Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Rather than translating βασιλεία into “kingdom,” “reign,” or “kin-dom,” I translate it into “empire” from the perspectives of postcolonial and decolonial theories. Unlike the traditional biblical translation, “kingdom,” liberation theologians have translated βασιλεία into “reign” focusing on the utopian hope of the present history. However, scholars have highlighted that βασιλεία can also be translated into an aggressive term: “empire.” The imperial implications of βασιλεία become invisible when people refuse to translate βασιλεία into “empire.” Thus, instead of romanticizing βασιλεία, I argue that ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν should be translated into the “Heavenly Empire” with imperial implications in the Gospel of Matthew. By reading the Heavenly Empire’s arrival (Matt 25:31–46) from the perspective of my Taiwanese context with sensibilities shaped by postcolonial and decolonial theories, I argue that the Heavenly Empire’s arrival is not a hope. Rather, it provides an imperial/colonial proposal of occupation, slaughter, justification, and separation.

Hal Lindsey is arguably the most influential American biblical interpreter of the last fifty years. His *The Late Great Planet Earth* was the #1 non-fiction bestseller of the 1970s, his popularization of dispensational premillennialism shaped American evangelicalism, and his advocacy affected national politics. While Lindsey’s work shaped the popular American religious imagination, his actual biblical interpretation has received little scholarly attention. Yet Lindsey’s work addresses a question that has vexed historians: why did a religious movement rooted in biblical predictions of judgment and destruction, awaiting a “rapture” from the earth, spend so much time and energy in politics? This paper examines the progression of Hal Lindsey’s influential books *The Late Great Planet Earth* and *The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon* to understand the way that biblical texts, especially prophetic and apocalyptic texts, can motivate political activism.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was dubbed “America’s Refugee Capital” in 2016, due to its large resettled refugee population. The area leans politically conservative and is steeped in a unique heritage of Anabaptist Christianity that has permeated the culture and people for 300 years. The positive attitude towards refugee welcome appears to be nonpartisan; however, there is some variance in motivations for this refugee-welcome activity. Qualitative interviews were conducted with leaders of eight congregations and faith communities in Lancaster County to elicit perspectives on their community’s motivations for its involvement in refugee welcome and resettlement activity. The results yielded varied theological motivations and scriptural bases, including a tendency for self-identified conservative communities to lean into eschatological or evangelical language, while moderate to progressive communities more frequently mentioned the life and teachings of Jesus. How can these distinctions help and hinder continued refugee resettlement by faith communities in the current political climate?

Michel Foucault’s On the Government of the Living (2012) explains how confession and obedience shape the ‘modern’ concept of the subject. The ‘West’ developed a false concept of confession as ‘liberation’. Jo Sol’s documentary Fake Orgasm (2010) stages performer Lazlo Pearlman who explores the subversion of confessional culture via the use of the nude transsexual body. They experience a strong request of the audience to confess their ‘identity’, which they resist. Pearlman performs a corporeal insurrection. Film extracts elaborate how the performative and material body denounces the production of the ontological, identitarian body, biopolitical regulations and allows for a genealogical, and critical discussion of the body. The paper scrutinizes the problem of confessional culture and truth regimes; On the Government of the Living – subject formation, agency, embodied resistance and confessional culture; developments in performance theory; epistemology; religion as a discursive, intersectional and performative category of knowledge production (DIP).

This presentation will explore critical methodological issues arising from the study of political spirituality in historical cases. The Novohispanic insurgency of 1810-1821, whose early leadership was composed of priests, one-time seminarians, and lawyers, developed in a milieu where religious and theological discourses of Catholicism inescapably permeated Spanish-American political thought. Moreover, by the turn of the 19th century, the intensive intermingling of Catholicism and the Spanish Crown effectiely blurred the lines between forms of pastoral power and powers of governance. Because Foucault himself had only partially formed an idea of political spirituality at the time of his death and scholarship on the topic has remained relatively underdeveloped, inquiries dealing with political spirituality have necessarily entailed navigating a thicket of methodological issues. Included among these issues are conceptualizing political spirituality, analyzing and interpreting documentary sources to identify political spirituality, historically situating politically spiritual assumptions and statements, and measuring a spirituality's practical effects.

Islam has been a key feature in the history of Malaysia, and Muslims have been considered a majority community. The spread of Islam in transforming the population has been narrated as a process of Islamisation. Since the 1970s to recent times, this Islamisationnarrative has gained further dominance in influencing theyouths and civil society movements, educational institutions, government policies, and also legal and political decisions in the country. However, critics have perceived the Islamisation narrative as to be over-simplifying the complex inter-relations between Islam and the Malay-Muslims population. Thus, this paper aims for a critical examination, by using the Epistemeas a key concept. This paper shall demonstrate how Islam is related to three different epistemic phases; under the Malay Sultanates, British Colonial rule, and the nation-state in the history of Malaysia, and its relation to knowledge and power in shaping the Muslim population in Malaysia.

Can Foucault’s philosophical ideas be in discussion with indigenous traditions? While there have been rich conversations on Foucault and big religions, there is little attention given to Foucault and indigenous religion. This presentation attempts to discuss Foucault’s ideas in comparison with traditional indigenous thoughts.

The comparison mainly addresses the Foucauldian “care of the self” constructed in Foucault’s two writings The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. The indigenous tradition used in the comparison is the Batak-Indonesian concept of sahala (superior character). The argument of the paper is twofold. First, while indigenous traditions have often been considered community-centered, the idea of “the care of the (individual) self” has long existed in some indigenous communities, one whose purpose is to care for other selves. Second, while the labors of self-cultivation in Foucault sets the ethical goals for self-mastery, the Batak sahalalabors on the ethics of self-giving and integrity.

This paper examines the early American Bahá'í periodical discourse on race, with particular attention to Black, African American or “Negro” peoples. To empirically ground this research, I examine the original three American Bahá'í periodicals: Bahai Bulletin (1908-1909), Star of the West (1910-1934), and World Unity Magazine (1927-1934). These periodicals’ discussion of race—as well as content by and about African Americans—was complex and contradictory. With temporal overlap with Jim Crow, the Great Migration, New Negro Movement, and Harlem Renaissance, as well as the fact that many early African American Bahá'í converts retained relationships with the “Black Church”, this manuscript promises to engage an understudied aspect of African American religious practice, discourse, and multiple religious belongings.

This paper will highlight direction from the Universal House of Justice and National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States to the American Bahá’í community over the past 30 years that refocuses Bahá’í efforts on racial unity. This attention to race unity is in tandem with efforts to encourage expansion efforts, create social change and engage in infusing Bahá’í principles into social debates on the problems facing humanity. This paper will also present findings from the national FACT research project which has surveyed American Bahá’í communities over a twenty-year period. Survey results show that spiritually-engaged Bahá’í communities have not only increased their community-building efforts (through the multiplication of Bahá’í “core activities”), but also expanded efforts to transform society by promoting activities that foster racial unity.

With demands for reparations circulating throughout the American (and indeed global) political sphere, religious organizations of various inclinations have been forced to (re)render the history of modernity in theological terms. For many this has involved an extension of existing principles of redemption, love, and justice to the current discourse surrounding reparations. For others this has meant a deep dive into their faith tradition for historical and scriptural touchstones to make reparations legible. As some religious bodies have been proactively leading the way in reparations conversations, others find themselves reluctantly called to account for their own institutional histories. Within this complex landscape, developing a shared ecumenical theology of reparations capable of informing the secular conversations already taking place appears as an urgent need. This paper will explore the current state of reparations and religion before advancing a Baha'i conceptualization of reparative (and indeed transformative) justice.