Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper explores the roles of remorse and recollection as ethical resources apropos tragedy, particularly in reckoning with what constitutes tragedy and what does not. Firstly, I suggest that tragedy has often been eclipsed in favour of fatalistic or deterministic accounts of catastrophe, with detrimental, 'silencing' effects on ethical reflection. Then, I explore how remorseful recollection might help us to recognize and reflect on tragedy historically—which is to consider tragedy within its authentic, truthful temporal conditions without being trapped in deterministic evasions. To further elucidate this, I explore how 'rememory' in Morrison's Beloved serves as a type of remoresful recollection vis-a-vis tragedy.

Finally, in mournfully recalling the tragic past, I consider how such (re)narrations of shared, tragic loss might also serve as ethical resources for articulating and engaging in an alternative, liberative reality through protest, repentance and repair, and forgiveness. 

This paper comparatively considers Judith Butler’s and Paul Ricœur’s respective engagements with Greek tragedy to argue that conversion by tragedy is vital for ethics. Paying particular attention to structural evil, I ask what tragedy teaches about ethical living amid the ruins of racism, sexism, classism, militarism, and speciesism. Reading Sophocles and Aeschylus with Butler and Ricœur, I argue that by bringing attention to the overlooked contradictions that characterize human identity and which inevitably complicate action, and by inviting witness to unbearable suffering wrought by superindividual forces, tragedy engenders a re-theorizing of oneself and one’s world that is necessary to nourish ethical responsibility. It does so by fostering sensitivity to vulnerability – one’s own and others’ – through a narrative-performative mode, which refuses premature resolutions, and instead “undoes” witnesses into wider perspective. I conclude by pointing to tragic theorizing’s potential to productively approach structural evil without proliferating shame, nihilism, or moral absolutism.

How can ethics account for appeals to tragedy in public discourse, particularly when it comes to rivalry between social orders? This essay traces the enduring ethical significance of Greek tragic drama while engaging with its critical reception in German philosophy and theology. It begins by analyzing G.W.F. Hegel’s influential criticism of fate in Greek tragedy, particularly through his treatment of Sophocles’ Antigone. It then engages with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own response to Antigone, situated within his broader criticism of Hegel, which involves his disavowal of tragic self-reference for resistance politics. Although there are significant differences between Hegel’s and Bonhoeffer’s ethical projects, I demonstrate how they each seek reconciling forms of thought and life that overcome an ultimately tragic clash between social orders. In light of their works, I argue that although responsible action may incur guilt, it need not also bear a sense of the tragic.

The “frame” of the American War in Vietnam has rendered Vietnamese refugees, particularly women, legible only insofar as they are willing to offer their forgiveness of American male violence. Christian theology, in prioritizing the forgiveness of American war crimes over the need to witness Vietnamese refugee’s pain, has colluded with the dehumanizing structures that deny Vietnamese refugee women’s subjectivity. Yet the solution is not to offer a complete narrative of Vietnamese refugee trauma; both critical refugee studies and the material turn in trauma theory question whether narrative is sufficient to bear witness to war wounds. Building from critical refugee studies combined with Shelly Rambo’s work on trauma and theology, I argue for a Christian theological account that witnesses to trauma by utilizing a sensory epistemology to construct a more textured perspective on forgiveness

Due to their ties to their home countries, immigrant churches reflect foreign political, ideological, and cultural influences. These influences impact both the church and the immigrant community. Korean immigrant churches, shaped by Korea's political context, often maintain mono-faith and mono-ethnic structures, fostering exclusionary attitudes. In the diverse landscape of the United States, this exclusivity may provoke isolation or even violence. Therefore, examining the intersection of political-religious identity and immigration in these churches is crucial. In this paper, I argue that Korean immigrant church should transition its foundational structure from an exclusive structure of separation/survival to the structure of embrace/self-emptiness. It explores the origins of the separation/survival structure through the political context of Korea and proposes a theological framework based on Christ's ministry for embrace/self-emptiness.

This paper posits that constructive theologies of interpersonal trauma are often cyphered through religious texts and reflections. This is illustrated via a comparison of the betrayal of Christ in two unique and highly contextualized gospels. The first, the Old Saxon Heliand, depicts Jesus as a conquered chieftain, submissive to his fated agony, potentially intending to domesticate the rebellious ethos of the recently conquered Saxons. The second example emerges from a criminally understudied text, the Homerocentones of the Empress Eudocia. She presents a defiant Christ, who levels a poetic condemnation of Judas and other evildoers and thus reflects facets of Eudocia’s own character and possibly aids in her own internal adjudication of her unjust banishment from the imperial court. Such trauma informed reading produces fresh understandings of how collective and individual traumatization can be navigated within the resources of a scriptural tradition and its varied contextualizations.

This paper examines the role of print media in the 19th-century dissemination of transnational esotericism and the promotion of South Asian yoga traditions beyond their indigenous contexts through an examination of the local and global concerns of Heeralal Dhole, a print entrepreneur in colonial Calcutta (now Kolkata).  The paper examines the context and content of a selection of Dhole’s publications, revealing how translation facilitated appeals to transnational networks of cultural transmission and exchange.  Then, through an analysis of Dhole's connection to Paul Carus and the Open Court Publishing House, the paper explores how vernacular agendas were both influenced by and influential in shaping the anglophone public's reception of yoga. The paper contributes to the understanding of yoga's historical transformation through translation, highlighting the complex interplay between publishers, book distributors, and the market's appetite for esoteric knowledge.

This paper examines a brief episode in the modern re-interpretation of kundalini as a vital component of Indian cultural heritage, initiated by the Indian author Gopi Krishna (1903–1984). In his autobiography Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967), Krishna assessed kundalini as an evolutionary mechanism inherent within the physical body. As Krishna’s network of global collaborators expanded, Indian politicians and journalists endeavored to involve him in various research projects in India aimed at elucidating the esoteric nature of kundalini through scientific means. The “Kundalini-Yoga” series, featured in the Indian tabloid Blitz between April and May 1976, played a pivotal role in disseminating knowledge of kundalini. The aim of this paper is two-fold: Firstly, to illuminate the significance of Blitz in the nationalization of kundalini, and secondly, to examine India’s research efforts aimed at demystifying kundalini.

Based on ethnographic “fieldwork” conducted during a 75-hour online course on Indian, or “Vedic” astrology (also called jyotish), this paper explores how non-Indian yoga practitioners incorporated astrology into their spiritual lives. In particular, I focus on how the course’s instructor, Nish, presented a brand of Vedic astrology that was simultaneously Indian and universal, mysterious and accessible to all. This leads to a broader reflection on how an astrological worldview—one with hidden meaning and suffused with beautiful connections—aids in the spiritual seeker’s search for physical and spiritual alignment.

Combining Michael Marder's "plant-thinking" with apophatic theology, this paper proposes that if language can be understood as a coming-into-being as plant–a self-articulation into spacethen I argue that plant-thinking provides a new lens through which to consider the ecological significance of apophatic theology. I will ask: what is “God-talk” if language itself can be corporeal? Further, if language is spatial articulation, then trees are “speaking” themselves constantly–and perhaps also communing with the divine? In my paper, I will argue that plant-thinking (as described by Marder and similar thinkers) can be read with apophatic theology and argue that this may suggest that the very doing of theology derives from a property of matter.

As our warming planet heats and burns, shade—that refuge from the sun—becomes increasingly precious, and rare. The refuge we find below the canopy of trees is soothing, essential, and yet also threatened. We find ourselves facing a world that is more difficult for arboreal survival, and so for our own. In conversation with trees—perhaps the paradigmatic shade provider—this paper explores the unsettling, but also soothing, powers of shade (and of the trees who provide it). In conversation with anthropologists, and philosophers like Michael Marder, this paper invokes the chthonic dimensions of shade that provides refuge for those who’ve been forced to migrate too far from their world of plants.

This paper analyzes the vegetal theology of Gustav Fechner by drawing upon the author’s original translation of his previously-untranslated 1848 book, Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plants. I explore the telelogical and aesthetic implications of Fechner’s category of plant-soul (Pflanzeseele), and explore how it rests on a thoroughgoing dual-aspect monism. I put Fechner’s arguments in dialogue with monistic predecessors, including Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling, and contextualize the uniqueness of Fechner’s methods in the context of post-Hegel Germany. Finally, I characterize my translation project as a kind of vegetal ressourcement, along the lines of philosopher Michael Marder, whose 2013 book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life attempts to “vegetalize” the Western philosophical cannon.

This paper will elucidate how Christendom within popular imagination, spurred on by coalescing imperial identities, created and forced violence upon minority persons, such as Jews, in the build-up to the first crusade. While we think of the crusades as acts of war within the Near East, we need to disrupt this perceived binary of Christians and Muslims. Looking at the formations of modern antisemitism is more crucial than ever. This paper will look at the Jewish sources of the Rhineland massacres to understand the reception and reaction to Christian crusading ideology outside of a pure Christian/Muslim binary and to see how Christendom interacted with new ideas of national identity to purposefully and violently create an Other. This violence will be understood through theories of narrative fracture that unveil the continued trauma, even in narrating the accounts themselves.

In May 1525, Luther published a fiery pamphlet titled Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. Luther found little understanding for rebelling against legal authorities with violent actions, especially when conducted under the name of Christ. Before encouraging rulers to take the sword to strike the rebels down, he advised them to offer the peasants an opportunity to come to terms, “even though they are not worthy of it.” This paper presents a historical arch, examining the development of Luther’s political and theological thought behind the well-known pamphlet. The paper examines the shifts in the historical context affecting Luther’s theological connotations, claiming that the idea of peace as a primary solution remains in Luther’s societal teaching while promoting the ruler’s duty to carry the sword. The paper presents changes in Luther’s biblical teaching related to the lived experiences in the 1520s in the ever-changing societal and ecclesial realms.

Informed by the new historiography of American evangelicalism and critical, queer, and feminist theory, this paper is a strategic intervention in the social and cultural history of the sexual politics of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. Relying on a careful analysis of a wide range of primary sources (e.g., autobiographical literature, social media posts, and church-adjacent documentation), I frame the seemingly disparate enunciative modalities of contemporary evangelical Christian intimacy as taking place within a dense cluster of related discursive regimes. Moreover, I connect these threads through their effects as examples of discursive violence.1 This cluster of discursive regimes produces new subjectivities that hinge on the violence(s) of mandatory heterosexuality, misogyny, and the normalization of patterns of institutionalized abuse and gendered violence. Case studies of “celibate Gay Christian” homonationalism, the imperial, white supremacist logics of “tradwives,” and the neo-Volkskörper of Christian Nationalism converge against the backdrop of rapidly changing coordinates of public space and place, ever increasing socio-economic precarity, and the decline of the public sphere under neoliberal capitalism. The paper includes a discussion of how these American-born cultural products are being exported elsewhere, especially to Europe.

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