The last few years have seen an increasing attack on academic freedom and free speech within higher education. Legislation passed in Florida, Texas, Ohio, Arkansas, North Carolina, and other states threatens academic freedom, diversity and inclusion, and the future ability for public universities to create spaces where students and faculty can freely and critically examine ideas and events together. Many states are also including so-called “anti-woke” bills that in some way limit the education of K-12 students and prevent discussion of slavery, the genocide of native Americans, and anything having to do with LGBTQ+ issues. Together, these “attacks on education” are attacks on the future of a viable democracy, which depends upon an educated citizenry. Professional organizations such as your AAR, ACLS, AHA, and MLA have released statements condemning these attacks. What might we do as faculty and scholars to resist these types of attacks on higher education? This session, moderated by Charles Mathewes, will be a place for faculty and scholars affected by these types of legislation, and their allies, to share resources and ideas about how to deal with these new laws in the classroom and in the academy in general.
Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book
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Both the spoken and confessional languages of Latinx Christian communities have made their labors invisible to scholarship on the ecumenical movement in the United States. Ecumenical efforts in the United States seek to facilitate discourse with ecclesiastical and political entities, foregrounding the choice of language as a determinative paradigm for ecumenical action. The predominance of English as a medium of institutional communication in the country privileges the language within the ecumenical activities of churches, overlooking non-anglophone communities within these same churches. Additionally, while ecumenism is often regarded as the domain of “Mainline” Protestant denominations, the vast majority of Latinx Christians in the country are members of other churches, leaving their work outside of the typical scope of attention for ecumenists. The consequence of the argument is the need for the study of ecumenics to be multilingual—literally and confessionally.
The advanced usage of technology during the COVID-19 lockdown shows that our epistemology is bounded by the accessibility of digital networks/devices, if not merely by our geographical locations. Likewise, the knowledge scholars produce/absorb may also be limited by what they are exposed to. As an interdisciplinary study between sociology and theology, this paper investigates the production of knowledge within the world Christianity discourse and argues for the necessity of epistemic justice within the production process, through Martha Frederik’s emphasis of a ‘world Christianity approach’ and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s ‘sociology of absence’. In an interconnected world, I propose that we world Christianity scholars have to be sensitive to the invisible ones during the process of knowledge production, and to avoid the dilemma of being bounded by the methodology per se and forget the marginaliased ones we suppose to lift up in our research.
According to the United States Census Bureau, over one-fifth of the U.S. population speaks a language other than or in addition to English at home. That the same is not true in our classrooms reveals a power imbalance in academia rooted in a long history of settler-colonial white supremacy. The exclusive use of English marginalizes non-English speaking and multilingual populations and hinders learning. This paper argues for a translingual approach where students are encouraged to use all of their languages in their learning and are given resources for doing so. Drawing on the presenter’s experience teaching undergraduate and seminary courses in theology and world Christianity, it highlights what professors, especially those who do not speak the same languages as their students, can do to recognize and support the wide diversity of multilingual students in our classrooms.
Respondent
This co-sponsored session highlights creative pedagogies in teaching Asian American religions. Each presentation offers a different perspective on how Asian American religions are taught, including what is typically overlooked. One paper makes a connection between therapeutic well-being and Asian American history in Asian American evangelical spaces. Another offers an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching Buddhism to high school seniors, while the last one focuses on the particular methodological questions that arise when Asian/Asian American women teach religion in the classroom. We welcome active audience engagement as part of the larger conversation. The Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society unit's business meeting will take place after this session.
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In this paper, we propose that the public pedagogical practices of contemporary centers of Asian American evangelical higher learning revolve around self-care. Indeed, we argue that what these programs do is to personalize the learning of Asian American history as a therapeutic practice for personal application. Using the methodologies of virtual ethnography and digital archiving, we examine the conferences and seminars held by the Center for Asian American Christianity (CAAC) at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Center for Asian American Theology and Ministry (CAATM) at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the recent development in Asian American pedagogy at New College Berkeley, as well as the Asian American Christian Collaborative’s (AACC) partnerships with institutions of theological education such as Fuller and Wheaton College. In so doing, we show that the transformative pedagogy that is imagined in these Asian American educational spaces in their conference hosting emphasizes a relationship between Asian American history and personal psychological wellbeing that is at present undergoing theoretical development.
This interactive presentation surveys the past and reimagines the future of “Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard” (L2BB), an experimental ten-week course organized as a collaboration between a high school religious studies teacher and a scholar of Asian American Buddhism. Conceived as part of an experimental school-within-a-school that seeks to reimagine the “grammar of schooling,” L2BB seeks to overcome pedagogically limited approaches to the study of Buddhism that contribute to the ongoing erasure of Asian Americans, including the local Chinese, Khmer, Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese Buddhist communities the students partnered with during the course. Emphasizing student perspectives from the L2BB 2022 and 2023 high school student cohorts, as well as graduate students in education in 2023, this presentation aims to generate feedback to contribute to L2BB in 2024 and to help inspire similar projects across the country.
In this paper, we investigate the importance of building a narrative for Asian/Asian American Women, teaching religions in Higher Education in North America. In the 21st Century, especially after the Covid-19 outbreak, threats from racism and sexism still challenge society. Therefore, higher education institutions, instructors, and students have been searching for possible ways to incorporate how they feel, address, and understand this threat in research and education. In particular, instructors who identify themselves as women with Asian backgrounds face intersectional challenges while teaching Asian-related topics to students who could be impacted by Anti-Asian hate crimes. Instructors and students need a common understanding of Asian Americans’ experiences in the US. This paper aims to share our challenges and possibilities in classrooms using existing works of literature. Our question is: “How can our own narratives based on race, gender, and classism better guide teaching, and how can we continue collaborating for Pan-Asian/Asian American solidarity?”
Many are deeply concerned about the current state of political, ethical, and religious polarization. This panel focuses on the pedagogies and best practices that attempt to dismantle polarization, also by critically and constructively engaging ideas advanced in Amy Carr and Christine Helmer's Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press, 2023). While Carr and Helmer introduce a theological model based explicitly on the doctrine of justification by faith to envision possible ways of decreasing polarization between different visions of justice among Christians in churches, the panel addresses the many dimensions of conflict in classroom and society and explores theories, methods, and tools to facilitate mutual understanding and peace.
Idolatry is an important category in theological thinking. To a large extent, it is the counterpoint of “God”, and possesses a central place in theological reflection. To know God is also to recognize idolatry and to serve God is to avoid idolatrous behavior. “Idolatry” all too often serves as a means of othering the religious other and delegitimating other religions. There is, however, also an alternative approach to idolatry, where the category is used to affirm what must be overcome within a religion, as it points to God and as it helps believers overcome any number of human weaknesses. The proposed panel will focus on this latter sense of idolatry. Contributors from four faiths – Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Hindu, will reflect on the moral and spiritual uses of idolatry, on its internal uses and on how these can be shared and serve as source of enrichment and insight across religions.
An established tradition of thought has long critiqued the “secular” as a distinctive formation of power and knowledge. What has received less attention within this tradition is the relationship between the genealogy of the “secular” and the history of colonial settlement. Theorists and historians in the fields of Indigenous Studies and Settler-Colonial studies have long underscored the importance of this distinction by circulating a series of concepts meant to challenge the vocabularies that have guided analytic engagements with colonialism. This roundtable asks if and how these different trajectories can supplement each other. What can Indigenous studies and Settler-Colonial studies contribute to our understanding of the “secular” as a mode of liberal governance and “secularism” as an ideology? How have the language and practices of secularity sponsored settler projects? Finally, could a conversation between these fields help to interrogate the problems subtending the question of “decolonizing the secular”?
This panel looks to literature and poetry as resources for the philosophy of religion. It seeks to find common forms of inquiry and insight across different genres of writing. Some of the papers pair poets with philosophers in order to find ways in which each illuminates the other. Other papers treat poetry or fiction as themselves a form of philosophizing. Some of the figures considered are: Adrienne Rich, Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, Clarice Lispector, and W. E. B. du Bois.
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Drawing on a hueristic that combines Walter Benjamin's concept of history with Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue, this paper argues that Adrienne Rich's poetry exemplifies an intentional relation to histories of oppression, and that she deserves a more prominent place in the history of queer theory. With an underlying philosophical paradigm provided by Buber and Benjamin, I interpret a selection of Rich's essays and poems, framing her poems as 'artifacts of saying You to the wreckage of history,' particularly to the history of hetero-patriarchal oppression. This framework underscores Rich's prescient, perhaps still underappreciated contribution to queer theory, provides an example of how the resources of religious thought and poetry can come together to offer fresh perspectives on philosophy, and highlights poetry's capacity for imagining and conveying new modes of being in the world, a capacity that may outstrip that of discursive philosophical prose.
This paper reads Anne Sexton’s “Sickness Unto Death” alongside that of Kierkegaard to argue that literature can serve as the metafiction of philosophy. I suggest that Sexton’s poetic engagement with Kierkegaard makes salient the precise structure of despair’s transformation from experience to expression to concept. Her writing does this by thinking about itself as a participant in the confessional process it facilitates. I argue that this confession embodies despair as a specific structure of the relationship between subject and experience, an at-once literary and existential form which consequently structures expression, communication, and address. Sexton's engagement with Kierkegaard offers us a new way of thinking about the role of literature in philosophy--an alternative what Hollywood, Hammerschlag, and Furey describe as the empty use of "literary texts as exempla for already articulated philosophical views." Instead, her poetry moves us beyond ornamentation and embodiment—and towards the constructive possibilities of metafiction.
Philosophy of religion names a method: a way of asking questions about what we call religion. Literature can do that, too, in ways that can methodologically expand ways of doing philosophy of religion. This paper explores these paths of possibility by turning to Clarice Lispector, whose texts do philosophy by being literature: by doing what literature can do. This paper unpacks this suggestion by turning to _A Breath of Life: Pulsations_. It’s a complicating text, because it’s a transgenred text: a novel that’s a play that’s a kind of autobiography and, maybe, an auto-elegy. By reading _A Breath of Life_ as literature, and attending to the (philosophically speaking) expected and unexpected questions that _A Breath of Life_ poses through its ways of writing, this paper suggests that _A Breath of Life_ can teach philosophy of religion new methodological lessons and offer new possibilities of questioning through literature.
After broadly addressing the question of this session, How literature and poetry contribute to philosophy of religion, I turn to Du Bois. His philosophical reflections and arguments are lyrical and affective; his poetic and literary works are conceptual and argumentative. An intimate dance between the cognitive, lyrical, and affective permeates Du Bois’s works, and they thereby become one answer to the session’s question: literature and poetry contribute to philosophy of religion when they mutually inform each other. In the Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois’s philosophy is written in a lyrical (a literary and poetic) mode; in Darkwater, Du Bois’s poetry and fiction is written in a philosophical mode. And in both books, Du Bois is the master storyteller. Richard Rorty claimed that we need “a turn against theory and toward narrative.” Contrary to Rorty, I recommend a turn to a poetic narrativist philosophy as exemplified by Du Bois.
This panel will provide a dynamic review of scholarship intersecting with Gay Men and Religion subjects and authors; looking back a decade, and casting visions for the future. Following this review, we will explore the text of *Queer God de Amor* by Miguel Diaz.
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This paper examines the lived experiences of Spanish gay men in conversation with Queer God De Amor by Miguel Diaz. Particularly, the essay explores how the queering of the works of St. John of the Cross relates to processes of identity disruption and construction for members of CRISMHOM – an LGBTQ+ Christian community in Madrid, Spain. Through an interpersonal analysis of human-divine and human-human interactions, the text unpacks how Roman Catholic gay men at CRISMHOM come to know God and to “savor” his love – in Diaz’s words.
The Gay Men and Religion program unit committee members will offer a review of scholarship that intersects with subjects and authors related to our field of study, surveying texts from 2013-2023.
The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, also known as the Shakers, are often remembered for their strict lifestyle (which included mandatory celibacy) and striking furniture. But more central to the Shaker way of life was a commitment to the principle of ongoing revelation, which made any Shaker a potential mystic or “instrument.” How might the study of mysticism look different if we moved the extraordinary world of Shaker spiritualism from the periphery to the center? The five panelists on this roundtable, all of whom work outside the subfield of Shaker studies, will relate aspects of the 19th-century spiritual revival known as the “Era of Manifestations” to conversations central to the study of early modern mysticism. These include theological debates over continuous revelation; the relationship between race, authority, and religious experience; changing conceptions of heaven; the history of the book and industrial printing; and ideals of gender, motherhood, and communal dynamics in monastic life.
Psychedelics have come to be not only objects but also methods of research in scholarship on mysticism and in the broader field of religious studies. Based in part on personal reflections, this panel asks what methodological questions are provoked by scholarship that is informed by psychedelic experiences. It also identifies insights for our field that have been produced through reflection on and use of psychedelics.
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Drawing upon the philosophical perspectives of William James and Henri Bergson, this paper explores the genesis and dynamics of the visionary/mystical experiences that can be catalyzed by psychedelic substances. The paper explores how the "filter" theory of consciousness offered by Bergson postulates that the main function of the brain is to protect us from being overwhelmed by the torrent of information that pours into us from the cosmos. In this way, psychedelics can be seen as a way to “change the channel” of the “television” of the brain so that it can receive information from alternate, typically hidden, dimensions of reality. Similarly, James's theory of how “normal” conscious experience is an intricate interweaving of two qualitatively different strata of knowledge, i.e., “knowledge-by-acquaintance” and “knowledge-about,” is extended to psychedelic visionary experiences to suggest that these experiences are also a pre-conscious fusion of sense-like immediacy and cultural categories of understanding.
I am a professor of Religious Studies at an R1 public university. But I also am training to become a licensed facilitator for the Oregon Psilocybin Services program. As part of my training, I did a facilitation practicum at a medical clinic that offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.
Whereas much of my psychedelic facilitation training argues that psychedelics transport people to a Jungian transpersonalist realm where they have healing mystical encounters with divine beings and/or ultimate reality, my ketamine journey revealed two, quite different insights about entheogens and Religious Studies. First, psychedelics taken in therapeutic contexts could help scholars uncover the deepest subconscious narratives that shape the interpretive impulses that frame their scholarship. Second, the interpersonal “container” of therapeutic psychedelics expanded my definition of “the sacred” by giving me an experience of sacrality as human relationships of deep trust and mutual care.
This paper examines the life and legacy of R. Gordon Wasson, arguably the most important figure in the explosion of interest in psychedelic mushrooms during the late twentieth century. A banker by trade, Wasson achieved huge international fame in the 1950s when he began to explore the use of Psilocybe mushrooms in the religious practices of Mexico. He soon expanded his exploration of psychedelic fungi into a kind of global mushroom mysticism that he believed could be found everywhere from Siberia to Greece and India, perhaps revealing the origins of religion itself. Yet Wasson’s research was also deeply problematic; he deceived the Mazatec curandera who showed him the ritual use of mushrooms; and his work on Vedic and other materials is extremely flawed. To conclude, I discuss the ambivalent legacy of Wasson’s work in the twenty-first century, both in the study of mysticism and in the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
In this paper, I examine the reciprocal relationship between scholarship about religion and discourses and practices related to the “First” and “Second Wave” psychedelic movements. Following the work of Agehananda Bharati, I argue that the “First Wave” psychedelic movement was instrumental in the success of Religious Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, facilitating interest in a range of issues around religious experience and its interpretation. I postulate two key spheres of influence: scholars whose experiences of psychedelics were formative in their study of religion versus others not associated with psychedelic use but have had a major impact on thinking within psychedelic communities. To illustrate this, I draw on my experience as a participant-observer in one of the first state-approved Psilocybin Facilitator training programs in Oregon, providing examples of how scholarship on religion informs psychedelic discourse and practice and the implications of it for the future of the academic study of religion.