Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Christopher D. Tirres will be discussing his new book, Liberating Spiritualities, reflecting on the use of spirituality as a catalyst for social transformation and showcasing the profound insights of six distinguished twentieth-century liberation thinkers from across the Américas, including: Marxist philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, constructive theologian Virgilio Elizondo, cultural and feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, activist mujerista theologian and social ethicist Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara.

Benjamín Valentín will be discussing his new book, Touched by this Place: Theology, Community, and the Power of Place. Reflecting on his own lived experience in Spanish Harlem, Valentín will discuss how his book calls for a Christian theological return to place,place-based thinking, and "home."

This paper argues that Origen's Homily on Psalm 81, in which he issues a universal summons to the imitation of divine virtue through spiritual vigilance and the practice of justice, reveals a "Methodist Origen." Encountering Origen as a Methodist thinker not only broadens Wesleyan theology's awareness of its own resources in the Christian past, but also suggests a new approach to the study of Origen, one which centers not the controversial and speculative questions that have dominated European study of Origen since early modernity, but the exhortations to virtue and holiness that characterize his preaching.

Themes of John Wesley's Sanctification, Christian Perfection, and Glorification theology can be traced back to the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers. Wesley wrote in his sermons that perfection, or being made perfect in love, is given by grace from God throughout sanctification. The Cappadocian Fathers argue that wholeness is reached through a life of community modeled by the economic Trinity, where people are transformed by meeting the image of God every day. Additionally, the Cappadocian Fathers' harmonious theology between God and creation after death, where a person is made whole, is also reflected in Wesley's theology of sanctification, leading to glorification when a person is completely perfected after meeting the face of God. Both theological communities saw discipleship as a journey of becoming more whole through the incarnation and imagined a moment of complete wholeness after death when they were united with God.

This paper explores the ways in which ancient Christian eunuchs were a precursor to eighteenth century Methodism. In bringing together the histories of Christian eunuchs and early Methodists, this paper seeks to highlight the sexuality that linked them. This "radical," "excessive" sexuality was readily glimpsed by the torrent of Anti-Methodists who called out such links. This paper thus argues not only for a deeper analysis of the figure of the eunuch from early Christianity to the Methodist revivals of the eighteenth century, but that Anti-Methodists are a prime and necessary source for exploring the ways in which eighteenth century Methodism was connected to the Methodisms of the past. 

This paper will place Augustine in conversation with Wesley on the topic of original sin and human depravity, not through their treatises but through their sermons. The goal of the paper is not only to assess Wesley’s agreement or lack thereof with Augustine, but to examine how these two proponents of original sin presented the doctrine in pastoral contexts: What pastoral concerns motivated their commitment to preaching on original sin? What was their goal in such preaching, beyond the promotion of orthodox belief? And to what extent can Augustine’s vision of the Christian life as represented by his sermons on original sin be seen as consistent with a type of “Wesleyanism before Wesley”?

My position paper argues for the Islamic authority of ordinary Muslim women who are lost in the blur of a gendered everyday life in the home, dwelling at a remove from activities of the mosques and madrasas. I join feminist scholars of Islamic Studies in critiquing “ulama-ology” (cf. Dana Sajdi, 2013) i.e., the patriarchal politics of knowledge that privilege ‘ulama-led discourses written and uttered by men. I argue in my presentation for the role that diverse religious interpretations by ordinary Muslim women – i.e., women unlinked to Islamic institutions of mosques and madrasas, infantilized and silenced by men as ‘nāqiṣ al-‘aql’ (of deficient intellect) – play in shaping the meanings of texts and traditions in Islam. This demographic of Muslim women live an ordinary life performing gendered care and service work, and they make up the majority of Muslim women in the larger MESA region. I synthesize findings from my ethnographic research on women in Pakistan where ordinary Muslim women agentially create and transmit Islamic knowledge, particularly related to taboo aspects of sexuality and hygiene, situating these findings in the larger interpretive quest of locating feminist voices in the field of Islamic Studies.

What is the relationship between religious authority and power? In contemporary Muslim theology, women’s growing prominence as religious leaders appears to be related to an increased conceptual awareness around rahma, Divine Mercy, rahim, the womb, and al-Rahman, the God of Mercy. I trace this connection in the writings of prominent Muslim theologians and scholars and ask how and when it is leveraged to support new modes of Muslim religious authority and praxis. I argue that the feminist move towards the tradition represents a Muslim engagement with the global feminism debate and allows for gender-fluid and non-hierarchical readings of the Qur’an.

When it comes to the issue of patriarchal legal praxis in fiqh, Muslim feminist theory and praxis have remained in a relative stalemate. There are Muslim feminists who argue that Islamic law can be reformed and those who argue that fiqh is completely irredeemable. In this position paper, I draw on the work of autonomous Marxist-feminist scholar Silvia Federici to reconceptualize ritual obligations as a form of reproduction. Federici's conception of reproduction challenges classical Marxist thought on reproduction. Rather, Federici's work is an invitation to understand how knowledge, information, ideologies, and the materiality of daily life are forms of reproduction. Through Federici, I argue that thinking about ritual obligations as the reproduction of religious life requires Muslim feminists to think about what aspects of religious life they want to reproduce. As a result, they're better poised to do the work of dismantling patriarchal legal praxis in fiqh.

Islamic Liberation Theology recognizes that margins shift. The #MeToo Movement has been the locus of one such margin: the sexually abused. Focusing on iterations of #MeToo amongst Muslim societies, this paper finds that while both Islamic Liberation Theology and Muslim #MeToo are committed to the Islamic tradition, neither substantively engage Islamic Law, representative of a larger pattern within Islamic feminism. Additionally, analysis of the neoliberal discourse underlying the #MeToo Movement and how it has informed #Muslim MeToo responses is missing. This paper seeks to begin a conversation on these limitations, namely, the sidestepping of Islamic Law and inattentiveness to decolonial concerns. Instead of dismissing Islamic Law as irrational or irredeemably patriarchal, I argue that engaging its indigenous interpretive methodology (ʾuṣūl al-fiqh) addresses the decolonial concerns of external co-option and epistemic delinking, while providing an avenue for the Islamic Liberation Theology component of praxis inspired reinterpretation.

This presentation explores the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals in Flanders concerning the Catholic Church based on oral history research conducted with 17 interviewees. The current welcoming initiatives of the Flemish bishops, along with the strong Catholic heritage of the region and its history of support for LGBTQ+ individuals, render this context exceptionally intriguing. This presentation highlights two key findings. Firstly, individuals interviewed can be categorized into three groups based on their current stance towards the church: those rejecting it entirely, those who have gradually secularized, and those who firmly identify as Catholic. Secondly, the interviews reveal that people’s sense of inclusion or exclusion from the church is significantly influenced by their image of ‘the church’, shaped by memories of upbringing and past life experiences. Consequently, the presentation concludes that achieving an inclusive church necessitates a profound shift in personal perceptions, extending beyond changes in teaching, practice, and leadership.

As a “memorial” literary text that queers the religious past (and present), this paper explores a Japanese (juvenile) novel series, Maria Watches Over Us (1998–2012), by Oyuki Konno. This work can be interpreted as a literary resource for creatively remembering the ambiguous desires of adolescence, erotic and otherwise, especially within the context of religious education. In this work, female students maintain diverse forms of intimacy with one another—from very close “friendships,” a somewhat polyamorous yet hierarchical “sisterhood,” to lesbian romantic relationships—at a fictional girls’ Catholic school. Through a close reading of the text, this paper argues that Maria Watches Over Us “queers'' the past and present of a religious educational milieu in the Japanese context (and beyond). This study concludes by utilizing Foucault’s theory to emphasize the importance of (re)visiting both the comfort and discomfort that arise from the ambiguities of sexuality, relationality, and religious imagery. 

This paper looks to queer feminist authors and activists for insights about coalition-building amidst ongoing traumas stemming from structures of coloniality. M. Jacqui Alexander’s theory of palimpsestic time, Aurora Levins Morales’ focus on narrating histories of interconnection, and artist/activist JeeYeun Lee’s organizing will frame an example of coalitional activism in 2021 that re-enacted memories of disputed Indigenous land rights in the same location as the 1983 Parliament of World Religions. Attending to the entanglement of racism, sexism, religious supremacy, and settler colonialism shows how identities, histories, and even city structures hold the legacies of violence that continue to persist today. I argue that re-narrating histories that focus on the intersection of religion, race, gender, and nation can move decolonization from a metaphor to a practice. Both trauma and spirituality, in different but interconnected ways, show how the past must be acknowledged as embodied in the present.

This paper constructively synthesizes Paul Tillich’s theology, Christian Danz’s pneumatology, and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. The synthesis demonstrates how both Christianity and gender/sexual identities can be regarded as embodied forms of communication in which memory plays a constitutive role, recasting tradition and memory as synonymic within an ecclesiastical context. Moving beyond Tillich and Danz, this paper makes clear the dynamic and interconnected relationship between memory, gender/sexual identity, and God through the role of ontology. By re-framing identity through a queer-memory model of ecclesiology, this paper proffers that through memory both gender/sexual identity and Christian identity are constructed in communities that orient us through tradition (received meaning). Therefore, it contends that memory takes on an ontological function – tradition shapes our understanding of being – one that can free Christian communities from heteronormativity's gender essentialism, which problematically concretizes not only the gender binary but also conceptions of God.