Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

This paper examines the figure of the dharmabhāṇaka (“preacher of the dharma”) and their audience as depicted in the Sukha-vihāra-parivarta (“Chapter on Dwelling in Ease”) of the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka-sūtra (hereafter, Lotus Sūtra), through a close reading of select stanzas from the verse portions of the chapter. Through this study, we will see that these verses have much to say about some aspects of the preacher and their listeners, such as the rhetoric the preacher employs, the subject-matter of their sermons, their style of exegesis, and the circumstances of the dharmabhāṇaka’s delivery. At the same time, we will see that verses leave other aspects implicit, such as questions of the dharmabhāṇaka’s identity, the genres of their preaching, and the specifics of how they interact with audiences. This study thus underscores the ways that some Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras envisioned their own bearers, transmitters, preachers, and auditeurs.

In early medieval China, the composition of Buddhist exegetical works was intricately connected to scholastic preaching performed by the Chinese Buddhist monastics. The content of these exegetical works, although expressing their religious views shaped by general soteriological and philosophical concerns, inevitably engages audiences at social occasions and is thus subjected to public assessment. This paper thus proposes to divert attention away from the philosophical intricacies of exegesis. Instead, it explores the following question: what were the criteria of social evaluation for “good” exegesis in early medieval China? Through the analysis of praise and critiques recorded in three consecutive hagiographical collections, the study identifies a major continuity and a major transformation in the evaluation of Buddhist scholastic preaching. It analyzes several pairs of dichotomies at stake in the analysis of Buddhist preaching and assesses their relevance in response to this question. 

This paper discusses the performance of “popular sūtra lecture” (sujiang) in medieval China by examining the codicological, paleographical, and textual features of “sūtra lecture texts” (jiangjingwen) from Dunhuang. Normative depictions of preaching and the preachers are found in transmitted sources such as Biographies of Eminent Monks and the Sūtra of Golden Light, but these scriptural and hagiographical works offer scant details about actual performance. The rich trove of Dunhuang manuscripts provides unprecedented information about how performers, redactors, and scribes drafted, assembled, and revised scripts, as well as about the afterlife of scripts as post-performance reading texts embellished with literary devices. Closely reading the textual and material features of actual scripts, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the collaborative and social world of popular preaching and shows the essential role of preaching in spreading Buddhism. 

This paper examines Eison’s (1201-90) linked preaching, ritual, and performative activities. Eison’s Shingon Ritsu movement spread broadly in medieval Japan, as he and his disciples restored temples across the islands and conferred the precepts on male and female monastics, lay elites, and commoners alike. Venues for Eison’s activities ranged from small gatherings in temples and convents; to material offering ceremonies at prisons, marketplaces, and outcast communities; to mass assemblies of monastics and laypeople and more private precept conferrals for court and warrior rulers. The paper thus uses the diversity of venues and audiences for Eison’s activities to argue for the value of understanding both “preaching as performance” (Deegalle 2006) and performance as preaching across Buddhist traditions. In so doing, I highlight how greater attention to the performative dimensions of official religious leaders can nuance still common portrayals of doctrine versus practice, elite versus popular, and institutional versus “everyday” religion.

Chanted performances of bilingual sermons were the centerpiece of most Buddhist rituals in the Theravada world from the fifteenth to early twentieth centuries, and their prestige still holds power for many Buddhist communities today. Most are structured as interphrasal Pali-vernacular bitexts, where classical Indic phrases are followed by their translation into a local South or Southeast Asian language. Bitextual sermon manuscripts function as scripts or scores for chanted performance, not books for private study, and thus invite us to imagine their composition, reception, and performance over time. To unpack the many layers of chanted bitextual sermons, I engage a tripartite model for the semiotics of music as developed by Molino and Nattiez. By analyzing selected passages from seventeenth-century Pali-Khmer and Pali-Lanna sermons on monastic ordination, I chart new possibilities for the study of Buddhist genres of performance through the semiotics of poiesis, esthesis, and materiality.

Sometime between antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Alexander Romance – a fictional account of Alexander the Great’s adventures in Persia, India, and China originally composed in Greek around the 3rd c. CE and attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes – was translated in Ge’ez, the literary language of premodern Ethiopia. This paper explores how the displacement and translation/rewriting of this text brought a specific cosmological vision into the Christian world of Ethiopia, offering resources to conceptualize the Other and the Unknown (exemplified in the text in the ‘East’ that Alexander discovers) as sites of both immense delight and unspeakable danger. By calling attention to the effects of the migration of this text, this analysis aims to augment contemporary conversations on the premodern imagination of the East in literary texts (i.e. work by Akbari, Kinoshita, and Bisaha), revealing how literature can perform complex restructurings of one’s cosmology that, in turn, suggest complex existential possibilities.

While most people know Khorasan as the heart of Shi’ism in Iran with a solid Islamic heritage, this region has a forgotten rich Christian history and heritage from the third century. Locating at the intersection of major trade routes made this region a mission destination for the Syriac-speaking Christian monks and merchants. However, natural disasters, war, and religious persecution by Muslim Mongols and Timur wiped out Christian communities in this region from the earth and the collective memory of Khorasan's inhabitants.

This research is an endeavor to trace any evidence of the existence of Christian communities in Khorasan and map them. Through library research and field visits, eight Christian monasteries, two churches, and 160 Jewish and Christian traces in Northern and Central Khorasan were discovered mainly in Sabzevar, Neishabour, Mashhad, and Torbate Heydarieh Counties in Central Khorasan and Maneh Va Samalghan County in Northern Khorasan.

The studies on the height and glory of the Mongol Empire at its rise, expansion, and institutionalization had become increasingly robust throughout the 20th century. With forthcoming sources such as the Secret History of the Mongols and compounding discoveries by admirers, scholars, and inheritors alike, had allowed for greater insight into the dutiful impact that this period left on the vast expanse of Central Asia and beyond. Amidst this complicated relationship with their history, the current inhabitants as well as direct descendants of the Mongolian nation steadily regard the prominence of the dynastic regime spurred by the successful conquests of Genghis Khan.

In this paper, I present the affinities of the Mongols’ expansion westward into the Middle East and Near East; their assimilation of the Eastern Churches; and the tolerance of religion as a function of the philosophical commonalities between Eastern Christianity and Mongolian imperial spiritualism.

The Mandaean scriptures have been the subject of sustained interest from non-Mandaean scholars for more than two centuries, beginning with Matthias Norberg’s pioneer edition and translation of the Genzā Rabbā or ‘Great Treasure’ in 1815. Those that followed his are considered banner examples of the philological enterprise, one that processes and thereby subsumes data from texts such as these into its own episteme toward a variety of uses. In Foucauldian terms, the ‘subjugated knowledge’ represented by the various philological editions and translations of this text yet paradoxically disguised within them presents an opportunity to critique those same works of scholarship and by extension the entire enterprise of scholarship on Mandaeans. Because of longstanding Mandaean engagements with the surrounding communities, these texts plainly have much to say about their history and other subjects of interest and relevance to historians working on an array of periods and places.

This paper investigates a relatively overlooked excerpt of ʿAbd al-Masīḥ b. Isḥāq al-Kindī's Epistle where he makes references to Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist beliefs and customs in support of the veracity of the Christian faith against Islam. While the ninth century apologetical tract continues to garner scholarly attention especially given its early witness to Islamic beliefs and practices, and particularly the question of the canonization of the Qurʾān, this study proposes to situate the Epistle against the backdrop of the vibrant intellectual scene of ninth-century Baghdad. To this end, this paper situates Kindī’s Christian “true religion apology” within the interreligious context of the caliphal capital and the corresponding enterprise of comparative religion that is part and parcel of the ʿAbbāsid intellectual project.

The black maternal health crisis is intersectional conversation because when  problemized it converges into an issue of racism, religion, health, and democracy. Having children in the state of Georgia is dangerous and health risk for black women because we are three time more likely to die in childbirth or within a year of postpartdum. I argue it is not just an issue of race but an issue of the “racism” women encounter by this system. Second, black women are reported by Pew research as the most religious subgroup to self-identify as religious and attend a weekly service. The teachings of these faith communities are influences how black women are making decisions regarding their reproductive health before they are in labor. Often creating moral dilemmas for these women within the larger moral conversation. Finally, this crisis involves democracy and equality.

Conservative Christian women in the US operate under a logic of exceptionalism by which they are able to elide the circumstances of others while understanding their own abortion care as morally exempt. This exceptionalism helps us to understand how the prevailing logic of conservative Christian stances on abortion are able to both maintain cultural power and withstand contrast in the daily practice of believers on the ground. Conservative Christian women’s exceptionalism results in “mothering decisions” for me but not for thee.

Increasingly, heterosexual women are choosing periods of celibacy (defined as the conscious choice of not having sexual relations or encounters with men) or celibate lives. With the fall of Roe v. Wade, celibacy takes on another level of significance. At a practical level, for women in the 24 states that has banned abortions, celibacy offers a level of safety as women fight to restore abortion rights. Meanwhile, the choice of celibacy is also a powerful statement of autonomy and agency in relation to women and our bodies. Further, facing this battle launched by the religious right, let us couple celibacy with self-pleasuring as the ultimate challenge to their age-old efforts on controlling female sexuality and reproduction. 

The Dimensions of Religiosity Dataset (DIM-R+) is a harmonization of all of the currently available waves of the European Social Survey (ESS), the World Values Survey (WVS), the European Values Study (EVS), and the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) that includes data from more than a million individuals. In addition to harmonizing existing variables, DIM-R+ includes theoretically well-grounded syntheses of variables for key measures of religiosity: religious affiliation, participation in public religious practices, participation in private religious practices, self-declared religiosity, and supernatural belief. The usefulness of DIM-R+ can be appreciated by using it to improve the robustness and generality of David Voas’ fuzzy fidelity theory, which has been a major development in our understanding of the secularization process.

Measures of religion have been available from US polls and surveys since the 1940s, and yet, the characteristics and trajectory of religious change in the country is a topic of intense debate. The Religious Identity and Change in the USA (RICH-USA) harmonizes existing measures of religion present in historical polls and more contemporary surveys, permitting a more comprehensive view of religion in the US and how it has changed over time. Like DIM-R+, RICH-USA includes measures of religion along multiple dimensions including identity, public religious service attendance, private practices, the personal importance of religion, and supernatural worldview. The creation of RICH-USA is an unprecedented effort to harmonize eight decades of religion data to connect past and contemporary research on religion in the US.

The Religious Identity and Change in India dataset (RICH-India) combines an historical dataset for religiosity in India with more recent quantitative data based on the Indian national census and other datasets. This paper describes how RICH-India was constructed, includes information on how the codebook was created and the proxies used to measure historic religiosity, and raises questions about possible methods for linking and relating the two parts of the dataset. No comprehensive quantitative sources exist that measure religiosity in India before the early 1990s. Using a categorical coding scheme, we generated a historical dataset by performing a content analysis of ethnographic profiles in the Anthropological Survey of India’s People of India project publications and other earlier twentieth-century sources containing qualitative statements on religious beliefs and practices. A quantitization process translates coded qualitative data into quantitative data.

Religious population projections are politically sensitive click-bait. Methodological self-awareness calls for understanding to what extent measurement assumptions affect the population projections in which they are employed. Traditional demographic methods do not support the required sensitivity analyses. But emerging demographic methods from computational social simulation possess the flexibility to determine precisely how sensitive population projections are on numerous measurement assumptions, in all possible combinations, simultaneously. The Assumption-Relative Religious Demographics Information System (ARDEMIS) is a computer-simulation-based system for estimating and visualizing the impact of measurement assumptions on religious demographic projections. Just as we learn more from the distribution of a statistic than from its mean, so we learn far more from population projections produced in the ARDEMIS way than we do from a projection presented with no sense of its likelihood or stability in the face of alternative measurement assumptions.

This paper explores the construction of political martyrdom narratives around George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt, and argues that such a closer examination can help scholars articulate a new vocabulary of political martyrdom. Political martyrdom provides a fertile ground for understanding the intersections of death, violence, collective memory, and meaning-making across historical contexts. It involves three components: 1) death in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity(ies) or political commitments. Such conditions often involve the exercise of violence by state authorities, community members, or even martyrs themselves; 2) the sacralization or consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing it transcendent meaning. Consecration charges the death with powerful cultural and political resonances and places the death within narratives that attribute it symbolic significance; 3) ot merely death and consecration, but the repeated commemoration of the martyr’s memory across the generations through media, ritual, and commemorative practices.

In the summer of 2020, Sean Feucht introduced a new archetype into the world of American Religious Right leadership: the persecuted worship troubadour. Feucht’s fame (and notoriety) has spread since he launched his mid-pandemic “Let Us Worship” campaign, staging public worship gatherings with thousands of Christians attending in defiance of local COVID restrictions. He has leveraged that popularity to rapidly become one of the most recognizable figures in American religious politics. But undergirding Feucht’s provocative worship tours and aggressive MAGA associations is a potent narrative of persecution, of being “canceled,” and of having to stand firm against his demonically inspired opposition. Through a close-reading of Feucht’s martyrdom narrative (particularly his hagiographic Superspreader documentary), this paper examines how he has created a model of right-wing living martyrdom where he can be simultaneously a gleeful provocateur and a Davidic, set-upon saint who advances Christian freedom – and public Christian dominance.

The Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine in La Crosse, Wisconsin is an important new religious site which thematizes and visually represents human sacrifice as central to orthodox Catholic piety. This sacrifice is not understood as a “self emptying” spiritual economics, but instead insists on the necessity of women’s bodily sacrifice in service of both virginity/purity and reproduction. Through an examination of two paintings at the shrine, both of female Catholic saints canonized for sacrificing their lives rather than violating the Church's position on virginity and abortion, this paper will examine the dynamics of sainthood as sacrifice in an anti-abortion religious context.

Airport chaplains who conduct en route memorial rituals for newly identified veterans’ remains during the veterans’ final journeys home offer what I call *tangible islands*—brief spaces of healing for the veterans’ families amid the liminal sea of the families’ feelings of guilt, moral anguish, grief, ambiguity, and relief.  Using refined DNA analysis techniques, the U.S. Government is identifying the remains of American soldiers killed in wars decades ago.  With bodily identification unavailable until now, families whose loved ones were killed in combat have spent generations grieving ambiguous losses.  In this liminal grieving space, relatives may suffer moral injury around sending their loved ones off to war, as the soldiers die, do not return home in caskets, and remain missing in action until some families receive repatriation notification that confirms their suspicions of the soldiers’ deaths.  Through tangible islands, airport chaplains help provide healing to the families of long-missing veterans.

My paper explores the untapped potential of the Song of Songs as an ecotheological text. I unlock this potential by synthesizing insights from a pair of pioneering ecotheological readings of the Song by Ellen Bernstein and Ellen Davis with related themes from one of the most influential allegorical interpreters of the Song in the Christian tradition, John of the Cross. Bernstein and Davis explore the Song’s ecological vision of relational wholeness and the non-possessive reciprocity that makes this wholeness possible. John of the Cross takes up the motifs of relationality and reciprocity but uses them to explore foundational theological and spiritual themes. My thesis is that, according to a constructive synthesis of these readings, the Song offers both a Christological ideal of restored relationality between humanity, the environment, and God, as well as a spiritual path of radical non-possessiveness and Trinitarian reciprocity which makes the realization of this ideal possible.

Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century mystical theologian, and Martin Heidegger, the twentieth-century philosopher of technology and aesthetics, offer complementary accounts of human creativity, art, and design that can serve as antidotes or alternatives to the aesthetic, social and ecological deterioration that unchecked forces of modern automation and mechanization can cause. Through their treatments of the interrelated themes of creation and creativity, they offer resources for articulating an artistic humanism that is not radically autarchic, but rather one that appropriately appraises the way that freely creative human subjects are also subjected to an openness that exceeds them. They explore the revelatory function of works of art that can produce normative totalities for their communities. They provide perspectives from which we can reconsider our modern aesthetic and technological condition, in order to allow both the constancy of wisdom and the disruptive novelty of genius to shape our artistic, scientific, and spiritual pursuits.

In the last line of latest work, famed biologist Andreas Wagner writes, “The thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas was onto something when he wrote that God created the world in play.” Wagner’s contention concerned the emerging evidence that evolution itself might be regarded as genuinely creative. In this paper, I incorporate the work of Wagner and the philosopher of science Denis Walsh with the trinitarian theology of Nicholas of Cusa and the doctrine of Christogenesis in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to arrive a Christian theology of ongoing creation (*creatio continua*). To begin, I argue Nicholas’s suggestion that the Logos is the “art” of God reflects a belief that this intra-Trinitarian poiesis grounds *ad intra* all creative activity *ad extra*. Then, I integrate this with Teilhard’s concept of Christogenesis, whereby the creative activity of nature becomes the means through which God’s eschatological embodiment is effected.

This paper argues that reflection on theories of sexual selection can be theologically generative, and that it presents needed counter-emphases to discussions about theological anthropology fueled by reflection on natural selection. It introduces sexual selection and provides an overview of different approaches to sexual selection found within evolutionary biology today, before transitioning to a reflection on one theologically relevant insight from sexual selection—namely, the importance of play. It argues that the mating and play behaviors of animals reveal the non-competitive relationship between necessity and gratuity, and thus provide theologians with an example of grace building upon, and not destroying, nature. Play is sometimes depicted in philosophical and theological accounts as the achievement of culture, but sexual selection can help to illuminate how culture is dependent upon nature, and play is a natural phenomenon that provides resources for cultural elaboration. 

In this paper, I seek to develop a “post-anthropocentric” doctrine of creation by incorporating insights from current natural sciences and new technologies. My idea is that not only human beings but also non-human creatures and technological artifacts can be legitimately called “created co-creators” (Philip Hefner) or “co-created co-creators,” for non-human creatures, including artifacts, have been taking part in the continuous creation of the world. Meanwhile, the extended application of the idea of created co-creator should not lead to a naïve “flat ontology” in which all different forms of creatures claim the same status. Anticipating this misunderstanding, I will then suggest elaborating a qualitatively differentiated ontology by drawing insights from Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway, Karan Barad, Bruno Latour, and the Bible. Thereby, in the final analysis, I hope to lay a foundation of a renewed doctrine of creation for the age of science and technology.

Utilizing TikTok as a marketing/evangelizing platform has become not simply an effective strategy but the effective strategy for reaching and evangelizing younger demographic cohorts. More than a quarter of adults under 30 now get their news from TikTok, a phenomenon not lost on influencers—religious and otherwise. In this presentation, drawing insights from practitioner “best practices” and social capital theory, in conversation with Religious Studies, I will use content analysis to examine how influencers leverage resources (followers, personal branding, content, engagement) to enhance religious content on this platform. Importantly, TikTok’s algorithm is “hyperpersonalized,” increasing opportunities for parasocial relationships and word-of-mouth marketing on a level not seen elsewhere. For this paper, I will analyze Orthodox Jewish TikToker’s like @miriamezafui, an Orthodox nurse who answers questions about her faith, and the Christian revival at Asbury University, which was driven by promotion on TikTok.

Consider the following lines from an Ariat western wear TV spot, voiced over images of rugged cowboys and cowgirls driving cattle across a majestic range: “Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard work. It’s long days. It’s all kinds of weather. But when you work under the open sky, you come into contact with something bigger than yourself. It’s not a job; it’s a life.” Drawing from marketing scholar Christopher Miles’s (2018) work on the “magical foundations of marketing theory,” and from folklorist Linda Dégh’s (1994) theorizing of advertising as contemporary “magic folktale,” this multimedia presentation analyzes the enchanting dimensions of Ariat’s ad campaigns and how/why they might evoke particularly powerful public resonances in the digital/Zoom era. Ariat, this presentation argues, effectively casts a “magic folktale” of bygone “sacred labor”—vocations in tune with America’s mythic landscapes that provide powerful (and personally/nationally regenerative) conduits to the transcendent.    

This presentation considers discourses of capitalist productivity in the work of prominent life-advice gurus who today cast free-market capitalism as an aspect of a holistic lifestyle – integral to one’s mode of being in the world. I focus on the publications and social media dialogue of Deepak Chopra, Devdutt Pattanaik, and Vishen Lakhiani. I highlight the invocation of classical Hindu ideals as well as Indian Sanskrit texts such as the Arthashastra in the service of reinforcing free-market capitalist ideology as an example of the instrumentalization of ancient knowledge in service of the expectations of the 21st century market economy. I conclude with reflections on continuities and departures in the attitudes of these present-day corporate lifestyle gurus from related, antecedent discourse in the Human Potential Movement, suggesting ways in which the heirs to this movement have accommodated their message to what Kathryn Tanner and others have deemed “the new spirit of capitalism.”

This multimedia presentation will explore the rhetoric of “freedom through fashion” in the marketing materials of LuLaRoe, and the ways the company targeted stay-at-home mothers in particular with its promises of unlimited “blessings” and opportunity contingent on individual action. The company’s messaging defines women’s “freedom” in terms of individual feeling (happy, sexy, beautiful) and consumption (having it all), while also framing the actual labor involved in building the business as well as the labor of reproduction and childcare as a matter of individual women’s responsibility, psychological strength, and “hustle,” as opposed to being conditioned or constrained by broader structural, political, or economic issues. LuLaRoe promises an almost messianic vision of bringing “life more abundantly,” to paraphrase John 10:10.  I argue that attention to these elements in LuLaRoe’s marketing helps us better understand the uses and power of religious language as a driver of MLM recruitment and sales.

This presentation examines yarmulkes as platforms for marketing in American presidential campaigns since World War II. Most visible since 2000, these items have served as political accoutrements by the Jewish supporters of candidates, most of whom are not Jewish. Designed and sold with little input from candidates, campaign yarmulkes have brought free media attention to the candidates to whom they are devoted. They may be the first item used in American religious ritual that also advertises political preference in sacred liturgical spaces. What might the manufacture, sale, and use of such items mean in such circumstances? What does it reflect about American Judaism, or the relationship of religion, commercialization, and presidential campaign politics in the United States? This presentation argues that the case study of the campaign yarmulke offers a unique, rich, and overlooked window into the complex convergences of religion, media, marketing, material culture, and American politics.