Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Through the lens of two Indigenous-Catholic holy sites in the North American West, this paper focuses on changing lifeways, contested spaces, and religious power. The first site, Lac Ste. Anne, is located in the land currently-known as Alberta, Canada. It is a lake known for its healing water. The second site, el Santuario de Chimayó, is located in the land currently-known as New Mexico, United States. It is a church renown for healing dirt.

Examining these two case studies brings into focus the role nineteenth-century Catholicism played in establishing new social conditions and reshaping the physical environment at Indigenous holy places in the North American West. French and Spanish missionaries and colonists disrupted Indigenous lifeways: bison hunting at Lac Ste. Anne and farming at el Santuario de Chimayó. These Catholic missionaries and colonists used religious, linguistic, social, economic, and military power to Catholicize the landscape and local Indigenous Peoples.

This paper looks at the politics of mourning on the part of religious and political leaders in the aftermath of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and shootings, and how Catholic religious leaders' reluctant mourning of queer death but refusal to support queer livelihood are a reflection of recent changes in the rhetoric of Catholic moral theology on sexuality. Faced with this reality in which queer death "matters" more than queer life (but barely so), queer theology and practical politics, I argue, must embrace the agential and sexual presence of the dead as a form of counter-remembering against those forms of commemoration that effectively neuters/desexualizes the queer dead. This paper, drawing from hauntological theology and queer theory, explores the beginning of this queer political theology, where the queer dead continues to desire and dance among us.

Over the last twenty years, fitness culture has gained prominence in American Catholic male culture. Whereas bodybuilding and fitness culture was once considered a purely secular (and even sinfully vain) concern, today, body builders lead major Catholic organizations and Catholic self-help programs recommend weightlifting to their male audiences. In this paper, I examine the relationship between physical exercise and asceticism in contemporary masculine Catholic culture by analyzing interviews, blog posts, and publications from the Catholic organizations Word on Fire and Exodus 90. Specifically, I argue that these organizations draw on ascetic discourse to adapt fitness culture to Catholic norms of masculinity.  This turn to asceticism serves to stabilize normative contradictions within fitness culture discourse, while simultaneously opening up Catholic fitness masculinity to new avenues of immanent critique.

This paper examines the supply of portable Mass kits to priests in the U.S. military during World War I, analyzing the intersection of civilians, soldiers, and religion through the literal business of devotional objects. Through study of surviving Mass kits, commission letters, receipts, and transaction documents, it argues that the materiality of devotion was a bustling economy that relied on a network of artisans and suppliers, as well as advertisement and marketing strategies to appeal to the "consumer": the Catholic public who purchased items for priests abroad.

The uptick in antisemitism in the last few years in North America and Europe reveals a crisis that has been building for decades. The Holocaust and its aftermath helped to initiate an era of dialogue, educational efforts, human rights work, genocide prevention and a deeper commitment to international peace. Yet despite these many important initiatives and the longstanding efforts to educate on the Holocaust, the distance in time from the genocide and the passing of the survivor generation, brings us to a critical moment how we comprehend historical antisemitism, what it is and how it is expressed.

In light of this, defining antisemitism has become a critical mode of assessing these issues. I will assess the creation of these varying definitions and the definitions themselves. I will note how Israel plays into this argument over antisemitism and explore whether these varying definitions are helping or hurting us fight Jew hatred.

Since the end of the Algerian War, the question of race and racism in France has been intimately tied to a history of colonialism and immigration. As various scholars and activists have illustrated, the colonial question and its afterlives continues to structure French political and intellectual life today. This is especially true of the emergence of the “Muslim Question” and Islamophobia which are deeply connected to France’s colonial history in North Africa. However, what is the relationship between this colonially inflected racism and the broader discourses of anti-Semitism? How are these treated in the public, scholarly, and national discourses? This paper traces the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism in France from the aftermath of World War II through the the turn of the century. I suggest that though nominally grouped together, these discourses went through a slow and steady separation such that by the turn of the century racism and anti-Semitism were conceived of almost entirely apart from one another. This paper outlines that evolution and explores some of the consequences that have resulted from this split.

The paper examines the dynamics of public confession [t’onghoe chabok] and the rise of nationalistic discourse during the P’yŏngyang Revival in 1907. I assess how early Protestant nationalism was formed in religious spaces where mass gatherings for public prayers called for national renewal. In particular, I show how the Korean Protestants publicly expressed their patriotic sentiments through public confession and how such verbal acknowledgment of unruly emotions became the subject of spiritual discipline. Public demonstration of emotions at mass gatherings created a bifurcated discourse on emotion: one that affirms patriotic sentiments as a mark of Christian sincerity and the other that simultaneously regulates unruly feelings through repentance.

This presentation aims to compare two worship services of evangelical megachurches in North America and South Korea to identify the distinctive feature of the Korean megachurch, while also discovering some parallels between the two as evangelical megachurches. Evangelical megachurches are commonly regarded as “non-liturgical churches,” as the antithesis of “high church” that emphasizes ritual and priestly authority. This notion comes from the evangelical characteristics of avoiding being constrained by old traditions while focusing on biblical verses and increasing the number of converts. However, this presentation challenges this view on evangelical worship with the case of a Korean evangelical megachurch. Whereas a North American megachurch sees worship as an “enjoyable festival” that is not distant from mundane life, the Korean megachurch exhibits “liturgical” aspects to a certain degree in its worship, which explicates its theological position and understanding: a heavy emphasis on “holy and sanctified life.”

Religion has been a major transnational actor. This presentation examines context in which Koreanized Protestantism is transplanted into South Asia. The cultural and historical conditions of globalized East Asia since the late 19th century have acted as a positive factor for the growth of Protestantism in Korea. As Korean Protestantism has actively spread across borders amid the trend of intensified globalization since the 1990s, South Korea currently sends more Protestant missionaries than any other country except for the United States. Factors that formulate Korean Protestant missions in South Asia include contemporary transnational interdependence, missionaries' ethnic nationalism, multicultural evangelicalism, the postcolonial religious politics of India, international faith-based NGOs, and the use of digital media. The transregionalization of Korean Protestantism in Global South shows how Christianity is reformulated in the 21st century global society and also how East Asians and South Asians are connected by appropriating the once Western tradition of Christianity.

In addition to a café and bookstore, now common features of large-scale megachurches, Korean megachurches often present those who enter their facilities with a world map. Stylishly designed in abstract form, the map cum wall-art visualizes the globe two dimensionally. The visual image of the oversized world map also notates the locations of church plants, ministry partnerships and/or aid projects both domestic to Korea and abroad. This presentation provides preliminary qualitative research of these spaces with accompanying visual content analysis of the maps. I suggest that tracing gospel progress inadvertently also renders visible the fault lines of development and underdevelopment as structured by the processes of racial capitalism. The presentation brings into explicit conversation the growing literature on Korean megachurches and interpretive frameworks that center the ongoing evolutions of racial capitalism and its material forms.

Based on long-term ethnographic research in Agro Pontino (Central Italy), this paper discusses the struggles and activism of the first generation of Sikhs settled in an area dominated by local criminal networks (agromafie). Observed for the first time by Italian sociologist Marco Omizzolo (Fanizza and Omizzolo 2018; Omizzolo 2022), the systemic exploitation of Sikh workers has recently caught the attention of international media and NGOs, although the issue - and the possible responses - have never been approached from the Sikh perspective. Engaging in synergy with an underserved community of Sikh workers, the researcher introduced the singing of devotional hymns (kirtan) as an empowering practice to reaffirm GurSikh values about honest labor and resilience, especially among Sikh youths.

This paper centers on the recipe of making ink found in the 17th-18th century manuscripts copies of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture. This recipe, found in the colophon, allows us to think about the scribal labor involved in the transmission of the Sikh scriptural text in its material (bodily) form, as well as its relationship to other kinds of devotional labors, a set of nested activities of the early Sikh community that make up the complex picture of the transmission of the Sikh scriptural corpus in the early modern period. The paper combines literary analysis of the poetic corpus of the Sikhs with the material history of the Sikh scriptural book.

The factors responsible for immigrant entrepreneurship and the role of entrepreneurial activities in sustainable economic development of migrant communities have been extensively discussed in academia.  However, the role of Entrepreneurial ventures in enabling the migrant community to transform space into a personal place where they can choose to perform and claim identity has rarely been explored. This paper, with special reference to the diasporic Sikh entrepreneurs on Soho Road in the English study of Birmingham, attempts to address this gap in Cultural and Entrepreneurship studies. Based on five unstructured interviews with first-generation Sikh entrepreneurs, this papers offers an understanding of the bilateral transaction between entrepreneurship and the Sikh faith (Sikhi) by exploring the following key questions: 1) how does entrepreneurship enable Sikhs in diaspora to perform their cultural and religious identity by transforming space into place; 2) how does Sikh  identity and Sikh ethics informs their entrepreneurial establishments.

On the basis of fieldwork in the English city of Leicester, Banks (1991) identifies three tendencies within Jain faith: orthodoxy, heterodoxy and neo-orthodoxy, which “claims for itself the status of a science” (252). I will discuss the British Jain statistician K.V. Mardia’s book The Scientific Foundations of Jainism (1990) as a distinctively neo-orthodox work. Mardia presents Jain doctrine in scientific terms, e.g. labelling the binding of karma by the soul “karmic fusion”, explained as the soul’s absorption of subatomic karmons. Although himself a Śvetāmbara, he adopts a typically neo-orthodox non-sectarian position. Diasporic Jain lay communities are largely cut off from regular contact with fully initiated ascetics, making developments in the diaspora of particular interest for scholars on the Jain laity. Of Banks’ three tendencies, neo-orthodoxy has least interest in ascetics. I will add to scholarly understanding of this distinctively laical category through analysis of a neo-orthodox diasporic text.

The Jain lay author, Paṇḍit Daulatrām (VS1855-1923/1798-1866 CE) belonged to Pallivāl Jain Society. By relying on my reading abilities of old Hindi and an understanding of the Adhyātma movement in the Digambara Jain tradition, I will discuss the philosophical and literary significances of Daulatrām’s works in the Jain tradition. Even if the number of his available works is just two, what does Daulatrām’s works distinct from the other similar works that are available in Jain literary history claimed by Veersagar Jain (2000) that there exist other similar types of works but only Chahaḍhālā by Daulatrām became popular among the Jain community in especially Hindi speaking regions. The second desideratum to explore is the number of Jain lay authors in the Digambara Jainism. The reason for the growing numbers of lay authors and the demise of Digambara monks during the period of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal will be touched upon.

Exploring lay Jain author, Dhīrajalāl Ṭokaraśī Śāh’s (b.1906) two volumes, Śrī Pārśvapadmāvatī *Ārādhanā* (“Adoration of Pārśvapadmāvatī”) and Padmāvatī Prasanna (“Padmāvatī, who is Gratified”), published in the year 1972 and 2001, respectively, this paper aims at identifying their contributions towards two parallel developments: introduction of a distinct category, *“ārādhanā”* literature and establishing Jain goddess Padmāvatī’s efficacious place in Jain tradition. In turn, both developments correspond to each other, which, I argue, results in blurring the boundaries between devotion, Jain *mantravāda*, spiritual endeavors, and theological principles. More particularly, by investigating the approach and content of Śāh’s volumes, I will discuss how lay-authored Jain literature in the Gujarati language emerge as partakers of a broader Jain literary and religious culture by de-marginalizing those religious things that have been seen as peripheral.

Faith-based organisations (FBOs) are increasingly visible in climate action with growing numbers at the UNFCCC and the UNEA. The role of FBOs in climate action has been framed variously through their social, economic and moral capital, yet these are complicated by the diversity of FBOs in secular climate spaces. As such, the following questions arise: What role do FBOs play in climate action at the UN and to what extent are these roles distinctively ‘faith-based’? How do FBOs navigate with and within this ostensibly secular arena? I draw on findings from fieldwork conducted online and at COP26. These findings demonstrate the strategic ways that FBOs engage with the UN on climate action whilst still seeking to carve out a distinctively faith-based voice through moral, though not always confessional, framings of climate change. I suggest the post-secular provides a fruitful way to frame these developments in faith-secular collaboration on climate action.

Religions and development research over the last twenty years has centered around some major common themes: that religions matter but are side-lined or ignored; that there are surges of interest in religions from international development policymakers and practitioners but that these can lead to instrumentalization and unfair co-option of religious assets; and multiple definitions and categorizations of faith-based organizations. While these major themes have advanced the field previously, recent emerging themes update and re-frame these previously dominant debates. The analysis in this article finds that the new emerging themes push for engaging with the complexity and contextuality of religions, working with a fuller diversity of religious actors, and using a range of research methods. Ultimately, the article finds that researchers in religions and development can move beyond questions of “added value” of religions to development, and instead focus on the nuance of religions for development goals in contextually specific ways.

Data driven conclusions, complex technological infrastructure, and engineering knowledge have served as the politically “neutral” harbingers of contemporary progress narratives. Alongside this practice, science and technology studies have described the ways political neutrality is constructed in technological development, serving to elide value-driven intentions, even when well meaning. But how is this neutrality affected when developments are undeniably value driven, ones that have political stakes in international development, with religious actors serving as the main drivers for their creation? Using the field of engineering for community development as an empirical case for exploring how technology, religion, and development are all co-constructed, this piece argues that optimisms inherent in both technological development and religious engagement efforts can and do both compound and hybridize. This piece articulates new and varied forms of secularity and religiosity constructed when technological logics are embedded in international development efforts.

This paper argues that progress ought to be considered a key term in the study of religion and memory through an examination of institutional practices of the memorialization of slavery sweeping across our colleges and universities. These efforts, while necessary, are ultimately insufficient in confronting material and epistemological legacies of slavery. I address the moral incompleteness of these projects, which ultimately serve an institutional and national narrative of progress. Remembering for the sake of progress not only undermines historical narratives of violence and tragedy and further marginalizes archival absences, as Saidiya Hartman makes clear; memory-making devoted to progress—and the architectural projects and DEI initiatives it inspires—fails to meaningfully address the demands of local descendant communities and student activists and confront the realities of anti-Black racism endemic to the academy.

A paradox lies at the heart of German theological education. Students of theology in Germany are overwhelmingly white, native speakers of German, and members of either a mainline Protestant or the Roman-Catholic church. But after graduation, they will teach the subject “religion” in public schools, many of them full-time. Pupils there come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, adhere to many faiths (or none), and often bring with them experiences of discrimination that their teachers have never had to endure. What does a successful, transformative engagement with diversity, equity, and inclusion in a course of study look like under these circumstances? What can educators hope to achieve regarding societal power imbalances? To answer these questions, presentation draws on the notion of a “post-migrant society”, a sociological concept prominently advanced by Iranian-German scholar Naika Foroutan, which has recently found its way into the debate on inclusive pedagogy in Germany.

DEI paradigms contribute to equitable and inclusive change to the extent they decenter pedagogical authority and foster the co-creation of knowledge.  DEI paradigms do not decenter the power of knowledge holders by default.  They can, and often do, instead reify “status quo” power structures.  However, DEI paradigms can also work to decolonize the power of knowledge in the classroom.  DEI models have been developed toward that end, and yet even so, traction for liberatory change is difficult to obtain. This paper presents the claim that societal and group level trauma patterns can stagnate DEI work and accordingly that attention to trauma healing on the organizational level opens a way forward.  In applying trauma theory to DEI paradigms, this paper advances the claim that organizational trauma healing is necessary for DEI to be transformative in the classroom.

Research on religion and migration suffers from a parochial focus on the religious lives of people who physically move across state borders. Developing an alternative framework of migration as a matter of who you are, not where you are, this paper reconfigures the “stages of migration” discourse from an emphasis on physical mobility to matters of personhood and identity. It draws insights from online surveys (N=650), interviews (50), and ethnographic observations of Ghanaian aspiring migrants to examine how religion—particularly in Pentecostal-Charismatic forms—enables people to embody migration without physical mobility across state borders. While migration aspirations might never be realized, mobility materializes in people’s bodies and emotions through religious experiences such as dreams, visions, prophecies, and divinely attributed intuitions. These religious experiences contribute new insights into the psychological modes of human migration that problematize the emphasis on place utility in conventional notions of "stages" of migration.

“Abolition and Faith” tracks the violent histories that have produced racialized and gendered representation in the neoliberal immigrant rights movement, while identifying and examining the formation of what this project calls “migrant liberation narratives”—the narratives of those in immigrant detention centers or migrants impacted by detention—that produce alternative, and oftentimes, liberatory understandings of border politics, criminalization, migration, and faith. Employing an abolitionist framework, I consider how calls to “abolish ICE” rely on the language and goals of “abolition,” but fail to consider how contemporary anti-immigrant practices of incarceration, detention, deportation, policing, and surveillance are rooted in the histories and legacies of racial chattel slavery and the forced transatlantic trafficking of African Diasporic and Indigenous peoples. Against these racialized logics, I argue that notions of faith and the sacred play a crucial role in determining how detained migrants construct their understandings and visions of liberation.

Refugees and migrants are exposed to sexual violence throughout their journey. Nationalist concepts are invoked – exploiting the vulnerability of “women” to protect a “national collective”. Debates charged with racism and sexism fall on fertile ground at a time of a global shift to the right. Particularly problematic is the attitude towards LGBTIQ+ persecution and the non-recognition of sexual violence as reason for asylum. Some of the flight and migration discourses reveal a lack of understanding of the effects of sexual and gender-based violence. The presentation scrutinizes epistemological premises; the ‘Cologne Event’ in the migration debate; Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine; flight and migration from Ukraine and beyond; agency and human flourishing in postmigrant societies. Questions of belonging, exclusion and integration polarize entire societies. Postmigrant concepts evoke a reordering of established privileges, structures, and migrants’ rights. “Post” in postmigrant is not a temporal prefix – it means looking behind the migration narrative.

In the spring of 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, local initiatives in a small town in Värmland, Sweden, made it possible for three buses of refugees from Ukraine, mainly women and children, to reach Sweden. The local initiatives were made by relatively small and diverse groups, among them the local Pentecostal congregation that has had a long-term exchange with a Pentecostal congregation in eastern Ukraine. Many of the refugees belonged to the Pentecostal church and had visited Värmland as children for a church summer camp.

This paper presents the results from a year-long ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Pentecostal refugees from Ukraine, focusing on religious practice and support structures. In order to shed light on refugees from Ukraine in 2022, intersectional variables are used in a comparison with the experiences from migrants, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, who arrived in Sweden after 2015.