Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

In this presentation, I turn to three African queer-affirming films – Inxeba (John Trengove 2017), Walking with Shadows (Aoife O’Kelly 2019), and The Blue Caftan (Maryam Touzani 2022) – to investigate how they imagine gay life and love in Africa (specifically, in South Africa, Nigeria and Morocco), and what role religion plays in these visions. Drawing especially on African film studies, African queer theories and theologies, I argue that with their stories, the films challenge both African and western social and theoretical discourses on gay identities and relationships in several significant ways, contributing thus both to a new imagination of gay individuals as a part of African societies, and to the development of theories of sexual and gender identities that attend to the particularities of the African context.

As many as 370,000 Filipinos live in the United States without legal status. Under the Trump presidency, their daily lives were plagued by fears of state violence in the forms of incarceration and deportation. Despite his promises, President Biden has not succeeded in changing U.S. immigration policies. Seizing on a crisis at the Southern border, nativists have continued to depict undocumented immigrants as “illegals” who are a danger to American society, even though empirical studies have consistently shown otherwise. In this paper, I examine the lived realities of undocumented Filipino Americans in order to challenge assumptions about their Christian faith and ethics. By situating their decisions historically and sociologically, I show that they are not only victims of largely-hidden legal violence, but that their communities offer important contributions to the work of nonviolent resistance.

Based on religious scholarship of “micropractice,” I demonstrate how immigration detention work produces violence. Through examination of incidents of gender-based violence in immigration detention contexts across history–from ships moored off the California coast to modern private prisons–I show how workplace micropractices culminate into incidents of gender-based violence.  Through methods of control, surveillance, and humiliation, those involved within the immigration system learn how to treat immigrants that they encounter; if you spend every workday demeaning immigrants, what is one more personal act of degradation? I propose that in order to end gender-based violence within the immigration system, and the violence of the immigration detention system itself, we must look not just at the religious ideologies that support xenophobia, but also the ritual practices that sustain it.

This paper investigates religion’s ongoing contribution to the transmission of the memories of the May 18 Uprising, a historic South Korean pro-democracy uprising against the authoritarian Korean government, and the generation of new multi-racial activist networks in the U.S. Based on qualitative research and drawing from feminist and womanist theo-ethical frameworks on memory, I examine the role of religion in three sites of social memory: haunted bodies, political art, and religious networks. In these three sites, the Christian religion and the Korean spiritual traditions preserve the memory of the movement and regenerate its radical spirit. I argue that such a confluence of religious traditions provides fertile ground for mobilizing resources for cultivating transnational democratic (political and cultural) belonging. More broadly, my presentation invites conversation on how religion uniquely contributes to keeping memories of progressive social movements “alive” for a liberative and decolonial democracy.

The particular intersection of the novel and the unchanged in today’s relations between borders, sovereignty, and migration—which can be called “toxic Westphalianism”—represents both a moral challenge and an opportunity to rethink rights with respect to violations of migrant rights in border spaces. In light of the history of Westphalian sovereignty, in which nonhuman considerations were excluded, theological elements were sublimated, and non-European territories were colonized, the examination of borders as systems of exclusion renders visible elements that can be brought together in challenging but promising ways. The situation demands Christian ethical attention, both as a moral concern and because of Christianity’s ambivalent historical relationship with sovereignty. Such attention facilitates rethinking rights in terms of encounters that ramify across wider social relationships. This account of rights does not occlude the universalism that typically accompanies assertions of rights so much as deploy it within specific acts of contestation or resistance.

In the past twenty years, scholars and former adherents of White evangelical purity culture that originated in the 1990s have offered numerous engagements of the culture’s originating political contexts, theological scaffolding, and wounding legacies. This paper draws from those efforts to posit that a new and dangerous purity culture is emerging in this contemporary moment with gender essentialism as its organizing principle. It articulates significant characteristics of this campaign, investigates the role of movements for freedom that catalyze constricting frameworks, and, informed by historical precedents, names potential strategies for critiquing and curtailing this emerging purity culture.

In this paper, I investigate the overlapping modes of religious, political, and social surveillance of queer Rwandans. I argue that such surveillance of sexuality in the centralized public sphere in Rwanda pushes queer sexuality further to the margins, eventually enabling and encouraging surveillance in marginalized public spheres and in private, domestic, and intimate spaces. In a post-genocide context that prohibits LGBT visibility, these layers of surveillance result in LGBT Rwandans somewhat paradoxically participating quite visibly in hetero-marriage and reproduction as forms queer survival, creating networks of hidden love and clandestine relationships while attempting to skirt social stigma. My work expands scholarship on sexuality, gender, and race by arguing that Rwanda’s queer politics of invisibility can provide an alternative to the queer politics of representation and visibility so prized in the Western discourse.

How does evangelicalism maintain control around licit sex/sexuality, when endless illicit versions attend a world increasingly infused with technology? In the quest to curb immoral behavior, a lucrative industry of accountability apps and organizations provides a key mechanism for surveillance and containment. The ubiquity of internet pornography is especially threatening, exposing the porosity of boundaries needed to discern “true” believers with a “God-ordained” sexuality. This paper considers the role of sexual surveillance within evangelical purity culture via “shameware” to better understand the contestations surrounding sexuality and gender revealed by spiritualized pathologizing practices, and how these pathologies are reimagined by once-believers now operating under new sexual schemas. Examining how adherents make sense of their participation, and the modalities in which exvangelicals shift, reject, or rearrange sexual surveillance allows for greater insight into the sexual schemas of both groups, the geography of deconstruction, and the messy potentiality in these sense-making endeavors. 

This paper analyzes Nigerian Pentecostal receptions of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77) and engages existing narratives of “rupture” used to characterize Nigerian Pentecostalism. In doing so, this paper seeks to offer an alternative account of Pentecostal relationships to the imagined “past” associated with Orisa traditions—focusing on “contempt” rather than “rupture”—that can account for both violent rejection of Orisa among Pentecostals as well as the presence of Orisa in Pentecostal religiosity. What may seem a rupture or break with the past, can alternatively be seen as Pentecostals inhabiting a contemptuous posture towards specific objects (groups, traditions, people, etc.). While Pentecostals consistently narrate the rise of Christianity as a break from a “dark” non-Christian past, Pentecostals in Nigeria and the diaspora draw from Orisa cosmologies and traditions while sustaining a theologically generative posture of contempt towards those same traditions.

The study explores Tanzanian women's engagement with Islam through an ethnography of Radio Nuur, a non-denominational Islamic station in Tanga, Tanzania. Based on participant observation and interviews, the research investigates the discourse types and ideologies broadcasted, emphasizing women's participation and perspectives. Contrary to other stations, Radio Nuur actively involves women, both as staff and callers, potentially increasing their "voice" in the workplace and community. I examine how radio discourse shapes Tanzanian Muslims' sense of belonging to local and global religious communities and influences their interpretations of gender roles amidst diverse religious discourses. By studying media's role in constructing community identities and negotiating various ideological influences, the research sheds light on gendered communication dynamics within Tanzania and beyond, impacting understandings of Islam's local and global dimensions.

This paper engages Islamic frameworks of historical memory along the Swahili coast. It argues that Swahili ideas of inheritance (*urithi*) formulate a dynamic and generative way in which Muslim scholars and biographers articulate and live with Islamic pasts and religious memory along the coast. Building on anthropological approaches to history and memory as well as work concerning Islamic historiography, I explore *urithi*’s significance as a Swahili-Islamic ordering of the past based in a spiritual tradition that posits knowledge as a meaningful historical inheritance and Islamic scholars as “inheritors of the Prophets” and thus bearers of religious memory. These arguments are based on analysis of two biographical texts covering the lives of pioneering reformist Swahili-Muslim scholars, Sheikh Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui (d. 1947) and Sheikh Abdulla Saleh Al-Farsy (d. 1982). My analysis is further informed by insights gathered from various interviews with the authors of these biographies.

In my book Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians (2022), which will be discussed at a roundtable in the 2024 AAR conference, I present a new theory on the development of Black Christianity in the Americas. The goal of this paper is to complement this panel discussion with a presenation that debates the Portuguese influence on the early development of African Catholicism. It does so with a focus on the little-known African Atlantic island of Annobón. 

In this paper I consider the place of theodicy in Spinoza’s well-known critique of clerical power.  In his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza explains how clerical authorities maintain power by driving a feedback loop between fear and superstition.  Although Spinoza criticizes the philosophical underpinnings of theodicy itself, he also criticizes its promulgation as pernicious. Drawing on Spinoza’s account of the affects, I connect Spinoza’s view about the dangers of theodicy in terms of his account of wonder, and more broadly to 17th century concerns about the dangers of wonder—as opposed to curiosity—in natural philosophy.  Understood as foolish wonder, we will be in a position to see how theodicy relates to the fear/superstition loop.  I close by briefly comparing Spinoza’s criticism of theodicy to that of contemporary critics.  

This paper considers an economic dimension of theodicy as a legitimating discourse: reconciling the tension between a sovereign's ultimate power and yet inability (or their ultimate benevolence and yet refusal) to intervene into a system of distribution and valuation to create justice. It begins with a theo-political reading of the Book of Job, linking the text's insistence on (divine) sovereignty as the sole basis of wisdom and justice with Modern Monetary Theory's contentions in debates over the role of the Federal Reserve. The specter of Job is raised again with Hobbes' Leviathan: in the attempted 1611 monetary renovations of James Stuart, we observe an ostensibly 'divinizing' monarch perform uncharacteristic impotence before the demands of foreign markets, in which the cost of re-capitalizing domestic market liquidity is effectively forced onto the bearers of base-metal currency. 

Theorists of ecological crisis privilege concepts of ambiguity and partiality as simultaneously truer to material realities andmore politically and ethically promising. Taking Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene concept as a case study, this paper asks if this move successfully avoids theodicy. Though Haraway defines the “time-place” of the Chthulucene in opposition to the salvific logics of theodicy, her celebration of ambiguity emerges from a reading of ecological breakdown as the source of a renewed vision of entanglement. In other words, ecological crisis becomes an opportunity to materialize a reformulated best-case scenario. I argue that Haraway’s attempt to circumvent theodicy recapitulates its errors: naturalizing loss and assigning a silver lining to structural violence. I call this persisting logic of theodicy a “partial theodicy.” 

In this paper, we explore political theodicies in “transnationally Asian” literatures after 2010. We claim that the literary cultures of these transpacific networks and communities constitute what Yunte Huang calls a “counterpoetics” that attempts to challenge what Gary Okihiro calls the “social formations” that shape the power structures of transpacific arenas. Herein lies the theodicy: we argue that these transpacific counterpoetics also have trouble naming the powers that constellate these social formations. We move across three literary cultures: military apocalypses arising from Korean diasporas, geopolitical tensions in Sinophone and Vietnamese communities, and ecological disasters circulating from the Fukushima subduction earthquake in Japan. Our paper contributes to the global critique of political theodicies by showing in the transpacific region that evil might be seen in the wounds of war and disaster, but naming what exactly inflicts this violence is difficult – and generates even more pain in its indeterminate articulation.

In this paper I will evaluate the reception of Mosaic Law (hereafter just Law) by Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – c. 254 C.E.). Within in the polemics against “Christian heretics” and Judaism, Origen ascribed an important place to the Law preferring allegorical interpretation to the “heretical” and “Judaizing” approaches to the law, which included both rejection and literal interpretation.  Origen of Alexandria treated the Mosaic law on the one hand as relatively lower in value to Christian message while at the same time defending its divine origin and limited but continuing relevance. While a chronological evolution is apparent in Origen’s thought, I argue that there is a great deal of continuity in Origen’s view of the Law between the Alexandrian and Caesarean period.

St. Maximus the Confessor states that "the mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos is the key to all the arcane symbolism and typology in the Scriptures." This project explores to what extent Maximian Logos/Logoi theology aids an inclusivist interpretation of the Book of Job within the Judeo-Christian Traditions. Joban scholarship is typically siloed to discussions of theodicy; however, the Scriptural account of a pagan saint is prophetic in content and provides a pedagogy for the religious 'other'. Applied theological structures include Maximian Christology and Mystagogy which is aided by Pope Gregory the Great's threefold spiritual hermeneutic in Moralia in Job. The exploration concludes that Christology and Job provide theological grounds for an inclusivist interpretation of salvation and hopes for further explorations in Patristic writings on Job.

This paper contends that Orientalism and right-wing Slavophilia are based in the same colonial epistemology aimed to disentangle, legitimize, and hierarchize the sociopolitical categories of “East” and “West.” With this as a backdrop, I will propose a reading of Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis as a postmodern and postcolonial response to both, attempting to reconstruct a foundation for self-actualized Orthodox Christian identity neither in subjugation nor in contrast to Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. I will explore how this differs from a Slavophilic reading of neo-patristic synthesis, which I call “neo-patristic reactionism,” focusing on method and historiography. Lastly, I will discuss its implications for contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology and ecumenical relations, including an appraisal of its flaws and limitations.

As objects of devotion and veneration, icons invite the beholder to an encounter with the one depicted. But the presence an icon promises is grounded on a metaphysics of presence and absence, which, refuses stability or mastery and ultimately entails an essential difference between the icon and whom it depicts. In this paper I explore how phenomenology illuminates this encounter with the icon’s metaphysics of presence and absence. Drawing on Jean-Louis Chretien’s analysis of prayer, which explores the experience of presence and absence in prayer as both wounding and blessing, I argue that the traditional metaphysical accounts of the icon are amplified by consideration of how presence and absence is an experiential reality revealed in the prayerful encounter of the one depicted, an encounter that carries with it the possibility of wounds that bless.

This study looks into how Xitan Temple 悉檀寺, located on Chicken-foot Mountain (Ch. Jizu shan 雞足山; Tib. Ri bo bya rkang), facilitated material, human, and ritual encounters between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. Drawing upon the Sixth Zhwa dmar Chos kyi dbang phyug’s (1584-1630) pilgrimage account, Xu Xiake’s (1587-1646) 徐霞客 travel diary, temple inscriptions, and mountain gazetteers, this paper examines the ways in which Mu Zeng 木增 (Tib. bSod nams rab brtan, 1587-1646), a Naxi Chieftain who governed the Lijiang (Tib. ‘Jang Sa tham) area in northwestern Yunnan, played a critical role in Mt. Jizu’s transformation into a sacred site by patronizing both Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. This will shed light on the power dynamics among different ethnic groups in Yunnan, and how this influenced decisions on the religious market.

The Ming Court probably bestowed seven sets of the Yongle Northern Canon to areas in Yunnan. In one case, the Wanli Emperor (r. 1573–1619) issued a decree to present the canon to Huayan Temple on Jizu shan in the fourteenth year of Wanli (1586). His mother, Empress Dowager Li (1545–1614), issued a decree the following year that imperial court would exempt 1284 _shi_ 石of grain-tax from the local people (almost equal to 65,736 kg of rice) to bring prosperity to the country and blessings to the local people. This paper examines the Ming court’s bestowal of the Yongle Northern Canon in Yunnan to analyze the relationship between the Imperial Court and the border province in the southwest and to explore why the court disproportionately favored temples on the sacred Buddhist mountain Jizu shan. One purpose was clear: to consolidate the border region and to protect the empire.

This paper nuances the dominant view that the Buddhist kingship of the Dali kingdom drew upon the Sinitic teaching of the _Humane King_. It does so by calling attention to a group of unstudied Esoteric Buddhist ritual manuals for the consecration (Sk. _abhiṣeka_; Ch. _guanding_) of the Dali rulers and by showcasing the ideal of divine rulership embodied in the final part of the ritual. I argue this section is modeled after the enthronement part of the Hindu kingship ritual _pratiṣṭhā_, through which the king reigns as an incarnation of the Buddha. Such a merging of the king and Buddha in one person was never attained in the _Humane King_ model but constitutes a parallel with the Hindu-inspired _buddharāja_ (Buddha-king) ideal in contemporaneous Southeast Asian Buddhist kingdoms. In drawing the parallel, this paper advocates repositioning Dali in a cosmopolitan world consisting of the synchronous pursuit of an Indian-inflected divine kingship.

Bilingual Pali-vernacular versions of the Vinaya, including the core Pātimokkha rules and their ritual framework, are some of the most widespread forms of monastic exegesis in the Theravada world. These bilingual compositions, or bitexts, typically follow an interphrasal format, in which Pali words or short phrases are followed by expanded glosses in a local vernacular. As part of a broader inquiry into how bitexts shaped Buddhist translation across mainland Southeast Asia, this paper focuses on a single Pali-Dai example of the Pātimokkha from early modern Sipsongpanna (today’s Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan province, China). This paper compares this text—preserved in facsimile form as part of the massive _Zhongguo beiyejing quanji_ project—with other manuscripts in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand to reveal how the translation choices made by Dai scholars—into Dai as well as into Chinese—made the Pātimokkha respond to local conceptions of scriptural authority and temporal power.