Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

The term theosis (θέωσις) refers to the concept of divinization or deification, and it can be traced both in the Neoplatonic and Judaic/Christian tradition. In particular, the term theosis is also usually associated to the journey of contemplation taken in order to reach the union with God.
Aim of this speech is to show the central role of theosis in the contemplative path, and how Philo of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite not only evidenced in their treatises the centrality of this transformative path, but also used the figure of Moses to “symbolise” the ideal archetype to reach deification.

The Neoplatonic-Christian notion of theosis, the deification of humankind, has been understood to sever humans from nature. However, this reduces the diversity of interpretations to a caricature. I argue that theosis is a concept that opens a space of interrelational possibility. Engaging with François Laruelle, I examine an inversion of theosis that turns human consciousness toward radical immanentism. I argue Laruelle’s work paradoxically produces its own transcendental position and obscures paths for cultivating empathetic relationships with nature. However, the Neoplatonic tradition does offer resources. I then address a version of apophaticism in the works of Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme, wherein the language of theosis in conversation with the esoteric notion of the “feminine” aspect of Divinity, Sophia, gives rise to a unique speculative realist position with an earthly orientation. I maintain that this discourse challenges both the vertically transcendental orientation of classic apophaticism and the flattening immanentism of postmodern appropriations.

 I will discuss two approaches in describing the ways of surpassing bounds of human knowledge in theosis by gaining spiritual perception, both having a great impact on the Christian East. One was formulated by Plotinus and later by Maximus the Confessor or Gregory Palamas, having as a major concern theorizing the outlines of spiritual perception. The other one gained its expression starting from practice, from the very experience in questing/acquiring spiritual perception, the most influential author being Isaac of Nineveh. Both accounts had an exceptional role in terming supra-intellectual knowledge, the deified perception.

In this study, *the problem of individual* identity encapsulates the series of inquiries stemming from the basic question: what distinguishes one human being from another? I propose to reconsider how the Carolingian thinker John Scotus Eriugena (d. ca. 877) answers this question by framing his thought under a *collective-evolutive* model of individual identity, based on the recognizance of *theōsis* as the cornerstone of Eriugena’s anthropology. Within this *collective-evolutive* paradigm individual identity is not something given immutably, singularly bestowed at birth. Instead, human beings do not invariably possess individual identity but must long for it (evolutive), and they eventually attain it through the primary reality of human nature (collective). *Theōsis* challenges the Aristotelian understanding of individual identity, transcending dichotomies and hierarchies involving substance and accidents, primary and secondary substances, individual and universal.

Resume of *Unfinished Christians.*

In her 1989 book *Greek Gods and Figurines,* the scholar Brita Alroth coined the term “visiting gods” to describe the puzzling phenomenon where travelers to the most popular sanctuaries in the Greek world would dedicate a votive image of one god to another. Drawing on the work of materiality theorists, I argue that these votives can be understood as a means of expressing and instantiating spatial relationships in the ancient Greek landscape. For the ancient Greek pilgrim, “visiting god” votives may have been a way to articulate particular cosmological and mythological connections between the divine resident of the sanctuary and the home community of the human visitor. Complementing this approach, I aim to show that the polysemous iconicity of the image allowed the pilgrim to not only materially mediate the presence of the visiting god, but also their own presence before the residents of the sanctuary. 

In recent decades, scholars of Greek religion have taken a particular interest in ritualized processions, especially toward major sanctuaries, and the embodied experience of participating in them. Less attention has been directed to individualized itinerant religious practices and experiences, or to the smaller shrines that travelers would have encountered along their journey. In this paper, I focus on portable objects excavated at a selection of roadside shrines on mainland Greece and their implications for understanding the intersection of religion and travel. In keeping with Georgia Frank’s on-the-ground, kinesthetic approach to portabilia (2023), I consider travelers’ origins and the expense of money, effort, and emotion that their journeys across the landscape would have entailed. Intimately connected with travelers’ bodies, portabilia possessed the twofold capacity to materialize personalized acts of religious devotion and to express, through repetition of customary forms of dedication, individuals’ belonging to a community of worshippers.

The Letter of Aristeas is a diasporic Jewish work composed in Ptolemaic-era Egypt, likely during the second century BCE. In an under-examined section, Aristeas offers an elaborate ekphrasis of a set of ritual objects that Ptolemy II constructs and sends as gifts to the Jerusalem temple (§§ 51b-82). In this paper, I examine the ekphrastic presentation of ritual portabilia as a strategy aimed at cultivating Alexandrian Jewish identity through a focus on elite craftsmanship and benefaction. I argue that the work adapts the conventions of ekphrasis in order to guide its reader through a mode of "ritualized viewing" that parallels the visually-marked practices of how these objects were piously produced and ritually offered to the Jerusalem temple. The work thus elevates Ptolemy II as a model of elite devotion whose efforts bridge the Alexandrian present with a scriptural past. 

A wide range of Christian observances testify to the belief that the presence of Christ is mediated by scripture with protective and healing effects. In order to gain a rounded picture of early Christian culture, these need to be considered alongside formal liturgical usage. Portions of scripture have been carried by humans and attached to livestock to give protection from natural harms. Verses have been carved upon lintels to safeguard houses. Such uses intensify the moral and spiritual significance of scripture rather than diminish them. Narrative accounts describe Gospel books being placed by beds or under the head during sleep to promote recovery from ailments, with the latter confirmed by physical wear to book pages. The specific texts that were used tended to reflect the condition from which recovery was sought, whereas during later periods, particular texts such as the Gospel incipits came to be used for multiple purposes.

.

.

.

.

This paper brings mimetic theory into dialogue with contemplative theology, using resources from both these disciplines to challenge the view that knowledge is merely the acquisition of facts. Such a conception of knowledge ignores increasing scientific evidence that affect, embodiment, and reason are linked in the process of cognition. A view of knowledge that ignores its affective, embodied component is unable to explain why human knowledge is becoming more polarized as factual scientific understanding grows. In this paper I consider the relation of desire to knowledge in René Girard’s mimetic theory and in the contemplative text The Cloud of Unknowing. Mimetic theory analyzes the roots of illusion and self-deception in rivalrous imitative desire. The paper claims that a reading of The Cloud in relation to mimetic theory will discover a way toward freedom from this self-deception, and so to true knowledge, through the transformation of desire from rivalrous to pacific.

Peace-talk is incoherent because we do not have one definition of the word “peace.” Everyone has different understandings of this term, and thus we cannot help but selfishly impose our understandings of peace onto someone else’s understandings of peace. With the help of Augustine of Hippo, we underscore this issue through an analysis of disordered desire; in addition, with the help of French theorist René Girard and his theory of mimesis (which very much has an Augustinian flavor in terms of its low theological anthropology) we emphasize how humanity cannot help but disorder even the noblest of endeavors such as just peacemaking.  Therefore, this essay argues that humanity’s peace presents a mimetical trap that needs to be broken from above via a divine disruption that is simultaneously violent and nonviolent. Divine violence can spur up hope and hence can affect the way one does theology today in the *saeculum*.  

What is God’s providential relationship to the nations and nationalism? This paper seeks to constructively connect how Barth’s theology reckoned with nationalism and nations with his doctrine of divine providence and das Nichtige. This paper contends that Barth’s positive and negative distinctions between nationhood and nationalism parallel the distinctions he makes between providence and Nothingness. This paper briefly describes Barth’s positive account of nations as part of God’s providential overruling of the world-occurrence and related to God’s right-hand and positive willing. Further, this paper argues that when nations fail to remain open and peaceable toward their neighbors—by seeking to become a totality—nationhood has morphed to nationalism. Barth’s vehement opposition to nationalism, its destruction, and “national gods” means nationalism can be best understood as a virulent manifestation of Nothingness that exists only under left-hand of God’s rejecting will as that which is overcome in Christ’s death and resurrection.

In this paper, I will first critically analyze the recent rise of Christian Nationalism in Brazil and the US by engaging the work of scholars like Benjamin A. Cowan and Willie James Jennings. After a brief provisional exploration of social diagnosis, I propose Karl Barth's theology as a potentially fruitful correcting theological force against religious nationalism movements. In particular, Barth's Christ-centered theological anthropology exposed in CD IV/1, § 58.1, and § 58.2 offers us a useful theological tool to counter the collapsing of religious and national identity underlying these movements. I will develop Barth's insight by engaging Kathryn Tanner's work Christ the Key, where Tanner develops a Christ-centered view of human nature as radically "open-ended," corresponding to an "apophatically-focused anthropology." I will conclude with practical suggestions of how this theological view of human identity might foster new forms of political resistance in Brazil and the United States. 

This paper engages Karl Barth’s theology as a potentially generative resource for exploring the theological dimensions of a resurgent form of collective protest and assembly.  Specifically, this paper theologically explores the reclamation, repurposing, and renaming of grounds that we have witnessed in uprisings against police violence and, more recently, encampments on college campuses protesting the ongoing destruction of Gaza. I examine Barth’s own confrontation with and theological critique of state violence, developed in the first edition to the Römerbrief. I highlight elements of his critique that are generative for theologizing insurgent grounds. At the same time, I contend that Barth’s theological dialectic reinscribes the state’s territorial claim over the grounds of social possibility, a claim that excludes possibilities originating from and cultivated upon insurgent grounds. I conclude the paper by turning to James Cone’s theopolitical response to the racial protests and uprisings of the late ‘60s as an alternative site of engagement.