, even despite their past and ongoing invocation in the problem of declension among North American religious communities.  Using the example of the Young Friends, a loose confederation of young-adult Quaker organizations in the early- to mid-twentieth century US and Canada, this paper exposes the perceived and actual role of young adults in attempts to stem the tide of declension and organizational rupture, i.e., schism.  The paper also offers tools for thinking more broadly about scholarship on oppressed or marginalized groups, namely through a theoretical tool I call “triple self-sufficiency.”  Triple self-sufficiency allows us to identify institutions and organizations that both engender a consciousness of shared identity and ontologically represent this shared identity.

In this paper, I focus on artistic achievement as a mode of establishing political authority in the context of the seventeenth-century courts of the Deccan Sultanates, located south of the Mughal Empire’s borders. I argue that in a set of multilingual and multi-genre texts produced at the court of Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II in Bijapur, authors propounded a form of divine kingship through depictions of the sultan as a skilled artist not only resembling, but in some cases surpassing, God as Creator. In so doing, I situate sixteenth-century Deccani claims to divine kingship amidst conceptions of the sovereign-as-artist located across the broader Islamic world. Finally, I suggest that while the Deccan Sultans’ claims to sovereignty have largely been linked to those of their Shi‘a neighbors, the Safavids, Ibrahim II had the Mughal emperor Akbar in mind as a perpetual foil when crafting his political-theological program.

Akbar’s reign (1556-1605) as Mughal emperor has always been notable for his massive sponsorship of Persian letters and Iranian intellectuals. This paper considers what was at stake politically and theologically in the decision to use Persian as the language of empire through examining the linguistic cosmology constructed by three groups of Iranian migrants courted and sponsored by Akbar: dictionary writers, and two occult Iranian groups known as Nuqṭavīs and Āẕarīs, both invested in the upheaval of the Islamo-Arabic order at the turn of the Islamic millennium. From their writings, I argue, a clear picture emerges of the hold occult ideas about a new “Persian age” had on Akbar’s millenarian project. I also consider the broad legacies of Akbar’s theologization of the Persian language as pertaining to issues of linguistic authority, vernacularization, and nationalist myth-making.

This paper explores the centrality that Krishna came to play as an ambiguous figure in the milieu of the “Mughal translation project."  Krishna’s vilification as a deceitful magician by the poet Faiḍī in his Mahābhārat, and his elevation as a “sovereign” in Sabzavārī’s Garden of the Pure [Rauḍat ut-Ṭāhirīn] are both considered in the context of the Persian Haribans’ laborious translation of Krishna’s lineage.  Linking these works is not only a philological genealogy but also a common field of force: a political theology which sought to frame Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar as an incarnational figure, an instantiation of divine logos bringing order to a hermeneutico-ontological domain stalked by deceitful pretenders.  In this context, Vishnu—and Krishna in particular—served as an exemplar for the Akbarian project and as a competitor: at once a prefiguration of Akbar, and a sacred King belonging to a rival lineage sent into occultation by the Mughals.

How do religious leaders’ perceptions of the science and religion interface shape how they understand congregants’ mental health disorders? Pastors are often the “first responders” of their congregants’ mental health needs. However, few studies have analyzed how pastors’ understandings of the science and religion interface may influence how they make sense of the causes of mental illness and treatments they recommend. Relying on the National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL), a nationally representative survey of religious leaders, we found that pastors who see epistemological and institutional conflicts between science and religion are more likely to attribute depression to faith-related reasons. Epistemological openness to science decreases the likelihood of suggesting religious causes and treatments. Findings from this study have implications for fostering dialogues between science and religion and providing religious leaders with additional resources to respond to mental illness in their congregations.

This presentation will present recent research that highlight systemic ways clergy and chaplain well-being can be increased, and thus burnout risk can be reduced. These implications include the need for (a) more holistic formation in seminary to support the development of personal and relational capacities that buffer burnout risk, (b) increased collegial, systemic, and social supports to address isolation, and (c) increased interdisciplinary collaboration between theologians, religious studies scholars, social scientists, and psychologists. Findings from three different projects will be highlighted to frame this complex and complicated reality.

Emerging evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has often caused burnout in the form of emotional, mental and physical fatigue among Japanese women. However, in a context that tends to stigmatize and medicalize mental distress, women struggle to find emotional and psychological support. Drawing upon an ethnographic survey (2020-2023) on 35 Japanese women aged between 25 and 60 affiliated with different Japanese religious organisations, the results of this phenomenological study indicate that: 1) more women affiliates have favoured non-doctrinal spiritual coping mechanisms in the forms of meditation and body-mind practices to build emotional resilience; 2) more organised religions have been appropriating holistic forms of spirituality to respond to demands of emotional care, especially for younger Japanese women. The discussion will tie issues of persisting conservative gender complementarity ideologies and the pressure of the care economy with women affiliates’ drive toward holistic practices to cope with their burnout.