Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Table-top role-playing games (ttrpgs) have recently experienced a renaissance, and are being used in ecclesial communities as outreach beyond proselytization. This paper will determine how this ecclesial practice can encourage non-violence in the 'real world,' especially Principles #5 and #6 of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Non-Violence. New data will be collected through ethnography in EcclesiCon at Central Baptist Church in Palmyra, NJ (for example, interviewing gamers and participating in games); author's experiences at other gaming 'conventions' (i.e., gamer gatherings) will also be used. Data will then be analyzed through the lens of immersion (i.e., the act of 'inhabiting' the game world individually and communally) and performance (i.e., the structured yet fluid habitus of gamers) from Role-Playing Games Studies. The hypothesis is that ttrp gaming is demonstrably beneficial as micro-ecclesial practice, especially when intended as macro-community building (i.e., within and beyond the church itself).

This paper utilizes ethnographic research to examine how one ecumenical basement church uses discussion-style preaching to create an opportunity for congregants (including many people who experience homelessness) to process their experiences through the lens of scripture and communally interpret and reconstruct. Unhoused people are vulnerable to multiple forms of violence, including encounters with ecclesial practices that dehumanize the poor or treat people as mere “objects” of service. In this paper, I examine how this embodied nonviolent communication as preaching creates a space with the potential for communal processing and healing where people can imagine and enact resistance to violence together. While in this specific marginalized community “sharing the sermon” offers people experiencing homelessness space to process the forms of violence they encounter, I believe that within this example are opportunities for emulating this practice as a form of communication across theological (and other) differences and resistance to violence.

This paper builds on a research project with New-England based congregations to examine the complexities, challenges, and transformations three churches have experienced in pursuing callings to racial justice and repair. It begins by discussing the initiatives each congregation has taken in pursuing the call to racial justice, including examination of ecclesial histories and injustices, uncovering problematic theologies and spiritualities, “abolishing” interiorized bias, and taking tangible steps towards racial repair, such as making material reparations. The paper then explores the challenges and complexities congregations have faced as they have pursued vocations of repair, including confronting ecclesial complicity in racial violence and identifying paths of repair that respond meaningfully to historical harms and create future peace. The paper concludes by naming some of the “celebrations” and areas of growth for congregations in pursuing callings to racial justice, as well as identifies implications for thinking about ecclesial vocations in an age of violence.

Double Consciousness and Divine Chosenness Examined: This paper delves into W.E.B. Du Bois' exploration of race, religion, Zionism, and antisemitism within the American context, uncovering notions of Jewish power and equality. Du Bois' nuanced stance on these topics reveals an intricate interplay of personal experiences, philosophical reflections, and societal contexts within the United States. Through an analysis of his views on antisemitism and Zionism, alongside contemporary scholarship, this study elucidates the complexities of Jewish identity and the racialization of Jews in America. By comparing Du Bois' approach with other theorists' perspectives and engaging with modern Jewish studies, the analysis exposes enduring stereotypes and the intertwined dynamics of antisemitism and Zionism within American society. Ultimately, Du Bois' intellectual legacy sheds light on the intersections of race, religion, and identity, significantly contributing to our understanding of race relations and the "Jewish Question" within the American landscape in the 21st century.

Islamophobia is on the rise, along with anti-Semitism, in Europe and North America today. To combat such bigotry, we need a better historical conception of the ways prejudices become imbedded in religious and cultural thought patterns. This paper focuses on gender in Anglo-Protestant discourses about Islam as a key to understanding the deep roots of anti-Muslim sentiment. I show how images of violent Muslim men migrated from continental Europe to Britain during the Reformation, I explore how the Orientalist discourse of the veil influenced British and early American thought about Muslim women’s oppression during the Enlightenment, and I document how nineteenth and early twentieth-century Anglo-Protestant missionaries employed tropes about abused Muslim women. Recognizing the endurance of these negative gender discourses even with the growth of interfaith and Christian-Muslim initiatives after the mid-twentieth century, I ask how the lessons of history might assist us in confronting American and British Islamophobia today.

In this paper, I set out to challenge the assumptions of unrelatedness between twenty-century Jewish and Catholic renewal. Echoes of various aspects of the Jewish renewal of the interwar period can be found in the writings of many central figures of the later Catholic renewal, who encountered these ideas through direct reading of the Jewish thinkers or through the mediation of major theological figures, and some of those echoes even made their way to the conciliar documents.

In fact, I claim that there is a vast network of subterranean intellectual connections that extends the links between the Second Vatican Council and Judaism far beyond the Nostra Aetate Declaration to which it is usually reduced. My paper will uncover some of these unknown sides of the European movement of Catholic renovation before and throughout the Vatican Council.

This paper will think through the seeming paradoxes of an Urdu poem full of Quranic imagery—Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous Ham Dekhenge (We Will See) –becoming a widespread anthem of protest in defense of the secular character of India in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 and 2020. I argue that the poem’s reception history opens up a way for us to understand the critical role poetry plays in the Islamic tradition, and also the ways in which Urdu poetry acts a medium for Islam as a universal ethical discourse beyond the boundaries of Muslim religious identity. It also shows us how the rapid spread of the internet and social media in India has given rise to an extraordinary mimetic archive(Mazzarella 2017) of Urdu poetry that has deeply informed and transformed Indian public culture and ethical life far beyond the boundaries of Muslim identity.

In North Africa, the majdhūb saint is colloquially known as the “mad saint”: a figure pulled to God so quickly that it loses control of its rational faculties. Debates about the categorization of the majdhūb emerge in seventeenth-century hagiographic compendia yet also echo in everyday Sufi discussions of spiritual training and authenticity today. The circulation and interplay of similar transgressive acts, discursive arguments, and linguistic phrases attributed to past and living majdhūbs construct what I term “lived intertextuality.” In this presentation, I examine how the lived intertextuality of two majdhūb saints, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Majdhūb (d. 1569) and ‘Umar al-Fayyāsh (d. 1968), illuminates the reworking of the classical genre of Sufi biographical dictionaries. By tracing the interplay of sixteenth and seventeenth narratives with Facebook hagiographies, aphorisms, and pious television shows, I demonstrate how ongoing discussions of the majdhūb’s contested subjecthood renegotiate notions of sanctity, sanity, and the state. 

ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661) is widely known as a master orator famous for his rhetorical eloquence. A collection of his orations appears in the 11th century collection, Nahj al-Balāghah. Despite ʿAli’s prominent role in the Shiʿi tradition and rampant anti-Shiʿi sentiment in Egypt today, his orations continue to serve as models and citational sources for Egyptian preachers. Taking genre as an organizing thematic, this presentation explores connections, ruptures, and continuities in Islamic oration across time. It examines the aesthetic and ethical work of oration, asking what classical oratory can tell us about the genre of Islamic oration when put in conversation with contemporary preaching. I argue that Islamic oration is characteristically marked by the marriage of the aesthetic and the ethical, but not linearly. That is, the rhetorical and ethical force of contemporary oration is dependent on the construction of classical Islamic oration.

During the 1930s, as the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi revival spread throughout Senegal, poetry recitation became an important means of transmitting and cultivating spiritual knowledge of God. While the Arabic poetry of Fayḍa founder Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse has received scholarly attention, Ibou Diouf’s vernacular Wolof poetry became an equally important channel of spiritual knowledge, and it has recently undergone a resurgence through social media. Indeed, many Fayḍa adherents describe Ibou Diouf’s poetry as a kind of hidden Qur’an inspired directly by God, and classically trained scholars cite it in speeches and lessons. This paper takes a decolonial approach to examining how Ibou Diouf’s poetry contributes to cultivating knowledge of God. It untangles the distinctions between oral and written knowledge to recognize interconnected forms of knowledge typically invisible to academic observers. Although Ibou Diouf was illiterate, his poetry weaves together concepts from the Qur’an and diverse Islamic and Sufi literature.

This paper ethnographically explores the potential of understanding the citation of Islamic texts in terms of the production and circulation of “phantasms” that affect the senses and soften the heart in the context of a three-day jamaat (gathering) in Birmingham, UK.  This paper turns to Mary Carruthers to glimpse the role that sensation and imagination play in the tradition that informs this Muslim community’s understanding of how they engage with texts, and then proceeds to provide two ethnographic examples that highlight this. Ultimately, the paper argues that approaching textual engagement in terms of the production of phantasms provides a capacious understanding of “text,” that allows us to understand the intimate fusion of textual citation and the environment in which that citation takes place. This simultaneously allows for the enrichment and specification of the emotional and embodied dimensions of Muslims’ engagement with texts.

This paper theorizes contemporary discourse about fossil fuel extractivism, arguing that various enculturated ideas about the social power of petroleum are used to legitimate and maintain unjust systems of resource exploitation. The argument is constructed in three parts. First, I discuss ‘commodity fetishism’ and the relationship between colonial systems of resource extractivism and the development of racialized classifications of religion. Second, I consider “industrial religion” as an interpretive frame for contemporary discourses that attribute supernatural powers fossil fuels. Third, I conjoin these two strands of analysis and conclude by suggesting some of the implications for environmental humanities scholarship on extractivism.

This paper explores mining in Burma/Myanmar. With particular attention to the ruby and jade industries, this paper investigates the relationship between Burmese Buddhist imperialism and the exploitation of the environment and borderland communities. Myanmar has produced the world’s most valuable rubies, and Chinese courts have favored Burmese jade for centuries. These extraordinarily lucrative gemstones have ornamented powerful Burmese and Chinese ritual objects and enriched royal patrons of Buddhism. At the same time, mining practices have inflicted extreme harms on minoritized communities and non-human beings. This paper examines the ways that Buddhist authorities have justified mining violence in royal orders, public inscriptions, and ritual artifacts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. It argues that these sources reveal a pattern of situating violence as a small demerit that is justified by a larger agenda of establishing Burma as the earth’s last remaining realm that protects the “pure” Buddhism (sasana).

Pushes for “clean” energy have raised the price of uranium to a point where the energy industry is looking to reopen mines across the American west. Historically the same corporations that mine uranium also extract fossil fuels, making this one industry, not two separate entities, relying on fetishized science and technological solutions. I consider how “clean” energy operates to perpetuate colonialism, obfuscating that all energy is extracted from somewhere, and offering a promise of salvation from the impending existential catastrophe of global warming. To do this I examine popular culture representations of scientists in the show *Manhattan* which paints scientists as atheist gods (obfuscating that most religious institutions in Los Alamos were founded by the scientific community), contemporary news reports on climate change, and social media memes about “believing in science.”  I argue that the concept of “clean” energy, understood as a fetish offering salvation, erases continued energy colonialism.

Recent interest in the metaphysics of participation (and in Platonism more widely), and burgeoning scholarship on that theme, is a notable feature of current evangelicalism, not least in North America. I will argue that this should be understood as both the fruit ecumenism and a driver for further ecumenism, and that while it is focused on doctrine or systematic theology, it cannot fully be appreciated if seen as isolated from spirituality, mission / apologetics, and the recovery of a historical sensibility. I will argue that this attention to Christian Platonism should not be seen primarily as one turn to philosophy among many – one which happens to be Platonist – but that the character of the particular philosophical vision is central. I will conclude by asking what the interest in participatory metaphysics among evangelicals might offer for conversations with other religious traditions.

In Aristotle’s view, nothing comes from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). Both he and Plotinus thought, therefore, of the substratum (ὑποκείμενον) of matter as being eternal. Christian theology has consistently rejected this understanding of material causality through its teaching of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). Theologians have parted ways, however, on how to understand the creator-creature relationship once eternal matter is rejected. The Augustinian-Thomist approach has rejected creation from God (de deo). This paper draws attention to an alternative tradition, that of Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, which thinks of creation as both out of nothing (ἐκ τοῦ μή) and out of God (ἐκ θεοῦ). This paper argues that a genuinely participatory metaphysic requires the combination of creation ex nihilo and ex deo.

The (post)modern world oscillates between radical monism and pluralism. On the one hand, various forms of scientism claim that science alone is sufficient for explaining everything, while reductionist physicalism seeks to reduce all of reality into nothing but matter. But in its effort to unify all things with a single principle, these kinds of monism are destructive to the irreducible richness and complexity of reality. On the other hand, with its extreme emphasis on difference and otherness, postmodern thought has celebrated diversity at the expense of unity. In this paper, I will argue that participatory ontology provides a balanced worldview in which all of reality is unified by an absolutely transcendent source that nonetheless respects difference and diversity.