Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Religious iconography can be essential to political movements. Through imagery of hope and resistance, new theological imaginations are developed. This paper examines the imagery of Black Madonnas as a tool for resistance to the multidimensional oppression facing Black Christian women. Drawing on the works of theologians Kelly Brown Douglas, Albert Cleage, James Cone, Michelle Wolff, and philosopher Paul C. Taylor, among others, I will argue Black Madonnas both re-affirm the *Imago Dei* found in brown skin and represent the liberative vision at the heart of womanist theology. Through an examination of two works of public religious art, the *Black Madonna* in the Shrine of the Black Madonna #1 in Detroit and *Madonna and Child of Soweto* in Soweto, South Africa, this paper demonstrates the political power in these iconic works of art.

Fr Zinon (Teodor) is widely regarded as one of contemporary Russia’s most important—and controversial—iconographers. This paper argues that his work offers an alternative social-religious vision to that which is currently dominant in the Orthodox Church in Russia. The paper explores, in particular, the opportunity that Fr Zinon had in 2012–13 to realize his theological and artistic vision most fully, when he designed and executed the icons for the lower church of St Petersburg’s Feodorovskii Sobor. Fr Zinon asserts that the design of the lower church realizes what makes the church a loving community in which all members know themselves to be valued and in which they are able to participate actively in the Divine Liturgy and in loving service to others.

The Russo-Ukrainian war has prompted the creation of a great deal of marian iconography, where the Virgin is depicted as protecting and fighting. A notable example is the Javelin Madonna mural, with Mary carrying an anti-tank weapon, which was criticized by Ukrainian religious leaders as blasphemous. Although this critique rightly resists the politicization of religion, the accusation of blasphemy ignores the military symbolism within religious art of various traditions. I use Eastern Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary (which I compare with the Hindu representations of the goddess Durga), to illuminate some of the military features of the divine feminine. The key question I am trying to address is: what does a marian, i.e. feminine, military representation add to our understanding of religion and violence. Mary as Sophia, the Church/Polis and Women of Apocalypse allows us to keep the sacred and mundane together, and avoids an easy de-politicization of religion.

This paper posits an Anglican theology of iconographic practice, tracing shifts in Anglican engagement with Eastern Orthodox icons from 1888 to 2020, with reference to the Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue. It highlights a growing openness to iconography, reflecting a convergence with Orthodox theology on a range of theological topics over the past 50 years.  This culminates in the work of Rowan Williams, whose life-long interest in Eastern Orthodoxy lays a foundation for a uniquely Anglican interpretation of the icon.  The paper concludes with a case study of "Icons of Resilience" in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, General Theological Seminary, NYC. A trio of icons, depicting Alexander Crummell, Florence Li Tim-Oi, and Pauli Murray, both inspire students and promote practices of remembrance and repentance, rooted in Anglican baptismal theology. The Anglican appropriation of Orthodox iconography at General Seminary reveals a theology where theosis is intertwined with social holiness. 

This paper presents how Hajj, as one of the five pillars of Islam, modified and became a political ritual with aggressive aspects that represent political and sectarian conflicts and struggles between Saudi Arabia and Iran at both structural and individual levels in post-revolution of 1979. Theoretically, the paper is based on new formulation of political ritual concept and methodologically, it is based on content analysis of speeches, photos, open messages and Hajj costumes for Iranian pilgrims.  

This paper argues that early American civil defense drills, large-scale rehearsals for nuclear war performed in cities across the United States, are usefully interpreted as rituals inscribing new nuclear metaphysics. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) operated with the stated goal of preparing the nation for surviving atomic attack, even as planners privately acknowledged the implausibility of national survival. This paper argues that an under-theorized tactic—if not goal—of the FCDA was the transmission of a nuclear metaphysics assigning ultimate causative power to the bomb itself. Bringing scholarship on civil defense from the fields of affect theory, performance studies, and cultural criticism into contact with the framework of ritual to reevaluate the FCDA archive allows a clearer evaluation of these metaphysics. This paper further argues that the reinscription of the bomb as a metaphysical entity rendered invisible all forms of imperial violence other than total nuclear war.

For centuries, civilizations and communities around the world have utilized ceremonial rites of passage to welcome home returning warriors. Yet today, veteran reintegration into society after being deployed in a war context is often a fraught process. We don’t have a standardized ritual or a structured method of offering returning soldiers a sense of purification, emotional release, or the time and space for personal healing. When soldiers are too quickly reintegrated it can be detrimental to their mental health, overall well-being, and the well-being of their families. In a similar vein, people returning to society after incarceration are often plagued by both the trauma of their past actions and their experiences in prison. Yet a rite of purification and intentional reintegration is not part of the prison release process. In this paper I utilize Turner’s social drama theory to examine two organizations tat offer models of what a reintegration ritual might look like.

This paper presentation explores Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology in a creative undergraduate course titled *Abuelita Theology* (Grandma Theology). This course integrates sources from U.S. Latina/x and Mujerista theologies and uses *Abuelita Theology* as a metaphor for understanding grassroots wisdom and everyday practices (lo cotidiano) as a theological source. In this course, students are active participants who learn and create new knowledge. In addition, students are encouraged to correlate the class sources with their own lived experiences, social locations, and faith identities as a liberatory practice. This presentation will provide examples of a creative participatory and reflective action practice (praxis) of storytelling used within the course. By Engaging the people as active participants, as they articulate and reflect theologically on their practices, we can reimagine and bring new insights and action to practical theology, the church, and the larger community in the twenty-first century.

Member checking, also known as respondent validation, is a common qualitative research practice that involves presenting written data to participants in order to receive feedback and check for inaccuracies. While often cited within longer lists of techniques for validating research, member checking holds the potential for bringing researcher and participant together toward the co-creation of knowledge. This not only adds new insights to the research itself, but also cultivates a methodology that is decolonial in praxis, not seeking to extract from but to partner with in the analyses and interpretations of experience beyond researcher re-presentation. Drawing upon a current research project to understand practices of decoloniality among pastors of color, I apply the practice of in-depth member checking in the analysis and writing phase, thereby opening up my own interpretations to possibilities and realities that further center the lived experiences, practices, and knowledges of participants.

There are currently forty-two Fijian villages slated for relocation because of environmental catastrophes and rising tides.  The majority of these villages are iTaukei Fijian communities that are part of the Fijian Methodist church.  The sermons of these Indigenous communities describe rich and complex relationships with place (i.e. vanua) as a theological, biblical, and ontological category – often in response to place’s loss. They also resist reductive, colonial understandings of place that continue to haunt Western practical theological methods. In attending to the theological and ethical questions raised in iTaukei sermons, this paper interrogates approaches to place in practical theology that continue to marginalize displaced communities and argues for the environmental significance of the ecclesial practices of communities displaced by the climate crisis.

This presentation introduces abductive analysis as a qualitative research methodology that ought to be adopted as a means for theological reflection.  Abductive analysis orients the researcher to surprises in data that might provide explanatory potential outside the study’s initial parameters. It helps generate new theories based on unexpected findings that abduct or lead the researcher away from their preconceived notions and generally accepted norms toward possible new insights.  Using abductive analysis as a theological method provides researchers in theology and qualitative research a way to create space for the work of the Holy Spirit amidst supposedly predictable empirical realities.  Assuming God’s presence is real and active in human experience, orienting one’s analytical attention toward unexpected surprises creates space for the Holy Spirit to disrupt and realign our research and our faith.

A womanist practical theological approach sets the departure point at the lived experiences of Black women and other marginalized groups and speaks to the love of all persons and the commitment to the survival and wholeness of all people. A womanist practical theological methodology explores a praxis-reflection-analysis-theory-praxis circular model approach. Through this model, research begins with the lived experiences of Black women and other marginalized groups' praxis or practice with the researcher, then uses theological reflection, which incorporates hermeneutics, scripture, and practices of the world, to reflect and analyze the practice. The analysis is then discussed with theory to describe, articulate, and call to the forefront the observed liberatory practices that can inform faith leaders and academics in their practices and engagement with the world. 

This paper will consider creative methodologies as a means for theological inquiry, identifying how a/r/tograhphy and creative research methods might be used to deepen researcher understanding and dissemination of work. Highlighting the approach as cognitively demanding, holistically integrated and accessible to a wide variety of people, the presenter will explore practical examples and broad theological traditions. This paper emphasizes the importance of multimodal methodologies as a way to highlight voices that are traditionally marginalized using modes that are academically neglected. Sharing performance poetry, textiles, and academic scenarios where room is given for creative expression will mean this paper is offered as a living exemplar of ways in which creativity and intellectual rigor are in harmony with one another and enrich theological inquiry as a discipline. Theological work is a work of heart, hands and head, and the paper seeks to make this explicit as a research practice.

This paper outlines a collaborative ethnographic story project conducted at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, MN, focusing on the experiences of leaders, members, neighbors, and volunteers during the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in 2020. The project examines how the church, situated in the heart of the uprising, transformed into a vital community resource hub amid the sudden goods, services, and resources desert that befell the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. The paper details the innovative research methodologies employed, including a paper and digital workbook, small story-sharing groups, one-on-one interviews, an audio recording booth, and photo exhibit. Digital resources, such as social media posts and virtual worship recordings, were compiled to enrich the historical archive. The project aims to illuminate how the lived theology of Holy Trinity continues to shape the church's ongoing narrative and foster a broader understanding of community resilience and faith in times of crisis.

As a survivor of sexualized abuse, I do research on the topic of sexualized abuse in Christian contexts. I take my body, with her stories and experiences, into the field to meet other bodies with their stories and experiences. For this presentation, I am inspired by the work of Adriaan van Klinken, who has interlaced his description of fieldwork with personal interludes in which he reflects on personal experiences of researching and writing (Van Klinken 2019). Taking examples from the work of Nina Hoel and Adriaan van Klinken, in this presentation I explore both reasons and ways to bring the ‘I’ in (embodied) research to the fore. Interlacing this methodological discussion, there will be several interludes in which I dive deeper into my own lived experience which I bring to the field. With words and visual artwork, I convey my own positionality and my embodied involvement in creative ways.

This paper explores Nietzsche’s conceptualization of violence as a physiological concept, manifested in degrees of “defense and attack.” This paper situates itself between three areas: Nietzsche’s conceptions of health and sickness, literature on violence within a Nietzschean framework, and broader discussions of health, sickness, religion, and violence. I argue that Nietzsche views the “instinct for violence” as a measure of health, but with certain conditions. By offering an interpretation of Nietzsche’s four-point “war praxis,” and by exploring the counterintuitive proposition that healing requires an instinct for “war,” it argues that disease, for Nietzsche, is not an abnormality but a distorted relationality to reality, rectified by regaining the capacity for war. 

In the first volume of *Capital*, Marx famously describes the historical advent of capitalism as a kind of horror story. Nourished by colonial wars, enslavement, and the massacre of indigenous populations, capital constitutes and sustains itself through a near-limitless exercise of violence, conceivable in both physical and ideological terms. This paper investigates another modality of violence proper to capital, namely, formal violence: the diffuse, but titanic power by which human and non-human entities are constrained to appear as species of value. I develop this concept through the juxtaposition of two related, but distinct treatments of formal violence in the respective work of contemporary philosopher Jean Vioulac and Karl Marx. For Vioulac, formal violence constitutes a quasi-ontological subreption of humans’ essential purposive activity. Re-reading Marx, however, we come to see that formal violence operates on two levels, naming both a structure of phenomenality and the ruse of its false critique.

In On Violence, Hannah Arendt defines violence as a tool wielded to serve particular interests, and unjustifiable on universal moral grounds. Drawing on Arendt’s response to Frantz’s Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and its role in justifying what she terms the “violence” of Black Power political strategies in the 1960s, I turn to Fanon’s earlier Black Skin, White Masks to define the structural violence of racism excluded from Arendt’s definition. Showing how Fanon’s text exposes the racial hierarchy that sacralizes the notion of the human, I place his text in conversation with Jean Genet’s play, The Blacks. Arguing that both works expose the structural violence of race, the rituals that maintain it, and the difficulty of countering it, I show that they both position literary and performative excess as a violence that can counter this structure from within the conventions that maintain them, and give rise to unpredictable political action.

In 1964, Jacques Derrida published an extensive commentary on the then-little-known Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The text was an emphatic celebration and devastating critique of the latter’s attempt to break with the inherent violence of philosophical language through recourse to religious sources. Sixty years after the initial publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” I argue that this essay still contends that the best we can ever hope for is mitigating violence. In dialogue with Martin Hägglund, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Jean Vioulac, I address its contemporary purchase along the axes of politics, technology, and religion. On my reading, religious concepts are insufficient to break the complicity between theory and technological-political oppression. At the same time, the thought of God is ineluctably produced by war and violence. These problems converge around the question of Zionism, a theme in the background of Derrida’s questioning that today must be explicitly submitted to its demands.

Given the cottage-industry of research on John Calvin, it is surprising there are no substantial studies on his interpretation of Christ’s descent into hell despite the centrality of this theme in his thought. Some emerging studies have clarified that Calvin’s interpretation was not novel given his inherited tradition. However, it has not yet been clarified that Calvin primarily interpreted the descensus in relation to eschatological themes on soul-sleep, the intermediate state, and Holy Saturday. In this paper, I survey the eschatological context of Calvin’s descensus interpretation and show how this context was decisive for Calvin’s enduring opinion and included a robust theology of Holy Saturday. This eschatological evidence contradicts a widespread misunderstanding that Calvin reduced the descensus to a metaphor for the cross, which cannot be the case, since for Calvin the descensus refers to the soul of Christ and its relation to the state of souls after physical death.

This paper puts forward the argument that, so long as it does not inhibit the preaching of eternal hope and security, it is both right and profitable to assert the death of the soul. This argument builds on two premises: (1) If total depravity, then total mortality; (2) That which does not die cannot be resurrected. If the soul is something that is corrupted by sin and something that participates in the resurrected life, then it is also a thing that dies. Toward this end, to speak of the immortality of the soul is at least misleading and bares the possibility of being altogether incorrect. By affirming the death of the soul, we can minimize body/soul dualisms and metaphysical speculations, resting instead on the proclamation of the gospel: That which was dead has been raised to life!

In the recent turn to liberation in Christian theology, personal action and advocacy are paramount. Such action is indeed liberating for many oppressed minorities, but fails to take account of the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities, many of whom are unable to self-advocate. In this paper, by drawing on Barth’s theology of witness, I argue that the invading work of Christ through the Spirit in the life of Christians provides a means by which those with profound intellectual abilities experience the liberation of God. As they are liberated by the action of God, people with intellectual disabilities are simultaneously empowered to witness to this liberatory event, thus becoming sites of liberation themselves. As witnesses to their own liberation, people with intellectual disabilities offer glimpses of the coming kingdom of God, disrupting our tidy eschatological vision by the Kingdom appearing in the places some may least expect.

The Christian practice of contemplation can be a resource for Filipinas to resist violence caused by patriarchy, coloniality, and clericalism as overlapping forms of oppression pervading both society and the church in the Philippines. This practice is drawn from the reflections of Constance FitzGerald and Beverly Lanzetta on the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross and how these spiritual works can offer women possibilities for flourishing today. These reflections are placed in conversation with the feminist theological works from the Philippines, which are concerned about gender dynamics and stereotypes detrimental to women’s well-being and offer a reimagining of theological anthropology. This dialogue proposes opening up spaces for contemplation to encounter God as Gracious Mystery who desires women’s flourishing, affirms women’s dignity, pays attention to their embodied nature, and offers a nuanced approach to suffering in the world that is caused by physical and epistemic violence.

This paper uses a feminist Latin American liberationist perspective to explore how Marian veneration and theology help Mexican women experience hope and resist feelings of religious isolation after intimate partner violence. Many women who speak up about domestic violence experience a shunning from their religious community, thus losing their major ties to her community and to God. After examining a few cultural factors that impact the Mexican experience of intimate partner violence, I will use the example of home altars to La Virgen de Guadalupe to show how women who have experienced violence still turn to Mary for religious hope and healing without needing the church, the congregation, or the pastor. Through private and popular worship of Mary, Mexican women have developed a practice of hope that can help them overcome violent and marginalizing contexts.

What response might Christianity offer to the problem of violence? The cross has often been upheld as a symbol of non-violence. Yet it has also been upheld as the symbol of those who promote colonization, patriarchy, and oppression. Little scholarship exists exploring the idea of non-violence’s foundation in the womb of a woman rather than the cross built by man. This paper will argue that in the incarnation, we see God’s embrace of and entering in to the universal vulnerability of humanity that makes violence insupportable under any circumstance. Christian calls to nonviolence, then, begin not at the cross, but within the womb of Mary, the mother of God.

Informed by feminist and trauma theologies and formed by contemplative spirituality, this paper offers an evolving innovative approach to explore and transform ecclesial hospitality such that it is attentive to the aftermath of violence in a faith community.  The methodology adopted for this doctoral research is shaped by the particularities of my own context, shaped by my contemplative spiritual practices, and my commitment to nonviolence in a violent world.  Through a series of difficult yet crucial contemplative dialogue circles, participants from the study community will critically reflect on the assumptions and beliefs underpinning current ecclesial practices before envisioning new approaches in the light of feminist trauma-sensitive scholarship embedding in trust, truth, justice and right relationships, for the flourishing of all.

This paper uses Lee Edelman's theorization of queer negativity to read the crucifixion of Jesus together with the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell in protest of the Palestinian genocide, arguing that Edelman's construction of the "nothing" as critique of the social order can interpret (some of) the inarticulable power of these public deaths. In the context of Western biopolitics, both events present a confrontation of the "meaninglessness" of a painful, innocent death against the explicit meanings stated before their deaths and by interpreters. Through Edelman's theory, this meaninglessness becomes itself an affective political force which exposes the fantasy of invulnerable wholeness that sustains the illusive rational subject and the intersecting axes of marginalization that both enable and maintain that illusion.

My paper addresses the intersection between environmental harm brought about by capitalist production and the societal and religious solidarity in response to violent eviction. I will contextualize the politics of extraction by examining the Rempang Eco-City in Indonesia that infuriated residents over the governmental policy of forced eviction and elicited distress among Muslim leaders. I will first discuss the relationship between indigenous people and their land and show how their violent removal is unjust. I will secondly connect the indigenous people’s claim to their land to the legal discourse on land inquisition by the state as expressed in the 2023 Omnibus Law on Job Creation. I will finally examine Muslim leaders’ grievances over the forced eviction in Rempang island, their attribution of the Islamic theological notion of unjust (ẓulm) to the land-grabbing practices, and their advocacy for an Islamic ethics of repair (iṣlāh) to address violent measures directed toward indigenous people.

Myanmar is a diverse country, divided along ethnical, political, social, and religious lines. Amidst the unresolved internal problems due to differences, the three-year-long military coup is ongoing. I posit that the Myanmar people are establishing a just and liberated country by resisting the regime, embracing the “deep solidarity” among different ethnic groups, and establishing mutual understanding among differences. First, I briefly introduce the political background of Myanmar, and then, different marginalized groups’ experiences will be discussed. Lastly, the oppressed people’s collective efforts for liberation will be presented. I will analyze the current political turmoil in Myanmar and the oppressed groups’ struggles for liberation from the lens of the margins by using postcolonial liberative and feminist approaches. It is a timely, intersectional, and insightful proposal for different disciplines.

This presentation will examine the intellectual trajectory of liberation theologian and economist Franz J. Hinkelammert. The paper will offer an analysis of three major contributions his scholarship made to the development of Latin American liberation theology and three theses pertaining to each of these aspects of Hinkelammert’s work. First, the paper will offer an account of the development of Hinkelammert’s theological critique of capitalism and argue that it gained shape through a theological stylization of Marx’s critical project. Second, the presentation will investigate Hinkelammert’s call for a critique of utopian reason which will be described as the setting up of a liberatory social-epistemic analysis about the limits and possibilities of transformative action in the world. Finally, Hinkelammert’s more recent writings (2003-2023) will be summarized to demonstrate his engagement with contemporary political theology and mark how his work might highlight new development within liberation theologies.