Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

In 1997, Shasana Rakkhit Bhikkhu, a Bangladeshi Buddhist monk, established a bank named the Buddhist Co-operative Credit Union Limited (BCCUL). A Buddhist monk being the head of a financial organization radically challenged the common perception of Buddhist monks being detached from worldly affairs. Initially, the BCCUL aimed to help 20 poverty-stricken people. Now, it has expanded to over 23,000 members, transcending religious boundaries and promoting trust among Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. Shasana Rakkhit Bhikkhu’s daily routine resembles that of a corporate executive as he manages his many initiatives which include organizing ordination ceremonies, leading meditation retreats, undertaking housing projects, founding a Buddhist art academy, and establishing a beauty salon academy for Buddhist women. While these endeavours challenge traditional notions of monasticism, they also provoke controversy and backlash from proponents of a more orthodox approach. Despite this, his multifaceted activities blend spiritual insight with commercial acumen, empowering Bangladeshi Buddhists and nurturing interreligious harmony.

This study seeks to understand how a Buddhist monk effectively manages a financial organization, how his initiatives contribute to community development across religious traditions, and how these initiatives challenge or expand the traditional role of Buddhist monasticism.

Buddhist monastics across Asia have long been held in esteem by their community of lay adherents, are frequently the recipient of material support as "fields of merit", and are given an elevated social status as advanced spiritual practitioners and clergy who perform important rituals. This paper looks at ways in which Buddhist monastics affirm that difference through their attitude toward the physical body. Are Buddhist monastics made different through their practices of ignoring the body, and how is that manifested in their responses to physical pain? As a lens through which religious transformation can be understood, pain can lead to both suffering and liberation, functioning as both an obstacle and a teacher along the spiritual path. My ethnographic research focuses on the Xiangguang or "Luminary" bhikshunis in southern Taiwan and their strategies of resilience, exploring what it tells us about Buddhist understandings of transcendence and the purpose of monastic life.

Eight Tibetan Buddhist women became fully ordained nuns (Tib. *dge slong ma*) in the 1980s in Hong Kong. The topic of this paper is how differences in ordination procedures create unique challenges for the identity of *gelongmas* living and practicing Tibetan Buddhism in India. Drawing from fieldwork in a nunnery and teaching institution in the northwestern Himalayan region, this paper features two *gelongmas* who have held vows for nearly forty years. They share their distinct experiences and innovative understanding of their identities as *gelongmas*–one who narrates inclusion and the other exclusion. Their experiences of identity and difference provide a lens into the authoritative claims about who counts as a *gelongma*. This presentation explores the possibilities and limitations in their everyday lives and argues that more attention be paid to the plurality of ordination practices in order to better understand how the parameters of *gelongma* ordination remain subject to scrutiny.

The purpose of this paper is to examine religious studies’ constitutive theoretical dichotomy between social scientific study and religious practice from a Baha’i perspective and propose possible paths towards its reframing. Specifically, I argue that the prevailing preoccupation with the boundary between religious studies and practice stems from a contingent conception of religion inherited from the epistemic categories of modern secularism. The questions we ask of an object of study and the approaches we employ to answer them are rooted in what we think that object is. This paper offers an analysis then of the theoretical and methodological implications of a Baha’i conception of religion. In particular, I discuss how the Baha’i concept of religion as a system of knowledge and practice, analogous in some ways with science, invites distinct questions about religious actors and phenomena, as well as distinct methodological approaches to answering them.

The governing bodies of the Baha’i Faith have written relatively little about disability. A major exception to this is a 2000 statement “A Bahá’í Perspective of Disability” by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United Kingdom. The statement is unique in that it implicitly seeks to articulate the potential benefits of the Baha’i vision of civilizational progress for disabled people. Its main points are that Baha’is believe both government and charity are responsible for providing for those unable to work due to disability, and that Baha’is encourage the development of cures for previously incurable conditions. This reveals an essentially medical understanding of the origins and proper response to disability, generally reflecting the medical model of disability. The medical model is by no means unique to Baha’is, but is illustrative of the high regard given to medicine as a source of knowledge by Baha’i authorities and Baha’i writings.

During the last century, religious communities in America have engaged in conversations about the tensions and benefits of studying religion from academic perspectives. In this presentation I try to understand better what Baha’is involved in Religious Studies have said about the ways they have tried to integrate Baha’i theological or ethical perspectives into their work. I also will comment on the possibilities for developing distinctive Baha’i-inspired perspectives on religious studies methods and theories.  Though not much work has been done at the intersection of the Baha’i community and the academic study of religion, there are many possibilities for mutually beneficial discussion.

Charles Calistus Burleigh (1810-1878) was a proponent of Immediate Abolition who was also a committed adherent to principles of peace and non-violence. His pacifism and non-resistant ideas were tried in actual struggle, as he was present at some infamous attacks upon the Abolitionists, such as the attempt in Boston to attack William Lloyd Garrison (1835) and the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall (1838). Based primarily on original archival research, this presentation looks at his combination of theory and practice, aided by an eclectic approach to religious resources from groups as disparate as the Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers, that highlight how Burleigh's direct engagement with the struggle helped accelerate the diffusion of non-violent ideas from many sources into a genuine practice that, despite its shortcomings, can speak to issues of social justice that remain cogent today, including race, gender, capital punishment and the violence of war. 

Scholars have underplayed Bayard Rustin’s Quakerism.  Labeled a “Gandhian,” Rustin is said to have prioritized techniques Gandhi tested in India over biblically-based teachings about nonviolence from a distant past.  Gandhi did influence Rustin; however, I argue that Quakerism played a key role, as shown in Rustin’s “holy experiments'' at the Ashland Federal Penitentiary and at interracial institutes he organized.  Rustin’s Quakerism is revealed as a radical habitus (N. Crossley).  Rustin called on fellow Quakers to “expend our energies in developing a creative method of dealing non-violently with conflict,” to “make war impossible in ourselves and then make it impossible in society,” and to share with others what Quakers already have at hand: “a pattern for a ‘way of life that can do away with the occasion of war.’”  Rustin’s experiments, grounded in this “way of life,” powerfully influenced non-violent direct actions he organized.

Rabid, emotional, and fiercely loyal sports fans defy common descriptors and social norms, hence religious terminology is often used to them. In this paper, I will apply religion differently to sports fandom with the help of its intertwinement with the secular, thus preventing a strict bifurcation between the religious and the secular when it comes to fandom. I will examine the tension between football fandom and a committed religious life at select religious universities with high-profile sports programs in order to highlight this interplay between the religious and secular for the football fan of such university football teams.

Every sports fandom acquires some ugly stereotype which becomes representative of their fans, but only one repeatedly gets reminded that they threw snowballs at Santa Claus: Philadelphia sports fans. In this paper, I will examine how Philadelphia sports fans gained such a negative reputation and how viewing them like a religious community can offer new insights into how we study religion and sports.

Baseball can be called a Catholic sport since Pope Francis referenced John Navone, who said, "Jesus responded to the problem of failure with a loving patience.…like that of teachers who hope that at the end of the course the students will have learned what the course was all about." William Cavanaugh explains further in Theologies of Failure, how part of being Christian means following Jesus in failing to redeem humankind. Whereas Elysian Fields originated in Hoboken in 1846 as a bucolic escape from urban factory life, baseball has become for “fanatics” a daily meditation on human failings. The hitter who fails three out of four times or pitcher who fails once every inning are esteemed. This paper interviews devoted “fans” of the losing-est team in America’s losing-est city, the San Diego Padres, (named after Franciscan Friars) about the religious appeal of fealty to futility amidst a sport about failure.

The paper examines how Jewish baseball fans understand their connection to Jewish players and theorizes about what that means for Jewish identity. Baseball was a pathway for Jews to become (White) Americans in the 20th century. Today a large cohort of Jewish baseball fans remain obsessed with counting and rooting for Jewish players, regardless of team affiliation. I will argue that these fans are motivated by both a continuing insecurity about their place in American life and a search for the meaning of their identity as American Jews. The paper will focus on the American Jewish players on Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic to explain the role Israel plays in the American Jewish imaginary, contrasted to the Southpaw League, an anti-Zionist virtual group of diehard Jewish baseball fans. It will also include a study of Jacob Steinmetz, the only Orthodox Jew in the MLB.

Divine and demonic powers play an important role in everyday life in the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India, shaping how people relate to the delta’s multispecies ecologies and to each other. This paper considers changing relations with water beings under conditions of water privatization. In the Sundarbans, certain creeks, ponds, and lakes are recognized as “awakened” (jagroto), enlivened by the presence of beings that sometimes assume embodied form in aquatic animals like crocodiles and fish. With the enclosure of these waters as private fisheries, water beings have become a point of contestation. Many say that they have departed local waters, even as fishery owners continue to enact relations with water beings through prayer and ritual. I adopt a cosmopolitical ecology framework to understand how extraction in aqueous ecologies articulates with more-than-human relations, generating material and spiritual gains for some and disorienting losses for others.

Across cultures and throughout history, glaciers have been considered to be living beings who respond to human activity, sometimes marauding mountain villages, sometimes rebuking moral infractions. Climate change is leading to rapid extinction of glaciers, with significant implications for the lifeways of local, rural, and Indigenous peoples. Placing the cryohumanities in conversation with studies of extractivism, this paper examines the ways that the global decline of mountain glaciers – terrestrial seas – sets the stage for enclosure and extraction of economically important resources including water, minerals, and land, with specific attention to the contested ontologies and epistemologies of glacier extinction in and around Bolivia’s Milluni Valley, where Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and Indigenous Aymara cosmovision intermingle and glacial decline has exacerbated inter and intra-community tensions around resource access. Indigenous Aymara cosmology understands mountains and glaciers as ancestors and guardians, yet glacier extinction creates emergent possibilities for resource extraction and exploitation.

Beginning with an insistence on hydrosocial pluralities of fresh waters, this paper presents a comparison among three kinds of narrative futurisms: Octavia Butler’s 1993 parabolic futurism (from Parable of the Sower) of the arid southern California of 2024; Andrea Ballestero’s ethnographic future anterior as watery ontologies are negotiated between the regnant concepts of commodity and human right; and the increasingly geopolitcally-influential mainstream Anthropocene Fresh Water futurisms. I argue against five specific totalizing dangers and evangelical fervor of mainstream fresh water futurisms, suggesting instead that the social ontologies and narrative multiplicities offered by anti- and decolonial speculative fiction writers (Butler) and contemporary social scientists (Ballestero) are necessary for thinking and relating to fresh waters.

The paper talks about Ethiopianism as the first recognizable religious movement among Protestant Christians of African descent. Significantly, it was a religious movement which emphasize the idea of social ameliration/racial uplift.  The paper will make the case that Ethiopianism originated among free black Christians who were conscious of the ways in which racism among white Christians limited the spread of the ideas and ideals of liberal Christianity among peoples of color.  For these Christians, releasing liberal Christianity, and its social ameliorative properties from the fetters of white racism became an evangelical goal, with the understanding that there was an onus upon them, as Ethiopianists, to pursue this goal among peoples of African descent. The concern of the paper is with how Ethiopianism grew from its 18th century North Atlantic origins to become the impetus behind African initiated Christian reform movements in the 20th century Atlantic world.

In her 2008 experimental poetry collection, Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip untells the “story that cannot be told” of the Middle Passage Zong Massacre, in which over one hundred fifty Africans were thrown overboard to ensure insurance compensation for the ship owners. Philip uses the single archival trace of the massacre, the Gregson vs. Gilbert court case, to assault the language and logic that render Black bodies consumable. Murdering words and their false sense, Philip describes herself  as a “sangoma,” or a Zulu physical and spiritual healer. She thus reclaims African diasporic ritual practice, opening to an ancestral voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng, who speaks the stammers of the dead through her onto the page. I connect Philip’s sangoma poetics to what Christina Sharpe calls “Trans*Atlantic” Blackness, a mode of living in the afterlives of slavery in which risk and disruptive possibility inhere in the surplus meanings of Black flesh.

This paper examines both the writings of Ursula de Jesus, (1604-1666), a Black woman born into slavery who lived in the Santa Clara convent (of the order of the Poor Clares) in Lima with her ama (owner) for 28 years as one of hundreds of slaves, as well as the visual literacies she demonstrates through written accounts. Ursula’s freedom was purchased by a nun in 1645, and Ursula became a free religious servant called a donada. I argue her writings and the visual literacies they draw on reveal how multiple paradigms of blood were actively circulating in relation to colonial Peruvian understandings of religion. Blood was at once redemptive in a Christian understanding and potentially limiting when understood through racialized colonial frameworks that associate one’s ‘character’ with their bodily composition through fluids like blood.