Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

Science and religion are not natural kinds, but they are constructs of our pragmatic and secular life-world. Their future looks good as long as the life-world upon which they depend persists. This short paper explores what might bring that life-world to an end, and then imagines what a resurrected Western Christian faith undergirding a new natural philosophy might look like, after science and religion have died.

The ‘After Science and Religion’ project has included notably criticisms of the influence of a scientific mindset on Western intellectual culture, alongside a deflationary sense of the role of attention to natural science for theology. Here, I argue that the same metaphysical framework that is in play in these criticisms (broadly scholastic, and with particular sympathy for the Radical Orthodoxy school) points rather in the other direction (on account of its metaphysical and epistemological realism), and that the natural sciences – as they are actually practiced, and not as they are presented in rather a decontextualized fashion – could be more of an ally than an enemy in getting beyond the reality that these ‘After Science and Religion’ authors see as denuded, and have criticized.

What makes for the appearance of incompatibility between science and religion? Some contributors to the “After Science and Religion” project attribute incompatibility to scientists’ assumption of naturalism. In this paper, I argue that the appearance of incompatibility actually stems from upstream theological assumptions about the meaning of the Christian doctrine of creation. In particular, an overemphasis on creaturely participation in God as the consequence of creation can lead to a view that finds non-participatory outlooks, such as naturalism, totally incompatible with theism. I offer an alternative reading of creation as a corrective, which emphasizes the difference between creatures and Creator. Keeping this difference in view creates room for the study of the natural world apart from explicit reference to God, and for a theological reason: the “ever greater dissimilarity” between Creator and creature warrants a mode of explanation that seeks to understand creatures as different than God.

This paper discusses the relationship between the field of science & religion and what has come to be known as “science-engaged theology,” with a particular emphasis on the methodological debates and “turf wars” that inevitably arise in such disciplinary evolution. It is argued that while science-engaged theology’s emphasis on disciplinary and thematic specificity has been a productive advance within the more general area of science & religion, ongoing methodological debates about the “correct” way to conduct such research continue to prove unhelpful. The paper claims that future progress in science & religion and science-engaged theology will be dependent on an expansive and inclusive posture amongst scholars, such that a variety of methods and commitments are seen as necessary for the overall organismic flourishing of the science & religion research area.

Many of the contributors to the “After Science & Religion” project suggest that the methodological naturalism of scientific practice inevitably entails metaphysical naturalism. Ironically, these authors agree with Christian physicalists, members of the Science & Religion field, who maintain that the successes of neuroscience render the soul obsolete. This paper offers a theological interpretation of the successes of neuroscience that draws on both the theory of the incomprehensibility of the human being developed by Gregory of Nyssa and recent work in the philosophy of scientific models. This reinterpretation of neuroscientific success allows theologians to value neuroscientific models that rely on the mind-brain identity thesis without dismissing traditional beliefs in a separable soul. This paper models a more local approach to “Science & Religion” that focuses on particular concerns arising from particular sciences in the context of a particular theological tradition.

This paper looks at the identity of the science-and-religion discipline and asks where the present concerns about essentialism are taking us. I look critically at the After project's concerns about scientism and methodological naturalism, and suggest that a constructive way forward might be to start thinking about the disciplinary identifier of 'theology of science':  a cousin to history of science and philosophy of science, both of which disciplines are fully essentialist in name if not in practice.

This paper evaluates the philosophical conclusions that Harrison draws from his anti-essentialist philosophy in the two volumes associated with the “After Science and Religion Project.” While I agree with Harrison’s criticisms concerning early scholarship in science and religion and value his historical scholarship, this article raises questions about the philosophical conclusions that Harrison draws from the history of science. I worry that Harrison’s project is too skeptical towards the categories “science” and “religion” and places too much emphasis on naturalism being incompatible with Christian theology. One can accept the lessons of anti-essentialism—above all, how meanings of terms shift over time—and still use the terms “science” and “religion” in responsible ways. I defend the basic impulse of most scholars in science and religion who promote dialogue; a complete rethinking of its intellectual foundations is unnecessary, much less is science and religion “dead,” as Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank and “After Science and Religion” project participant has recently proclaimed.

The goal of this paper is to explore the influence Christianity has on the American Wiccans understanding of their own spirituality. I will argue that the way Wiccans discuss their spirituality uses an emotional language that was inherited from a Christian understanding of what it means to be religious. I will then expand on this by showing the influence emotions have on cultivating religious experience using psychological research to support this argument.

This study investigates the impact of two key concepts, "open and closed practices" and "unverified personal gnosis" (UPG), on chaplaincy in contemporary Paganism. Drawing on qualitative data gathered through surveys and interviews with Pagan chaplains, practitioners, and scholars, this study explores how these ideas transform chaplaincy in Pagan communities.

This study highlights the ways in which the concepts of open and closed practices and UPG are transforming chaplaincy in contemporary Paganism. As Pagan communities continue to evolve and grow, the role of chaplains will remain an important and dynamic part of the spiritual landscape. This paper will explore the skills and knowledge chaplains may develop to navigate the complexities of these concepts to provide effective and supportive pastoral care to all members of their communities.

The influence of secularization in paganism and occult practice is generating cultures of magical practice with secular aesthetics. These secular aesthetics appeal to scientific reasoning when seeking sources from which to draw traditional authority. Tulpamancy is a magical practice that struggles with the term ‘magic,’ despite originating from traditions without this challenge. Instead, tulpamancy describes a collection of meditative and visualization techniques that create a particular experience while embodying a secular aesthetic. This embodiment makes tulpamancy particularly salient to the discourse on magic and science. Whereas other inquiries might reductively compartmentalize magical experience to engage it successfully with science or ethnographic theory, tulpamancy actively molds itself to that example. I suggest that this makes tulpamancy particularly salient to discourse on the relationship between emic experience and theory while providing valuable insight into non-sui generis models of practitioner experience and supernatural agent encounters.

Using the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, this paper will consider why an author might engage with sacred scriptures by examining the revelatory capacity of sacred and fictional texts. By employing the concept of the world of the text established by Paul Ricoeur, a common referential function emerges between sacred and fictional texts. A dialectic of revelation and imagination is used to solidify this function, and a dialectic of explanation and understanding is used to suggest that an author may engage with sacred scripture to extend its referential trajectory. This extension constitutes a unique instantiation of referential activity as a means of imaginative understanding. This reading, limited to texts associated with the Christian tradition, is beneficial to the extent that it can be adapted to account for fictional texts with differing intentions, whether that be in accordance or discordance with the scriptures to which they refer.

This paper examines an early poem of Marguerite of Navarre as a genre-blending response to Scripture that both performs its own self-authorization and invites a community of writers to further reading and literary production. Written in the early years of the reform movement (1520-1527), Marguerite’s Pater Noster was likely an early project toward her lifelong project of vernacularizing the Bible in France, as Luther had done in Germany. This paper, however, endeavors to bracket better studied questions of Marguerite’s historical context in favor of examining this text in terms framed by its genre(s): i.e., as a work that actively configures a loquacious relationship with Scripture, drawing on gendered generic codes and on the voices of biblical and visionary women. In closing, this paper suggests that Marguerite’s Pater Noster may be fruitfully read as a hospitable scene of composition, one that invites further Scriptural reflection and creative response

Just as the frightened Pip of Melville’s Moby-Dick jumps overboard in pursuit of the whale, one also feels scared shipless when interpreting this whale of a novel. Recent scholarship on religion and Moby-Dick has addressed the book’s obsession with theodicy, while others have focused on the story’s irreducible religious meanings. Romantic irony, I contend, is a more appropriate frame of interpretation for Moby-Dick because Melville, like other Romantics, is not bemoaning just the lack of justice or stability in the world, but also a lack or absence of the divine. Romantic irony, and the resulting disorientation, vertigo, and seasickness constitute the greatest moments of divine intensity in the novel, whereby Melville fuses moments in which high themes meet the low and the divine meets chaos. In doing so, Melville anticipates modernist James Joyce, who re-wrote one cornerstone of Western literature, The Odyssey, as Melville too re-writes another, the Holy Bible.

This presentation explores exceptional dimensions of Islamic calligraphy as practiced by selected masters from Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and China and reassesses their roles as religious cultural ambassadors.  Distinguished in their respective countries, these calligraphers have also developed reputations abroad: their works figure in major collections; each has made seminal contributions to their field; and each is a scholar as well as instructor of their art. Of particular interest, they have attained recognition in the genealogical system of Islamic instruction by obtaining ijazas (authorizations) from recognized masters, and they have also earned doctorates or similar degrees from state institutions of education. They are therefore doubly authoritative wherever they practice, and they effectively perform roles of international outreach. They augment this in publishing original studies in which they reproduce Islamic genres of text and scripture, some in multi-lingual formats. Closer to home, their work may present them with unanticipated cultural-political challenges.

This paper critically evaluates ways in which ancestor traditions (what Paulin Batairwa Kubuya calls “ancestor religion”) have been interpreted in both Chinese and African settings. The aim is not to recover notions of an a priori universalism for comparative inquiry into two traditions as polyvalent as Chinese and African ancestral traditions, which are diverse in each case, but, by exploring patterns of “Christian conversations” on these traditions (fraught, controversial, or constructive - ranging from the political, to the proselytizing, to the intimate, to the conciliatory, and the theologically constructive) found in historical ethnography (including empirical findings), to critique how Christian ethnography has pronounced upon the ancestral rite across cultures. The comparative reconstruction of this conversation conceives of ethnography as a joint negotiation among insider-informants and non-insiders acting as cultural translators and interpreters, albeit with their own agendas, rather than the imposed interpretations of the cultural outsider alone.

The paper explores the intersections of Haitian Vodou and structured injustice against black bodies and communities in the USA. Haitian migrants in Miami-Florida who practice Vodou live in two parallel worlds as far as questions of criminality and justice are concerned—one world is informed by Vodou discourse and the other by the culture of the American legal and criminal justice systems with the institutions designed to enforce them. The research considers ways ritual agents, especially, Mambos deploy models in Haitian Vodou in contesting ‘blackness’ in the USA —an effect of the structural injustice and violence of black bodies and communities.

The research involves fieldwork among members of the Vodou Holistic Center in South Florida, living in Pembroke Pines and Little Haiti. These religious agents perform their religions under imperial duress whereby the hegemonies under which they live as migrants criminalize their bodies and practices, even describing some as criminal.

This paper explores how farmers in the village of Bakayo maintain peace and solidarity with their migrant neighbors through mutual funeral participation in Post-conflict Cote d’Ivoire. Violent conflict struck Côte d’Ivoire from 2002 to 2011, charged by nationalist discourse and xenophobia against immigrants.  This paper takes us to the village of Bakayo, home of Bété-speakers. Beginning in the 1960s, the Bété-speakers gave uncultivated land to immigrants from Burkina Faso, namely Mossi, through a system of land-sharing known as “tutorat.”  One of the main stipulations of this system is that the Mossi must help Bété with their expensive and elaborate funerals. Based on my fieldwork in Cote d’Ivoire from 2022-2023, I argue that the inter-ethnic participation found at funerals in Bakayo provides us all a new means of looking at peace and conflict, as the people of Bakayo build peace their own way, finding reconciliation through death in Post-conflict Côte d’Ivoire.

In this paper, I explore the relationship between Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and Africana religion. I maintain that while Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and Africana religion arise from similar ontogenic, sociogenic, and egogenic impulses, there has been a lack of engagement across their literary and theoretical domains. Such a state of affairs has meant a missed opportunity to imagine innovative and potentially liberative ontologies.

Drawing upon interviews with Adivasi (indigenous) Christians in India as well as my own experience as a new mother during the pandemic, I highlight the challenges for moving beyond place-based and geographically tied religious expressions. Although digital media offers enormous potential for cross-cultural engagement, I argue that it has not and is not likely ever to result in a boundary-less Christianity. Interweaving ethnography and autobiography, I explore the ways that boundaries reflect our earthly attachments to places, people, and things. I suggest that Christianity, as an incarnational faith, calls us to engage with rather than try to transcend these earthly attachments.

This paper situates the influence of transnational linkages of Nigerian (African) Pentecostal gospel music (NPGM) with its diverse languages within the discipline of World Christianity. It focuses insight on Nigerian women’s use of technology to assert their spiritual, cultural, and economic relevance in broadening the frontiers of World Christianity towards ecumenism. The women, considered subalterns and unclean in ritual places, have become valuable resources for advancing ecumenism in world Christianity. The presence of NPGM in unexpected global religious landscapes points to the “reverse mission” theory advanced by scholars. While human migration has been the focus of scholarly debate, this dimension of NPGM transnational migration is yet to be widely researched. Therefore, this paper utilizes multiple disciplines to theorize how Nigerian women use technology to reshape and make expressive contributions to transnational religious practice and affirm how World Christianity could be more inclusive of different voices, particularly those of subaltern women.

Boundarylessness is proposed as a guiding methodology for studies of World Christianity. Boundary-crossing has always been a major theme in the field of World Christianity. It can be problematic if it reiterates national borders, continents, languages, and world religions as “natural,” but it does not have to essentialize such boundaries. Instead, it can point to the dynamism and incoherence at the heart of Christian claims, especially to the ways in which cultural assumptions have been continually reiterated and naturalized from the very first years of the Christian movement.

As a method then, boundarylessness makes such “natural” assumptions queer again, opening up space for new discourses, both critical and constructive. The classic canon of Christian theology, for instance, seems strangely over-reliant on Greco-Roman foundations, whether in scholasticism, Protestant Reformation, or Enlightenment. Questions of “authenticity” and “indigeneity” also seem misplaced. Instead, boundarylessness focuses on the changing negotiations that constitute Christian authority. 

The Gobi is not a consensual idea. It is a contrarian stage of desire and repulsion, of mobility and obstruction. Forged in the negative space of sea, sky, and land, the material Gobi has long been a membrane of past and the present; so much sand blowing and settling atop the longue durée of its ecology. How were those who sought to overcome the absence that marks its vast topography—whether Buddhist philosophers or paleontologists, prophets or botanists, tantric hermits or archaeologists—made anew in time by working with and through the planes of its geologic media?

In Kathmandu, Newar women, known as dyaḥmāṃ, while possessed by the Buddhist goddess Hāratī and her children perform ritual healings and divinations for clients in their living rooms. On possession days, clients come seeking solutions to their problems. Devotees chant in unison, the dyaḥmāṃ inhales smoke, then she sits on her throne, and the event ends with her swallowing a burning piece of string. The solutions to client’s problems involve substances such as rice, incense, and water, and implements such as a vajra and a broom. Throughout the session, these items are manipulated and deployed by the dyaḥmāṃ in various ways. How do these concrete items participate and how are they used in the discourse of ritual success and failure? Using ethnographic data, this paper will consider the role of these materials in constructing the intersubjective notion of ritual success, and ritual failure, especially as it pertains to healing rituals.

The Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa (Mmk) outlines in exacting detail the labor-intensive crafting of the ritual cloth (paṭa). However, the text also offers an easier abbreviated ritual without compromising on efficacy. Anticipating a degenerate future when performing elaborate rituals would be impossible, the text allows us to explore the changing relationship between practitioners and ritual material. Focusing on the role of ritual objects in early Buddhist tantra, the paper examines the flexibility that the Mmk envisions for ritual material. The crafting process employs oral (mantras), visual (painting) and tactile (grasping the cloth where the practitioner’s image is painted) means through which the practitioner is transformed and transported from the periphery of the paṭa to the center. The paper complicates the transformational potency of the paṭa by analyzing the dynamic crafting process, which straddles the specialized ritual sphere as well as the public space of the fabric bazaar where the paṭa is born.

This paper considers questions of ritual expertise and efficacy by examining Tibetan Buddhist bodily preservation practices and the hands-on work of transforming the corpses of Tibetan lamas into whole-body relics. Instructions for how to handle the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s (Thubten Gyatso, 1876–1933) remains are detailed in a little-studied embalming treatise by the Gelugpa scholar Phabongkha Dechen Nyingpo (1878–1941). In the manual, three potent mortuary substances emerge as primary active ingredients: corpse salt (pur tshwa) as an embalming agent and quasi-relic; mercury (dngul chu) as a purgative (sku sbyong); and milk (’o ma) as a litmus test of efficacy. Mapping the lifecycles of these ingredients alongside technical inflection points in Phabongkha’s text, this study considers what signs of ritual success look like in materially embedded—and embodied—terms for Tibetan caretakers who specialize in and preside over the “special dead.”

This paper examines how the inclusion of medicinal botanical substances with purgative and cleansing properties in the Tibetan Treasure revealer Guru Chöwang’s (1212–1270) Buddhist relic pill known as the “maṇi pill” could have contributed to its sense of efficacy and popularity in thirteenth-century Tibet. The discussion traces in particular the material properties, histories, and valances of two substances that figure as key ingredients in Guru Chöwang’s maṇi-pill tradition: tarnu (thar nu) and takngu (rtag ngu). It relates the properties of these botanical substances to details in Guru Chöwang’s maṇi-pill consecration liturgies, which feature Avalokiteśvara and his mantra, and promise that consumption of a pill will result in rebirth in his pure land. In so doing, it argues that the pharmacological properties of these substances worked hand in hand with liturgical imagery and aims to produce an embodied sense of efficacy above and beyond the sum of its parts.