Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

A painted reliquary from late antique Palestine, now preserved in the Vatican Museums, is one of the earliest material testimonies of Christian pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Complementing the evidence from the first extant pilgrimage accounts in important ways, the Vatican reliquary helps to shed further light on the experience of Holy Land pilgrims before the Arab conquest. In unique ways, the painted box illuminates the idea of pilgrimage as an act of witnessing the reality and continuing validity of sacred events described in the Bible. The artifact can be fruitfully used in teaching as a key source to provide insight into typical phenomena characteristic of Christian religious devotion and pilgrimage. It invites discussion of a variety of themes, e.g., spiritual religion and sacred matter; art and the imagination; vision and memory; authenticity; art as a trigger of emotions; sacred place/space; concepts of time; and virtual pilgrimage.

In his fourteenth-century biblical commentary, the Postilla litteralis (Literal Commentary), Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan scholar at the University of Paris, compared Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Old Testament and designed visual images to illustrate these comparisons.  A premodern bestseller, Nicholas of Lyra’s illustrated commentary was widely copied throughout Europe for three centuries.  Copies of Nicholas’s illustrations from fourteenth and fifteenth-century manuscript illuminations serve as powerful teaching devices. First, these illustrations teach students about late medieval Christian interest in Jewish biblical scholarship.   Copies of Nicholas’s illustrations display a reliance on rabbinic commentary regarding literal meanings of scripture, yet express Christological and typological principles. Second, by comparing Nicholas of Lyra’s illustrations with Hebrew manuscript illuminations, I help students to see differences in the way late medieval Jewish and Christian art represents the divine. To enable the sharing of pedagogical resources, my digital images are sourced from open-access internet databases. 

This paper will explore the pedagogical potential of *Lamentation Over the Dead Christ* (2008) by Kehinde Wiley as a catalyst for cultivating meaningful dialogue around race and religion in the mainline American church. Wiley’s work is provocative and complex, a powerful teaching tool. It will be used to anchor a “triangle of aesthetic pedagogy” that can effectively illuminate deep learning. Rooted in aesthetic experience, the triangle coalesces around Maxine Greene’s notion that works of art have the ability to evoke a “consciousness of possibility” (*Variations on a Blue Guitar*, 2001, 117). Wiley’s piece motivates learners to challenge their conception of the imago dei and by doing so, strengthens their imagination and capacity to see race and religion with new vision. This vision, unencumbered by hegemony and free to see clearly, is a desperately needed lesson in the mainline American church; *Lamentation Over the Dead Christ* is a remarkably effective teacher.

In 2013, Master Iconographer Vladislav Andreyev of the Prosopon School of Iconology added a new image to the iconographic canon, an icon of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”. Though the Feast of Orthodoxy has been celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent since 843, there is no festal icon associated with it. Typically, an image of the Icon Not Made By Hands, the Mandylion of Edessa, is venerated. Andreyev’s icon is a complex image that combines, remixes, and elaborates various previous iconic themes in a way that is both incredibly innovative, yet completely faithful to the tradition. I use this image in my Visual Theologies class because of the ways in which it opens onto multiple horizons of conversation, including the theological nature of images, Christology, questions of creativity and tradition, spirituality and worship of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the often-fraught relationship between Church and State.

Within this paper, we bring together two accounts where God reveals Godself to Mary within and through her visceral, embodied experiences of pregnancy. We ask how these two accounts inform our traditions’ understandings of God and God’s relationship to and with humanity, specifically women. We want to share two readings–one from the Gospel of Luke, the other from Surah Mariam (Q 19), that give accounts of Mary that are not shared or overlapping, but invite our imaginations and theological reflection on the example pregnant Mary gives us. In considering scripture reasoning, we analyze how these particular Marian texts transcend barriers through the personal, relational, and everyday faith lived. We start from a place of friendship, of shared personal affinity for Mary, and in this paper move to explore the two different textual accounts, before coming back together to contextualize how these particular accounts continue to motivate, shape and sustain particular communities of women across the Christian and Muslim traditions. 

This paper explores the overlapping and intersecting histories of race and the Bible as a form of translation. How do biblical texts and translations refract, render, and represent race? Conversely, how are modern understandings of race reflected in, shaped by, and indebted to biblical interpretation? After establishing a working definition of race informed by critical race theory, I examine examples that illustrate a notable pattern in the history of interpretation of racializing the bible and biblicizing race.

This paper will explore the way a contemporary Jewish thinker with innovative, some might say heretical, ideas translates them back into the language of tradition bridging the new and the old through language. In doing so, the radical nature of his ideas become refracted, and normalized, through the language of the past.

This paper studies how asymmetrical relations between colonial and colonized traditions informed understandings of freedom and sovereignty in late-Ottoman Islam. It argues that these negotiations became a sight for larger ethical debates about how Islamic truth should and could be defined within the conditions that make up modern life. By centering the writings of feminists thinkers like Malak Hifni Nasef, `Aisha Taymur, and Fatima `Aliyye, it presents a notion of freedom that champions the interdependence of human, natural, and cosmological orders.

Transitions are a fundamental part of the human experience, yet they are often accompanied by feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and discomfort. In response, many turn to spirituality and spiritual practices to help them navigate these transitions. Practical theology is one such discipline that intentionally investigates the role of spirituality in the everyday lives of people and therefore makes it uniquely suited to identify the unique ways that spirituality supports communities undergoing various challenges such as great upheaval. Open and Relational Theology on the other hand, asks for theological reflection to be performed in ways that center creativity, relationality, and flexibility therefore making it an amenable partner to facilitate what I call “critical hope,” a much needed quality in times of change. In this paper, we will explore the ways that practical theology’s bias towards lived spiritual practices might be brought in dialogue with ORT’s themes of creativity, relationality, and process to encourage new forms of empowered living in times of great transition.

“Trauma theology” is one of the most significant permutations of practical theology to emerge in the twenty-first century. And, though not always recognized, trauma theology displays numerous debts to open and relational thinking. Beginning with the seminal volumes of Serene Jones and Shelly Rambo, trauma theology has often quietly traded in the categories of relational theological models, especially in its valorization of divine solidarity with creation and in its denial of sovereignly-arranged meaning within the sufferings of victims and survivors. Relatedly, open and relational theology has often pinpointed its own significance in relation to questions of suffering, trauma, and abuse. This paper thus argues for the “mutual constitution” of trauma theology and open and relational theology, presenting a crucial juncture for understanding how relational renderings of doctrine can impact lived practice and demonstrate significance in the midst of real human suffering.

This paper will explore existing and novel concepts for rethinking white supremacy as complexly entangled in, across, and between human and more-than-human bodies, and interrogate the interrelated processes by which pale flesh becomes a white body. This work will then offer theoretical tools for creative application in the development of white, anti-racist theology. Utilizing the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and existing explorations of phenotype, viscosity, and emergence in open and relational theology since the material turn, this paper will propose a reading of whiteness and white supremacy as viscous assemblages that thicken, making pale bodies stick to certain objects, landscapes, institutions, and patterns of interaction, building white supremacy into the fabric of the world. The emergence of whiteness is imagined as a process of bleaching, and transformative rearrangements of white supremacist assemblages as a processes of mercerization, nurturing openness to affinities, responsibilities, and hauntings beyond the epidermal line.

Influenced by Atalia Omer's argument in Days of Awe (University of Chicago Press, 2019) that the category of religion ought not "be studied in isolation from gender, ethnicity, race, and other sites of contestation" (p. 248) and her related commitments to critical intersectional approaches to the study of peace, this paper argues that intersectional decolonial thinking and design practices can critically resist Eurocentered Christianities' universalizing influences on the study of peace and religion while designing pluriversal processes and approaches to Religious Peabcebuilding (RPB). Drawing on the critical resistance offered by decolonial thinkers from the Global South and diaspora and Indigenous North, this paper then calls for self-reflexive creativity centered on the principles of decolonial design justice as the basis for antihegemonic and convivial praxis that encompass Walter Mignolo's description of pluriversaility in The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Duke University Press, 2021).

Using ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this paper analyzes the endeavors, or jihad, of a Sunnī Muslim community in Cape Town, South Africa, to challenge the (neo)liberal peace of post-apartheid South Africa. The discourses and practices of this community attempts to cultivate an intersectional Islamic ethic attentive to the operations of violence in late modernity. While postcolonial South Africa has been lauded for its liberal rights-based framework, it has not transformed the forms of power producing structures perpetuating socio-economic marginality. Responding to this lacuna, some Muslims draw on Islamic tradition in dialogue with the praxis of solidarity. Divided into three sections, this paper maps socio-religious context through the multi-vocality of jihad. Then, it shows how jihad is lived out in the religious activism of the mosque. Finally, it argues that hegemonic framings of peace need to be deconstructed, because of its embeddedness in relations of violence, and critically reconstructed.

From its inception in nineteenth-century Europe, Christian Zionism has operated as one of the strongest ideological forces in support of a Jewish nation-state in the Levant. While the theological underpinnings and narrative structures of this ideology are well-established, certain notable discursive shifts have emerged in the past decade. Chief among these is the introduction of language around indigeneity, diversity and social justice—imports from wider conversations and cultural concerns globally. This research explores the nature of these discursive shifts, including their imputesus, target audiences, and impact. Particular attention is given to the role of Palestinian Christian communities in these trends, as well as the changing ways in which both Judaism and Islam are employed in the service of a Christian Zionist political agenda. This research has the potential to contribute to conversations around Middle Eastern religious minorities, social movements, intersectional struggles, globalization, and Palestinian Christianity.

In contexts of historical violence—from the immediate aftermath of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and gross human rights violations to addressing the ongoing legacies of the injustices and violences of colonial projects—one regularly encounters religious actors using the language of healing to describe the shape of the justice and peace they seek. This is often the case when philosophies and practices of restorative justice inform the shape of social action in these contexts. For example, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission utilized the language of healing in its project of national reconciliation and Indigenous peacemakers in North America often use this language in formal and informal processes to address historical harms. I propose to examine the use of healing in these two examples to excavate the relative merits and dangers of conceiving a just peace as a project of healing.

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Recent philosophy has seen a remarkable renaissance of panpsychism. Since the concept of the soul is one of the most problematic concepts in modern philosophy, and has been all but eclipsed in recent philosophical discussion, it is rather surprising that this should be generating so much contemporary interest. Of course, panpsychism is de facto a doctrine of the ubiquity of mind or consciousness rather than constituting a theory of soul. Etymologically, panpsychism is the doctrine of the ‘all-soul’, and the ‘world-soul’ or anima mundi is a distinctively Platonic notion. Traditional theistic models have not been sympathetic to the world soul, nor indeed panpsychism, while various forms of panentheism are more sympathetic to a version of panpsychism. This paper explores the prospects for a version of panpsychism within the framework of a Neo-Platonic panentheism. 

Neoplatonism is often accused of valorizing transcendence to the detriment of immanence. And given the current ecological emergency, Neoplatonism might appear as an archaism best left behind. But this reading is reductive; it obscures the diversity of the Neoplatonic heritage and its potential to address the existential dimensions of the crisis. My paper explores the thought of Jacob Böhme (1575-1624) and considers its entanglements with ecocritical poetics. Böhme synthesizes the Platonic-Christian heritage of “apophatic mysticism” with an embodied speculative naturalism that brings this tradition “back to earth.” I subsequently explore the echoes of this tradition in the queer feminist theory of Gloria Anzaldú (1942-2004) as well as the poetry of Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) and Charles Wright (b. 1935), to articulate a panpsychic poetics of presence. In closing, I suggest that a new form of "Dark Neoplatonism" can contribute to reimagining immanence and offer resources for an ethics of affect.

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