Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Crockett A (4th Floor) Session ID: A20-220
Roundtable Session
Books under Discussion

There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,” Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What is Philosophy?. Their claim that Christianity “secretes” atheism “more than any other religion,” however, reflects the limits of their archive. Their primary reference point for “religion” remains Western Christianity; likewise, “religion” conversations within Deleuze studies have been dominated by Christian and Christocentric lenses. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze’s atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. Michael Muhammad Knight’s Sufi Deleuze argues that Deleuzian studies of theology have excluded non-Christian traditions and offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. By examining what Knight calls “secretions of Islamic atheism,” he argues that Islamic tradition offers its own resources for navigating the theological tensions between transcendence and immanence that have defined Deleuze’s contributions to theology, and draws from these resources to imagine a Sufism of pure immanence. This panel brings together readers who will discuss Knight’s intervention into critical theory, Sufi Studies, Hadith Studies, Qur’anic Studies, and Islamic Studies more broadly.

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 005 … Session ID: A20-224
Papers Session

How have Tibetan Buddhist communities and cultures throughout history enlisted bodily substances and fabricated material objects to make sense of the relationships between humans, their bodies, and their environments? Drawing upon Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) characterization of the “transcorporeal” as the “material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world,” this panel examines discourses and practices involving the natural elements, human sexuality, diseases, relics, and pills, to explore Tibetan Buddhist perspectives regarding the boundaries, connections, fluidities, and distributions of personhood within and between human and non-human bodies and environments.

Papers

An enduring motif in Buddhist writings on the primary elements (‘byung ba) of earth, water, fire, wind, and space is the distribution of matter into “inner” elements of the human body and “outer” elements of the surrounding environment. But the significance of this idea varies across Buddhist scholarly and practical contexts. In eleventh and twelfth century Great Perfection Seminal Heart (Rdzogs chen snying thig) texts known as the Seventeen Tantras (Rgyud bcu bdun), the inner and outer elements paradigm functions to order and cohere various perceptual, experiential, and doctrinal binaries and boundaries: between bodies and environments; individuals and worlds; and relative and ultimate dimensions of religious experience. Collocating these ideas with ecological feminisms that propose new ethical figurations of the body in its entanglement with material environments, this paper explores a distinctly Tibetan Buddhist transcorporeal form constituted in and by the elements.

This paper examines meditations on bodies full of buddha bodies, an integral aspect of life force cultivation and disease prevention in an important fourteenth century scripture of Tibetan Great Perfection (rdzog chen) called The Seminal Heart of the Ḍākinī’s Five Key Points (mkha’ ‘gro snying thig las gnas kyi gdams pa lnga pa). It prescribes visualizations of buddhas embracing buddhas (yab yum) throughout the bodily interior. The yab yum is a symbol that has been productively critiqued by feminist theorists for its centering of the male subject. However, another pressing issue remains to be considered, its function in redefining the boundaries of bodies, suggesting the porosity of bodies and an extended corporeality enmeshed with gnosis, the five elements and planetary cycles. This paper examines this expanded and extended version of corporeality signified in this case by the visualization of female-centric couples, the Ḍākki yab yum, pervading the bodily interior.

This paper explores the transcorporeal and intersubjective possibilities opened up by the ingestion of bodily substances in Tibetan Buddhist material culture. Drawing on nineteenth and twentieth century Tibetan biographies, historical chronicles, and funerary manuals, as well as ethnographies on contemporary embalming procedures, this study explores relic ingestion practices involving corpse salts (pur tshwa) sourced from the remains of Tibetan hierarchs. From its use as an embalming agent and quasi-relic to a medicinal substance and transnational commodity, pur tshwa and the sacred corporeographies enacted by its consumption reveal the plasticity of the mind-body-world complex. This paper demonstrates novel ways of thinking through the roles that relics play in and beyond the Tibetan Buddhist funerary context. As hybrid objects that create and exist in third spaces, salt relics are potent substances that mediate relations between human and non-human, living and non-living, past and present, blurring and reconfiguring the nature of these divisions.

This paper discusses the history of the maṇi pill, a Tibetan medico-ritual pill tradition incorporating bodily relics of the Buddhist special dead and Tibetan medicinal substances, and consecrated in rituals featuring Avalokiteśvara and his mantra. It specifically examines the influence of the Pacifying (Zhi byed) tradition of Padampa Sangyé (d. 1117) on the revelatory literature of Guru Chöwang (1212–1270) in which the maṇi pill first originated. Surveying the early narrative, ritual, and contemplative literature of the Pacifying tradition, the paper discerns emergent themes of transcorporeality, such as the transformation of the living body into a powerful relic, and its use in the production of pills. The paper brings attention to how the Pacifying tradition’s conceptions of mind-body-world porosity drew from Indian Buddhist tantric models to craft a uniquely Tibetan approach to embodiment that finds expression in a pill tradition whose popularity has endured to the present. 

Following the introduction of Āyurveda to Tibet, physicians and scholars adopted wind, bile, and phlegm as the treatable causes of disease, centering Sowa Rigpa upon an etiology of humoral imbalance. Despite Sowa Rigpa’s explicit focus on the humors, however, an outbreak of widespread disease in the thirteenth century led to the addition of a further nosological category: nyen fever. In this paper, I will compare etiological explanations in the medical and religious texts of this period to demonstrate that nyen fever embodies a uniquely Tibetan etiology of invasion. Nyen fever marks a development that is at once etiological and ontological; when disease is invasion, pathogens are invaders. Rather than replace one etiology with another, however, Sowa Rigpa has retained both explanations of disease, resulting in methods for understanding the body as both an orderly system and a penetrable entity whose boundaries must be protected.

Respondent

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 207A… Session ID: A20-231
Papers Session

This panel examines unconventional and underutilized sources for philosophy of religion. It also draws from non-philosophical methodologies (history and social theory, for example) in order to see how they might inform philosophical inquiry. Some of the papers look at major figures in the humanities and social sciences, like Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon, who are well known but not necessarily for the bearing that their work has on religion. One paper examines the status of idealism in an important Indian Buddhist text. Another paper explores the ways in which spirituality and spiritual practices might inform philosophy of religion, specifically in relation to the topic of hope.

Papers

Examining Frantz Fanon’s references to religion and fetishism in Black Skins, White Masks, this paper argues that religion is central to his conception of the human in Western colonial discourse, and to his conception of the Black as what the human excludes. Drawing on his analysis of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, it shows how the role of religion in articulating Blackness is negotiated through comparison to Jewishness as another fetishized object of European modernity.

In this paper I make a case for and explore the underappreciated relation between spirituality and hope. In the first part of the paper I propose a broad account of spirituality that makes room for secular and non-doxastic forms, and argue that hope is a necessary constituent of spirituality so understood. In the second part of the paper I dig into this observation, and argue that understanding this relation sheds new light on the character of spirituality as embodying techniques for developing and improving the ways that we hope and the ways that we envision the future.

Saidiyah Hartman describes her method as one that excavates the invisible and unspoken elements of the archive and brings their possibilities to the fore through the speculative. Such a method has much to inform the philosophical field of Religious Studies. Given the nebulous nature of the notion of religion, there is irony in the disciplinary field being bound to a more rational philosophical approach. The speculative nature of Hartman’s method in many ways resonates with the speculative nature of religion itself. It is my desire and intention in this paper to focus on the method of “critical fabulation” that Hartman both coined and constructed in her article, “Venus in Two Acts” and employs in her latest book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. In Wayward Lives, Hartman engages themes of freedom, beauty, self-fashioning, morality, and desire, all of which are serious intellectual pursuits in the philosophical study of religion.

It is commonly thought that verses 11-15 in Vasubandhu’s Viṃśikā encapsulate by his lights a sound argument for idealism. This paper argues that the ostensibly uninteresting concluding verse and his comment thereon suggests otherwise. There, Vasubandhu maintains that a demonstration of the position that there is only representation (vijñapti-mātratā) is beyond the reach of reason (tarka-aviṣaya). If this paper’s interpretation of Vasubandhu’s project is sound, a logical demonstration of vijñapti-mātratā was not in the first place meant to ground the truth thereof. What Vasubandhu offers in verses 11-15 is a putatively valid argument—an argument whose conclusion follows from its premises. But what he self-avowedly does not offer is a necessarily sound argument—or so I shall argue.

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221D… Session ID: A20-211
Papers Session

In conversation with this year’s Presidential theme “the work of our hands,” this panel examines care work. Religious beliefs and practices are sometimes understood to take care of people who are suffering or in pain while accounts by people suffering or in pain often belie this palliative function of religion. The papers in this session draw on disability theory, feminist care ethics, and histories of sexual pathologization to reconsider what it means to care for people living outside of social norms. Are institutions anti-thetical to care or is it possible to extend care in institutional contexts? These papers examine care work in institutional and domestic contexts as well as the harms done in the name of care.

Papers

In the state of Georgia, over 7,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are on a waiting list for a Medicaid waiver to fund home and community-based care. Without these funds, many disabled people are at risk of institutionalization and separation from their homes and communities. This paper examines the political advocacy of L’Arche Atlanta in response to this crisis of care. Through analysis of the documentary 6000 Waiting, I argue that L’Arche Atlanta (re)politicizes care by situating the current crisis within the state’s long history of abuse of disabled persons in the name of care and exposing the norm of institutionalization embedded within the Medicaid waiver system, even as it advocates for increased funding within this system. Placing disability theory in conversation with feminist care ethics, this paper challenges common academic representations of L’Arche, care work, and intellectual disability within Christian disability theology.

Throughout the 1930s-40s, Protestants established a network of training sites where seminarians gained supervised experience caring for people in crisis. Drawing on archival material from the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education, this paper traces how chaplaincy programs partnered with prisons and mental hospitals to produce new understandings of sexual morality for the twentieth century. Thinking with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s critique of carceral power, I follow the ACPE’s investments in prisons and in rehabilitating non-normative sexualities (which were often conflated with psychological disability or pathological criminality). I make two critical interventions. First, I counter secularization theories that characterize sexual discourse as shifting sequentially from Christian confession to psychoanalytic methods. Second, by examining care-work’s imbrications with carceral frameworks of rehabilitation, I challenge scholars and practitioners to further disambiguate care-work from state violence. More broadly, this history highlights the entanglements of non-normative sexuality, criminality, and psychological disability in Christian imaginations.

Around Christmastime 1954, Margaret Henshaw, a 15-year-old girl living near Kalamazoo, Michigan, contracted polio. She spent sixteen weeks in the hospital, and upon being released to her home, continued making twice-daily trips to the hospital for therapy, plus a several-week visit to an inpatient rehabilitation facility in Warm Springs, Georgia. Throughout the next year, her mother and primary caregiver, Rena Bestervelt Henshaw, kept a diary documenting each day’s activities, Margaret’s therapy and progress, and her own challenges as mother and caregiver. Through this glimpse at the daily life of a Methodist family caring for a child with a physical disability, in the caregiver’s own voice, this paper considers gendered and unpaid caregiving in the private sphere, conceptions of disability and healing in the 1950s, and the strengths and challenges religious communities provided in times of crisis. 

            I am a trans, neurodivergent poet and mixed-media artist. I ground my practice in the archive of institutions and institution-building in the 19th century, with a particular focus on the "lunatic asylums" of nineteenth-century Virginia. Understanding institutionality as antithetical to care, my work attempts to unearth a record of people whose resistant strategies of social, sexual, and ecological connection continue to invite us to recognize the world-making possibility within nonnormative modes of feeling and believing. Asylum patients often used sewing and embroidery materials as a means of writing, to tell their stories or advocate for their needs. This artist talk surveys the archive of patient sewing that has inspired me to reperform mad textile practice in my work. Attending to historical detail through the dual practice of embroidery and poetry is a material act of attention, through which I may care for textile archives and the people who made them.  

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 301C… Session ID: A20-204
Papers Session

Augustine of Hippo is the star of Michel Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh, posthumously published in 2018 and translated in 2021 as the fourth and final volume for the History of Sexuality series. Continuous with his 1980-1981 Collège de France lectures, Foucault asks “the big question in Christian thought, Saint Augustine’s question, but also our question: ‘What in truth is our desire?’.” This co-sponsored session between the Foucault seminar and the Augustine and Augstinianisms unit brings together three papers and a respondent to ask: whose desire does Foucault attend to? And how does Augustine offer a different account of desire than we see in Foucault’s Augustine? Our panelists and respondent take up and challenge Foucault’s reading of sexual desire (as focused on the male erection and individualizing forms of subjectivity) through a relational understanding of desire as a more robust way of considering the ethical relation between self and others.

Papers

As Lynne Huffer suggests in Mad for Foucault (Columbia, 2010), the question of ethics is, for Foucault, always a question of the self in relation to the other. This relationality that Huffer locates in Foucault is inspired by her reading of Luce Irigaray, and, as such, is a question of ethics as it relates to a cultivation of self in relation to desire. In this paper, I chart Foucault’s notion of desire across four volumes of The History of Sexuality to articulate desire as “the historical transcendental from which we can and must think the history of sexuality” (Foucault, 1981). I then read Foucault’s interpretation of the desiring subject in Augustine through Irigaray’s concept of sexuate difference (as an irreducible two necessary for desire to exist), and conclude by considering the ways a radical reading Irigaray’s notion of self-affection contributes to a more robust reading of desire in Foucault. 

In Confessions of the Flesh, Michel Foucault attempts to show how Augustine was instrumental in reconfiguring early church debates about the nature of Christian marriage.  The key to licit sexuality, for Augustine, was the self-governance of libido in the conjugal act.  Foucault’s genealogy of desire in the church’s discourses on marriage uncovers a “subject of concupiscence.” This essay expands Foucault’s method of analyzing the desiring subject.  Augustine’s (and Foucault’s) gaze is fixated on male erection.  However, another involuntary, visible, and unpredictable bodily phenomenon—shared by men and women—also manifests erotic desire: the blush. This essay examines the erotics of blushing in a comparative analysis of two keen observers of human passion: Augustine and Jane Austen. I argue that examining the role of blushing, using theological and literary analytical methods, complements and deepens Foucault’s analysis of the construction of the desiring subject.

In Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault argues that Augustine reframes ancient attitudes toward sex by emphasizing the quality of the desiring subject’s will. For Foucault, Augustine’s emphasis on the will transforms the ethical questions around sexual conduct into a question of the self’s relationship to itself. What Foucault’s account misses, however, is that Augustine’s discussion of sexuality in City of God expresses longing for a therapeutic restoration of a lost harmony to the human subject. More importantly, with regards to sexual ethics, Augustine’s discussion of Edenic sex focuses on how this harmony of the unperturbed subject coheres with a harmony between lovers. This is a profoundly relational ideal, by contrast to the solipsistic subjectivity Foucault presents; this tension between paradise and the present is central to Augustine’s complicated attitude toward sex and sexuality.

Respondent

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Bowie C (2nd Floor) Session ID: A20-229
Papers Session

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) has always been comparative. That is, it explains religious phenomena shared across a large swathe of traditions. Nevertheless, CSR researchers have often generalized familar, Abrahamic religious elements into ones considered the most universal. This is not to say that pioneering work has yet to be done in CSR that recenters non-Abrahamic religious traits. Still, this remains an underexplored area. For this reason, this panel is devoted to the specific exploration of CSR methodology in the strict context of South Asian traditions. By focusing on key elements and thinkers from Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava, Buddhist, and Tantric traditions, we hope to expand the explanatory power of CSR by demonstrating its applicability outside of the Abrahamic sphere.

Papers

The siddha-rūpa is the perfected, unique, body that advanced Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava practitioners cognize in meditation and inhabit in liberation. This paper builds on Haberman’s notion that Gauḍīya practitioners inhabit their siddha-rūpa identity through “acting” as in the Stanislavski Method, when performed actions allow actors to fully inhabit their target character’s subjective world (Haberman, 1988). This paper utilizes the interrelated notions of 4E cognition and transjective reality in order to illustrate siddha-rūpa formation as more than a subjective pursuit. According to 4E cognitive science, cognition is not only embodied and enacted, constituted by bodies and what they do, but also embedded and extended within an environment (Rowlands, 2010). Vervaeke’s notion of transjective reality builds on this, proposing that reality is “co-shaped” by an organism and its environment (Vervaeke 2019). I argue that the siddha-rūpa is likewise “co-created” by the relationship between a bhakta and their expansive, immersive “environment” of devotional interrelationship.

This presentation explores the nature of cognition through a dialectic encounter between scientific and religous thought. On the latter side, I draw from the work of two important Buddhist commentarial figures on Dharmakīrti’s (fl. 6th or 7th century CE) Proof of Other Minds (Saṃtānāntarasiddhi): Vinītadeva (710-770) and his Tibetan commentator, Ngawang Tendar (b. 1759). On the former, I draw on Alan Turing (1912-1954), bolstered by the theories of predictive coding championed by Karl Friston (1959-). Both camps are concerned with defining cognition, intelligence, and awareness. That is, how do we know when someone or something is aware and intelligent? This question is especially pressing given the advances of Open AI’s ChatGPT. And while these authors pursue these questions in different contexts, putting their analysis in conversation provides new resources on how we might approach an answer. This dialectic gives fodder for an eliminitavist approach to CSR that overcomes certain hurdles.

One of the most enduring debates within the study of religion over the last century and half has been how to make sense of the plurality of mystical experiences. However, there is a rich history in Indian theological and philosophical thought that has recognized and developed various theories relative to their particular worldview. Among these is the mystical pluralism of early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology, the most comprehensive articulation of which is arguably found in Jīva Gosvāmin’s Ṣat Sandarbhas (ca. 16th c.). To make sense of Jīva’s theory of mystical pluralism, I argue, we can take a multiprong approach that draws on history, contemporary theories of mysticism, and psychological scientific research. I argue that different soteriological processes, such as those that Jīva discusses, can serve as learning strategies that help one increasingly internalize a particular conception of divine reality and what it is like to experience or perceive it.

This preseentation offers a comparative assessment involving a contemporary, currently popular neuroscientific theory addressing the relation between the mind and the body, Integrated Information Theory (IIT 3.0), in relation to a medieval Indian model, the 11th century Hindu philosopher Abhinavagupta’s nondualist Tantric panentheism, the Pratyabhijñā, or Recognition philosophy. What is unique about Abhinavagupta’s philosophical model is that he uses a first-person perspective as a primary ontology, and in a departure from other Indian idealist monisms such as Advaita Vedānta, insists on the reality of the external world. I suggest that Abhinavagupta’s philosophical insights can help us to think through some of the logical ramifications of a first-person perspective—specifically, that Abhinavagupta’s use of a first-person ontology as a way of bridging the mind-body gap can shed light on the cognitive neuroscience model formulated in Tononi et al.’s IIT 3.0.

Respondent

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Bonham D (3rd Floor) Session ID: A20-228
Papers Session

This panel underscores the potential of World Christianity to work toward global justice. The first paper analyzes the relationship between the French Trappist monk Christian de Chergé and the Muslim community with which he conversed in twentieth-century Algeria. The second paper considers the translatability of Christianity in light of the freedom of members of other religions to reject conversion, drawing on the example of the Javanese Muslim princess Kartini. The third paper calls attention to how Christianity’s global spread has not led to a safer world for women. This paper highlights the work of Christian communities that are fighting the gender-based violence still prevalent throughout the world. The fourth paper calls for World Christianity scholars to consider not only local instantiations of Christianity, but also the ways in which World Christianity, both as a phenomenon and as an academic field, might bring about a more just world.

Papers

Christian de Chergé (1937-1996) was a French, Catholic, Trappist monk at Notre Dame d’Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria. He was also a pioneer in Muslim-Christian dialogue, displaying extraordinary openness and appreciation for the teaching, practices, personalities, and values of Islam. That openness was substantially the fruit of his Algerian context, where the French post-colonial Church was essentially stripped of any power or influence. In that milieu, de Chergé developed and practiced a Christian spirituality that emphasized humility, hope, solidarity, and love. His words and life occasion the opportunity to discuss colonial and post-colonial Catholic experiences of dialogue with Muslims as well as to reflect on the relevance of a tiny Algerian Catholic Church for our American context.

The principle of translatability proposed by Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh has provided the world Christianity studies with a framework to explain the phenomenon of diverse forms of Christianity. However, due to Walls' and Sanneh's concern was primarily on the successful spread of Christianity through mission movements, they avoided discussing the application of the translatability principle in cases where rejection and resistance toward the Christian message was the response, thus leaving a gap in the applicability of the translatability principle. This paper seeks to fill that gap by highlighting the understudied interreligious encounter between Dutch Christians and Kartini, a Javanese Muslim princess, in the early 20th century. Using Kartini’s life as a locus of study, I argue that the translatability of Christian messages not only enables people to appropriate and express the Christian faith in their culture and cosmology but also empowers the recipients to critique and reject the faith. 

This paper discusses the “crimes of the flesh” that exist in World Christianity, as the shift of Christianity to the global South has not appeared to improve rates of violence against women Two major examples of Christianity’s shift to the global South – Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both 95% Christian – have some of the highest rates of gender-based violence worldwide. Intimate partner violence and domestic violence are just as prevalent in churches as they are in wider society. Social norms, power imbalances, and individual beliefs and behaviors perpetuate discrimination against women. The stark reality is that women are simply not physically safe anywhere in the world. This paper contains data on and descriptions of gender-based violence in global Christianity and concludes with examples of Christian communities, churches, and organizations addressing these crimes to combat gender-based violence.

In the critical book, Relocating World Christianity (2017), Joel Cabrita and David Maxwell charge the nascent discipline of world Christianity with abandoning the vision that animated initial conceptualization of the idea of world Christianity. While the initial vision was to invoke an international community of Christians who could redeem a world that had descended into catastrophic conflicts and violence, the current manifestation of the idea has focused on exploring local Christian iterations. This paper builds on the critique of Cabrita and Maxwell to argue that the shift from a transnational to a local vision in the study of world Christianity has been occasioned by a genealogical haste in which the initial vision of the concept is often elided or mentioned only in footnotes. Focusing on francophone Africa, the paper calls for a slower reading of the discipline’s genealogy that accentuates the worldmaking potential of this earlier vision of the concept.

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 303C… Session ID: A20-207
Papers Session

The papers in this session explore the complicated role religion plays in genocidal contexts. It can both perpetuate othering and violence as well as inspire people to rescue persecuted religious minorities. Ranging from how communities engage the complex emotions of fear and hope to how current political and ethnic entanglements serve to suppress altruistic religious behavior, the papers in this session examine how both the history and the collective memory of genocide influence how political communities draw upon religious ethics to address contemporary forms of political persection.

Papers

A large, quantitative study of a minority religion in post-genocide Rwanda contributes to the fields of religion and genocide. The Rwanda National Ethics Committee approved a nationwide online survey open to all baptized adult Jehovah’s Witnesses. The faith community is known for their nonviolent, neutral stance in political conflicts and is one of the fastest growing religions in Rwanda. Their congregations bring together converts from diverse backgrounds, including survivors who were targeted for genocide, rescuers who helped targeted persons, and perpetrators who were convicted of genocidal crimes. Findings from the spring 2023 survey show how these disparate groups differ in their perceived religious orientation, identity, support, and motivations to convert, depending on their gender, generation, and genocide situation.

In the 21st century, public consciousness of the Holocaust has grown enormously in the UK though a state-led memorial day, museum exhibitions, and various educational initiatives. The relationship between this phenomenon and Britain’s Muslim communities is complex, encompassing accusations of both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Through most of the 2000s, the Muslim Council of Britain boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day, provoking accusations of antisemitism and feeding a breakdown in its relationship with the government. Over the last decade, Holocaust education in schools has been used to bolster state anti-extremism policy, but given that such policy has been perceived as fostering distrust of Muslims, Holocaust memory is here implicated in a contested intersection of politics, identity, and memory. This paper outlines the dynamics at play in these controversies, but points to evidence of more nuanced relationships behind the headlines and ultimately argues against using memory of the Holocaust for British identity-construction. 

Robert Braun’s 2017 empirical case study "Religious minorities and resistance to genocide: the collective rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust" presents results that demand further study, investigating the role religious networks play in cultivating individual and communal fear, and examining how fear is oriented and activated within systems. This comparative study aims to prompt insights into community, the emotion of fear and its relationship to virtuous action by bringing two accounts of fear into conversation. The practical, pastoral work of al Ghazali’s The Book of Fear and Hope and Aquinas’ categorizations of the passion and gift of fear within the Summa Theologiae provide insight into how fear and its complementary opposite, the virtue of hope, are shaped and guided through our active participation in community. Findings are brought into conversation with the warning signs we are seeing in the US context today.

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 008B… Session ID: A20-200
Roundtable Session

This roundtable discussion brings together academic leaders to consider ethics and strategies for caring for and supporting contingent faculty. How might administrative leaders promote an ethic of care and support for their contingent faculty members? What are some of the obstacles and challenges? This panel brings together wise and seasoned leaders in higher education to reflect on these questions.