Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Since early modern Iran (16th century), the covering with black Muharram banners (Siyah-Poushan) was a visual call for practitioners; a sign for Shias to adopt a solemn attitude at the start of the Muharram annual mourning ritual. Muharram calligraphic banners, like a mnemonic device, evoke emotions and a spiritual environment in Shia Society to honor the martyrdom of Husain-ibn-Ali (680 CE). This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach combining ritual study, art history, material culture studies, and religious history to display Muharram banners as a multi faceted religious object and a symbol of Shia belief that objectively shaped a ritual. Therefore, those are not only sign of sadness and mourning for unjust killing, as reflected in the martyrdom of Husain-ibn-Ali, but also a materialistic conscience that provide a powerful visual signal that creates community through ritual praxis and identity formation.

In a TikTok post, user @sofiapena00 dances to a Mexican cumbia song while wearing hijab, celebrating being the first and only Muslim in her family. She voices her frustration with being perceived as too religious by Mexicans yet not religious enough in hegemonic Muslim spaces. This content is increasingly visible on TikTok, where Latina converts to Islam challenge normative portraits of Muslim piety by reclaiming ethnic and national identities. This paper explores a variety of TikTok performances that intertwine Latinindad and Muslimness to examine how Latina Muslims negotiate their faith and culture against those who deem their identity and practice as “un-Islamic.” I look at how TikTok trends, including music and dance, are utilized to counter claims around social legibility and the discursive formations they foster. Attention is paid to how intersecting layers of marginalization, including race and gender, play a role in the discursive production of this content.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s “call” (daʿwa) materialized through multiple forms of print media, including magazines and books. Through textual practices of daʿwa, Brotherhood activists envisioned the sound transmission of Islamic knowledge as resting primarily upon embodied relationships and affective bonds among individuals. The Brotherhood’s bibliocentric approach thus aimed to use textuality to exceed the bounds of print—the media itself was not the message, but was rather a medium consciously embraced to cultivate embodied Islam in everyday life. This presentation demonstrates how modern Islamic print culture combines strategic textuality with the expression of Islamic piety in the supra-textual mundane. A critical aspect of the art of daʿwa, as the Brotherhood understood it, was the demonstration of virtue in lived relationships. Brotherhood activists thus sought to inculcate an affective regime that emphasized the efficacy of charisma and the development of affective power itself as a technique capable of establishing Islam.

This paper analyzes how senses and emotions motivate halal consumption in Philadelphia. Specifically, it focuses on an ambiguous smell at a halal butcher that to one Muslim smells "suss" and to another smells "intimate." I show how these two smells motivate these two consumers in opposite directions, which both emerges from and shapes their respective enactments of Islamic tradition. This paper is based on 12 months of extensive site visits, formal interviews, and digital mapping of halal consumption in Philadelphia. Theoretically, it builds on conceptualizations of Islamic senses (Hirschkind 2006) and affects (Elias 2018; Chan-Malik 2018; Khoja-Moolji 2021) to show how Islamic tradition shapes and is shaped by the local acts of everyday consumption and the emotions that motivate them. Ultimately, I show how ethnographies of Islamic emotions, affects, and material culture can clarify formation of Islamic difference along lines of class, race, and devotion.

On October 25, 2022, Rishi Sunak became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The British-born Hindu quickly garnered attention from Hindu nationalists within India and the diaspora. Beginning before this appointment was confirmed, Hindu nationalists took to social media to praise the lion of India who would right the wrongs done to India under British colonialism. I have analyzed hours of videos, social media posts, and other mass media productions by Hindu nationalists that laud Rishi Sunak as a secret operative for the movement. By tracing the origins of Hindu nationalism from its beginning to the present day, I explore how the Indian diaspora has played a role in the creation and proliferation of Hindu nationalism. This research is ongoing as new memes and posts are created daily, all this while Rishi Sunak has yet to address the Hindu nationalist claims leveraged against him.

Since 2018, fans around the globe have celebrated the Korean pop group BTS’s birthdays through local pop-up cafés. Through exclusive swag (특전) such as cup sleeves, photocards, and stickers, these fans share memories of the special BTS member, highlight meanings they found in their relationships with him, and form a welcoming community among other fans. Considering the global pop-up cafes as a global religious movement, this paper draws a parallel between this movement and past celebrations of another global celebrity: Jesus—particularly, the representation of Jesus as a white man. This paper examines how the global religious project of white Jesus in an early twentieth-century transpacific context grew into a global celebrity culture through collective acts of imagination. By circulating and interacting with the white Jesus figure, many Koreans imagined, revised, and reconstituted stories of Jesus into their own identity formation process—all while undergoing Japanese colonization.

In his lifetime, Mahatma Gandhi was a global icon that captivated international audiences. Among them was colonial Korea. In 1926, the president of the Dong-a Ilbo (East Asia Daily) in colonial Korea proclaimed Gandhi to be “not a stranger, but a beloved leader of our own.” This paper examines the popularity, multiplicity, and ambiguity of the imagined Gandhi in colonial Korea between 1920 and 1934. The cultural knowledge on Gandhi generated by colonial Korea’s mass media connected the faraway land of India to Korea’s own nationalist movement. I argue that what was at stake in the many (mis)representations of Gandhi is the relationship between religion and politics and the possibility/impossibility of decolonization as a religious, spiritual, and moral project. “How Gandhi was culturally represented” had a more real effect in colonial Korea’s religion and politics than “what Gandhi really was,” destabilizing how scholars conceptualize authenticity and religiosity.

How do American Muslim advocates imagine the public role of religion in the U.S. today? Research on public religion in the U.S. has mostly focused on Christian groups. Empirically, this focus prevented researchers from asking the crucial question of how non-Christian religious groups adopt and adapt repertoires of public religious expressions circulating in U.S. civic culture. Theoretically, expanding our inquiry to non-dominant religious groups provides insights into the possibilities for imagining different modes of public religious expressions in U.S. civic life. What can non-dominant religious groups do to push the boundaries of Christian-infused modes of public religion? Through two years of participant observation in two Muslim advocacy organizations, I identified different styles of public Islam that American Muslim advocates use in U.S. civic life and theorize the filtering mechanisms that prevent certain expressions of public Islam to reach wider audiences, thus foregrounding the power imbalances that shape U.S. civic spaces.

How do American diasporas negotiate their faith, liberty, and public space in the face of both interreligious and intrareligious challenges? What kind of tensions and complexities arise, from inside and outside, when they opt for pluralistic approaches over confrontation and legal action? Addressing these questions at the intersection of civic space, religious pluralism, and public understanding of religion, this paper rethinks the category “public” in the context of religious diversity to argue that conflicts concerning religious publics can be solved by rising above the private-public, political-personal, secular-religious dichotomies in which public religion is usually understood. Drawing from the social scientific and ethnographic research conducted in the Swaminarayan-Hindu diasporic community in America that faced years-long resistance from native publics in constructing its temples and cultural centers, the paper further contends that self-reflective and constructive conversations with the self and co-religionists can help enhance public understanding of religion, thereby promoting harmonious coexistence.

Through categorization and display, museums identify some things as religious, some things as exemplary of religions, and in so doing, help shape the public's understanding of religion. By analyzing how museums have categorized and displayed religious objects, I argue the public encounters religion through specific biases and definitions of religion that museums employ in their attempts to exhibit material culture they believe to be "religious." Through the analysis and study of museums—like the Vatican Museums, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, and the Brighton Museum—and the religious, scholars can investigate new ways of answering Laure Patton's question of "who owns religion," bolster Hugh Urban's claim that ordinary people help construct what counts as a religion, and shed new light on what Jonathan Z. Smith says counts as the academy in which he states religion has no place apart from.

Public health scientists often think about religion sociologically. Yet, many do not critically consider their assumptions and understandings of religion or cite scholars who define “religion.” This can lead public health scientists to draw on public assumptions of what “religion” is. Thus, I conducted a systematic analysis of scholarly work that included discussion of religion in the American Journal of Public Health to understand how religion is conceptualized among public health scientists. Three ways of understanding were most prominent: religion as institution, religion as theology, and religion as culture. Understanding religion as institution often led to seeing churches as resources; understanding religion as theology often led to seeing religion as negative beliefs to overcome; and religion as culture was often a stand-in for an ambiguous understanding of religion. This work urges sociologists of religion to examine the ways that public health scientists understand religion and reinforce biases within their scholarship.

I argue that unpaid labor is being transformed in the US through the promise of future monetization. First, I develop a concept of social agency in conversation with feminist accounts of reproductive labor. In short, social agency is the ability to produce and maintain the social identities and relationships which constitute a person’s subjectivity. Second, drawing on Foucault, I show how a market rationality captures and exploits people’s social agency so that their social identities, relationships, and even their sense of self become a means to the end of enhancing their value and the often false promise of future monetization. Finally, I argue that this new site of exploitation necessitates new forms of resistance. In union organizing, people’s collective agency is used against the very exploitation of that collective agency. In the same way, resistance to the social agency’s exploitation will need to make use of people’s social agency.

       The distance between the American university's professed commitment to altruism on one hand, and its reliance upon underpaid labor on the other, widens with each passing year.  Unwilling and in some cases unable to pay just wages to employees, especially part-time faculty, institutions of higher education attempt to span this distance by equating academic labor with self-sacrifice.  Despite rapid secularization at many religiously-affiliated higher institutions in recent decades, leaders in the expanding higher education bureaucracy have proven adept at defining underpaid labor as quasi-religious sacrifice, particularly in the context of relationships between students and faculty.  With particular attention to recent developments at Roman Catholic colleges and universities, this presentation will demonstrate how a managerial class exploits a long-standing gap between Catholic social teaching and actual labor relations at Catholic institutions by means of sacrificial discourse, even at schools whose collective commitments to theology and religious practice have been marginalized.

The emergence of the COVID pandemic underscored the degree to which we are all dependent upon essential workers, including unpaid caregivers. Unfortunately, pregnant persons too often remain overlooked as caregiving, essential workers. We must better appreciate those who gestate, birth, and nurse our future firefighters, doctors, and janitors. This requires providing material appreciation, including maternity leave and expanded child tax credits. Those who do not perform the work of childbirth—a group largely composed of men—must contribute otherwise by redistributing its material burdens. However, those with uteruses have instead been subjected to forced pregnancy and childbirth, especially following the 2022 Dobbs decision. This contravenes, among other things, Christian commitments to suffer with our fellows when they suffer. As I argue in “La Labor de Nuestras Matrices”—a riff on this year’s presidential theme, invoking the work of our wombs—we must better appreciate the essential labor of pregnancy.

In this paper, I draw from Vasubandhu’s account of ignorance (avidyā) in his Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya to begin to model an account of moral ignorance. Arguing that ignorance is neither a negation of knowledge nor its absence, Vasubandhu instead claims that ignorance is an activity of opposing knowledge (Abk. III 28cd). By conceiving ignorance as an activity, Vasubandhu’s account allows us to explain the mechanisms of moral ignorance (both psychological and socially), the evasiveness and tenacity of moral ignorance, as well as its relationship to false beliefs. I argue that this account of moral ignorance as activity is better suited to explain the nature and function of moral ignorance than competing accounts.

This paper aims at clarifying the nature of the elemental ignorance (āveṇikī-avidyā) and its relation to the afflicted mentation (kliṣṭaṁ manas). In the eight-cognition (vijñāna) model of the Yogācāra system, the afflicted mentation has been considered a synonym of self-consciousness—the view of one’s own temporospatial continuum as real, everlasting existence—and hence an ultimate target of elimination. According to the Mahāyānasaṁgraha, this wrong view of self is bred through something more fundamental, that is, through ignorance. A concept originated from the Sarvāstivādin tradition, the elemental ignorance should not be viewed as an elemental entity independent of ignorance; rather, it is the aspect/modality of ignorance that captures and represent collectively its dharmic characteristics. By rejecting the possibility of its presence in the first six cognitions, the Mahāyānasaṁgraha argues for an additional cognition to accommodate ignorance which constitutes the cause of suffering and rebirth.

This paper investigates the issue of how sentient beings come to be ignorant or non-awakening (bujue 不覺) according to the Tathāgatagarbha tradition by asking three questions: (1) If the mind is originally pure, then how could there arise ignorance that veils the mind? (2) If the mind is originally pure and somehow becomes veiled by ignorance, then what would be the first symptom of the mind’s mixture with ignorance? (3) What would be the state where ignorance has been totally removed? This paper suggests that (1) Neither the Śrīmālādevīsaṃhanāda-sūtra nor the Awakening of Faith identify the origin of ignorance; (2) Following the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, the Awakening of Faith identifies the function of mind, mentation and consciousnesses (including the arising of mental representations) as the first symptom of ignorance; (3) After the elimination of mind, mentation and consciousnesses, what remains is the reflexive noble awareness.

Meditation as practiced in Buddhist traditions and contemporary Micro-phenomenology are two methods for the empirical investigation of lived experience. Even if their goals are different (respectively soteriological and pragmatic), both practices start from a disturbing observation: our lived experience, which is what is most intimate and closest to us, escapes us. We do not see it as it is, we need training and apprenticeship to learn to recognize what, nevertheless, is there. Both practices offer various "skillful means" to elicit this recognition, to unveil what is hidden. However, surprisingly, neither of these, offer much by way of precise procedural descriptions of the veiling and unveiling processes. From written and oral meditation teachings on the one hand, and microphenomenological interviews applied to meditative experience and to the interviews themselves on the other, we tried to collect procedural descriptions of the veiling micro-gestures, of the unveiling micro-gestures, that is, the gestures through which veils dissipate, and to compare the devices used by meditation and by microphenomenology to elicit this unveiling. I will present the most salient aspects of this study.

In the Dzogchen traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, relinquishing effort is a central instruction when it comes to practices oriented toward discovering the nature of one’s own mind. What do meditation practitioners do, how do they respond and what do they experience as they seek to engage in this normative ideal of effortlessness? What, if any, phenomenological experience is reportable from states of consciousness said to transcend language and the subject-object structure of ordinary experience. This last is an open question. Nevertheless, micro-phenomenology produces fine-grained descriptions of microgestures of attention and embodied experience, offering rich nuance to the growing body of (neuro-) scientific research on nondual practices. Based on repeated interviews with twelve experienced practitioners and with teachers of Dzogchen, this study explores the edge of awareness - what happens just before and/or just after moments or stretches of contemplative deepening in the direction of nonduality. Taking a close look at these may help unpack the process, phenomenology and practices towards effortless meditation. That is the focus of this paper.

This paper focuses on micro-phenomenological interviews I collected in the United States and Nepal. The discussions in then address two points: 1. interview structures of practitioners and 2. how culture affects their perceptions, as disclosed in the interviews. In order to elicit specific experiences, the interview process uses prompts like “bring your teacher to mind,” or “recall a moment when you felt love for your teacher.” Questions I consider are: Can interviews across cultures be compared? What cautions or considerations apply, for example, in optimally understanding a Nepal/Tibetan cultural experience of tsewa (tenderness, intimacy) when compared with responses of an American participant? These micro-phenomenological interviews focus on very short moments of experience; another type of interview is the lifestory interview which provide additional background on how interviewees made meaning from the prompts. My interviewees are from different cultural and language backgrounds, and therefore my paper asks how to analyze data across language and cultural boundaries. A working hypothesis is that at least some micro-experiences may not be limited to particular cultural or language contexts.

Based on a film and fieldwork project with Sufis in Egypt, I reflect on how microphenomenological interviews and audio-visual media can be combined to describe religious experience. Micro-phenomenology provides a powerful tool to identify subtle and often unrecognized structures of lived experience. The interviewer helps the interviewee evoke a concrete experience by recounting the experience with the words of the interviewee, and then asking simple questions that allow the interviewee to retrieve further dimensions of the experience. The medium of film, as developed in the discipline of visual and multimodal anthropology, provides complimentary opportunities for enabling micro-level analyses of the verbal, bodily, and emotional interactions between research participants, researchers, and the environments in which particular kinds of experience emerge. By using film excerpts from everyday situations, ritual practices, and interviews as the basis for reflection and feedback, I suggest how a research project can be established as a joint collaboration between research participants and researchers. Furthermore, film can be used to communicate and assess the structures of lived experience that can be revealed through micro-phenomenology.

This talk will engage in comparative theology to compare Jain conceptions of the non-one-sidedness of reality (anekāntavāda) to Jewish conceptions of pluralism. Often the comparison has been made in popular accounts but with insufficient knowledge of the actual Jain position. This paper will attempt to clear up various misreadings of the comparison to look for similarities.  In addition, the Jewish concepts have often been read as literary indeterminacy, as textual infinites.  We will explore how the anekāntavāda position generally does not use inference or textuality, but the Jewish pluralism creates a cognitive pluralism based on inference and texts.  We will also look at the concept of omniscient beings as transcending the plurality. Finally, we will conclude with observations on how the comparison to Kabbalah can illuminate Jain doctrine.

The Jain teaching of the non-one-sidedness of reality (anekāntavāda) is of great interest to philosophers and theologians who seek to apply this concept to the diversity of worldviews, in the name of developing a pluralistic philosophy aimed at cultivating greater harmony amongst the adherents of the world’s religions and philosophies. Similarly, a central teaching of Vijñāna Vedānta, the worldview propounded by the modern Hindu teacher Sri Ramakrishna and his pre-eminent disciple, Swami Vivekananda, is dharmasamanvaya, or the harmony of religions, which claims that many religions can lead to the goal of the realization of humanity’s true, divine nature. This paper will seek to outline how each of these doctrines can be enhanced by the other.

The starting point for this paper is the discussion of passages from the Ācārāṅgasūtra, which instruct the renouncer on the appropriate relation to non-human life. Further lessons about the interaction between human and non-human life can be taken from Jain art, such as the statues of Bahubali or Parshvanatha, whose iconography combines the human figure with animal or plant life. The paper will relate these Jain attitudes to passages and artistic depictions from Christianity. I will focus on the painting “Saint Francis with the Animals” by Lambert de Hondt and Willem van Herp the Elder and discuss how this painting exemplifies Christian ideals of human/non-human relationships in ways that are comparable to the Jain statues. The claim of the paper will be that the human is in both traditions not decentered in favor of the non-human but to direct the human’s attention to a higher reality.

By approaching with the lens of comparative theology, this paper aims at reading literary compositions on the Jain Goddess Padmāvatī in the light of Goddesses in Cāraṇī literature. While goddess worship is integral to the Cāraṇs' theological and religious life, it has arguably remained marginal and relegated in Jain tradition. By reflecting on the distinction as mentioned earlier and then by ways of juxtaposing the similarities in the literary style, language, and motif used in both Jain and Cāraṇī literature on goddesses, I explore and discuss that Padmāvatī, a non-liberated female deity of the Jain pantheon is elevated as an object of bhakti; and śakti, the divine feminine energy in the same manner as goddesses are being depicted in Cāraṇī literature. By doing so, I address the tension and creative solution Jain literature uses to negotiate Padmāvatī's identity in Jain theological setting. 

While work has been done on Buddhism and ecology, and a few studies have been devoted to bringing together Buddhist ideas and those of Bruno Latour, it is remarkable that there has been virtually no comparative work done on Latour’s thought and that of one of Buddhism’s most highly developed philosophical traditions, Middle Way (Madhyamaka). In this paper I compare Latour’s thought in Facing Gaia and Irreductions to that of the Tibetan Buddhist philosphers Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa and Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje. By putting their ideas into conversations, I offer new ways forward in the tradition of Latour’s philosophy.

This paper analyzes the potential for an eco-political theology that is inclusive of participants in both animal and plant communities. It examines the nature politics and network theory of Bruno Latour in dialogue with ontology of flesh developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These are then re-constructed through an examination of often neglected lectures series by Merleau-Ponty where a Marxist revolutionary framework is applied to the natural relations between the human and more-than-human worlds. The paper concludes with constructive proposals for the participation of religious communities within such an eco-political theology that examines the role of grief and green criminology within an ecocidal industrial-extractive politics.

In their study of modern scientific self-narration, the philosophers of science Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers offer a novel approach to the question of how to think philosophically about and with religion. The unifying factor between these thinkers is an engagement with Catholicism both as a historical institution and the signature of a philosophical idiom. Focusing on how their work emerges out of the fraught dual-identity of Catholicism, far from binding the act of critique to a given religious doctrine, instead opens a field of inquiry, discourse, and even contestation, out of which may spring new possibilities for speculative thought.

This paper, drawn from a larger book project, will consider the discrete depictions of phenomenology of touch in the work of two contemporary theorists: Luce Irigaray and Karen Barad. Specifically, I consider the importance of touch as elaborated in Irigaray’s self-proclaimed “phenomenology of desire” (Sharing the Fire, Palgrave, 2022) and in Barad’s agential realism. In their preservation of radical alterity and their anti-metaphysical approach to materiality, both thinkers might be read in relation to the tradition of transcendental phenomenology. I focus on both thinkers’ recent works in which they imagine the very constitution of being in terms of touching, and in this way, they establish a certain ontology of touching—a relationality in difference that could ground a phenomenology of perception that preserves radical alterity. Importantly, these thinkers reimagine touch itself in a way toward a post-metaphysical materiality and transcendence.

According to Tracy Fessenden, religion in American literature has been hidden behind the secular. Good religion is transparent and good literature is non-religious. The aspiration of non-Protestant religions seeking acceptance in America was to make themselves transparent and leave their religious views out of their writing. For Muslim American poets, it would be best not to talk about one's Muslimness and to keep one's beliefs to themselves for the sake of literary acceptance. This paper looks at the role of Islam in the poetry of Fatimah Asghar and Kaveh Akbar, who challenge this view of the relationship between religion and literature, even as they situate themselves much differently in relation to Islam. What these poets have in common is that their work reveals the inextricability of religion from bodies. Religion shapes bodies and is marked on bodies in ways that cannot be neatly incorporated into American secularism as currently constructed.

The poetry of the renowned poet monk Taixu 太虚 (1890-1947) offers a unique perspective on the classical Chinese image of the "lamp and candle", exploring its Buddhist meanings and literary characteristics. Through his continuous writing, Taixu draws upon a rich cultural heritage, incorporating elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism into his verse. His poetry is characterized by evocative imagery and philosophical depth, reflecting Taixu's expression of personal emotions. This article offers a hitherto unexplored assessment of Taixu's literary achievements as a poet, focusing on his use of the classical Chinese image "lamp and candle". Through a detailed analysis of this image in his poetry, this study sheds new light on the role of classical Chinese imagery in the development of modern Buddhist poetry. The article contributes to the fields of Chinese literature, Buddhist studies, and comparative religion, providing insight into the intersection of artistic expression and spiritual practice.

A consensus in the field of Jewish Studies holds that modern Jewish literature is a secular phenomenon. While religion per se is undoubtedly a muted theme in the literary production of Jews, this does not exhaust how Jewish writers have engaged with theological idioms. This paper asks about the theological valence of the Jewish literary secular through a reading of absence, negativity, and relationality in the writings of philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) and poet Anna Margolin (1887-1952). Focusing on the poem “Mary’s Prayer [Maris tfile]” alongside her broader use of the rhetorical figure of apostrophe, I show how Margolin fashions a poetic subjectivity that leverages theological tropes to blur boundaries between Jew and Christian, absence and presence, silence and speech. In so doing, I ask how poetics, for Margolin, becomes a practice of relational subjectivity and its ruptures, one that critically departs from predominant modes of modern Jewish identity.

In this paper, I explore the religious and ethical significance of contemporary San Antonio-based Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetics of the small and ordinary in conversation with Latino Catholic theologian Alejandro García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics of “lifting up the lowly.” First, I offer a description of Nye’s poetics of smallness in the context of American-led wars in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, I utilize García-Rivera’s concept of poetic “foregrounding,” or “lifting up the lowly,” wherein the poetic violates the aesthetic norm by “lifting up” something that had been in the background of attention. I argue that in Nye’s poetry, this act of “lifting up the lowly” reveals the sacredness of those overlooked by logics of military and religious violence. Finally, I illustrate this poetic “foregrounding” in the poem “Holy Land,” which contrasts the ideas of holiness amongst religious patriarchs with that of Nye’s Palestinian grandmother, Sitti Khadra.