Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Join a discussion about *Interreligious Studies: An Introduction*, a new textbook for graduate and undergraduate students. Part I, “Mapping the Field,” presents emerging principles, objectives, concepts, terms, and nuances of the field; a history of interreligious learning and engagement; and an investigation of ethical, philosophical, and theological grounding for religious pluralism.

Part II, “Meeting Spaces,” explores multiple contexts in which we encounter religious difference on a regular basis: families, congregations, college campuses, workplaces, media, and the public square. There is also a discursus on antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Part III, “Modes of Engagement,” addresses work being done in the world that is designed to draw together people who orient around religion differently—and the scholarship that relates to these efforts. It sketches principles, projects, practices, problems, and possibilities of the following areas: dialogue, study, spiritual encounter, community-based service, organizing, advocacy, the arts, and conflict transformation.

Join a discussion about *Everyday Wisdom: Interreligious Studies in a Pluralistic World,* a new book for students and instructors that introduces the growing field of interreligious studies, with an emphasis on lived religion, interfaith engagement, and leadership. Its themes include the study of religion, religious identity, the global religious landscape, lived-religion approaches to the study of religion, (inter)religious literacy, the relationship between the academic field of interreligious studies and the civic project of interfaith engagement, various responses to religious diversity, the role of secular and pluralist forces in religiously diverse societies, dominant theological modes of approach to other religious traditions and to interreligious theological encounter, and the role of human relationship across religious difference for inter- and intra-personal development, self-discovery, changemaking, and leadership. Tying together several  ultimate aims and learning objectives of interreligious studies courses, it proposes a framework, based on practical wisdom, for interreligious studies and interfaith leadership.

Institutions like Wheaton College have unique challenges and opportunities regarding interreligious scholarship and pedagogy. Regarding scholarship, faculty must navigate the tension between the institution’s desire for excellent scholarship with donors and board members who might see such scholarship as violating the institution’s statement of faith. On the other hand, faculty are relatively free to teach and develop courses for interreligious engagement that promote critical rethinking of religious beliefs with students who have a deep understanding of the power of religion and desire to learn interreligiously. I propose a way to ameliorate the disparity the scholarly freedom to publish and the pedagogical freedom to teach is to increase inter-collegiate collaboration with religiously diverse institutions. Not only will such collaboration provide public facing examples of mutually transformative interreligious engagement at Wheaton, but it also offers opportunities to engage with a unique set of students who desire authentic interreligious dialogue.

Teaching interfaith studies is context-dependent, presenting distinct opportunities and challenges based on student and institutional identities. This presentation focuses on teaching interfaith studies in a Christian institution with little religious diversity. Using my own experiences teaching “interfaith cooperation” at a historically conservative Christian university, I will explore best practices, innovative pedagogies, and institutional justifications for interfaith studies. I start with my experience designing this course and establishing it in the regular offerings. I then address its relationship to a larger current interfaith engagement at the university. Finally, I share successes and struggles in helping students with exclusivist commitments to engage in John Dewey’s task of “creative democracy” toward what Eboo Patel has envisioned as “Interfaith America.” Afterward, we will collectively explore effective pedagogical methods for teaching interfaith studies in other Christian institutional contexts.

Frontline research generated through activism becomes more interesting, relevant, and accessible for a much wider audience when the core content is diversified through intersectionality, which then orients the core theme to an expanded, but distinct, context. The particular witness for justice focus remains constant, but the activist researcher expands and/or contracts the content (as appropriate/necessary) to contextualize the focus for a particular new academic and/or public audience. Drawing on her scholarship (6 recent academic books), experience as a volunteer chaplain with displaced families at the US-Mexico border, and teaching undergraduate interreligious studies, the presenter will invite conversation about how to diversify a core writing/teaching theme to reach more audiences, inside and outside of the Academy.

In the middle of the United States of America, Omaha, Nebraska, four co-located organizations contend with the question of who is included in “Tri-Faith”. Internalized antisemitism, international politics, and the radical leadership transition of partners losing their top leadership within one year of each other forces questions about the roles and responsibilities of leadership in the interfaith movement. Particular attention will be paid to the shift from a pseudo-fundamentalist strategy, prioritizing the supremacy of so-called “Abrahamic” religions, to the recognition of monotheistic privilege and the religious and cultural expectation to put reputations on the line for marginalized religious communities. Interweaving ethnographic research through direct interviews of Tri-Faith Commons stakeholders alongside a critical theoretical lens, I will demonstrate the ways that certain methods of interreligious dialogue are molded, contended with, and debated toward significantly different goals.

Reflective Structured Dialogue was developed as method of dialogue across difference in response to the intractable violence surrounding abortion debates in Boston in the 1990s. From its very start it was part of public activism aimed at promoting mutual understanding across religious and cultural differences as a foundation for civic cooperation. Originally organized as the Public Conversations Project and now as Essential Partners, Reflective Structured Dialogue has been used in civic dialogue projects in many contexts from interfaith groups in the United States to addressing Christian-Muslim conflicts in Nigeria. This presentation shares what I have learned over the past five years as I have collaborated with colleagues to bring Reflective Structured Dialogue from the context of civic activism into the classroom to cultivate learning across religious and cultural difference into higher education contexts in the United States and in Muslim majority countries.

Although our institutions currently offer a bevy of interfaith opportunities (lecture series, site visits, summer camp, student organizations, cohorts and fellows), the number of participants has decreased in the last several years. While this may be partially due to the lingering effects of COVID, we would benefit from some honest conversations with members of other academic institutions about successes and failures in campus-based curricular and co-curricular interfaith programming. A faculty member and several undergraduates from Drake University will share their perspectives as a platform for conversation.

When al-Bīrūnī (d. 1050) first encountered what we now call the Hindu tradition, and wrote his magisterial Arabic text Kitāb al-Hind (The Book of India), he mentioned Vāsudeva (the son of Vasudeva) repeatedly, more commonly known as Kṛṣṇa. Fast forward to 2023, and worshippers of Allāh and Kṛṣṇa span the globe. Both Islam and Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism (a specific tradition of Kṛṣṇa worship) have scholarly representatives in the Western academy, as well as multi-generational convert and immigrant communities in Western nations, but interfaith dialogue and interreligious contact between them has been extremely limited. This presentation opens a discussion based on research meant to push forward interreligous scholarship by making space for conversations between these two traditions historically subject to colonial domination. It aims to recover and revitalize the rich tradition of Muslim engagement with the Hindu tradition in a contemporary scholarly modality.

This presentation explores an Islamic theology of religions, one that considers the theological borders of interreligious dialogue, emphasizes reciprocal relationship, and recognizes the dynamic of “going forth and coming back” to address intrafaith dynamics in grappling with religious diversity. The ”A Common Word Between Us and You” initiative serves as a case study for the presentation and discussion. 

In recognizing that the spiritual is an inherent dimension of the human mind—seen, for example, in the self-transcending act of asking questions and, thus, expanding one’s understanding—then all psychotherapeutic practice and its methods that foster personal integration toward wholesome living ipso facto enhance spirituality. This humanistic theory provides the basis for any religious elaboration, in which case spirituality in psychotherapy becomes more complicated, that is, it needs to respect and work with a client’s beliefs about transcendence in general as well as specific beliefs about God—some of which may be known to be pathological. This paper presents an overarching perspective on recent ways of understanding spirituality in the context of psychology and psychotherapy such that therapeutic research and practices may reach their ultimate desired outcomes.

Around the world the complexity of human body-based experience has become a significant part of people’s awareness, often prompting intense reactions. Consider, for example, abortion, LGBTQIA+ identities, the me-too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, recorded incidents of police brutality, school shootings, the COVID-19 pandemic, the assault on the U.S. capitol, and, related to all this and more, the ubiquity of trauma. For more and more people, bodies matter. This presentation explores how spirituality and theology as disciplines can assist counselors and psychotherapists in these integrative tasks, especially if they or their clients are adherents of a particular religious faith. Using Christian faith as an example, a theological lens will be brought to bear on some of the body-based challenges and opportunities of spiritually-integrated psychotherapy.

Spiritual Direction is a centuries-old practice of providing mentorship and accompaniment of adults in all stages of their spiritual lives, dating back to the 4th century. The needs of neophytes differ from those who have matured in their spiritual lives and spiritual directors adapt their approaches accordingly.  Contemporary spiritual directors attend to the whole person in their accompaniment. They not only foster the spiritual development of those they accompany but also attend to their directees’ psychological well-being and life challenges. They consult with psychologists and refer directees for therapy when appropriate to practitioners who will respect their directees’ spiritual lives. This paper engages the practical challenges faced by practitioners who want to integrate spirituality in their work with clients but struggle with crossing ethical borders of their competencies.

This paper attempts to connect the pursuit of (black) incoherence with Frank Wilderson’s under-examined admission: “I believe in the Spirit world; that is to say I believe that the African ancestors are still with us and can be consulted from time to time." This belief in the spirit world resonates with Jared Sexton’s claim that black social life is out of this world. Consequently, this paper suggests that afro-pessimism invites a conversation with black theology, religion, and practices of the sacred. Accepting this invitation, this paper considers Dianne Stewart's and Tracey Hucks's recent studies of how Afro-Atlantic religious traditions re-concieve notions of the human and the world, terms that have been historically configured against blackness. The hope of this paper is to develop conversations between black studies and black religious thought around (social) death, anti-blackness, spirit, and that which cannot be contained by prevailing conceptions of the human/world.

Bringing in conversation Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of practice in Scenes of Subjection and Judith Casselberry’s ethnography of Black Apostolic Pentecostal women in Labor of Faith, this paper argues that Black Pentecostal women's religious imagination and its emergent practices provide "redress and nurture the broken body" and produce "other terms of sociality" in an anti-black world (Hartman, 102).  These women’s prayer lives demonstrate concern for and solidarity with the exigencies of black life in an anti-black world.  I argue that the practices work within and exceed the parameters of social death through supernatural, mystical, and divine interjection. Within Pentecostalism, speaking in tongues (glossolalia) intervenes in the world’s use and understanding of language.  As prayer language, speaking in tongues assures the faithful of God’s ultimate control and ability to intervene in any circumstance. God's presence, even if a moment, ruptures the world’s order while strengthening the faithful. By centering the prayer practices of Black Apostolic Women, this paper expands the present discourse on black theology and social death.

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone's call for white people to "hate their whiteness and ask from the depths of their being: 'how can we become Black?'." More precisely, this paper take W. E. B. Du Bois's reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the "soul of an ex-white man." For Du Bois, Brown's taking up of the "Negro question" proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben's monasitc/messianic informed notion of "form-of-life" and Afropessimism's elaboration of the "Negro question" through the idiom of social death, this paper offers a reading of (Du Bois's) Brown in terms of a form-of-life-toward-social-death. In imagining Brown as Du Bois's, Cone's, and Frank Wilderson's "ideal" white reader, this paper situates Brown as a model for Wilderson's iteration of Cone's charge "to lose one's Human coordinates and become Black."

This essay argues alongside Warren’s project of black nihilism that the crisis of the good life exists insofar as black life is always in crisis, meaning that there exist no onto-theological grounds for black life. Thus, there is a need to rethink what constitutes our theological renderings of the “good life.” The papers central claim seeks to go beyond Warren’s project and take at its word the necessity for black religion and theology to consider black life as that which is ungrounded. Thus, if we want to think of the possibilities of “the good life,” there must be a rupture and abandonment of the onto-theological categories which engender new possibilities for black life beyond the world. Turning toward Afrofuturism and black feminist notions of futurity may offer generative models of theological “ungrounding” to imagine black life beyond that which cannot sustain it.

In early fourteenth-century Ilkhan (Mongol-ruled) Iran, the Sufi poet of Tabriz Mahmud Shabistari (d. ca. 1320) composed the Gulshan-i Raz (“Rose Garden of Mystery”), a masterpiece Persian poem on Sufi doctrine and practice. The Gulshan concisely encapsulated, in a didactic question-and-answer format, the controversial philosophy of the famed Andalusian Sufi Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). While the poem’s simple summary of Ibn ‘Arabi’s cosmology and perspective on the unity of belief (iman) in Islam and infidelity (kufr) are well-known, this paper asserts that the Gulshan was a foundational master text for the people of tahqiq ("realization"), or the muhaqqiqs ("realizers"), a new group of Ibn ‘Arabian Sufi-scholars who treated the cosmos and human self as ever-changing scriptures on par with the Qur’an.

This paper argues that modern Muslim reformers’ engagement in the global post-Enlightenment paradigm led to the adoption of a liberal conception of selfhood, reflected in their discourse of jihād. The paper examines the underlying conceptions of selfhood in both pre-modern traditional and modernist discourses of jihād. The Aristotelian conception of selfhood and its reflection on the pre-modern discourse on jihād, represented by al-Ghazālī, is contrasted with the liberal conception adopted by Muslim reformers, such as ʿAbduh, Riḍā, and al-Marāghī. The paper demonstrates how these reformers' argument to annul the legitimacy of offensive jihād is rooted in a conception of selfhood that is rational and autonomous, which departs from the pre-modern conception of selfhood in which socialization and education are necessary for moral character. This shift in the conception of selfhood is analyzed within a global framework, emphasizing the interplay between the Islamic tradition and the global post-Enlightenment paradigm.

This paper contributes to the on-going debate surrounding the religious identity of the Sāmānid court poet Abū Manṣūr Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Daqīqī (d. ~976). I argue that while drawing from Middle Persian texts and detailing Zoroastrian mytho-history in his works, Daqīqī writes within a long-standing tradition of Iranian Muslims who incorporated Zoroastrian themes non-polemically in their works. I argue that such references would not present a challenge to these authors’ identities as Muslim, despite recent claims by scholars. My analysis highlights the benefits of consulting a range of genres including poetry in order to augment our understanding of religious identity formation. References to Zoroastrianism by Muslims authors of early Islamic Iran reflect processes of the indigenization of Islam on the Iranian plateau which allowed such newly Islamized communities to view their ancient histories as part of an Islamic heritage. 

Taṣarruf al-Kawn, the saintly ability to enact material change through spiritual causation, is a core idea that features prominently in Sufi and Shī‘ī traditions, and is also at the heart of South Asian Islamic reformist movements. Further, it is a topic that is understudied and undertheorized academically in terms of the unique conceptions of agency it reflects from 19th and 20th century South Asia. My reading of Shāh Ismail Dehlvi (d. 1831) and his predecessors, such as Shāh Walīullāh Dehlawī (d. 1762), takes seriously saintly powers without denying the actor their agency; it recognizes the human as the agential source of taṣarruf, though not independently. I seek to reformulate the critique in Taqwiyat al-Īmān and other reformist literature as not necessarily directed against taṣarruf or intercession, but against the marking of human agency as independent through forms of practice and devotion, which I identify as performative shirk. . This paper offers a theory of agency as liminal, multidirectional, and capable of enacting supernatural events (effecting change beyond material causal chains), while not explaining it away as miraculous or attributable to a single agential source.

The digital collections of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) include images of fourteen Zaydī-owned libraries from Yemen, over 700 individual manuscripts. While most items in these collections are by Zaydī authors, there are some texts by Sunnīs and a small number by non-Zaydī Shīʻīs. Some Sunnī texts are by early authors, especially Muʻtazilīs. Others are the result of later waves of interest in Sunnī thought among Zaydī scholars, including a faction who were attracted to the Wahhābī movement in the 18th century. The prevalence of non-Zaydī items varies from one library to another with the interests and ideological affiliations of their owners. This study moves beyond research on individual manuscripts to consider entire libraries as intentional assemblages. It will allow us to see how deeply intertwined the Zaydīs of Yemen have been—and continue to be—with their non-Zaydī neighbors in Yemen, across the Arabian Peninsula, and beyond.

Wendy Cadge argues that Chaplains are "brokers of death" in a secularizing culture. This is sometimes true, but in many areas of the country, religion remains a strong force, and chaplains must become "bi-lingual" capable of navigating both secular and religious languages and rituals, sometimes toggling back and forth between the two. I agree with much of Cadge's analysis, but argue that chaplains need different sorts of education then they are currently offered in Clinical Pastoral Education to prepare for ministry in this "bi-lingual" reality where strong religion and strong secularity may co-exist in the same hospital or hospice, and vary between patients. I offer some thoughts about what chaplaincy education might look like amid growing secularism, but also the ways Chaplains continue to draw on religious heritages for ministry in such contexts.

Chaplains in nineteenth-century British asylums played a pivotal role. They did not merely perform services and provide spiritual advice, but were often also in charge of educational classes, the library and particular entertainments. In his many capacities, the chaplain fostered relationships with patients, staff and the wider local community, offering those inside as well as outside the institution opportunities for agency and interaction. By revealing the therapeutic value assigned to chaplains in these asylums, this paper will historically underpin Wendy Cadge’s statement that ‘mental health services (…) are not sufficient or holistic for healing these wounds that are often deep and spiritual, calling for further support from figures like chaplains’ (2023, p. 196). It seeks to help us better understand the interconnectedness of religion and healing and underline the therapeutic potential of spiritual aid for patients struggling with mental ill-health today.

In her recent work on chaplaincy, Wendy Cadge has adeptly interviewed 66 chaplains in the Boston area, following them down hospital hallways and cavernous corridors. She approachs the term "chaplain" inductively [8], through interviews, field data, and ethnographic research. Using the work of John Chrysostom and the Oath attributed to Hippocrates, this paper considers the term deductively.

John Chrysostom (4th century CE) was concerned with *dis-eases of the soul* and  advocated the use of every means of cure.  This paper develops this patristic Greek and Christian concept, *physician of souls*, in a way that is not only currently relevant to the wounds of society, but to the pain of individuals as well.  As Cadge points out, the term "chaplain" has been resisted by some institutions because of the connection with Christianity.  The nomenclature *Physician of Souls* may not only be more inclusive but could strengthen the connection of body-mind-spirit/soul.