Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

In December 2021, *Abbott Elementary*, a comedy series created by and starring Quinta Brunson, began airing on ABC. While filmed as a “mockumentary,” the show’s comedy, particularly in the first season, seems inspired by stereotypical tropes, particularly of Black women. However, there appears to be a shift in the second season that has Womanist implications. Using the works of Tamura Lomax (*Jezebel Unhinged*), Angela Sims (*Walking Through the Valley*), Delores Williams (*Sisters in the Wilderness*) and Mitzi J. Smith (*Womanist Sass and Talk Back*), this paper explores how impacted characters can benefit from a Womanist evolution from offensive, oppressive tropes into fuller, richer personhood. The paper deconstructs how the portrayal of these tropes in *Abbott Elementary* continue to inflict harm on Black women and how Womanist ethics and hermeneutics can free, not just these fictional characters, but the real Black women who identify with them.

Historically Black women, their narratives, stories, and real-lived experiences have been under-valued, under-developed and under-represented in mainstream motion pictures and network television situational comedies. Scripts have been created to cast “superficial tropes” as roles that relegate Black women to third-class status, often placing them as “unsupported actresses” in a cast of characters where their on-screen time is limited. This paper will explore how Quinta Bronson, the creator, executive producer, and one of the actresses in the award-winning situational comedy, Abbott Elementary, uses cinematography to intentionally capture close-ups and one-on-one monologues with the camera, to amplify and reverse the incredible shrinking narrative of Black women. Further this paper will explore, how within a 30-minute comedy, Bronson has created a womanist blueprint that redefines lead actress and says “now they see me.”  

This paper places the movie, “Till,” with its” many pietas” in Till-Mobley’s faith context to broaden the retelling of the story Producer Whoopie Goldberg, Director Chinonye Chukwu, and actress Danielle Deadwyler have told in the film. It analyzes the best and weakest aspects of the film’s portrayal of her spiritual and theological location in the Christian tradition with reference to Till-Mobley’s own telling. It contextualizes the film with reference to Mamie Till-Mobley's faith narrative as a Pentecostal Christian woman and her theological worldview.

In this paper I consider how practitioners of Buddhist insight meditation use language to change how they relate to their bodies and minds. While insight meditation has been productively explored as a non-discursive practice, my fieldwork with a North American insight meditation community demonstrates how linguistic practices play a significant part in the affective and embodied transformations sought by meditators. I draw on two concepts from linguistic anthropology to help make this case: voice and stancetaking. I argue that in order for practitioners to change how they relate to their mental life, they must first come to understand their thoughts as not personal and idiosyncratic, but as the typifiable voice of “the mind.” This voice and its metapragmatic qualities establish the mind as the subject of an ethical relationship, but it is through practices of stancetaking that practitioners work to transform the mind.

I was in Nepal researching the phenomenon of people returning from death when I met Tashi, a woman whose husband had undergone this revenant experience. He was living abroad, but Tashi was a willing collaborator until our relationship fell apart in an unspoken argument about the shape of the biography we were crafting. In seeking to discover what “really” happened, I marginalized Tashi’s vision of the narrative. If “the story is not the goal. The goal… is the relationship out of which the story emerges,” my time with Tashi was a failure.[1] This paper is an ethical exercise in listening to Tashi to understand the social creation of extraordinary individuals, why people develop faith in unbelievable events, and how religious meanings sustain people through the struggles of everyday life.

[1] Lindsay French, “Refugee Narratives; Oral History and Ethnography; Stories and Silence,” The Oral History Review 46, 2 (2019): 275.

In this presentation we explore how listening is a critical activity within ethnographic research. While listening is implicitly understood to occur in ethnographic projects it is rarely explicitly discussed.  How and why we listen impacts the ways knowledge is produced and how relational ethics are understood. Drawing upon our collective experience of ethnographic research with immigrant and refugee communities in Switzerland and New York City, and informed by feminist ethnography and critical theory, we explore listening as a key element in ethnographic research. We will consider 1) how listening shapes the relationships an ethnographer cultivates in their fieldsite and 2) how listening presents ethical challenges to presenting data and generating knowledge.

Prior studies of gender in Indian Buddhism offer two distinct readings of Ānanda, the Buddha's cousin and personal attendant. The first sees Ānanda as a paradigm for normative Buddhist masculinity, while the second sees Ānanda occupying a liminal gender position in the Buddhist sangha, a foil rather than a mirror to the normative masculinity exemplified by the Buddha. Scholars developing this second, counter-normative reading have referenced a passage from the Mahāvastu in which Ānanda allegedly calls himself a "womanish, witless" man. This paper performs a close reading of that striking passage in the original Sanskrit, and makes the case that Ānanda is deliberately depicted in the Mahāvastu and other Indian Buddhist texts as a man at odds with the hegemonic masculinity of his peers, though the value judgements attached to his gender position have varied widely over the course of Indian Buddhist literature's transmission and reception.

The phenomenon of Buddhist addiction recovery offers an important case-study in the effort to lay bare the complex and contradictory elements of ‘Buddhist Modernism’ (McMahan 2008, 2012). Buddhist addiction recovery is, however, not a unitary phenomenon. This paper contributes both to an under-researched area of addiction recovery studies, and to the study of contemporary anglophone Buddhism, by illuminating the philosophical and epistemological diversity across Buddhist addiction recovery pathways. It also exposes the contextual inadequacy of the modernist therapeutic turn as a categorical framework.

The past decades have seen an increase in theories envisioning multi-cultural encounters and analyzing the hidden and obvious power dynamics that govern them. This paper suggests an innovative approach to assess and negotiate these theories. It introduces a metapsychology inspired by Buddhist philosophy, illustrated by original pictures and poems, to examine multicultural engagement, to negotiate the major representatives among the leading theoretical responses to diversity and globalism, to develop a heuristic model that interprets each theory in their own right, and to envision innovative strategies that enable co-existence across boundaries, imagined and historically sedimented. Finally, it proposes a brand new theoretical approach to the study of both cultures and theories.

In this presentation, I investigate mandala-inspired frameworks for human security drawn from Buddhist traditions and suggest potential contributions they can make to the human security and humanitarian response fields. In my exploration of mandalic modes of imagining and creating security, I analyze the ritual of "securing the six directions" from the Sigalovada Sutta in the Theravāda tradition; the security framework offered in the Tibetan Kalachakra mandala; and the "mandala of security" model developed by Ven. Professor Pinnawala Sangasumana, which incorporates elements from both Theravada and tantric Buddhism.

In 1951, the Commission on Accrediting of the American Association of Theological Schools (AATS) stripped a member institution, Asbury Theological Seminary, of its accredited status after determining that Asbury exhibited “conditions that jeopardize the general tone and educational efficiency of the seminary.” This paper explores the events and conditions at Asbury Theological Seminary which preceded this unprecedented and unrepeated action by AATS and the ways in which the maintenance of academic freedom was used to justify the Association’s action against Asbury, despite the Association not having an official position on academic freedom in its constitution, bylaws, or standards at the time. The paper also explores the evolution of positions and guidance about academic freedom by AATS, spurred by Claude Thompson’s treatment by Asbury; the Association’s adjudication of academic freedom as an institutional “right practice;” and the development of contemporary standards of accreditation, which do not include the phrase “academic freedom.”

Although the U.S. Supreme Court found school prayer and Bible reading unconstitutional in the early 1960s, these religious activities were part of a larger effort to promote “moral and spiritual values” in public schools, an effort that exalted white American heritage through the deification of the “founding fathers.” In the Cold War 1950s, moral and spiritual values curricula were influential nationwide but are now understudied. I examine how moral and spiritual values programs rendered the founding fathers as God-like and parental figures. I argue that public schools participated in this parentage because moral and spiritual values programs encouraged teachers to situate themselves as purveyors of white American heritage to children, who were to see themselves as its inheritors, regardless of their own racial identity. Decades before the Religious Right’s "family values" discourse, moral and spiritual values programs in public schools established “values” as intrinsically connected to whiteness and maleness. 

This paper traces the development of the adolescent as a key part of the nuclear family in America during the 1950s. It does so by mapping the evangelical strategy to fix the problems that adolescence posed to the nuclear family and the evangelical imagination of kinship. As anxieties of juvenile delinquency abounded during this period, evangelical Christians worked to understand the dangers that mass media and popular culture posed toward youth by relying on the framework of the nuclear family. The adolescent posed an internal threat to the family that needed to be dealt with as a collective unit. Evangelicals relied on the Protestant theology of confession and sanctification in order to develop strategies of dealing with the internal threat of the adolescent. In developing this strategy, evangelicals hoped to discipline adolescents into particular kinds of adults while simultaneously reifying the importance and strength of the nuclear family.

This paper investigates the role of the First Red Scare as a catalyst for the institutionalization of religious studies in US colleges following World War I. Following the war, a dedicated cadre of educators, clergy, administrators, and philanthropists capitalized on postwar anxieties concerning ethnic assimilation and American religious identity to produce potent new arguments for religion’s educational value, effectively creating the US study of religion as an Anglo-Protestant nationalist project. I examine this discursive process in detail, focusing on one particularly important group: the National Council on Religion in Higher Education (NCRHE), which formed in 1922 to coordinate the study of religion on a national scale. Drawing on unpublished archival material, I argue that the NCRHE articulated the goals and methods of US religious studies through a complex discourse of patriotic anti-materialism. I conclude by appraising the significance of this history for contemporary critical assessments of the field.

Whenever a sheep or a goat is sacrificed in the Indian Himalaya it is first expected to shake and thereby indicate its acceptance by the deity to whom it is offered. I suggest that this practice, which includes an inherent element of unpredictability and uncertainty, is essential to establishing a local sense of divine presence which is entirely accessible to humans yet not fully guaranteed. The offered animals thus emerge as prime mediators to the gods and as essential contributors to a mechanism that makes the divine present in the everyday lives of Hindus in this region.

This paper discusses the *Ōharae*, arguably the most important Shinto ritual. It is a  purification ceremony that is performed twice a year, at the end of June and December, in shrines all over Japan. The ritual is based on a specific natural landscape characterized by mountains, land,  rivers, and the sea, and these natural elements are envisioned as ritual tools in themselves. In the ritual, pollution (*kegare*) is collected from the air, the land, and the participants and is disposed of in the depths of the ocean. 

Throughout its history, the ritual has evolved from a secret ritual at the imperial court to a popular custom, profoundly changing its components. Nowadays, the *Ōharae* is a social event in which people participate to avert illness and promote luck. Recently, it has been performed also for pets, in a significant breach of the Shinto tradition. This evolution seems to have caused a change in the perception of pollution. 

This paper aims to shed light on the changes in this ritual and its role in contemporary society.

This paper focuses on Blessing of the Animals liturgies in the Roman Catholic *Book of Blessings* and *The United Methodist Book of Worship*. I examine the theological claims made about animals in these liturgies, including human relationships with nonhuman animals, animals’ relationships with God, and claims about the redemption and reconciliation of animals. I also read these theological claims against doctrinal statements about animals from the corresponding tradition. I suspect that animal blessing liturgies are largely anthropocentric, that they do not have a cohesive theological message about animals, that they contain contradictory theological messages within the liturgy, or that the liturgies reflect a theological aspiration that is not reflected in the church’s doctrine. Animal Blessings are often the only way churches publicly speak about animals, and so what these liturgies claim about animals is important for understanding animals’ place within the larger Christian tradition.

Wendy Doniger has suggested that in Hindu mythology the snake is ‘a creature of darkness’ (2009: 266). In the Mahābhārata’s opening frame stories, Takṣaka, the king of snakes, is cast as the mortal enemy of the Pāṇḍavas. Despite having mysterious and dangerous connotations in the frame stories, elsewhere in the text snake characters are generally represented quite positively. This paper will focus on the four snake characters who are given the most prominent speaking roles in the Mahābhārata: Ulūpī, Nahuṣa, Padmanābha, and Nāgabhārya. As I will show, these snakes are conversant in dharma, offer instruction to their human interlocutors, and are cast in the roles of helpers and allies. By looking at these characters together, we not only see that wisdom is as much of a characteristic for nāgas as danger, but also that snakes are not a homogenous category, but depicted in a variety of ways.

At early Buddhist sites on the Indian subcontinent, nāgas as cobra beings are depicted with a remarkable conception of bodily fluidity between human and cobra forms. Analysis of Buddhist visual narratives and textual accounts in Pāli and Sanskrit reveals their ability to take on the guise of a human, a defining feature that has been overlooked in previous scholarship which considers sculptures from the period before the Common Era. Examining their identities from the perspective of a Buddhist worshipper, I consider nāgas in visual representations with a status between animals, human, and divine beings, exploring how nāgas can inhabit heavenly places, yet remain confined to their unfortunate birth status as animals.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nagpur, central India, my presentation explores the multivalence of nāga figures, as understood by contemporary Ambedkarite, Japanese, and Taiwanese Buddhists who collaborate on monument building and educational projects. Despite the groups vastly different historical-political backgrounds and sectarian identities, they strategically manage their interactions by being somewhat cognizant of their differences without letting them hinder their respective projects. nāgas and their significance offer a remarkable shared point of reference, through which the variation of their perspectives can be appreciated. At this point in these relatively recent collaborations (going back barely thirty years), intense dialog and discussion of differences has not been a priority among the groups. Thus, their perspectives on nāgas remain independent but become entwined in the same geographic space—a vivid illustration of how the fluidity of nāgas allow the groups to communicate with their own respective constituents and each other.  

Three different woodcut illustrations on the same topic are found in the Cibei daochang chanfa 慈悲道場懺法(The Merciful Repentance Ritual). The scripture was attributed to Emperor Liang Wudi (r. 502-549), whose wife Empress Chi became a python after her death because her cruel jealousy in life had brought harm to others. She told of her great suffering in her new form of a snake and pleaded for the emperor’s rescue. The emperor compiled and performed an elaborate repentance ritual. As a result of his actions the empress returned to the emperor in the form of a lovely lady to report that the ritual had been successful and that she had been reborn in heaven.

The author tries to analyse how the mystery of python exerted impact on Chinese folk culture and dramas.

This paper explores the hierarchization among dragons and snakes in Chinese hydrolatry. Most cultures perceive snakes as ambiguous, but Chinese culture distinguished positive and negative traits into dragons and snakes. This distinction was somewhat superficial because there are various entangled categories of dragons and giant snakes. Among these, long-dragons came to represent the empire, the serpentine, riverine jiao-dragons represented the indigenous groups on the fringes of the empire. Chinese texts presented the latter as “unaccomplished”, “requiring” civilization to attain long-dragonhood, i.e., “to become Chinese.” 

Aside from introducing the Nagaraja to China, Buddhists also undertook anti-snake campaigns to claim local religious spaces. Buddhism hence became a reliable tool to subjugate “heterodox” local cultures. These reacted with various coping mechanisms to protect particularly their female deities.

A contemporary tale from southern Sichuan reflects these cultural conflicts and ascribes different metaphorical roles to the serpent, tortoise, and Dragon King, depending on the narrator.

The valley of Pindar river, in the Garhwal Himalaya region of Northwest India, is believed by local Hindus to be the territory of the Naiṇī or Nāginā Devīs, the nine serpent shaped goddesses or mothers. According to local stories, they came from their underworld, the pātāl lok or nāg lok, to participate in a sacrificial ritual giving shape to the “world of mortals” (mṛtyulok). Here, they were harassed by a shepherd, so each of them took refuge in a human village. Two or three times a century, each of the Naiṇīs is invited to come from the nāglok into her respective village, where she is embodied as a bamboo pole to wander through her territory for six months.