Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

This paper examines how the Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP) guided settler colonist Latter-day Saint families toward understanding themselves as racially different from, and superior to, the Indigenous students they fostered. While scholars have examined how the ISPP shaped Indigenous students’ religio-racial identities, I examine how it formed the religio-racial identities of the settler colonist foster families involved. Through a close reading of the guides the Church provided to foster parents in the program, I contend that through the ISPP settler colonist foster parents came to understand the difference between themselves and their Indigenous foster children as principally one of racial identity, rather than political or national belonging. The ISSP shows how religion often encourages settler colonists to understand Indigenous societies not as sovereign nations, but as racially marginalized communities in need of saving and incorporating into the broader White supremacist settler colonial project of the United States.

This paper analyzes Wynetta Willis Martin’s Black Mormon Tells Her Story (1972) as a narrative of religio-racial identity that reconstructed the racial category of “Black” in the Mormon imagination in an empowering way. In Black Mormon Tells Her Story, Martin presented a new story about people of Black African ancestry: past, present, and future. Instead of a cursed lineage, Martin situated the pre-slavery history of the “first Black men in the New World” in the story of the Book of Mormon. Banned from the temple, Martin located her profound religious experience inside alternative temples authorized by LDS scriptures. Rejecting the “exaltation exclusion,” Martin declared people of Black African descent would be last to receive the priesthood, but they would be “first in line” into the celestial kingdom. Through positive representations of Black lineage and Black divinity, Martin contributed to conversations about race within the LDS community that still resonate today.

In 1972, the gay-identified Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCCSF) began an experiment with queer, Christian kinship. The Rev. Jim Sandmire announced that members would be able to organize themselves into family groups of 4-10 people who would “make a commitment of love and concern for one another,” participate in regular Zion family gatherings, and take communion with each other. The paper will look at New Zion Families as an early experiment in sanctifying queer kinship. We will use archival sources, interview materials, and media to trace the Mormon resonances in such families in how they were organized and lived. And we will use them as an opportunity to examine the biography of Rev. Jim Sandmire and what his largely unknown story suggests about the contributions of Mormon thought and Mormon people to the gay rights movement of the 1970s in general and new gay religious movements in particular.

This paper examines the 1976 ordination of Larry Lester by white attorney Doug Wallace. Wallace’s ordination of a Black man caused considerable controversy among Latter-Day Saints and led to Wallace’s excommunication from that Church. Wallace’s actions were driven by his belief that he had received personal revelations from God and that this conception challenged the religious authority of Latter-Day Saints leadership. We argue that Wallace’s actions were driven by theological and political beliefs and understood within the larger context of dissent among Latter-Day Saints in the 1970s. Ultimately, we suggest that studies of modern Latter-Day Saints history, particularly those examining race, need to look beyond examining Latter-Day Saints leaders and give further attention to dissenters that were subject to discipline or pushed to the margins of the religious community for their views.

Awareness of religious trauma and abuse (RTA) associated with Christian communities continues to rise in the United States. Proposed recovery options for survivors of RTA include specific therapies, deconversion, or disidentification. Though chaplaincy studies often utilizes trauma theory in its research and praxis, the field has yet to address the needs of RTA survivors. Using theological and psychological scholarship, this paper proposes that institutional chaplains trained to integrate psychology and spirituality represent an important and underutilized resource for RTA survivors. Chaplains may accompany RTA survivors who wish to reconstruct their spiritual identity, image of God, and understanding of self. I provide a working definition of RTA and explore means of chaplaincy assessment and interventions. In conclusion, I suggest the field’s awareness of RTA will expose the need for spiritual care in new settings such as family and children’s services.

Preparing for and performing a Passover seder among Rikers’ Island’s Jewish community cracks open critical questions for pastoral care practitioners and academics. Guided by the Passover Haggadah, ‘Is This Night Different’ questions the pastoral theologies of Exodus and the lack of articulated pastoral theologies of carceral chaplaincy. Over a year of work with this community, and drawing on diverse genres of scholarship - from Africana Liberation Theologies to Theater of the Oppressed - the author develops a critical reflection on the liberative possibilities of embodied community ritual to center marginal voices, and provides compelling examples of this work. Simultaneously, the author uplifts deep ethical and theological concerns about the meaning and impact of working in the joint religious leadership-spiritual care role of carceral chaplaincy. ‘Is This Night Different?’ ends as it begins, with questions both practical and existential about a spiritual care provider’s role in a system built more for harm than for healing.

What is it to believe, and to do so sincerely?    

This age-old question arose anew during the COVID 19 pandemic as religious accommodation requests (RAR) flooded American institutions.  Such requests centered upon whether or not an individual had “sincerely held religious beliefs” (SHRB) that should provide exemption from a vaccine mandate or other like policy.  In the United States Air Force (USAF), it is chaplains who are charged with evaluating RAR and making a determination as to the sincerity of the religious beliefs upon which they are founded, and similar procedures exist in other branches of the American military.  Accordingly, this paper situates the military chaplain as a liminal agent between public interest and private conscience who is beholden to a rich and complicated history of American jurisprudence regarding SHRB.  It proceeds by reviewing relevant case-law, exploring Kierkegaard's pseudonymous treatment of the concepts subjectivity, objectivity, religiosity, belief, and sincerity that undergird the chaplain's evaluatory task, and offers certain considerations for the history and future of religious freedom and spiritual care in the American military.  

This paper analyzes how the Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial women-only congregation in Los Angeles, commits to interfaith activism despite a sociopolitical climate of Islamophobia that undermines its efforts. The WMA is continuous with post-9/11 trends to promote US interreligious dialogue, yet many American Muslims view interfaith activism as suspect. Their suspicions are rooted in the politicization of interfaith activism as an extension of government surveillance programs like CVE; or at best, as a part of an ongoing process of reconstructing American Muslims into respectable American religious subjects who conform to white middle-class Protestant values. Conversely, other American religious groups challenge interfaith engagement by excluding Muslims or creating conditional parameters for their inclusion. Nevertheless, organizations like the WMA take up the task of interreligious dialogue both as a means to address religious bigotry and because of the uneven power dynamics that compel them to do so.  

In this paper, I coin the notion of ‘dialogic innocence’ to capture a key problem that limits the critical and inclusive potential of the so-called interfaith movement. Dialogical innocence feeds on the “refusal of race” (Heng 2018, 4), which not only destigmatizes the history of religious prejudice, but can also  limit interlocutors in their capacity of taking an explicitly anti-racist  stance when faced with contemporary expressions of racialization, like Islamophobia. To deepen the critical potential of dialogue, the first essential step is to develop a critical historical consciousness (Joshi 2020) and understand how the “the refusal of race” is woven into the history of the interfaith movement (Hill Fletcher 2017). In brief, we need to start changing the ‘frame’ that separates religion and race, which means challenging some of the normative assumptions that underpin the interfaith movement, especially as they pertain to the religio-racial constellation.

How do secular Jews or Christians fit into in dialogue programs? How well are women, minorities, or queer individuals included in Jewish-Catholic dialogue? What role can and should converts play in interreligious dialogue? What about patrilineal Jews? How are the rich and diverse internal diversities of both Christianity and Judaism included in the dialogue? 

What is lost or gained? How does our construct of both our own religion and that of our dialogue partner take an alternate form due to who is included or excluded? How does it reify or shift power and meaning within the communities involved? 

These are just some of the questions that the Network of Young Scholars in Jewish-Christian Dialogue at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg have taken up in the past year. Come join this session to hear more on our answers and the questions we are left with. 

This paper explores intersecting histories of revivalism, postwar American religious revivals and Islamist revivalist frameworks, in the writings of Maryam Jameelah (1932-2012). Jameelah was an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival after moving to Pakistan in 1962. I argue that Jameelah’s vision for Islam emerged first from a critique of American religious revivalism in the 1950s, which she saw as reinforcing nationalistic impulses and rampant materialism. Through her later participation in Islamist networks, she came to see colonialism and materialism as dual evils, and an Islamic revival as the only remedy for the catastrophic effects of modernity. In bringing these two historical configurations of revivalism in conversation, I argue for an expansive definition of Islamic revivalism that traversed disparate political contexts through a set of affects, especially negative collective emotions, that emphasized the nuclear family as the foundation for an Islamic society.

American Muslim public discourse in the 21st century has witnessed a profound communal concern with doubt and loss of faith. This paper examines these pervasive concerns with “crisis of faith,” in connection with the revivalist ethos of influential American Muslim preachers and institutions. More specifically, I explore how constructions of “religion” and “faith” in Islamic revivalist discourses converge with those of American liberal protestant secularity – particularly in the centrality of authenticity to both. I do so by highlighting two key features of Islamic revivalist conceptions of piety and faith: the demand for heightened self-awareness and introspection in individual belief, and the notion of Islam being a simple and comprehensive system of doctrines. These features, reflecting anthropological notions of “objectification” and “authentication,” give rise to a very specific form of the ideal of personal authenticity, both converging and diverging from the more familiar imperatives of personal authenticity built into liberal protestant secularity in the US. Finally, I conclude by raising questions about what this analysis suggests regarding the relationship between projects of revivalism and conditions of secularity.

This paper examines a burgeoning religious movement in Anglo-American Islam spearheaded by three convert shaykhs – Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah.  The shaykhs guide seekers through a paradigmatic critique of modernity that emphasizes the importance of reconnecting with the tradition. This paper examines how the shaykhs’ anti-modernist polemics and in particular the narrative of the decline of metaphysics in modernity relates to politics. Before modernity, they contend, Muslims recognized the metaphysical arrangement of the world – which promoted a sense of harmony. Meaning, the traditional world had a metaphysical arrangement whereby the spiritual, the social, and the political were in equilibrium. This was reflected in everything from architecture, clothing, and it reflected the way people see society and government, gender identities and gender roles, and how traditional people saw tribulations. This paper examines their intellectual and political relationship with other religious conservatives – from teaching the conservative treatise on the civilizational decline by Richard Weaver and holding discussions on meanings of conservatism and the sacred with Jordan Peterson and the late Roger Scruton.

In 2022, a well-known Muslim preacher, Hassan Iquioussen, was issued an order to leave French territory by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. Darmanin argued that Iquioussen posed a “grave danger to public order” that legitimated his expulsion. French law makes systematic reference to the maintenance of “public order” as grounds for an exception to numerous laws guaranteeing civil liberties, including the freedom of conscience as outlined in the law of 1905. This paper takes up the case of revivalist preacher Hassan Iquioussen as a site for interrogating the relationship between public order, secularism, gender politics, and the governance of Islam in France. I argue that Iquioussen’s case intensifies a shift to an “immaterial” understanding of public order in a way that allows the state to legislate on the basis of a supposedly shared common morality, grounded in specific understandings of secularism and gender equality.

This paper places Karl Barth’s reflections on divine omnipresence and the spatiality of God in the Church Dogmatics in conversation with the queer theorist and literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her geographicized writings on theoretical method in Touching Feeling. Both Barth and Sedgwick use the occasion of writing about space and place to reconfigure the method of the system, insisting upon more responsive and particularist (rather than universalist) forms of reasoning—the irreducible particularities of space and place resisting tendencies of abstraction and universalization. By reading Barth’s reflections on the spatiality of God in light of Sedgwick’s development of “weak theory,” I show how Barth works as a perhaps surprising source for a “weak theology,” shifting beyond a strong theological methodology of the system, universality, and mastery to a humbler, more localized, and more responsible theological sensibility.

In 1939 the first book-length study of Karl Barth’s theology appeared in Chinese. After writing this little volume, T.C. Chao (1888–1979) is often described as becoming more “Barthian” or “neo-orthodox,” although how this actually happened remains unclear. In this paper I propose two ways of looking at how Barth influenced T.C. Chao, who was one of China’s foremost Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century. I demonstrate that “christocentrism” would serve as a fitting way of characterizing Barth’s influence and show how Barth’s theology shaped Chao’s view of Christianity’s public witness in China amidst cultural collapse and wartime crisis. It was during the Communist revolution and the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949) when Chao saw the Chinese Church as uniquely equipped to bear witness to Christ in the face of opposition and hostility.

What does collective karma mean in the context of America? In his book, America’s Racial Karma, Larry Ward, who was a student of Thich Nhat Hanh, criticized American culture for “holding onto the belief that America’s inherent goodness will prevail, even when faced with live footage of state brutality” (94). Building upon Ward’s work, this paper seeks to confront the harmful histories of othering that have been and continue to be occluded by the myth of a progressive, forward-moving America. Juxtaposing Ward with other Buddhist and non-Buddhist writings, this paper argues that the dominant story of America perpetuates a collective amnesia, ultimately bypassing the labor needed to heal the wounds of America’s racialized karma. This presentation will end with creative pairings of Buddhist theories of interdependency with work by adrienne maree brown, and Judith Butler to consider how attending to the body may be a constructive first step towards healing.

Techniques for improving health have attracted global attention since the Covid-19 pandemic. In Vietnam, pandemic health concerns compounded endemic health concerns around rising cancer rates. Vietnam is a Buddhist-majority country where concepts of karma have long influenced understandings of health. Between anxieties around Covid and cancer, lay and monastic Buddhists have become increasingly focused on daily practices to improve health through positively transforming karma. These practices include attention to dietary choices, styles of eating, ethically sourcing food ingredients, and consumer choices that support the natural environment. In this paper, I analyze how such minute practices promote ethical orientations toward intersubjectivity, rather than individualistic autonomy. While scholars have argued that the management of consumer choices to control health suggests a turn toward neoliberalism in Vietnam's culture and economy, I propose that Buddhist health practices demand more complex conclusions about the relationship between selfhood, consumption, and the body. 

How do abstract doctrinal ideas become visible and meaningful in the lives of religious practitioners? This talk approaches this question by examining the diary of the Tibetan pilgrim Khatag Zamyak (1896-1961) to explore how he engages with the idea of karma. Scholars of Buddhism often define karma as a law of cause and effect that is fundamental to Buddhist ethics, but this third-person approach to understanding karma can lead scholars to overlook what it feels like to live in a world structured by karma. This article explores how Khatag Zamyak confronts the fact that he does not know his own karma, and how he undertakes specific practices to be able to see and tell stories about his own karma. It further argues that Khatag Zamyak’s process of engaging with karma is integral to his formation as an ethical subject. 

In Thailand, a majority-Buddhist kingdom, sovereignty and religion are intimately entangled.  Since 1932, the year when the country embraced constitutionalism, coups d’état and violent repressions have hindered a normally functioning participatory politics. Positing a causal relationship between one’s karma and the ability to contribute to political decision making, conservatives have recently argued for replacing electoral democracy with “dharma-cracy”, a nebulous mode of sovereignty whereby only individuals with enough good karma, as proved by wealth and education, should be granted with the right vote. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, this paper looks at how progressive Buddhists, par contre, circulate prophecies anticipating the day in which the collective karma of the people will make all sovereign.

Rather than arguing for any one position, this paper aims to provide a field guide to recent scholarly works on the spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard. Given the explosion of literature on the topic, the need for such a guide is acute. I outline four different categories of research currently being explored: (1) historical; (2) translational; (3) philosophical; (4) liturgical, and I cover authors such as Lee Barrett, Christopher Barnett, David Kangas, and Tekoa Robinson. In conclusion, I argue for the importance of this avenue of research in comparison to previous approaches.

There is a fundamental tension in Kierkegaard’s account of prayer: prayer is described as both language in the most profound sense and a silent receptivity to God. Thus, this account appears inconsistent given these two descriptions. However, there is no inconsistency here insofar as prayer *as* language may foster the attention and listening constitutive of silence—and may *itself* be silent—in the relevant religious sense. This claim is developed by analyzing how Kierkegaard uses language in his own written prayers, focusing specifically on the rhetorical features of an understudied sequence of prayers from 1846. These rhetorical features suggest that *true* Kierkegaardian prayer may also be *spoken* prayer insofar as prayer *qua* language places the pray-er in a situation in which their self is continually echoed back by God’s communicative silence in a dynamic of mutual address that unifies the self *through* speech spoken out of faith and obedience.   

I explore the tension between Kierkegaard’s commitment to the absolute difference between God and humans and the emphasis on equality found in the story of the king and the maiden in Philosophical Fragments. I present Kierkegaard’s argument for why our love for God would make us embrace humility, and I point out that the same logic would call for God to humble Godself, which is affirmed in the pseudonymous story. But this raises the question of whether the absolute God-human difference would not frustrate God’s project of love with us, and I propose a way to hold onto both strands. In this scheme, the two spiritual practices geared toward remembering our finitude and receiving divine self-abasement, respectively, become appropriate. I finish by arguing that, to maintain this paradox, it would be helpful to conceptualize God as someone who takes ultimate responsibility for all the evils in the world.

This essay examines the relationship between Jean-Luc Marion’s argument of “conceptual idolatry” and John Duns Scotus’ doctrine of the univocity of being. I argue that Scotus does fall under Marion’s criticisms, which radically undermine the use of “being” in theology, but univocity, in its barest Scotist form, also seems impossible to avoid. After arguing that attempts to move past this ontological conundrum fail, I conclude the relationship stands at an impasse. While this conclusion is critical, I make it for the sake of a constructive argument: Post-metaphysical theology should reckon with the inevitability of being, appreciating this impasse between the apparent hegemony of being and the priority of God’s Self-revelation. Making the impasse clear at least points the way towards a renewed theological consideration of being.

In her novel Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila Julia Kristeva reads the work of Teresa of Avila through the dual lens of the psychoanalytic and the literary-poetic, providing a voice within the tradition of post-structuralist theory which seeks to retrieve something of the mystical from the Christian tradition. In particular, she identifies in Teresa of Avila a “scriptorial therapy,” which Kristeva identifies as working against typical interpretations of women mystics as pathological hysterics. Teresa’s scriptorial mode of mystical reflection instead is evaluated by Kristeva as a productive of a constructive, positive subjectivity oriented towards healing and community, rather than exclusively caught up in the jouissance of woman’s not-all-ness. The beguines, however, are associated by Kristeva with only the hysteria of the semiotic, rather than with the affective-intellectual balance of the semiotic and symbolic functions found in Teresa. This paper explores whether the writings of the beguines can provide their own spiritual-therapeutic narrative within and beyond Kristeva’s framework, taking into account the theological content of their writings while simultaneously appreciating the psychoanalytic and literary reading of Teresa that we find in Kristeva.

In a number of texts, Gregory of Nyssa denies either the existence of matter or, at least, our access to pure materiality. These arguments seek to answer challenges arising from (1) philosophical accounts of matter as eternal substrate and (2) the problem of an immaterial God creating a materiality. Gregory’s response calls matter itself into question, contending that we never experience it directly but only experience intellectual properties (e.g., shape and color) associated with matter. While a debate continues over whether Gregory intends this epistemologically (denial of access to pure matter) or ontologically (denial of matter itself), this paper instead offers a constructive rereading of these texts, engaging French phenomenology to argue that this denial—rather than expressing a philosophical oddity or denigrating creation’s goodness—reveals Gregory’s account of how the goodness of creation is found precisely in the groundlessness and incompleteness of finite being.

​This presentation follows the​ virality of a playful song post made in May 2021 by music artist Naje, #golaydown. Sung ​unaccompanied in a ​call-and-response structure, the original song by Naje ​quickly went viral on TikTok​ and has since received over 900K views​. ​Using ​viral musicking,​ digital antiphony​, and collaborative music making​ as frameworks, I will analyze both the original post as well as popular memes using the original song/sound. ​ The appeal of the song can be attributable to the song's theme of rest resonating with multiple audiences, the sound exhibits the call-and-response form of a spiritual, and TikTok's Duet feature makes it easy to add melodies to the original. In conclusion, I explore what ​#golaydown and ​virtual spirituals may contribute to transformations and transmissions of old and new spirituals in the digital age.

As with all popular music, Christian worship music has undergone a format revolution in the past half-century. Originally sold in physical records and paper songbooks and gradually integrated into Christian recording and publishing industries, most listeners now get their worship music fix through popular streaming services. Spotify even maintains a current “WorshipNow” list for nearly a million subscribers that promises to provide access to "the pulse of today's modern worship music." Obviously, these tools provide new opportunities for fan-worshippers to customize and expand their auditory worship experiences, but they also offer new platforms for worship music to circulate outside of the institutional church and interact with broader popular music ecosystems. In this paper, I begin to theorize the new patterns of circulation brought about by the “celestial jukebox” (pun intended) of cloud-based streaming and examine the material and theological effects of “interpassivity” as it relates to worshipping in contemporary media.

The shelter-in-place order of the pandemic was a blessing to recording artists who saw the marketplace open in an energizing way. Simultaneously to fans’ delight, soul music singer Gladys Knight and R&B artist Patti LaBelle agreed to engage a social media phenomenon called #VERZUZ, bringing to the Instagram platform music that has been the soundtrack of our lives. As seasoned touring tastemakers, Knight and Labelle exemplify gastromusicophysics in their business ventures expertise producing food that makes people want to sing. #Verzuz is an American webcast series of musical duals ideally between peer-performers, created by producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, riding the wave of increased virtual concert broadcasts. In this talk, I provide a degustation of issues revealed by the ingenuity practiced by touring musicians formed in the gospel music tradition like restaurateur Mahalia Jackson and her successors Knight and Labelle to establish the crucial contributions of touring tastemakers at the intersection of musicogustatory and sonogustatory production in commoditized mobility.