This session features a roundtable discussion reflecting on the theological legacies of two recently passed modern Orthodox theologians and metropolitans: Kallistos Ware and John Zizioulas. Six participants will offer brief opening remarks engaging one or both theologian from their own areas of theological and ecumenical expertise before turning to a moderated discussion on the theological legacies of Ware and Zizioulas. The roundtable features remarks from: Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Paul Ladouceur, Sarah Livick-Moses, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Alexis Torrance, and Anastacia Wooden.
While megachurches are a global phenomenon, they are also embedded in a particular social, historical, and cultural context, affecting and being affected by it. And unless we understand how megachurches interact with their contextual forces, their full texture will elude us. This roundtable aims to explore how Korean megachurches interact with their socio-historical and cultural forces. The panel comprises a presider and five presenters. Each presenter will speak to a noteworthy aspect of interaction between South Korean megachurches and their contextual factors. The presenters will discuss the following five topics: the spirituality of Yoido Full Gospel Church, especially with respect to Shamanism; megachurches and North Korean women refugees in the South; Korean megachurches’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and post-pandemic aims; insider criticism of Korean megachurches as exemplified in CBS Christian Now; and kyohoe saesŭp (churchly hereditary succession) controversy in South Korea, with a focus on the Myungsung Church controversy.
Please meet the bus in front of the Grand Hyatt Hotel at 600 E Market St. As a reminder, the Grand Hyatt Hotel is adjacent to the Convention Center. The bus will be ready to board at 12:40 p.m. and will leave promptly at 1:00 p.m.
If your schedule no longer allows you to participate in this tour, please email reg@aarweb.org. There are no refunds for tours, though we would like to allow as many as possible to enjoy this tour!
The Sacred Sites Tour will be led by David Bains, Samford University, and Daniel Sack, Washington, DC.
Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221C…Session ID: A20-303
The session focuses on Asian-American communities that have been historically underrepresented, including Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Asian-Christian communities. The panel looks at how religious and cultural identities have been constructed, reconstructed or represented in North American immigrant contexts. What emphases, innovations, or concerns do we see in Asian-American diaspora communities? What if anything has been lost or gained in transition? The three papers in this panel offer a mix of methodological approaches, including ethnographic, literary, and historical, to bring attention to how communities – Vietnamese diasporic, Taiwanese Christian, and Korean Christian – have reconceived and embodied religion.
Papers
This paper will discuss the quantitative and qualitative findings of ‘HANA,’ a bilingual study that took historical and empirical approaches to provide an intergenerational look into Korean American churches in New England and Northeast America. The findings of the HANA project will address topics such as the role of linguistic disparities in cross-generational misunderstandings, current generational attitudes around belonging and mentorship, the effects of forced tradition on the next generation, and the current dynamic between Korean-speaking and English-speaking adult ministries. The paper will then explore what this might mean for the future of the Korean Church of New England and the greater Korean Church.
Alongside recent scholarship in digital religion studies, this paper expands conceptualizations of ritual beyond sacred spaces of the temple or church by analyzing digital documentations of ancestral offerings made by various members of the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon, Westminster, CA, the largest population of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. The community ancestral offerings made to Pham Thong’s Trần Hưng Đạo Memorial and the digital documentation of them archive a shadow of historical pasts of war embedded in spatial -and digital- logics of the city. These alternate forms of diasporic ritual simultaneously gesture to the figure of the ancestor or “soul,” which teeters the lines between presence and absence, past and present, spectral and concrete. The digital, global diasporic rituals offer alternate modes of seeing and knowing that re-imagine Asia or Asianness beyond that which is objectified towards an ethereal mode of being that fosters its own community cultural futurity/ afterlife.
In 1972, “the Formosa Christians for Self-Determination Movement” was founded in Washington D.C. by four overseas Taiwanese Christian leaders in response to the statement released in 1971 by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) regarding the fate and future of the Taiwanese people because of the unstable diplomatic situation. This paper will analyze the ten issues of the occasional journal “Self-Determination,” which was published from 1973 to 1978 following the formation of the Movement, in order to observe how the Taiwanese American Christians and churches supported and echoed the Movement. The paper argues that the Movement enabled Taiwanese American Christians to become the leaders among Taiwanese Americans in the political advocacy of self-determination but also made them the target of political opponents who disagreed with their belief in self-determination and democracy, which has had a lasting effect even until contemporary times.
Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221B…Session ID: A20-319
The philosophical question, “What is the good life?", has arrested the development of the realities and resources that Black women’s lives bring to bear. Womanism as a scholarly endeavor has had to portend so much with the blowback from canonical discourses or the justification or juxtapositioning of itself to assumed allies or movements, that the process of engaging interlocutors has done more for building the discourse rather than remaining in critical engagement and dialogue with the very women to whom it seeks to advance. This panel seeks to revisit the age-old philosophical question of what is the good life by forefronting the womanist imperative of whose life is it anyway. Taking its cues from the intergenerational inquiries of womanist thought and its tenets, this interdisciplinary and intergenerational panel of womanist scholars introduces the intersectional field called womanist phenomenology as a critical landscape that is accountable to black women’s realities.
Papers
This paper is an examination of womanist thought and phenomenological theory as it offers an unlikely but fortuitous interdisciplinary perspective through which we many examine American culture’s fixation on objectifying black women without taking into account Black women’s existence and lived experience. It is a study of Black women’s consciousness and the objectification of their experience. It is an exploration of how Black women’s bodies and their embodiment of success are seen as scandal/spectacle within the contemporary public sphere while Black female-ness is simultaneously appropriated and persistently commodified. Amid these levels of contestation, the construction of Black women’s identities has to resist any challenge as a dually misognynist racist discourse.
This paper presentation seeks to interrogate the ontological claims embedded in womanist thought. “Being” for Blackness remains a speculative point of contention within canonical philosophical assertions that overdetermine and authorize the possibility of subjecthood. This possibility of being a subject is determined through the category of “the human '', which is presupposed by those who have access to agency, subjectivity, and identity. When those categories are foreclosed to Blackness, the question of “being” for Blackness is foreclosed, thereby making our ontological attempts to determine ourselves outside of an antiblack paradigm limited in its scope. In placing a specific lens on womanist thought, race and gender does not serve as distinct but colluded identity formations within the discourse – which is to say Black women are always forced to interrogate their existence as raced and gendered subjects at the same time.
What must Black women do to be saved? Salvation is a central locus in Christian theology and a moral crisis for oppressed populations. As an anti-oppression paradigm that takes seriously the survival and liberation of Black women, while advocating for the wellbeing of all, womanist theology embodies Godtalk for the least of these. While survival represents the means, liberation—the freedom and flourishing of Black women—is the ultimate telos. The economic and political history of Black women from slavery to freedom begs the question of whether a liberating God has concern for Black women. Adapting Alice Walker’s theological suspicion in the 1980s, womanist scholars interrogating geopolitical realities as well as theological categories with Black women at the epistemological center soon developed a progressive interest in articulating what liberation means to and for Black women.
Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 212B…Session ID: A20-305
The suffering caused by sickness, aging, and death is central to Buddhist teachings. While Buddhist philosophers and teachers present these states of suffering as universal aspects of human experience, work by historians and anthropologists has shown that human experiences can differ greatly by cultural context. Our roundtable addresses how Buddhist practitioners in a range of Asian contexts interpret and experience “suffering” through local understandings of human subjectivity and relationships, particularly focusing on concepts of emotion, feeling, and affect. Presenters will draw on ethnographic research across Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), and diaspora communities. Panelists will share vignettes from fieldwork and engage in a moderated discussion that addresses questions concerning (1) the ethics of writing about suffering, and (2) methodological ways to manage tensions between universal and particular representations of suffering through Buddhist cosmologies. This collaborative format will promote trans-disciplinary dialogue among Buddhist studies scholars, ethnographers, and affect theorists.
This roundtable session explores the impact of religious nationalisms in a global frame considering how such exchanges intersect with discourses about sexuality and gender. Much attention has been paid to recent campaigns by white Christian nationalists to unseat or discredit school board members, teachers, librarians, and BIPOC law makers. Less attention has been paid to the unlikely coalitions of conservative Muslims, Jews, and BIPOC evangelicals and Pentecostals, who have been working alongside white Christian nationalists in these efforts. Featuring discourses about sexuality, this roundtable attends to the reverberations of white colonial nationalism and its co-opting of agency in other countries and cultures.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the moment when A.I. becomes as smart as a human in multiple domains. This has sometimes been referred to as humanity's "Last Invention" as afterward, the AGI will create everything we need. Others have predicted an existential risk to our species with the advent of AGI. We have not reached that level yet, but it suddenly seems not as distant or impossible as was once thought. The papers in this session seek to understand the role of religion as we consider the advent of AGI. How do we make sense of it and what sort of implications might it have?
Papers
As the current limits of artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) technology yield to the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and its possibility of sentience, how will humans and machines respond to one another? History and anthropology reveal patterns of marginalization and social injustice when people fear the unknown or feel threatened by others who are different from themselves. Artificial intelligence technologies rely on human-coded algorithms and machine-learning that utilize information from multiple knowledge domains, including positive and negative examples of human behavior as well as theological and ethical resources. Using this data, AGI systems purportedly will reason, solve problems, demonstrate common sense, plan for the future, and adapt to change. Presently, artificial general intelligence is theoretical; however, as AGI evolves, will it become a victim or source of unjust human marginalization or will it become the great social justice equalizer?
This paper is concerned primarily with artificial general intelligence and thinking about its possibilities through philosophical and theological examination. Specifically, the work of Stanley Cavell is taken up to help us better understand what we have in mind when we talk about AI and what our necessary response is to such technology. Cavell points us toward the efficiency of criteria as well as their limitations through his parable of the automaton. Supplementing this with his discussion of slavery and embryos, his work is developed by and warrants reflection on our social responses to minority communities and the disenfranchised. Cavell thus provides both epistemological and ethical guidance as he is applied theologically to artificial intelligence.
In our 21st century, computers are revolutionizing the way we think, learn, live, and relate to humans, nature, machines, and the divine. The new hero -or antihero- is Strong A.I. The new utopia -or dystopia- is the Technological Singularity, the historical moment when technology will manage to irreversibly transform biology. This hyper-technological world has been produced -and reproduced- by the Transhumanist movement. In this paper I will address the following questions: what is Transhumanism? What is the transhumanist paradox of its Singularitarian version? Can theology help solve some of the problems that this group is facing whilst programming A.I.? To solve these issues, I will demonstrate why these are not only a matter of the positive sciences and secular philosophy – as Singulitarianism considers them to be –, but any proper solution must include theology. Hence, I will introduce Catherine Pickstock’s theological work “Eros and Emergence” into the A.I. discussion.
Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM | San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007C…Session ID: A20-315
An Author Meets Critics Roundtable Session for discussion on Barton Scott’s new book Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India published this year by the University of Chicago Press as part of the prestigious Class 200 series. Slandering the Sacred takes the specific case study of Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits deliberate harm or injury to religious feelings of a community, to raise and address larger and immensely consequential questions connected to the interaction of law, religion, and secular power in India and beyond. A multifaceted intellectual history cum literary analysis of blasphemy law, Slandering the Sacred moves between nineteenth-century and contemporary Britain and India to show that colonial discourses and conceptions of blasphemy were shaped and indebted to the life of this category as it operated among the colonized religious communities of India. This roundtable panel brings together scholars at different career stages invested in questions of law, religion, and secularism in India and beyond from varied thematic perspectives and specializations in Religious Studies and cognate disciplines.
This authors meets respondents session will mark the 15th anniversary of--and revisit--Carolyn Chen's classic study of immigrant conversion, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience. Respondents will put the work into the context of conversion studies, immigrant studies, and the religious studies classroom. Carolyn Chen will provide a response to the comments.
