Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Amid growing public enthusiasm for “dark tourism” excursions—that is, travel to locations featuring an engagement with the deathly, horrific, or macabre—the American prison museum has become an increasingly lucrative site of intellectual and affective stimulation. Over the last two decades, an expanding collection of scholarship in the fields of architecture, history, sociology, and criminology has sought to address the purpose, appeal, and ethics of the prison museum, with particular attention to its role as a site of cultural memory and meaning-making. The present paper builds on this literature to explore the ways that the prison museum functions temporally – that is, how it reproduces (and occasionally refuses) linear understandings of time that underwrite popular appeals to American progress.

In a recent essay, Richard Miller claims that Augustine presumes a duty to remember justly in the *City of God*. However, Miller’s cursory reference to a presumed duty of “just memory” does not explain how Augustine conceptualizes this duty, or how it relates to his theological concerns. In this paper, I demonstrate how Augustine presumes a duty to remember truly for the sake of justice in the *City of God*. I first analyze the relationship between forgetting and the earthly city, then explain how the earthly city’s logic of forgetting contributes to a false remembrance that denies the suffering of empire’s victims. Ultimately, I conclude that Augustine understands just remembrance as an obligation of properly ordered love. For Augustine, our failure to fulfill this obligation comes at the cost of a distorted view of the created order that inhibits our capacity for loving relation with God and other persons.

For nearly twenty years, institutions of higher education have been increasingly coming to terms with their histories of racial violence involved with slavery and its afterlives.  From the 2006 Brown University Slavery and Justice Report to the 2024 Yale & Slavery Research Project, the work of recovering histories has become a practice of institutional reckoning.  It is, in a sense, a project that requires reconstituting painful memories that have been willfully erased.  Following the theoretical path of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, this work of uncovering histories and reconstituting institutional memory is part of the truth-telling necessary as a first step to healing from our national trauma of White supremacy and racism. But what are the many costs -- financial, emotional, personal and institutional -- for doing this essential work?

This paper argues that Quaker's legal efforts against the draft in federal courts, draft boards, and military tribunals need to be understood as core to their pursuit of the Quaker peace testimony in the twentieth-century United States. It contends that Quakers of an earlier period had tried to avoid interactions with the legal system, handling disputes internally; they increasingly relied on lawyers and legal expertise. The paper argues this shift to legal activism also made the Quaker peace testimony startlingly effective; legal victories helped to undermine the draft to such a degree that by the early 1970s, it was no longer a viable policy.

This paper explores the impact of the Wilson administration’s 1917 Selective Service Act on pacifist religious minorities in the United States, using American Mennonites as a case study. As the first successful universal draft law in the nation’s history, its implementation changed the demands of (male) US citizenship in a way that made it difficult for members of historic peace churches to comply. Mennonites—whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe to escape religious persecution; often specifically to avoid draft laws—made up the majority of this group. Although the Selective Service Act made provisions for the exemption of religious “conscientious objectors” from combatant service, both the terms of exemption and its implementation continued to be negotiated throughout the war. For the first time in US history, the community was forced to make a case for the recognition of their theological commitment to the principle of nonresistance to the US government. I argue that conscientious objectors in WW I were early actors in the movement towards a more thorough accommodation of minoritized communities’ rights to freely exercise their religion in the US.

Non-violent action has often struggled to find its place within contemporary ethical and political theory. While often conflated with absolute pacifism and civil disobedience, this paper draws instead on social scientists who demonstrate the tremendous expressive range of social movements that claim the banner of “non-violent action.” But once non-violent action can be associated with a range of tactics—from prayer vigils to law-breaking to statue destruction—how ought we think about the norms that govern non-violent action? Using recent work in sanctioning and debates in just war theory, this paper proposes that for large scale collective actions, the use pressure and economic harm to achieve a movement’s goal can be understood under a general ethics of sanctioning. Applying basic intuitions in just war thought for the ethics of social movements yields larger insights about contemporary non-violence’s relation to debates in labor history and war, rather than absolute pacifism.

This paper addresses the ways that several major figures in the nonviolent tradition, including William Lloyd Garrison, MK Gandhi, and  M.L. King Jr., understand the place of violence in the service of just causes from the perspective of principled nonviolence. I argue that only a genuinely principled, rather than merely practical, commitment to nonviolence can render violent protest intelligible, in ways that challenge standard ethical outlooks. These perspectives present especially productive challenges for forms of virtue ethics and moral perfectionism.

For over twenty years Jeffrey J. Kripal’s classic work, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), has served as an enduring source of critical insight into the comparative study of mysticism. In this paper I extend Kripal’s comparative approach by placing his concept of “the erotic” in dialogue with nature mysticism. I claim that the erotic can enhance the way nature mysticism is addressed in contemporary ecological discourses because it offers a nondualistic lens of interpretation that can integrate the experiential knowledge of both body (nature) and soul (culture). Most significantly, I’m suggesting that constructing an erotic dialogue with the teachings of certain nature mystics, such as Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, underscores the hybrid and ultimately holistic significance of nature mysticism as a uniquely embodied esoteric movement within the history of American environmentalism.

            This presentation addresses questions such as: Where do scholars of mysticism situate themselves, ontologically speaking, when writing words about words or events that point to that which cannot be described? What are the scholarly spaces, other than ethnography, to examine the transformations they experience in the process of learning and writing about mysticism? And what are the limits of those spaces in a mostly white academy which prides itself of objectivity? While such questions may invite larger interdisciplinary conversations, Hernández will address them using self-referential materials taken from the process of writing her book Savoring God. She will also refer to how her own positionality as a Latino woman in her early career influenced the writing process. This self-reflection, that can only be done post-factum (or post-writing), questions the limits between scholars’ subjectivity and the scholarly products in the disciplinary field of the studies of mysticism. 

This paper highlights the mystical hermeneutic of Elliot Wolfson as a methodological bridge between the neuroscientific and textual study of mysticism by emphasizing the role of affect within mystical experiences and their textual analysis. Therapeutic and cognitive science of mystical states of consciousness have rightfully recentered the importance of affect within mysticism, an emphasis that has been lacking in the scholarly history of constructivism and perennialism. By setting in conversation Jeffrey Kripal’s *Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom* with the modern therapeutic model, this paper explores how Wolfson’s work demonstrates the necessity of scholarly self-reflexivity and empathetic engagement with the text for a phenomenology of mysticism to be illuminated. While these texts may report memory and reflect culture, they invoke affect, and it is the responsibility of the scholar to adopt a methodology that uncovers the affective states embedded within the text.

In this paper, I reflect upon my experience translating the mystically-inspired book Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plant by the 19th century German thinker Gustav Fechner. Though Paul Ricœur describes translation as an openness to the other, a practice of extending “linguistic hospitality,” I recount my translation experience as one of seizure by the other in a way that blurred the boundaries between 1848 and 2024, plant and human, Gustav and me. And because language is formed in the body, translation meant embodied occupation; in short: my experience of translation is a fleshy and fully erotic affair. I will share how what seized my body, through the text of Nanna, was the same thing that seized Fechner to write it —the ever-reaching plant soul. I'll reflect on what is at stake for scholars translating texts inspired by mystical experiences, and how translation itself can be considered an ecstatic practice.

Contemporary Mennonites link their theological commitments to nonviolence, peacemaking, and non-Christendom ecclesiology with the witness of the 16th-century Anabaptist martyrs, executed by collaborating church and civic authorities. Yet, interpreting Anabaptist deaths in a martyrdom paradigm implies the denunciation of the Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed persecutors who acted in “hatred of the faith,” an implication typically denied or forgotten, yet one which resurfaces in Mennonite theologies and practices in problematic ways. In this presentation, I argue that a confessional martyr tradition cannot itself sustain a nonviolent witness without a more direct reckoning with its own complicity in church division. While Anabaptist martyrs may inspire peace practices, their legacy may also foster self-righteousness, sectarianism, settler colonialism, the denial of violence within Mennonite communities, and resistance to external critique. Mennonite theology must reflect more deeply on how its martyrdom identity is implicated in patterns of violence.

This paper critically examines Anabaptist political ecclesiology, beginning with the assertion that willingly accepting suffering at the hand of one’s abusers is salvific, redemptive, and transformative. This approach, known as “revolutionary subordination”, has been devastating to victims of sexual and gendered violences in Anabaptist ecclesial communities. Given that Anabaptists root political theology in the suffering of Jesus on the cross, “revolutionary subordination” can be challenged with historical and theological analyses of the crucifixion as an act of imperial violence, one that strips victims of their dignity and humanity.  If we begin to understand violence as the imposition of “shame” on crucified and penetrated bodies, we can better understanding the cross's fundamental rebuke of violent self-aggrandizement, including that of colonization, patriarchy, racial capitalism, and spiritual abuse. Then, we will better articulate both peace and cruciformity as radical identification with the suffering and rebuke of their abusers.

The familiar rationale for Mennonite consensus-finding is that it evenly distributes power among all members. By resisting the tendency toward hierarchy, the reasoning goes, Mennonites foster traits that are conducive to peacemaking: a sense of responsibility, practice expressing their views, and the skills needed for dialogical problem-solving. Thus, church meetings where everyone sits in a circle and bickers about the budget play a role in forging the traits necessary for standing up for peace in a violent world. This familiar explanation has come under some criticism, however, about its naivete with regard to power. This paper surveys these critiques—and makes some of its own—before arguing that Mennonite ecclesiology can nonetheless foster virtues of dissent and an alternative moral imagination that calls into question the antagonistic, zero-sum assumptions that sustain and escalate violence.

This paper will draw upon the historical events of Mary Dyer, along with Anne Hutchinson, and their conflict with the Puritan community, to suggest that five themes were going forward in the emerging Quakerism vis-à-vis Puritanism. These themes remain relevant today: (1) a challenge to the notion of religion as ethics; (2) a challenge to the scapegoating tendency of certain religious attitudes; (3) a priority given to the role of experience as foundational to religious understanding; (4) a rise in the authority of women’s voices in religious matters; and (5) an ecclesial understanding of friendship.

For over a decade in the first half of the twentieth century, the Congregationalist missionary Ray Phillips worked with men on the mines of South Africa, attempting to combine both social control measures and evangelistic programs. This paper considers Phillips’s pre-1930 activities on the mines as representative of the larger missionary population and the violence inherent in their activities – both in social control and the remaking of indigenous minds, as well as in the environmental consequences of gold mining, and argues that they are related as part of the same program of western subjugation, through combining theories and practices from colonial/imperial studies, missiology, ecotheology, and history.

This paper will argue that Wangari Maathai and Afua Kuma represent two African women with significant theological insights, neither of whom were formally trained in theology, and illustrate a prophetic activism that promotes creation care, acknowledging the presence of Christ within his creation. By drawing on their works, I intend to demonstrate their prophetic warnings and prophetic hope which I will argue fuels an activism which challenges existing powers and lifts up the poor and oppressed, whilst also turning our eyes to the rest of creation. Their works declare theological truths that we desperately need to hear in an era of climate crisis. Their contributions also give voice to contemporary African women, particularly those suffering the effects of climate change, leading towards an egalitarian theological emphasis that cares for creation and for people who groan along with it.

Ling Ma’s 2018 debut novel, Severance, weaves intimately three types of fiction: the storyline of a post-apocalyptic survival narrative, interlaced with the coming of age tale of the narrator/protagonist (Candace Chen) struggling to find meaning and make a living in a globalized economy that was posing increasing ecological threats to its inhabitants, and through the flashbacks of her memory, a traumatizing story of her immigrant parents and her own childhood facing unfathomable heart-breaking tragedy.  Religion permeates each of those three strands. Published in the year before Covid-19, Ling Ma’s Severance offers an uncanny and unsettling depiction of the spread of a global pandemic and humanity’s chaotic response to it. While seamlessly rooted in the trajectory of a Chinese-American immigrant family, Severance can be placed in the long line of what Father Marc Rastoin (2018) termed “post-apocalyptic genre” in recent decades in which religion constitutes an important dimension.

I will argue that churches are to embody a messianic fellowship, uniting in solidarity to grapple with environmental exploitation and violence. This mission seeks to heal the natural environment by expanding the collective ‘han’—the deep-seated grief stemming from unresolved frustrations to the natural world. This embraces the natural environment and non-human creatures into a “*bapsang* community” or a table community of Jesus Christ.

In so doing, I will explore the engagement of local churches across various denominations in Korea, known as *green churches* selected by the Christian Environmental Movement Solidarity with green theology and practice, in dialogue with similar ecological churches in North America. I will highlight the need for organic solidarity among counterparts in Korea to enhance the effectiveness of their ministries by drawing upon core ideas of Minjung theology and expanding their scope into the natural environment. The green churches in North America provide viable examples for helping the Korean counterparts stand in solidarity, while also drawing insights from the Korean green churches to enrich the efforts in North America.

Deccan in the last quarter of the nineteenth century experienced nine famines, two of which were great famines. The second great famine happened over the turn of the century in 1899, de-populating the region of human life and livestock. Neil Charlesworth’s monograph Peasants and Imperial Rule points out that along with the natural phenomena, the implementation of a flawed land revenue settlement policy accentuated the agrarian crisis. Scarcity of food and credit capital had left multitudes dependent on moneylenders.

Amartya Sen in Hunger and Public Action has asserted that famines are triggered by the collapse of exchange entitlements rather than food availability decline. Based on archival research, this paper will highlight largely unexplored work of the American Marathi Mission in the famine period. The paper will focus on the actions taken by AMM missionaries to mitigate the immediate suffering of the famine population and efforts in mobilizing evangelical transnational help.

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