Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

There is a vast scholarly literature on how Orthodox Jews have grappled with the "woman question" in modernity, particularly when it comes to the permissibility of women studying the Oral Law. Texts which have not received enough attention from scholars writing on this topic include the literary-historical narratives written by R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. My paper will fill this gap by considering some of the halakhic ramifications of R. Schneersohn's deceptively straightforward stories. Specifically, I will consider how one of R. Yosef Yitzchak's narratives laid the foundation for his son-in-law R. Menachem Mendel Schneersohn's revolutionarily permissive discourses exhorting women to engage in the study of the Oral Law without any limitations. I will argue that R. Yosef Yitzchak's use of his chosen genre creates space within halakhic discourse for radical opinions that could not possibly be articulated within the entrenched, formal modes of discussing halakha.

In view of both the intellectual firepower behind its production and its mass distribution among the laity, Deborah Melamed’s *The Three Pillars: Thought, Worship and Practice for the Jewish Woman* (1927) is a major but largely forgotten site of American Judaism’s theoretical articulation. At once a Jewish legal (*halakhic*) digest and a theological primer, *Pillars* aims to reconstruct what its creators take to be the determinative arena of Jewish spiritual life -- namely, the Jewish home. Long after the collapse of the autonomous pre-modern Ashkenazi community (*kehila*), *Pillars* enjoins its readers to reinscribe the *kehila*'s socially constructed ritual realities upon the controllable walls of the nuclear family home. *Pillars* is a work of enduring importance to anyone interested in the family home as a crucial theater of religious life, or in the gradual movement of Jewish women into the historically male domains of Jewish learning and legal authority.

I focus on a transnational, masculinist Hasidic revival movement centered on The Kerestirer Rebbe (“Shayele”), a Hungarian “miracle-worker” who died in 1925. His iconic portrait is often used to ward off rodents in Jewish homes and businesses. I reveal how this is only one small piece of his current appeal, however. Drawing upon pilgrimage ethnography, hagiographies, and Hasidic social media, I argue that he operates as a patron saint of protection against other “intruders” in everyday Hasidic life (e.g. police and inspectors). In summoning a dead Hasidic master, his followers critique both the authority of the state and their own living Hasidic leaders. Indeed, Shayele’s revival is a product of this political moment. His male followers exhibit ideological affinities with the Alt-Right. In the last section, I argue that Shayele's tertiary attributes of "care" and "hospitality" are central to understanding how he performs protection for his followers.

Residents of Douglas, Arizona, gather once a week near the border wall for the Sanando Nuestras Fronteras (Healing our Borders) vigil to remember people who have died while crossing through the desert into the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizers transformed the vigil into a hybrid event, which has continued in order to accommodate participants who had not been able to join the vigil in the past due to constraints related to geographic limitations, health concerns, and accessibility issues. This paper discusses the transformation of the vigil into a translocal liturgical event. For virtual participants, the weekly vigil has invited the presence of the dead into my homes across the continent. The violence of the border has become part of their domestic life. With the vigil as a hybrid event, the border has migrated into domestic life, thus trespassing across the line between public and private spheres.

This paper explores the dynamic process of identity formation that is facilitated when the New Sanctuary Movement (NSM) demarcates a space as “sanctuary.” Drawing on participant observation and interviews with members of a NSM congregation that hosted a family in sanctuary, the paper discusses experiences of identity transformation that were initiated when the church became a physical manifestation of the power contest between church and state. These observations are considered in conversation with social scientific research on sanctuary practices and with theological reflections on ecclesiology and political theology that are generated by the church’s resistance to the state.

In conversation with practical theology and ordinary ethics, this paper explores the nature of sacred space-making at Lattice Ministries. A former church turned community hub, Lattice Ministries’ campus hosts myriad groups that accompany those who first came to the U.S. seeking refuge. Drawing on interview and participant observation data, I argue that the community of Lattice Ministries makes space sacred through practices of just neighboring. Just neighboring practices like convening meetings and enabling play are both ordinary and justice oriented. By molding the Lattice Ministries campus into a place where people routinely practice recognizing the Divine in all their neighbors, just neighboring practices deepen and expand the sacredness of the space. Attending to the work of sacred space-making at Lattice Ministries challenges scholars to grapple with the ways sacredness might not only linger but be made more capacious following a congregation’s closure and offers resources to faith communities experiencing decline.

Quantitative research has revealed a recent increase in measures of Black individuals who identify under the category of ‘None’ meaning (in general) those individuals who find their identities and meaning making not attached to particular religious traditions.  But what does this mean? The category of 'nones' has received significant criticism due to its inherent complexity.   Furthering this critique, we add that the categorical 'none' has largely been spoken about through White Christianity.  Combining our quantitative data with qualitative research, we found a pattern in which an increasing number of Black individuals find the Black Church to be irrelevant to their identities.  Cognitive research into 'unbelief' has shown a pattern of retaining beliefs in souls, afterlife, and supernatural forces.  While not deconverting nor espousing identities associated with atheism, the Black Church is increasingly less central to Black Identity.  This research offers a more complex and descriptive view into understandings of Black secularism.  

While theologians may proclaim that no one can be both an atheist and a Muslim at the same time, some American Muslims assert simultaneous claims to these identities. This paper examines results from focus groups and semi-structured one on one interviews to highlight the ways in which identity is separable from both belief and practice for some Muslims in the U.S. It also discusses the ways in which survey questions about religious identity often obscure the potential for this kind of separation. Finally, it will suggest some alternative approaches for scholars interested in quantifying the prevalence of this phenomenon.

Criticisms of religion from scientific perspectives gained further prominence in the 2000s and 2010s with the rise of the ‘new atheism’. Online discussion groups that focused on atheism were a significant site of such discourse at a popular level. They were important socially since (1) they connected isolated individuals who disavowed religion, (2) participants’ interactions fostered cohesion and sparked conflict in their online communities, and (3) interactions could influence participants' broader social lives.

Substantial archives of historical online interactions within these (and other) communities exist. However, technical barriers regarding the archives’ formats, heterogeneity and size must be overcome before using them. This paper presents a novel computational methodology which is used here to organise archived data and analyse engagement within historically influential online spaces set up to discuss atheism. This methodology is of wider relevance to the sociology of religion and the paper will discuss potential future uses and impact.

This paper explores how Hartmut Rosa's sociological theory of resonance (2019) may prove fruitful for understanding better the spiritual dimensions of long-distance running. The study focuses particularly on the material dimension of lived religion in long-distance running, and uses Rosa's theory to analyze stories about lived religion in written autobiographical narratives of long-distance runners. Rosa defines resonance as "a specific mode of relation – i.e., a specific way of being-related-to-the-world", where you experience a special connectedness, a vibrating and responsive relationship to something or someone (Rosa, 2019). This paper's analysis demonstrates how long-distance running can be a resonant space for different axes of resonance, albeit axes regarding the subject's relationship to the material is dominant.

This paper examines how the physical and discursive development of the Coptic hospital in Cairo reflected shifting notions of social responsibility, national belonging, and the very meaning of sectarian identification during early twentieth century Egypt. These developments were also reflected in the establishment of other charitable projects that permeated the landscape in proximity to the hospital—a confessional mushrooming that offered and organized benevolence work according to sect-based affiliation. This proliferation of institutions and projects are part of what I consider a ‘sectarian corridor’—a high concentration of sect-based philanthropic institutions established in Cairene urban neighborhoods along Ramses Street such as Fagalla, Azbekia, Daher, and Shubra. The Coptic Hospital became one of the most prominent charitable institutions of the corridor and continued to represent contested sectarian meaning and space into the twenty first century.

This paper aims to present the theoretical-methodological approach of the three-year European Union(EU)-founded project NEGOTIA and its main updated results. The NEGOTIA project focuses on the Coptic Orthodox diaspora communities in Europe, which it analyzes in the light of three key aspects: identities, needs, and relations. Its first goal is to examine the origins and the history of Coptic communities, their cultural and religious peculiarities, but also the dynamics of deconstruction and reconstitution of the material, emotional, and relational dimensions experienced by such communities in their migration path. Its final goal is to define the research field of religious mediation through an integrated, methodological approach to Copts, who are a peculiar case study to conceptualize this topic, which has never been systematically studied before. The NEGOTIA project has been conducted on three case studies located in Egypt, Italy, and Germany, and their recognition and integration process.

This project explores the notions of success and divine favor in medieval Middle Eastern Christian-Muslim discussions, with a focus on success related to the spread of religious adherence and political domination. It looks primarily at Arabic texts produced in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt from the eighth to fourteenth centuries. Four related themes are investigated: ‎1) a longing for and expectation of divine intervention and verification of truth claims, 2) ‎occasions of ambivalence toward worldly success and prosperity, 3) ‎redefinitions of success, and 4) ways to cope with situations in which expectations of ‎success and prosperity are unmet. The study looks at these themes to ask how this group of Christians on the margins of their society learned to live faithfully in their time. The hope and expectation is to bring fruitful insights into interreligious relations, missiology and understanding of the Christian faith in relation to power and ‎privilege.

Wes Craven’s distinctly comic storytelling sensibilities can be found throughout his horror filmography, from the humorously quipping Freddy Krueger to the often-comical meta-commentary of the Scream films, but when this comic vision collides with the traditional Gothic monsters of Vampire in Brooklyn and Cursed, what emerges is a curious but insightful pattern into the way laughter destabilizes monstrosity. A cursory overview of Vampire in Brooklyn and Cursed will reveal a nearly identical pattern in which comedy disrupts and detaches the locus of monstrosity from the body of the vampire or werewolf respectively. Instead, we find the locus of monstrosity reforming around the monsters’ stereotypical sidekicks. However, this “migration” of monstrosity from beast to buffoon does not merely reinforce the exoticism of the racial and sexual others in the films. Rather, both Craven’s monsters and stereotypical gag characters serve to expand the “fellowship of laughters” in which these outcasts find themselves.

The Curse of Cain and Ham is an old racist idea that surfaced in July of 2021 in Scientific American and in the April 24th, 2022 lesson of the Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath School Quarterly. The curse’s appearance revealed not only confusion about the biblical text, but also ignorance as to its origin. The curse is connected to early/medieval Christian speculation on monsters. Beginning with Augustine’s speculations on “monster races” in The City of God, this paper isolates the monstrous DNA of the curse and brings it into dialogue with Cohen’s monster theory, including the additional five theses developed by Laycock and Mickles. The Curse of Cain/Ham is a Frankenstein monster that “escapes” to keep the invisible monster of white supremacy alive. The conclusion is that the mark of a monster isn’t skin color, but the willingness to reduce the Imago Dei of other human beings to hold on to power.

H.P Lovecraft’s unique brand of cosmic horror and shared mythopoeia – the “Cthulhu mythos” – has had an indelible impact on the genres of modern horror, science fiction, and fantasy on a global scale. His influence has been especially felt by Japanese writers, manga artists, and in the realm of popular culture.  Japan is not only the largest non-English language consumers of Lovecraftian horror but is also one of the largest sites of its production. The success of Lovecraft in Japan is puzzling considering his well-established racism and xenophobia, which is closely tied to fear of the unknown and the genre of cosmic horror. This paper discusses how Japanese writers of Lovecraftian horror confront racism through subversion, empowerment, and historicization. Themes, such as the decline of Western civilization, degeneration, and monstrous reversion, are transformed in the works of these authors who explore the connections between their own purported monstrosity.

Our political discourse is currently full of monsters. The US right has formulated a potent brew of critical race theory, the trans agenda of grooming children, and a cabal of satanic pedophiles at the highest levels of government – a cumulative threat to the very existence of the United States. This paper proposes that the political style that blends anxieties about race, gender/sexuality, schools, and Satan may be usefully named “monsterbating”: a political, cultural, and psychological tactic to make monsters of the marginalized, cultivate pleasure in their demonization, and perpetuate a sense of existential threat. I argue that a primary goal of liberal arts and humanities education must be to teach against monsterbating, and that the religion classroom is particularly well-suited to this endeavor. 

The West’s use of the orientalist term “Lamaism” to describe Buddhist traditions across East and Inner Asia has been problematized by many since the 1960s. From Peter Bishop to Donald S. Lopez Jr., scholars have critically reflected on the West’s creation of the “myth” and “prisoners” of Shangri-La. Building upon their critiques and those of Asian scholars such as Shen Weirong, Kōmoto Yasuko, and Jian Jinsheng, this paper suggests new ways to reconsider the trope of “Lamaism” from analyzing non-Western forms of colonial discourses on religion, namely, through the perspectives of the Republic of China (1912-1949) and the Japanese Empire (1868-1945). Not simply a comparative exercise, this paper combines perspectives from modern China and Japan to show how transnational discursive practices competed to place, historicize, consume, ally with, Other, discipline, and know religion in disputed territories sandwiched between expanding Chinese, Japanese, Soviet, and British colonialisms in a post-Russo-Japanese War landscape.

On June 23, 2022, the 70th Je Khenpo, Tulku Jigme Chodrak, at the request of the king of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, and in an event organized by the Bhutan Nuns Foundation, conducted a bhikṣuṇī ordination to 144 nuns, restoring the Mūlasarvāstivāda female lineage in the Himalayan tradition. It is difficult to understate the importance of this event since, by most accounts, bhikṣuṇī ordination had never been introduced to Tibet or Bhutan, and nuns have only had access to novice status since the introduction of Buddhism in the region in the 7th Century. The goal of this paper is to discuss how this ceremony and the newly achieved bhikṣuṇī status has impacted the lives of Bhutanese nuns and nunneries. In order to do that the author has interviewed several newly fully ordained nuns, and leaders at the Bhutan Nuns Foundation, and visited some of the nunneries affected by this change.

Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha played an extraordinarily significant role in the development of epistemology in premodern India. It is curious, then, that several of Dharmakīrti’s first millennium commentators leveraged his apoha in social metaphysical debates with Hindu interlocutors to argue against the claim that the caste system is a natural hierarchy of human kinds. By putting Dharmakīrti and one of his commentators, Prajñākaragupta, into conversation with Ásta, a contemporary social metaphysician whose theory of social construction resonates with apoha in interesting ways, this paper takes seriously the idea that apoha is relevant to questions concerning social categories, particularly caste. By focusing on perception as a central component of the construction of social kinds for both apoha and Ásta’s ‘conferralist’ account, it explores the ways in which these theories compliment and push back on each other. Additionally, it considers how such a comparison further illuminates Dharmakīrtian anti-caste arguments.

This paper explores how stories about the Lotus Sūtra’s textual transmission contributed to its popular reception in medieval China. In his early-eighth-century work Fahua zhuanji or Records of the Transmission of the Lotus Sūtra, scholar-monk Sengxiang weaves lore regarding the scripture’s written manifestations and their journeys to China into a larger narrative explicitly intended to stir the public into faith. Recent scholarship on the Fahua zhuanji has focused on its later chapters, whose miraculous tales of Lotus Sūtra worship in China demonstrate how the touted powers of the scripture were verified and reinscribed among its medieval audience. Such approaches neglect how Sengxiang generates wonder out of the Lotus Sūtra’s history. As this paper argues, devotion to the scripture among medieval Chinese Buddhists was substantiated not only by lore of its miraculous powers in the present, but also through an affectively charged education in the history that brought them to China.

This paper seeks to broaden and problematize the theme of "Orthodox Dissent" by examing the case of "Orthodox Survival Courses" as a particular mode of "dissent" within U.S. Orthodoxy. Utilizing textual and narrative analysis, the paper will argue that the transmission and revival of OSC's is part of a broader epistemological framework within which U.S. Orthodox participation in conspiracy theorizing becomes more understandable. This suggests that invocations of "dissent" in the context of U.S. Orthodoxy in particular sits at the intersection of a number of historic and present tensions, many of which are demonstrably deployable towards antimodern and antidemocratic ends. This reality does not mean that "dissent" should be abandoned as an ethical framework for Orthodox striving for democratic and egalitarian realities; however, it does suggest that the context and content of how such dissent is narrativized requires intentionality and care. 

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of parishes within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate transferred to the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine. In Ukraine and in Moscow Patriarchate jurisdictions around the world, many believers expressed grave suspicion of Moscow, calling to cease liturgical commemoration of the pro-war Patriarch Kirill and weighing their own ecclesiastical reaffiliations. This paper analyzes this transnational discourse alongside similar developments in the United States a century before when beginning in 1912, disagreement over hierarchical administration and financial transparency within the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America manifested new parishes independent from any ecclesiastical affiliation. In both contexts, Orthodox laity and local clergy alike valued, even desired hierarchical governance. Amidst scandal and existential crisis, however, each turned to a similar, bottom-up Orthodox ecclesiology, asserting that modernity, globalization, and lived experience have transformed liturgical commemoration and ecclesiastical affiliation into powerful and useful instruments of Orthodox dissent.

This paper will examine the evolution of Patriarch Tikhon’s relationship to the Soviet government in the early years after the Revolution. In his capacity as head of the Church, the patriarch’s decisions and instructions put not only his own life, but also the life of those obligated to obey him, on the line. For a regime determined to destroy the Church, like the Soviets were in the early years, open resistance—even if non-violent—only gave them justification for more brutal repression. Patriarch Tikhon therefore continually sought to chart a course that would not compromise essential principles while, at the same time, trying to avoid the unnecessary suffering of the innocent.

This paper investigates how scriptures are accepted and appropriated by religious people in Korea and demonstrates how sacred status of scriptures are attained and their power is exercised. Examples of Korean religions, including Protestantism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Donghak, and Shamanism turned out to be very useful to show how the performative dimension of scriptures is usually inseparably related to their iconic status and how scriptures are ritualized and performed. These religions of Korea can amply show that the iconic and performative dimensions of scriptures are generally witnessed in any religion that recognizes scriptures. These religions will also show that how the three dimensions of scriptures influence each other and function complementarily in the lives of religious people. Examples from Korean religions will vividly show that the contents of scriptures, the published physical books, sounds reading them aloud, letters in them, and virtual images from them are ritualized to exert sacred power.

This paper focuses on iconicity as a type of memory that is established through discursive engagement with a text, but also serves a distinct and traceable social function beyond the pages of the text. This sponsors a way of remembering the text in a particular landscape that can be established and passed on as an iconic marker of social meaning. I am proposing a new category for a distinct subset of episodic memory—that of iconic memory. Episodic memory leads to articulation of the story, while iconic memory embodies the story and becomes itself a monument or memorial. Such remembering is almost always collective rather than personal. I illustrate this in the genealogy of Jesus, the scroll and the book, Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion, the cross, the creation, and the tree of Jesse. What is iconic here is a neural process rooted in discursive engagement with the past.

Reading scriptures aloud to congregations is common in many religious traditions. They invest great effort in training people to read correctly, yet congregations also show remarkable tolerance for inexpert oral reading. Reading aloud visible scriptures to congregations mixes expressive and iconic ritualization, which makes it both inspiring and legitimizing, by combining the divine voice of scripture and the community’s voice in the reader whose voice speaks for both. These communities use scriptural performance as a means for including as many people as possible into congregation. Literacy studies document how, even in secular school settings, group reading experiences cast oral readers as representing the audience as much as the author: in reading aloud to a group, the reader expresses the group’s voice. This paper analyzes the social force of this religious practice by testing a theory of ritualizing scriptures in three dimensions against studies of oral readings by literacy scholars.