Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

This paper presents an ethnographic collaboration with my dad’s congregation, which is largely made up of undocumented and recently-arrived Latin Americans. Here, I consider the assemblages that form when the Global South encounters the U.S. South. This paper takes inspiration from Joaquín Torres’ 1943 pen and ink drawing, “América Invertida” or “Inverted Map of South America,” where the artist shows the constructedness of place and the malleability of borders. While scholars like Thomas Tweed argue that migrants transpose their homelands onto, or reproduce their homelands in, their host societies, I insist that what happens is an inversion or worlds turned upside down. This inversion or Relation, to draw on Édouard Glissant, rejects ideas of a fixed root or single origin. Here, I theorize how my dad’s congregation is a case study in multiple Souths coexisting, colliding, and inverting our ideas of place and devotion.

This paper examines “My Hawaii,” a 1988 episode of country musician Dolly Parton’s eponymous 1980s variety show, to consider Parton’s extension of Appalachian-Southern religion beyond Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. As a celebrity, artist, and cultural icon, Parton is an expert in the marketing and selling of Southern religion in a secular key. If Dollywood, her theme park set in the Smoky Mountains, exemplifies the success of this project, My Hawaii’s attempt to graft Southern religion onto Hawaii’s mountainous landscape—merging religion, indigeneity, and capitalism— revealed its limits. With particular attention to capitalism and the historical context of the 1980s, this paper unpacks Parton’s use of analogy, translation, and ownership as techniques for transporting Southern religion. Assuming Parton a key figure in Appalachian-Southern religion, this paper explores the role of mountains in constructing and exporting of this religion and as a site where religion coarticulates with capitalism, tourism, and imperialism.

This paper considers the materiality of underground water in west Texas through the lens of queer and religious studies. By bringing these two academic disciplines into conversation with groundwater in this arid region, I examine how ideas about queerness and religion structure the legal and technological apparatuses that characterize, capture, and commodify what the Texas Supreme Court has deemed, the “oozing” and “occult” movement of underground water. Water is a substance that places boundaries on knowledge (as the deep and mysterious), sustenance (as the pure or toxic), and sovereignty (as the Texas-Mexico border or “international waters”). Just as frequently, however, water dissolves those boundaries in a torrent of liquid destruction or a drought of crippling proportions—both of which are labeled “Acts of God.” In this paper, I ask how fluidity subverts and solidifies conceptions of bodies, knowledge, and territory.

From a recent profile on Good Morning America to its featuring at Vice President Kamala Harris’s inauguration, majorette dance--a Southern-born black femme dance idiom--has quickly attracted the attention of middle America. However, majorette dancers of historically black college and university (HBCU) marching bands have long grooved through the architecture(s) of black southern religious life. This paper, “What’s a Girl to a Doll?: The Politics and Poetics of Black Femme Respectability in the Gulf South'' accounts for how this dance aesthetic shifts and dances with its geographic location. Historically, black women and femmes have been caricatured and publicly recognized through misrecognition, and majorette dance provides neglected insight on overlapping and distinctive black gender formations and agency in the Gulf South. My paper argues that majorette dance teaches us about the social and religious contracts of gender, embodied civility, respectability, and morality in the Gulf South.

In Oration 14, “On Love for the Poor (Περὶ φιλοπτωχίας),” Gregory of Nazianzus deconstructs barriers to justice and compassion amongst his late antique Christian audience and advances an ethical agenda of caring for the poorest in society. Gregory, relying on medical knowledge gleaned from late antique medical sources, recharacterizes the disease for his audience and reorients them to seek justice for the marginalized lepers. He rhetorically links elephantiasis with sanctity and provides an account of the etiology of the disease that counters popular ‘superstitions’ of the faithful. He further argues that the disease is the result of greed, an insight grounded in ancient theories of the connection between health and moderation. For Nazianzus, the remedy to poverty – and leprosy – thus lies in convincing his audience to alleviate the suffering of lepers with concrete acts of generosity and charity, which will restore balance and justice to society.

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What rights do fetuses have? And how do these potential rights relate to particular understandings of fetal personhood? This paper explores these questions in relation to rabbinic laws of inheritance and gifting. Through close readings of b. Baba Batra 142a, b. Arakhin 7a, etc, I examine one feature of Talmudic discussions of fetal inheritance: its consistent pairing with discussions of fetal sex.

I argue that, rather than reinforcing a model of inheritance wherein only male offspring inherit property directly, the Talmudic discussion of fetal inheritance works to create a default male-sexed fetus who does not inherit property;  the rabbis construct the fetus as potential property owner and inheritor but resist seeing the fetus as actual property owner and inheritor. Simultaneously, the rabbis construct the fetus as an actual male, who may potentially be female or intersex. I conclude by contextualizing these findings within the context of Sasanian inheritance law, and discussing the implications of this study for rabbinic understandings of fetal personhood and fetal rights.

Since the discovery of primary Manichaean sources in the early 20th century, scholars have largely focused on untangling aspects of the Manichaean mythos, with comparatively little attention being paid to more practical aspects of Manichaean religious expression. Uncovered in 1929 among the Coptic Medinet Madi codices, the Manichaean “Sermon on Prayer” from the Homilies codex, has received almost no scholarly attention. This paper will seek to remedy that by examining this long-neglected treatise in order to gain a clearer understanding of the spiritual rhetoric behind Manichaean askesis and its relationship with parallel discourses of renunciation across the late antique Near East. Special attention will be paid to exploring connections between this work and more recently published portions of the Medinet Madi corpus, such as the Dublin Kephalaia and the Letters of Mani. 

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Though the sudden presence of generative AI has produced concern within higher education, a religious studies pedagogy focused on shaping the virtuosity of learners rather than on easily assessed end-products will avoid simple binaries of prohibition or embrace. As students pay attention to the habits implicit in the way their expert instructors conduct religious studies work, they are shaped to embody an orientation and sensitivity towards academic values of justice, wisdom, honesty, and excellence. Generative AI models, however, learn by paying attention only to end-products of human work. The world in which any user of generative AI can produce a polished end-product needs religious studies to maintain an undistracted focus on the means of shaping creative and just human learners. These students will, in turn, be equipped to shape the ongoing development of generative AI towards an embodiment of justice as they engage in a mutual process of prompting/catechesis.

ChatGPT offers an opportunity and caution for educators. In this paper we discuss the creation of an AI Study Buddy with the goal of helping students more deeply explore the ideas in lecture classes through conversation with an AI.

According to ChatGPT this paper discusses biases in ChatGPT's responses related to religion, particularly in its ability to tell jokes about certain religious figures. The author tests the algorithm's responses to various religious figures and finds inconsistencies in what is deemed acceptable to joke about. The author argues that this reveals biases in the algorithm's training data and content filters, which need to be addressed. Additionally, the author questions the definition of religion being used by ChatGPT and its creators, and argues that the way in which certain things are deemed acceptable to joke about or not can define what is considered part of a religion.

This paper describes the ways one digital humanities project provides critical intervention into the perpetuation of the musical canon of “global song.” Many white North American and European Christians sing global song to identify with Christians from different countries and cultures. Marissa Moore (2018) and Lim Swee Hong (2019) note, however, that a small number of self-appointed global song curators and publishers exert a disproportionate influence in determining what is included in the repertoire. “Global song” thus often reinforces essentialist stereotypes, creating a “Christian Other” that upholds, rather than challenges, the power imbalances of “well-meaning whiteness” (Moore 2021). This paper addresses this issue by chronicling the creation of Nigerian Christian Songs, an interactive, multimedia DH website created by music doctoral students at Baptist universities in Nigeria and the USA. This project provides a model for international research collaboration and highlights the transformative potential of DH to aid in decolonization efforts.

Davóne Tines is the most innovative musicians in the area of classical music. Yet it is his innovative and subversive curation of Mass, first performed at Ravinia in August 2021, that has caught the attention of journalists, writers, musicians, and theologians. This paper addresses the polyvalent subversions that Tines's Mass offers, such as the dislocation of Mass from its traditional ecclesial setting to the concert hall; the curation of songs that emphasize Black and women composers and the implications for "decolonizing" the canon; the theological relation between aesthetic-political  performance and spirituality; and the creation of a "third space" that both resists power/violence and inspires artistic and theological creativity. The paper aims to demonstrate the pedagogical significance of music in relation to constructive theology.

Black musical influences have long been acknowledged as formative in the creation of white-dominated musical genres such as country and rock n’ roll. Recent scholarship places African American music as a foundational influence with an enduring presence, uncovering the banjo as an African American instrument and foregrounding the influence of figures such as Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, who taught Hank Williams how to play guitar. Yet the notion that country music is “the white man’s blues” is stubbornly persistent. This paper reviews recent developments in scholarship and music in light of the notion of “the blues” in the work of religious scholars like Cornel West and Eddie Glaude. American country music is ethically bound to relinquish its nostalgia for an imagined white bucolic past—including poets like Williams, the “Hillbilly Shakespeare”—and acknowledge itself as a quintessentially creole art form.

My paper tells the story of "Karezza," a sex-mystical practice coined in a wildly popular manual published in 1896, and its influence on canonical sexologists and the development of "modern" sexuality. In particular, it looks at influence of the practice - which entailed separating procreative from spiritual sex, refraining from orgasming, and viewing the act itself as a form of spiritual and racial purification - on its most important early twentieth-century advocates, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Margaret Sanger. Across works that collectively sold near a million copies, these authors all advocated for Karezza as part of a "modern," "civilized" sex life and as a means of cultivating a healthy, spiritual form of sexual passion and desire. As socialists, all moreover viewed the practice as integral to the gradual and peaceful overcoming of capitalism. My paper thus connects scholarship on Western Esotericism with the histories of race, gender, sex, and politics.

This paper argues that the marriage of art patron and socialite Mabel Dodge to a Taos Pueblo man, Tony Lujan, was an act of sex magic with the end goal of liberating the authentic self from the confines of Western sexual repression, in order to heal larger psychic wounds suffered by European immigrants as a result of alienation from the land. It explores her study of theosophy, magic, and psychoanalysis in order to attain that end, and presents archival research of various of her correspondences on the topics of metaphysics, magic, and sexuality, with such figures as Gurdjieff, Will Levington Comfort, Freda Lawrence, and Aleister Crowley. 

My paper focuses on one of the first texts that made a demand for a feminist tarot in America: Billie Potts’ A New Women’s Tarot (1978). My analysis identifies patterns of creative choices within this pamphlet that would ultimately guide the feminist and woman-centred decks that would follow. The paper will further explore how contributions of feminism in art and print during Second Wave Feminism led to the emergence of the tarot as a tool of political self-expression. While tracing the particular materiality of the feminist tarot, I trace its relationship to the popular feminist medium of the manifesto. My presenation also speculate on the possible futures of a tarot that is feminist. 

In 2021, HarperOne published The Freedom Transmissions, a 400-page tome claiming to be new revelations of Jesus (referring to himself as Yeshua) channeled by a boutique New Age guide with wealthy, well-connected clients, Carissa Schumacher. Does Schumacher – because she claims to give voice to a more traditional religious figure than some New Age channelers – “count” as a mystic? Or does she not count, because her expression of a conventionally eclectic twenty-first century spirituality makes her unlike those “unquiet souls” whose lives and writings implicitly challenged the religious and social status quo? This paper will compare Carissa Schumacher’s life and work to medieval Christian women mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Birgitta of Sweden, while also situating her in a genealogy of Spiritualism, in order to argue that Schumacher is a contemporary mystic who challenges scholars to reconstruct the category without classic definitions of “religion,” “theology,” and “secular.”