Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Michael Voris, the ex-gay founder of alt-right Catholic media outlet Church Militant, is a sword connoisseur. “We’ve got swords all over the place here at St. Michael’s Media and ChurchMilitant.tv. They’re all in my room,” he said in an interview with Catholic website, The New Emangelization. Swords are also prominent in Voris’ rhetoric. At various times, he has claimed that Catholics must put their sinful desires to the sword, that Christ came into the world bearing a sword, and that the kingdom of God is to be established on earth by the sword. Often, distinctions between symbolic, spiritual, and physical swords are impossible to parse out. Like many alt-right leaders, Voris employs violent language and images to stir up his followers. Swords, whether material, imaged, or rhetorical, help accomplish this task.

Many religious leaders across time and place have worried that their processes of fashioning a religious masculinity—through dress, grooming, and other bodily performances—made them look gay (or some other style of queer). From monks to pastors to social media celebrities, from Italy to Egypt to the United States, this presentation will explore these worries and propose a few reasons why so many religious men have long struggled, and will have to keep struggling, to look straight.

Robert Covolo’s book, Fashion Theology, illuminates the idea that what may start as a conversation about clothing eventually morphs into more critical questions about social order, aesthetics, and the public performance of identity (Robert Covolo, 2020). Much like we adorn our bodies with shirts, pants, jackets, hats, and scarves to present ways of being in this world, we daily choose whether or not to clothe ourselves with constructs of masculinity. I will sew a convertible clothing garment that can be worn in multiple ways to symbolize various expressions of masculinities. A video presentation will showcase the garment being worn by people of multiple identities to answer the questions: 1) How can these bodies help inform us about understandings of masculinities; 2) What happens when we decenter hegemonic masculinity and recenter alternative masculinities; and 3) How can fashion theory influence how we make meaning of presentations of religious masculinities?

“There are no hard rules in fashion,” advises Andrew Tate in a 2022 TikTok video, but every man does need some “loud pieces.” Tate, a notoriously misogynist masculinity influencer, is hardly original in this advice. Since the first masculinity influencers – at that time, "pick-up artists" – began to make waves online, “peacocking” has been a skill men must master. I offer a collage of peacocking and present religion as a “loud piece” in both interpersonal and digital economies of attention.

What works on women, then, works on digital audiences more broadly. But online, magical shimmer is not always enough to hold the attention needed for success. Tate converted to Islam shortly after TikTok banned his account. Awaiting trial for human trafficking, he walks into the courtroom with a Qu’ran. He has grown out his beard. Is he peacocking? Was he retaining his audience’s gaze with the loudest piece he could?

Douglas Wilson’s blog post “Surplices are for Sissies” illustrates the social “fashioning” of masculinity in real time. Amidst remarkably unfunny (and for that reason, hilarious) commentary about masculinity, Wilson defines the surplice as “a fetching little ecclesiastical number, with lacey-like accents.” “Showing off is always diabolical,” writes Wilson, “but showing off your piety is diabolical and gay” (emphasis original).“Tall decorated hats,” “elegantly styled flowing robes,” and “embroidered stoles” all come in for criticism. However, Wilson is not alone in criticizing religious leaders for effeminate dress: Jesus of Nazareth does the same (Matthew 11:8; Luke 20:46). Crossly and Myles, authors of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (2023), interrogate what they call the “butch millenarianism” of the early Jesus Movement. By isolating Jesus’s critique of soft clothing from the political and material factors that drove his movement, Wilson can write this incredibly campy rant to fashion his own idealized masculinity.

This object narrative examines wedding rings generally, and Groove Life’s silicone wedding band specifically, as religious garments that shape masculinity. Rich Froning, the 7x CrossFit Games champion and outspoken evangelical Christian is the spokesperson for Groove Life's silicone wedding bands. As spokesperson, Froning’s presence underscores the rings’ dual purpose to, first, replace metal rings that will show wear-and-tear when routinely rubbed against a metal barbell during training, and second, to announce and uphold one’s vows to a heterosexual monogamous marriage while in the co-ed gym.In the example of the Groove Life ring, we see the priorities of normative masculinity, muscular Christianity, Christian marriage, and men’s fashion combine.

This paper examines social media-based male evangelical Christian comedians’ fraught relationship with femininity as a performance, a sign of the Other, and a tantalizing possibility. At the same time as they reject femininity as an inferior way of being and an undesirable set of qualities for a society to embrace, these men often rely on the performance of femininity as the basis of their own comedy careers.

Through an exploration that brings Weems’s *Roaming* into conversation with her earlier series of photographs, entitled *Sea Island Series* (1992), this paper will take up the critical task put forth by Tracey Hucks and Dianne Stewart in their groundbreaking essay, “Africana Religious Studies.” By reading both series, I contend that Weems uses her body in her work to interrogate and challenge logics of space, race, power, domination, and religion as they are evoked through architectural edifices and landscapes–while also offering a poietic alternative in line with what Hucks and Stewart calls “legitimate locales for generative religious reflection.”

Expanding on the Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative, which was “designed to foster greater public understanding about religion and lift up the contributions that people of all faiths and diverse religious communities make to our greater civic well-being,” two religion curators will outline the religion curatorial process. Natalie Amador Solis, Latinx Curatorial Assistant, will highlight the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, *Living Religion: Creative Encounters in the U.S.*. Syona Puliady, Assistant Curator, will overview the Fowler Museum’s *Engaging Lived Religion in the 21st Century* program exhibitions, *Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings* (2022-2023) and the forthcoming show on contemporary and modern Sikh art. In this co-authored paper, Natalie and Syona will share their curatorial vision on the changing religious landscapes of museums. 

My proposed paper attends to these spatial contestations of American collective memory and public history, and their role in shaping and transforming how we understand and approach practices of memorialization. These monuments have acted as a way to spatially and symbolically enact the power of the white American sacred and dominate the landscape of American history, memory, and identity. In refusal of this claim to immutability, I argue we are experiencing a shift in how public history is spatially constructed, from narrative claims of discursive and structural permanence – through stone, monuments, and state records – to narration which embraces more ephemeral, creative, and composite ways of knowing, being, and remembering – through soil, protest art, detritus, and defacement. 

The International Survey of Catholic Women (ISCW) represents an important database to understand the lived faith experiences of Catholic women across the world. Distributed widely, it collected 17,200 responses from 104 countries, making it the largest non-representative international survey of Catholic women. This paper will argue that large surveys such as the ISCW can be very effective in collecting data when they are oriented closely to the concerns of particular cohorts. In this case, the ISCW was commissioned by the network Catholic Women Speak to collect data for a submission to the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality. Its’ clear intent to listen to the voices of women on the current state of church culture and gender politics enabled it to capture the interest of Catholic women across the world. Indeed, many ISCW respondents described feeling silenced and ignored, and reported that they completed the survey so their voices might be heard.

Researching the religious dynamics of Argentina and Chile’s political developments is necessary to comprehend how anti- and pro-LGBTQ+ legislation has changed in these states. Argentina and Chile both encountered three significant phases of transformation in the actors that influenced LGBTQ+ civil rights, transitioning from the military and police (1887 – 1965) to the Catholic Church (1966 – 1990), then to Evangelical churches (1991 – present). These developments have been researched with a focus on the shift in LGBTQ+ civil rights, but not the religious perspectives that have developed and inhibited Argentina and Chile’s LGBTQ+ policies. Analyzing the doctrines, biblical interpretations, and political engagement of religious institutions, this essay proposes the following question to examine the religious impact on Argentina and Chile’s LGBTQ+ policies: How can the religious dynamics of LGBTQ+ civil rights help us take seriously the multiplicity of religious perspectives in these political developments? 

Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) is a national, peer-led professional development program that promotes change through self-reflection and interpersonal dialogue, with the goals of widening and deepening school and college curricula and making communities more inclusive. This study examines a Christian university in the coastal Western United States which is currently in the seventh year of its own version of SEED conversations involving over fifty percent of the college’s full-time faculty and a quarter of the college's staff. In order to assess the outcomes of SEED training, the authors conducted a survey of staff and faculty who completed the program.  This paper will present an overview of the benefits and issues with SEED training for staff and faculty in higher education and discuss preliminary results of the SEED program assessment.

The relationship between religion and the state has come to the fore during the pandemic also in secularized countries, mainly due to the impact lockdown restrictions have had on public religious gatherings, but also due to the role religious organizations played in advocating or undermining state restrictions and vaccination. The role of religion in societies in crisis gives insights into the processes of secularization. As part of the Trans-Atlantic Platform-funded project ‘The Changing Role of Religion in Societies Emerging from COVID-19’, we have analyzed documents produced by multiple religious organizations in Germany (Roman Catholic Church, Evangelical Church of Germany, Muslim communities, and Anthroposophical Society) as well as secular journalistic press media between March 2020 and March 2023. The documents were analyzed with a mixed-methods approach (qualitative content analysis and text mining). In this paper, we answer the question, how do religious organizations perceive their role in society and how are they perceived by the public? How do they engage with individuals, public actors, and the state? Do processes of secularization change in times of crisis?

The human “face” is a theme often associated with Emmanuel Levinas, though it enjoys a much longer pedigree. As this paper demonstrates, the face surfaces within the context of a debate among German intellectuals over the historical emergence of the concepts of ‘universal humanity’ and the ‘human individual’. These concepts represented both the promise and crisis of modernity: creating conditions for a more unified humanity while manifesting social fragmentation. Within the context of this debate, the human face gained particular salience in aesthetic theory, notably among neo-Kantian and Jewish philosophers, standing as both a sign of human individuality and an object capable of yielding synthetic meaning pointing to the promise of a more universal humanity. This paper begins by outlining the context of this debate and its emerging aesthetic, and concludes by highlighting two of its key proponents and innovators: Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). 

In “Monologue with Freud,” the final chapter of his 1991 book, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, Yosef Yerushalmi writes a letter to Sigmund Freud that he addresses, but does not sign. A few years later in his famous work, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida obsesses over Yerushalmi’s letter to Freud, but he makes no mention of Yerushalmi’s missing signature. This is surprising given Derrida’s extensive scholarship on the signature as exemplary of the limits of historical writing to fully capture the historical event. In this paper, Derrida is read with and against Yerushalmi’s missing signature in order to suggest that Yerulshami’s mode of doing historical writing—a history written but not signed—may provide a way to break out of the binary opposition between history and memory for which modern historiography advocates. The paper offers “signature” as a key term for the study of religion and memory.

This paper approaches questions of rest, labor, and care in Judaism by reading the motif of silence in Franz Rosenzweig and Anna Margolin. Silence, for both writers, functions as a figure for relation mediated by work and its cessation, whether in the liturgical rhythm of the Jewish calendar central to Rosenzweig’s thought or the aesthetic labor that Margolin’s poetry both thematizes and calls for. Yet while Rosenzweig’s Sabbatical silence engenders the theological realization of a community grounded in blood, silence in Margolin marks the limits of mutuality, the violence of relational fracture, and becomes in the end an imperative to refuse the gendered, reproductive relations on which Rosenzweig’s community is founded. This comparative reading, then, aspires to probe at once the affinities and distinctions of Jewish philosophy and Jewish literature in modernity, as well as to consider, through silence, the labor of relation, its limits, and its discontents. 

In recent years, Bonnie Honig has published two essays, which have uncovered the "Jewish unconscious" of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (HC).  In this paper, I will extend Honig's line of thinking. In particular, I will focus on Arendt's comments in HC about "the blessing of life" in the "Old Testament" (107). For Arendt, this blessing is evident in the lives of the "patriarchs," partiuclarly in the "brief spell of relief and joy which follows accomplishment and attends achievement." Though Arendt never mentions the rest of the Sabbath in these Jewishly inflected comments, following Honig, I take them to reflect something of a "Jewish unconscious." More importantly, for the purposes of this paper, I will read Arendt as offering a compelling phenomenology of Sabbath rest in the "Labor" section of HC. At the same time, I will use this phenomenology to critique Arendt's overly rigid distinction between labor and work.

This paper argues that Luther’s account of sacramental realism can prompt self-criticism for the sake of embodied justice. In Jesus’s telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan’s actions make a claim to being the sort of person who can love the embodied neighbor: a way of being moved with compassion toward others—that is, moved in one’s guts. The trouble is that one’s gut is both the seat of compassion and the seat of bigotry and bias. Becoming self-critical for the sake of embodied justice will require an openness to sacramental meaning in the world that can destabilize one’s unreflective normative commitments. It is the sacramental presence of God in the bloodied man that lights up for the Samaritan and moves him with compassion for the man. In this way, sacramental meaning in the world offers an ethics of self-criticism for the sake of embodied justice.

In Norway, conflict has recently evolved between Sami indigenous people and the government due to a decision to erect 277 wind turbines at a specific coastline, not taking into consideration that this coastline is also winter pasture for 2,000 reindeer. Huge wind turbines and grazing reindeer do not go well together. Thus, the concession violates the Sami's right to reindeer husbandry and mobility, according to the seasons. Due to their nomadic lifestyle and close interaction with nature, the Sami also differ from the non-Sami Norwegians in terms of “spirituality”. This will be critically discussed in comparison to Scandinavian Creation Theology.

This paper seeks to engage questions of human agency within the Lutheran theological tradition in light of the climate crisis. Historically, the centrality of the doctrine of justification within Lutheran theological frameworks has caused the tradition to have, at best, an ambiguous relationship with questions of human agency. Utilizing insights from Nordic Luther research and placing them in conversation with contemporary eco-theological scholarship, this paper demonstrates that Luther’s legacy leaves room for generative openings for the development of innovative agential models that take into consideration our entanglement with and dependence on more-than-human creation. While fully appreciating the work of scholars who argue for agential models to be based on the indwelling Christ motif, this paper will seek to broaden the field by discussing the need to balance such models with Pneumatological considerations. Such balancing is essential in guarding against heightened anthropocentrism within Lutheran theological frameworks.

When ecotheological questions are discussed in Arctic context, the focus is on the part of the region located closest to the glacial meltdown. By turning the geographical focus northwards, one gets a stronger sense of intercultural indigeneity, f.ex. Inuit and Sámi cultures. While all of the Nordic countries have have strong historical roots in the Lutheran traditions through national majority churches, the view from the Arctic shows different baptismal practices  than further south in the Nordic region.  The need to decolonize histories of oppression is emerging with a new force now while TRC´s are at work in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The first part of the paper discusses baptism as ecological source through environmental, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives on liturgy, while the second reflects on Icelandic baptismal practices past and present. The last part argues for baptismal practices as an eco-liturgical sources.

This presentation critically considers the mobilization of “military multiculturalism” (McAlister, 2005) by Christian combatives practitioners. Based on fieldnotes from an ethnographic study of Christian combatives I present combatives as an affective technology through which Christians feel themselves into a global multicultural “Christianhood” patterned on the bonds of military camaraderie and kinship. I engage theorists of affect and racialization to suggest that combatives are technologies that entrain subjects into racialized affect positions, instructing in the “political distinctions that the faithful come to feel” by producing “felt distinctions between us and them” (O’Neal, 2013) in ways that articulate religion as a component of gendered, racialized, and classed hierarchies of value. The imagined global and multicultural army of God relies on this simultaneous production and erasure of difference.

Following the trend of increases in those identifying as Spiritual or Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR), I tested the viability of adopting spiritual or spirituality when conducting qualitative and quantitative research on sport participation. Based on two different studies, I investigate the benefits and challenges of using "spiritual" (instead of religious) methodologically. After providing context for the emergence of "spiritual," the spiritual marketplace, and the spiritual revolution (Heelas and Woodhead) this presentation reviews collected data asking respondents directly and indirectly if they consider sport participation as a spiritual practice. These emic studies demonstrate that perceiving sport as a spiritual practice might require qualifiers and/or reconsiderations.

In 1980, when the Dallas Mavericks began play as the 23rd team in the National Basketball Association (NBA), they had an agenda that went beyond basketball. This paper analyzes the early efforts of Mavericks owner Don Carter and general manager Norm Sonju to build a born-again franchise, one that could spearhead the infusion of evangelical religion into the league while presenting to the United States a symbol of the possibilities for success and national renewal represented by the blending of evangelical faith and conservative politics. 

By tracing both the goals and failures of the Mavericks’ evangelical experiment, this paper highlights the ways religion, race, and politics intersected with professional basketball in the 1980s.

In the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe vs Wade, several American Muslim organizations issued open letters and public statements condemning the abortion ban as an infringement of constitutionally granted freedoms of religion and conscience. Dwelling on an in-depth analysis of these documents and on interviews conducted with representatives of the organizations that issued them, this paper argues that in the process of defending abortion rights and promoting reproductive justice, American Muslims develop Islamic arguments in favor of secularism and religious pluralism. Such alternative cognitive approach to the relationship between religion and politics, is rooted in the history of intellectual exchanges between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim feminist and queer theologians in the US and carries the potential to further develop and strengthen interfaith dialogue, thus providing a powerful corrective to identity politics.

Parties to abortion discourse often draw on polling results to support their views. Increasingly, polling discourse has been used to point to “common ground” on abortion, and to chide “both sides” for extremism, bad faith, or incivility. This paper argues that discourse about abortion polls reflects and reinforces a deeply-embedded framework of assumptions about the ethics of abortion—what Rebecca Todd Peters calls the justification framework—a framework that is deeply rooted in certain strands of conservative Christian thought. The framework itself must be interrogated rather than used to discipline participants into some sort of middle ground. Qualitative research into views on abortion, more than traditional polling techniques, can reveal internal inconsistencies and problematic assumptions underlying the dominant abortion discourse. It may invite people to adopt other frameworks of thought about abortion that can better respect religious pluralism and the moral agency of pregnant people.

In 2020 the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), a national advocacy organizing group representing Jewish women in the US, formed a group they called “Rabbis for Repro.” The stated goal of this group is to educate and mobilize Jewish clergy to be a moral voice for reproductive health, rights, and justice. As of January 2023, more than 1700 rabbis, Jewish educators, and cantors, have signed the pledge to be a “Rabbi for Repro.” Based on op-eds and other public remarks by those who signed the pledge, this paper explores Jewish responses to the dynamics surrounding reproductive justice today—including issues of religious freedom and the role of religion in recent legislation, court rulings, and public discourse. It also compares Rabbis for Repro to the Clergy Consultation Service, a collection of (mostly) Christian and (some) Jewish clergy who helped women get abortions before Roe.