Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Historians have long argued that one of Buddhism’s most disruptive effects on pre-modern China was its introduction of a novel social institution, the sangha. As a community that stood outside of family and state, the sangha posed a challenge to the traditional Chinese polity. This paper suggests that, during the medieval period, Buddhist thinkers attempted to clarify the relationship between sangha and state by exploring the nature of the monastic precepts. The paper argues that this discourse on precepts in fact amounted to an idiosyncratic form of political theory. The paper will further suggest that this precept-discourse occasionally broached the radical possibility that state and sangha were distinct polities of equal standing. Finally, the paper will explore whether this precept-discourse parallels Western political philosophy’s discourse on ‘sovereignty.’ The paper thus rests at the intersection of Buddhist intellectual history and modern political philosophy.

One of the pretexts that British colonizers denied India independence is the Orientalist claim that Indians cannot govern themselves democratically. In 1903, Rhys Davids discovered that the historical Buddha was not a prince but the son of a Saṅgha (council) elder of a republican state with some sovereignty. Inspired by this Buddhological knowledge, many twentieth-century Indian Buddhists developed traditional *saṅgha* rules into democratic theories of India’s self-governance. Unfortunately, to this day, their theories have not been studied seriously as social philosophy. This paper argues that these modern Buddhist developments are worthy of philosophers’ attention – as processual philosophy. This new perspective promises to go beyond the antimony of the individual against the collective by theorizing personhood and community as aggregated processes. As I show, these theorists conceived democratic societies as webs of mutual commitment, reproduced through motivated, nonviolent, organizational co-actions. 

On January 4th, 1948, Burma gained independence. On the same day, the reform-minded scholar-monk, the Mahāgandhāyon Sayadaw (1900-1977), published his *Future of the Sāsana* (B. *Anāgat sāsanā reḥ*). This text not only puts forward the Mahāgandhayon’s vision for the future of Buddhism, but for the modernisation of the nascent nation. I demonstrate in this paper that at the heart of this program of nation building is the philosophical question of the nature of the postcolonial subject. Given the Buddhist view of the individual as fundamentally driven by desires and enslaved to the conceit of the self, I argue that rather than embracing a liberal notion of development theory, the Mahāgandhāyon Sayadaw puts forth a vision of progress where the postcolonial subject does not need to be protected from the excesses of the newly independent state, but where the state needs protection from the corruption and chaos of the new citizen.    

Following the work of Niklaus Largier and Sandra Schneiders, this presnetation will explore the question of the body and human embodiment as it relates to the experience of Evangelical Christianity’s engagement with the world. Specifically, I argue that evangelicalism’s traditional biblicism broadly conceived across the fundamentalist - progressive spectrum of evangelical theology prioritizes a rationalized hermeneutical strategy of text and word over and against human experience in a way that relativizes the role of the body and reflections on embodiment, both as a means of sustained contemplative engagement with the divine, and with its sustained lived-engagement in this world.

The seventeenth-century kabbalist Naftali Bakrakh of Frankfurt developed several innovative and hyper-visualized contemplative practices. In this paper, I will discuss these meditations to rethink the complicated relations between interiority and exteriority, the visual and the spiritual, and the ritualized and the contemplative. This discussion will demonstrate the potential contribution of integrating Jewish traditions into the interdisciplinary discourse of Contemplative Studies.

This paper addresses the absence of the Ruist (Confucian) perspective in contemplative studies and explores Cheng Yi (程頤 1033-1107)'s contemplative practices as a case study. Cheng Yi is considered the foundational Ruist thinker in the Cheng-Zhu lineage of pattern-principle learning. The social context in which his practices emerged was characterized by political and social crises, diverse interpretations of classics, and the influence of Buddhism and Daoism. Cheng Yi's contemplative practice involves specific techniques such as sitting postures, breathing, and quieting the mind, but also emphasizes the virtues of "reverence" and "righteousness." Cheng Yi's metaphysics emphasizes the non-temporality of the regulative role of the pattern-principle, enhancing the pan-contemplative nature of Ruist lifestyle. His approach offers comparative insights for contemporary contemplative studies, providing inspiration for practitioners seeking to balance intellectualism with contemplation and ethical action. The paper provides original translations and scholarly analysis of Cheng Yi's Ruist contemplative practices.

This paper examines the role of contemplative practices in the construction of transcendental, gendered, and devotional subjectivities according to the 16th century Gaudīya Vaiṣṇava tradition. The foundation of such devotional subjectivities is theorized as Kṛṣṇa-rāga: the advanced devotional desire for Kṛṣṇa. Such desire is inherently embodied, in that it required a devotee to experience one of five "flavors" of desire relating to Kṛṣṇa's transcendental bodily form. The highest expression of this is madhura-bhakti-rasa, the amorous desire for Kṛṣṇa experienced by the young cowherd gopīs. Philosophers Rūpa and Jīva Gosvāmin carefully distinguish such desire as transcendental: beyond and separate from normative embodied sexual desire. According to the 16th century tradition, such desire is therefore confined to the internal realm of contemplation. And yet, through contemplative practice, such desire also generates transcendental bodily forms. Therefore, this paper offers insight into the Gaudiya recontextualization of gender as an imaginal - yet embodied - construct.

This paper explores the materiality of African American childhoods in light of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Conceptually, the paper serves as a dramaturgy of the events orbiting the bombing, with attention to characters such as the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in May of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, the children murdered apart from the bombing, and the politicized funerals of the victims, with hopes to interrogate the ways Black childhood destructibility is cyclical and an object of commodification.

Drawing on ephemera and oral histories, this paper tells a story about Southern Black childhood and religion in the Jim Crow period. The school’s administrators and faculty, I argue, linked the Christian transformation of its students—whom they described as “little wild things untamed and undeveloped”—with gendered performances of childhood.[1] Simultaneously, I attend to moments in which the archive reveals the perspectives of students themselves. Ultimately, I show that histories of educational institutions are productive sites for engaging the intersection of Black childhood and religion.

[1] “The Miracle of Mather,” n.d., Mather School Records, 42-G6, American Baptist Historical Society, Atlanta, GA, 9.

I am interested in the sundry ideologies and tools which render black children, and by extension black childhood, as illegible in religious communities. In order for a kinship structure or collective to cohere as a “legible community,” it determines not only who belongs but who does not; and by extension, it regulates which individuals or collectives are afforded rights and privileges, or which individuals or collectives are susceptible to additional harm or violence. Further, I want to parse out a distinction between visibility and legibility for black childhood. Visibility, or even representation, does not guarantee that an individual or community has a better chance of being humanized or normalized. I am interested in exploring how these machinations develop, for whose benefit, and to imagine what “care” might look like in such uncaring institutions. This paper seeks to both investigate the investments in not seeing children, and to inspire theological commitments to seeking.

What resources may be useful to rethink philosophy of religion? Despite some crossover in the early 20th-century, the field lies outside religious studies’ scholarship. “Theory” remains a novel methodology. Since the turn of the millennium some have contemplated how their scholarship engages with cultural critiques of social power. Anglophone philosophy in general is making this turn. Is an Anglophone philosopher of religion’s roughly ‘etic’ position vis-à-vis religious studies advantageous or irrelevant? This paper suggests that contemporary developments among philosophers of religion challenge the horns of a conservative dilemma: either retain the current scope and methods, or, lose the field's identity at the hands of theory. To avoid these horns, the field might learn how critical scholarship asks philosophers of religion to make their subject position and methods more reflexive. Given recent discussions on “critical religion," it is useful to show how this works in an (un)related field.

Can scholars of religion use historiography and ethnography to reconstruct subaltern philosophies? Or is this an anachronistic imposition? In 1919, in the City Magistrate’s Court in Trinidad, Baboo Khandas Sadoo stood charged with obeah, or “pretended” African magic. Yet, Khandas called himself a Hindu. His name evinced Hindu and also Islamicate elements. Further, during his trial, his defense brought Yusoff Ibrahim, a client of Khandas’, to testify that he knew Khandas to be “very philosophical.” Khandas identified himself as African but also as a Hindu. His ritual work brought together Hindus and Muslims and Christians and of Indian and African descent. Khandas’ case provides an opportunity to analyze the complexities of the modes of racial and religious identification that quilt together the Black Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, modes of life animated by subalterns embodying what we might call, following the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, a transverse philosophy.

Nishitani's 20th century philosophy of religion undermines a common assumption about how we ought to ground the philosophy of religion and offers one alternative. The targeted assumption is that the philosophy of religion can be adequately decentralized while continuing to rely on a purportedly value-neutral conception of humanity. Drawing on marginalia from his library archive, I examine Nishitani’s critical engagement with this assumption as established within Schleiermacher’s and Feuerbach’s, respectively, Christian and post-Christian elisions between "humanity" and "religion.” These elisions, I argue, continue to place minoritized philosophers of religion in a double bind devaluing analyses of religion based in emic concepts and normative aims. Alternatively, Nishitani’s late theorization of an “emptiness-in-affect” (情意における空) critically bridges 19th century attempts to ground religion in human affectivity with 21st century attempts to criticize the oppressive dimensions of that ground within the affective turn.

In this paper, I propose to draw on City of God to draw out underappreciated resources in Augustine’s thought which can help us think about our role in the created order anew. Exploring the ways in which he challenges Porphyry and Origen in their denigration of material reality, I will make the case that his portrayal of the creation as a “universal commonwealth” mitigates the hierarchical emphasis of platonic cosmology and instead emphasizes our dependence on and interconnectedness with other creatures. I will then connect this new emphasis with his contention that the order of nature is marked by an economy of service, not power. Finally, I will show that Augustine’s concern with our spiritual blindness complicates common contemporary ideas about what it takes to see our role in the created order properly, and points towards a more nuanced vision of how best to cultivate an ecological awareness today.

The current climate crisis presents an acute, existential threat to human and non-human life. While past readings of Augustine have characterised him as an ‘other-worldly’, upstream influence behind the denigration of nature and bodies, these readings tend to overlook Augustine's development vis-a-vis the senses, and his wider account of pilgrimmage to God via recollection in and through the sensible world.

This paper will explore how Augustine’s approach to nature develops from suspicion to ordered delight via an exploration of his accounts of memory, use, and pilgrimage while challenging past readings of Augustine that tend to overlook the importance of the senses, bodies, and sociality in his thought. In doing so, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Augustinian memory, use, and pilgrimage might not only texture and enrich a Christian doctrine of creation but also serve as a constructive resource for ecotheology in addressing our current climate crisis.

A common critique of Augustine in many contemporary theological circles is that he is so heavenly minded that he is no earthly good, insofar as his thought might be applied to our current environmental crises. In fact, however, Augustine’s thought requires a thoughtful engagement with creation for one to be able to contemplate heavenly realities. This is especially clear in his preaching, particularly his homilies on Psalm 103 (104). Augustine devoted no fewer than four homilies to it, which is replete with enough natural imagery to satisfy a preacher who was profoundly interested in interrogating signs and symbols found in the created world.  What is particularly compelling is how he guides his listeners toward a deep appreciation of creation in order to use it as a means of ascent to the higher reality that contains and permeates creation, for, as the psalm says: “in Wisdom you have made them all.”

This paper engages with contemporary scholarship on the meaning and role of sacrifice in Augustinian studies, on the one hand, and environmental politics, on the other, in order to show how Augustine’s theory of sacrifice and society can undergird a constructive, theological approach to environmental justice. How Augustine distinguishes between true and false sacrifices, theorizes sacrifice’s power to bind together more-than-human societies, and analyzes the rituals and practices characteristic of different sacrifices can inform environmental political theory and practice at a time when environmental harms and injustices are concentrated in what environmental justice activists call “sacrifice zones.” Interpreting environmental problems and solutions using an Augustinian hermeneutics of sacrifice — or one like it — can help prevent environmental “solutions” that simply continue the cost-shifting dynamics that characterized the fossil fuel era and reveal alternative, more transformative pathways toward a just sustainability.

In the Sigālovāda Sutta the Buddha portrays an individual as living within a network of relationships, with friendship having a decisive role. Many Buddhists consider this sutta to offer timeless advice for establishing a just economic and social order, even claiming that it provides a strong counter to the hyper-individualism of consumerist society. Yet this text is puzzling at points with some unsettling implications when read in a 21st century global and religiously pluralistic context. It thus requires careful “hermeneutic triangulation” for those of us interested in interreligious friendship in the present day.

One of the greatest challenges to interreligious friendship is difference (Goshen-Gottstein, 2018, p. xxxvi). Simply stated, the challenge lies in how we might account for interreligious friendship in the face of the deep orientational differences that exist between the friends. This paper seeks to overcome this challenge by arguing for an account of friendship not predicated on agreement between friends. It does this by first, offering an understanding of interreligious friendship, and second, explicating the influential accounts of Aristotle and Augustine that posits friendship as only possible when there is agreement between friends. Finally, in dialogue with the work of Janet Martin Soskice and Jürgen Moltmann, the paper argues that differences, even religious differences, do not foreclose the possibility of friendship because humanity’s difference from the triune God does not close off the possibility of human friendship with the divine.

This paper examines the political implications of friendship between women of different national, ethnic and religious identities within the Israel-Palestine region; it explores the personal experiences of friendship of faithful women peacebuilders as a navigational tool for peacebuilding. The analysis is framed both within the context of UN resolution 1325 (31/10/00),  (https://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/wps/), and within the context of faith. Friendship, and its intimacies, demands that women of faith collaborate with their whole selves. They do not leave parts of themselves at the door of their shared meeting spaces; to the contrary – they bring the violence enacted upon them; they bring their personal losses and grief; they bring their own involvement in oppression; they bring their fear and their hate and their exhaustion and their anger. Consequently, the stuff of friendship, is, arguably, the antithesis of ‘symbolic gesturing’, relating to the most profound, complex and weighty political issues.

In this paper, I discuss the work of my hands as a woman who studies her own religious community. One of my major challenges was that my community, a minority Muslim sect, has maintained privacy out of fear of religious persecution. In addition, as an initiated member of the community, not only have I undertaken vows to protect sacred knowledges, but I also want to respect the wishes of community members regarding sensitive issues, particularly relating to the women. In response to these concern, I approach my research through social media. My content creation echoed that of my participants and made transparent the aims and potential outcomes of my research: to prioritize participant voices and create knowledge with my participants with an ethics of care and transparency. My public scholarship allowed me to engage and build trust with my participants long before I started my research.

Is our work ever just singular? What is the role, and responsibility, of institutions in shaping the minds of workers who feel their work is mundane and insignificant? What responsibility does the Church have in shaping its doctrine of vocation to show the significance, dignity, and creativity of all work? This paper argues that pre-Civil Rights era social ethicist George Kelsey’s notion of ‘social mission through vocation’ offers a helpful way for workers to think about their work. First, it surveys Kelsey’s critiques of the shortcomings of early-twentieth-century Protestant doctrines of vocation, especially as they relate to urban industrial settings. Next, it considers the Church’s responsibility to redefine the doctrine of vocation to include a sense of mission and communal meaning. Lastly, it explores the ways in which Kelsey’s ‘vocational ethic of social responsibility’ can aid grad students as they navigate academic environments.