Program Unit Chairs and steering committee members are invited to a reception celebrating their contributions to the AAR Annual Meeting.
The Religion Department of Syracuse University would like to offer a space for Faculty, Graduate Students, Emeriti, Alumni and friends of the department to get together. We look forward to seeing you.
This panel explores divine-human interaction, community formation, and religious diversity in various cultural contexts. Each paper addresses its theme in a distinctively comparative manner, juxtaposing ancient Greek and Song Chinese rituals, Hindu and Muslim religious movements founded in India and Turkey, respectively, and debates about identity-formation in Muslim and Christian communities in South Korea.
This study compares attitudes towards religious diversity in Islam and Hinduism, focusing on the Muslim Nur Movement and the Hindu Ramakrishna Mission. The work explores historical and theological discourses, examining the debates in both religions on dealing with the religious "other." The study uses a tripolar classification to categorize attitudes as exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist. In the modern phase, the author narrows down the research by comparing the attitudes of two mainstream religious movements: the Hindu Ramakrishna Mission and the Muslim Nur Movement founded in India and Turkey, respectively. The aim is to understand the philosophy behind religious diversity and its impact on the relationship between religious communities. The investigation is based on critical analysis and discourse analysis of materials produced by both movements, such as texts, events, and grey literature, in the context of the religious "other."
In both ancient Greek and Chinese religions, dreams had been produced for direct communication with gods. A comparison of dream production in two polytheisms will involve further theological discussions than studying each polytheism separately. For example, can gods be directly accessed, or are they more hierarchical and can only be approached through priests? Do they only help with problems of this life, such as illness, wealth, exams and careers, or also have concerns over afterlife? Are rituals for producing dreams rigid or flexible, complex or simple? Are priests indispensable facilitators of dream production, or can they be absent from the process? Are temples designated place for dream production or are they not a decisive factor? From a comparative perspective, this study will explore the similarities and differences in dream production in ancient Greek and Chinese religions, and how they reflect the idea of controlled divine-human interactions.
This study was derived from the interest in building an Islamic prayer room with the increasing number of Muslim tourists and immigrants in South Korea, where the researcher lives. The Islamic prayer room has continued to trigger controversy due to the possibility of religious privilege and rising concerns that Islam will settle in South Korea, beyond simply providing facilities for tourists’ convenience. This study compared and analyzed the Islamic community Ummah and the Christian community church, focusing on the principle of community formation, the purpose of community existence, and the nature and identity of community rather than functional differences. Although there is a limit to in-depth study of the characteristics of Ummah, a community that each Islamic country has, it is hoped this study will help to understand Ummah, an Islamic community, in a deeper way within World Christianity.
This session explores visions of human flourishing in the face of scientific, technological, and environmental change. The papers address a series of pressing issues, including: How do humans navigate the challenges that AI advancements pose for meaningful work? What is the role of humans in a more ecologically sustainable future? How have ideas of the frontier shaped how American space sciences? In total, the session responds to the conference theme and highlights how the "work of our hands" is always guided by the futures we imagine ourselves to be building.
It is frequently predicted that one consequence of ongoing advances in AI and automation is the elimination of meaningful employment. This paper applies insights from objective list theory and lessons from the rise of populisms to navigating healthy integration of AI into economic systems. Recognizing the role that some kinds of work can contribute to flourishing provides insight into how and when work is valuable, and recognizing the social and institutional failures that has contributed to the rise of authoritarian populisms provides insight into how institutional implementation of AI can go wrong. Developing a healthy integration of work and AI thus requires careful institutional implementations of the valuation of work and the values embedded in AI’s own institutionalization.
Niche construction theory has illuminated the significant evolutionary effects of an organism’s modification of its environment. Highlighting continuities between the constructive work of humans and other creatures, I argue that la labor de nuestras manos can serve as a theological “order of sustainability.” This is an adaptation of select Lutheran accounts of the “orders” of human life—household, government, church—that challenges the nature/culture divide and opens up a broader ecological purview than is typical of that discourse. Challenging accounts of humans as “ultimate niche constructors” or even “world-makers,” I articulate a modest but crucial human role in ensuring that life can go on.
The frontier myth is one of the most powerful and pervasive myths in US culture. While many critics have rightly observed that this myth drips with the ideology of a white settler state, they tend to overlook the religious undercurrents that nourish the pioneer’s visions of domination, conquest, and, ultimately, regeneration. Spotlighting these religious undercurrents in particular, this paper attends to the influence of the frontier myth in the arena of space travel. More specifically, it examines how early NASA scientists, astronauts, and administrators drew on the frontier myth to articulate their religious visions of, and engagements with, the project of space flight. Finally, it looks at how the frontier myth’s application to the sky was contested on the ground by the Poor People’s Campaign in 1969. Taken together, this paper aims to chart largely uncharted territories of US religious history.
This session centers around innovation and risk taking in relation to the teaching of religion today. How do we, as educators in fields like religious studies, advance conversations about sustainability, decolonization, and using the arts to facilitate the learning of students with divergent lived experiences? The first presentation analyzes efforts to increase religious literacy on a campus that was already committed to an environmentally-aware ethos, broaching questions about how to frame conversations and engagement at the intersections of religion and sustainability concerns. The second presentation weaves together conceptual research, a case study, and reflexive methods to explore tools for decolonizing assessment. While questions about how to "decolonize the classroom" have been popular in recent years, assessment itself has received little attention in existing scholarship on teaching and learning. The third and final paper offers an innovative tactic for teaching religion, known as Reflective Artistic Visualization, that is supported by pedagogical theories of bell hooks, Laura Rendón, and others. All three presentations are grounded in case studies or data from different institutional contexts.
As an award-winning green campus, my Liberal Arts college leads the way in undergraduate efforts toward sustainability. An environmentally-aware ethos infuses our campus culture, from the classroom curriculum, to the landscaping, to the wide alumni network. What we do less effectively is talk about and engage with religion. The project began with this question: can we leverage the shared interest in sustainability on campus to both increase religious literacy, and encourage meaningful engagement with religion as an essential dimension of human experience? The results are resoundingly positive—there is demand for conversations that engage religion at the intersection of sustainability concerns. In this presentation, I analyze data from three years of teaching a course on Religion, Nature, and the Environment, as well as various campus events and initiatives. I will outline best practices, and provide resources and recommendations for faculty wishing to develop similar programs on their own campuses.
Reflective Artistic Visualization is a teaching tactic that divides students into groups of three or four for timed discussion and reflective listening utilizing artistic representation. The purpose of the tactic is to encourage learners to synthesize varieties of their knowledge and intelligence in artistic reflection and integrate their whole person into group conversation. In this activity, students take turns answering a discussion prompt in timed intervals. Presenting students speak for five minutes, listening students do not respond, interrupt, or ask questions during that time. While one student presents, the listening students are invited to artistically represent their own intellectual or embodied response to the presentation. This tactic has been demonstrated to produce divergent but effective learning experiences for students, and it is undergirded by the pedagogical theories of bell hooks, Laura Rendón, and Hongyu Wang, among others.
To what extent are calculations of the specific date of the end, and revolutionary activism inherent to Christian apocalypticism? This panel will put that question to a much broader span of Christian history than is typical. Two key goals are in view. The first is to reevaluate whether precise predictions and political activism—as opposed to apophatic patience and resigned quietism—are "baked in" to all Christian apocalypticism. The second is to investigate how much variance there may have been between predictive and patient, quietist and activist "strains" of Christian apocalypticism over the full course of Christian history. Through a comparison of how historically specific forms of Christian apocalypticism may differ in respect to their enthusiasm for prediction rather than patience, and activism rather than quietism, we stand to learn a great deal about the true range of possibilities that apocalyptic discourse offers.
Silence, secrecy, unknowingness, humility, and failure: these may not be the theological virtues with which we are most familiar, but they are, these three papers argue, the theological virtues we need. In thinking about the futures of theological reflection, the presenters consider the aesthetic and virtuous dimensions of theological work, but without investing in fantasies of performative virtuosity. Instead, they argue for an openness to humility, failure, and suffering as essential dimensions of theological reflection in the current time.
Engaging with a contemporary Korean American literary work, Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, this paper will show the Korean American diaspora’s aesthetic mode of witnessing the hidden historical trauma, the haunting family secrets, and ongoing secrecy forced upon Korean diaspora communities within U.S. culture via the violence of assimilation to demonstrate the subtle but dynamic relationship between unclaimed past traumatic wounds and lives of the current generation. While analyzing the phenomena of intergenerational trauma registered in the aesthetic form via the lens of trauma studies, this paper will present how trauma’s haunting representation in the Korean American diaspora literary work led theologians to the territory of silence, secrecy, and unknowingness—the very reality of traumatic wounds and survival, thereby challenging traditional theological approaches to human suffering, especially the conventional sin-guilt-redemption paradigm and the concept of a single victim.
Philosophers and psychologists have recently developed accounts of intellectual humility as a virtue. This paper argues that theologians ought to respond to these accounts by conceiving of the task of theology as inherently apophatic or negative. It describes the major definitions of intellectual humility offered by philosophers and psychologists, noting limited theological engagements with this work so far. It then notes modern varieties of negative theology in thinking influenced by Kantian and pragmatic philosophical critiques, feminist and political theological approaches, and mystical theologies rooted in spiritual practices. This leads to a brief account of how some theologians attempt to evade the limitations that such intellectual and socio-political critiques necessitate. Constructively, the paper then offers an account of theology as an intellectually humble attempt to make connections among diverse people and ideas. While limited in its aspirations, this remains a challenging task that requires historically, geographically, culturally, and socially broad knowledge.
Christian theologians have recently begun to adopt failure as a theological virtue, particularly in regard to practice and method. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson in Transgressive Devotion, and Hanna Reichel in After Method both pursue a (re)constructive approach to theological normativity through queer subversions of patriarchal heteronormative paradigms. Each results in a different methodological consideration of theological (un)knowing and practice of (un)becoming. This paper use Jack Halberstam’s “low theory” as a method to read between Wigg-Stevenson’s performance theology and Reichel’s conceptual design and argue for theological kenosis in the failures of Christian life.
The ongoing realities of migration, immigration, and displacement continue to raise multi-dimensional issues around marginalization, suffering, justice, and the work of care. What is the work of our hands in relation to these realities? The panel discusses themes related to being turned away and being welcomed, identity migration and identity formation, the creation of centers and margins, or other associated themes.
Forced migration involves manifold tensions of negotiating leaving and arriving, aloneness and belonging, grief and resilience, and being and becoming. This project investigates the spiritual, existential, and religious aspects of forced migration, and how these human experiences are culturally embedded, with the goal of amplifying the unique experiences and voices of refugee communities from Asia. The presenter summarizes findings from phenomenological qualitative analysis of selected oral history interviews (n = 17) within Princeton University’s Religion and Forced Migration Initiative. Countries of origin represented include Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and spiritual/religious affiliations encompass Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and non-religious. Contextualizing findings within the relational spirituality model and existential positive psychology, attention is paid to (a) spirituality as a source of both strength and struggle; (b) the roles of culturally embedded strengths and capacities (e.g., gratitude, hope) in meaning-making and resilience; and (c) how participants’ spiritual lives may change and evolve throughout their migration journey.
This paper aims to advance theology of migration from a Hong Kongese perspective, highlighting key aspects in the 2020s Hong Kongese migration to the Global North. Employing the notion of family life cycle developed in the field of family therapy, the paper problematises the concept of family and suggests that it is essential to perceive migrant churches at the countries of destination as “extended families”, because of the dysfunction of one’s nuclear family, that is, the ancestry country. I develop what I called an ecclesiology of family in this paper to argue how the concept of church as family in Chinese Christian literature impacts the ecclesiology of churches in the countries of destination. Mindful of the complex political climate in Hong Kong and mental health issues intensified by this climate, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, this paper offers some pastoral advice to theologians/pastors who serve migrant communities.
Drawing from pastoral care encounters and communal responses to weakening states in the northern cone of South America, this paper contends that the increase in survival migration necessitates consideration of several dynamics for the practice of pastoral care as the disintegration of democratic practices and ecological stability become ever more common. This paper examines how trust, betrayal, and care intersect in daily lived practices for survival as people on the move must turn to political agents for access to basic needs. In such interactions betrayal of trust or enaction of violence creates psychospiritual distress and coping, an aspect often ignored in humanitarian responses to survival migrants. Particular modes of communal care counteract betrayal through daily practices of participation and welcome. Two particular faith communities’ interactions with survival migrants in the Comité del Pueblo neighborhood will be analyzed to gain care insights.
A ‘religious revival’ is on the rise all over the world and it accompanies an explicit demand for the “purification” and separation of religious persons and communities that were historically interwoven. New forms of rivalrous discourses have created antagonistic interchanges among Buddhists, Christians and Muslims in Theravada Buddhist contexts. Yet, these rivalries are nonetheless characterized by certain discourses and practices developing in common amidst religious rivalry. Their innovative moves to enhance lay religiosity inaugurate new forms of cultural expression and theo-political formations. This panel examines innovative strategies, mechanisms, and ideologies of the organizations participating in global “religious revival” with special reference to Myanmar and Sri Lanka, locations characterized by majority Buddhist populations and substantial Muslims and Christian minorities. Their visions of “purification” are strongly marked by conceptual intersections and borrowings. By asking how these inter- religious milieus or practices of inter-religious mingling intersect one another, the scholars in this panel will examine Buddhists and Christians’ co-constituted religio-political efforts.
In recent times, Sinhala Buddhists, in particular monks in Sri Lanka, famously called as ‘militant monks’ shared a precarious collective perception— a constructed imaginary that treats an increasing Muslim population, their business, and cultural practices as a form of Muslim fundamentalist terror. The monks demand the sovereign power of the country to address this terror and put Muslims in the ‘right place where they belong.’ Sangha participation in politics is not a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka, but this demand to be sovereign in the country is new which informs the practical experience and consciousness of ordinary citizens leading to real consequences that interrupt state sovereignty as a mode of governance—a process I call ‘third wave monks’ politics.’ While monks involved in the third wave argue that they enact a deeply historical past precedent stretching to the early centuries, I underscore the relative novelty of their demand to be sovereign and current projects and ambitions, rooted only in the last two centuries.
The modernist transformation of southern Buddhism intensified in relation to Christian discourses that challenged Buddhist morality and practice during the colonial era. Buddhists’ revivalist projects endeavored to reorient laity towards Dhamma-following, and away from vernacular religion. In Sri Lanka, this laicization ideal-typically discouraged Sinhala Buddhists’ veneration of (ostensibly) “Hindu” deities, and sought to banish “superstition.” However, the last few decades have seen the arrival and growth of Pentecostalism—a Christian form that anthropologists characterize as “postmodern”. Pentecostalism takes spirits and deities to be materially very real. Religious modernization appears to have left Buddhist repertoires ill-equipped to respond to Pentecostalism. With this in view, this paper addresses the vernacular Buddhist deity and spirit possession, diabolizing Pentecostal rhetoric, and inter-Asian itineraries of spirits. The ethnography illustrates how vernacular Buddhists and Pentecostal Christians spar with, and misunderstand one another, as they respectively seek to retain roots, and gain new ground in Sri Lanka.
In 1905 Ma Nu, the daughter of one of the most prominent men in Rangoon was abducted by armed men and kept on a boat with E Maung for six weeks. Was this dramatic elopement against the wishes of powerful patriarch or a violent abduction of a vulnerable girl? The question hinged not on whether the two were in love, but on Ma Nu's religious identity. Under colonial law, if she was Buddhist it was a consensual marriage. If she was Hindu, she was incapable of consent or marriage to him. In this jumble of gender, sex and law by religious difference, when asked her religion, Ma Nu replied, "I am Hindu, and a Buddhist also." Working from Saba Mahmood's (2015) insights about how colonial secularism entwined the fates of minority religious identity and the gender, this paper explores how claims about sexual violence reify the boundaries of religious communities and force singular religious identities on people who otherwise lived lives multiple and fluid religious affinities.
After the coup in Burma/Myanmar, people criticized many prominent senior Sayadaws (abbots) for siding with the military as the regime committed atrocities throughout the country. However, the final outrage and ditch-down for one of the most powerful monks came in the form of “blasphemy”. The Sitagu Sayadaw opined that the Buddha had five hundred monks whenever he toured around because he needed protection from ill-wishers. This provoked a major public outrage as blasphemy since the Buddha could never be killed by someone. Considering how charges of blasphemy and heresy were used the State to control the monastics, this paper argues religious legitimacy as a Buddhist monk must have to come from the religion itself: the discursive power is socially located and once it is dislocated socially, it loses legitimacy and hence is called “blasphemous”. That is why even the revolution against the military dictatorship has to use the religious power of blasphemy to finally come to terms with the regime monks.
This roundtable takes a familiar subject in the study of North American Religion and American Catholicism–-the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton-–and reimagines his life and work as touchpoints in the sensorial production of religious lives and study in the modern world. An adult convert to Catholicism, Merton later joined the Trappist order of monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani outside of Bardstown, Kentucky, where he lived a contemplative, often writerly life, from 1949 until his untimely death in 1968. What we know about Merton is largely through examination of his many books and essays, published both during his lifetime and posthumously. But his life and work–even the work of reading and writing–was also engaged in intentional spiritual sensations of sound, sight, and touch. Each participant in this roundtable hones in on artifacts of Merton’s spiritual labor–sound, photograph, essay, reading–and unpacks them from the participants’ stated disciplinary and professional positions.
