Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper explores the Spanish-American-Mexican Borderlands as a location, a geography but most importantly a lens through which to come to terms with the present. Our failure to take the borderlands seriously undermines the welfare of our society both in terms of what we don’t know and admit about our past, but also in terms of how people are affected by that cultural whitewashing. Rather than a specter of the past, the borderlands continue to be a dynamic space of conflict, collaboration and cultural gestation in the world today. In particular, the North American borderlands have tremendous influence on the culture, religion, and even the epistemology and rhetoric of our era while simultaneously being misrepresented and poorly understood in popular culture and everyday interactions. I will explore this directly though Spanish language (*banda*) music on the radio, and the role it plays in preserving and expressing the borderlands perspective.

The emergence of queer Latinx Faith-based voices in culture, art, and politics raises important questions about how a person can synthesize conflicting identities within oneself and harness the energy from this process to engage in liberatory action. This presentation explores the concept of liminality, which is present at the intersection of queerness, Latinidad, and faith, and how such a space can be the source of hope-filled decolonial liberatory activism. The first part will offer an overview of the intersection, the second part will explore a deep analysis of the dynamics of the liminal space, and the third part will investigate how this process aids liberation. The overall goal of this presentation is to craft an understanding of the internal, spiritual dynamics of queer Latinx Christians to better understand how they have synthesized various apparently conflicting fragments of their identity and harness this power to create a better world.

In the context of Latine ethics and liberation theologies, queering Our Lady of Guadalupe offers a critical and liberative approach to honoring the complexity of culturally Catholic and Queer Mexican lived experiences. Specifically, queering our Lady of Guadalupe creates an anti-oppressive theo-ethical framework grounded in the tenets of Latine ethics and theologies of nepantla,  lo cotidiano, el acompañamiento, and doing theology en conjunto. Expanding on these theo-ethical cornerstones, queering our Lady of Guadalupe rejects heteronormativity, homophobia, machismo, marianismo, and any social construction of gender or sexuality which functions to exclude and/or oppress those of us identifying within Queer communities or outside of the sexual/gender norm. Living in the unique tension of both the colonized and colonizer identities, I examine how nepantla as an epistemological framework is limited to a specific hybrid existence and does not apply to all Indigenous experiences. Holding this tension, I prioritize queerness as an invitation to liberative reimaginings of colonial symbols for Queer Mexican Catholics. 

This paper utilizes a mujerista interpretation of Frida Kahlo’s artwork in order to complexify mujerista images of motherhood. The first section is an analysis of the motherhood-related language that Isasi-Diaz uses in her book Mujerista Theology. The second section provides a brief biographical sketch of Frida Kahlo as we explore a set of her paintings referred to as “anti-nativity scenes” and how these anti-nativity scenes contribute to the mujerista project of liberation due to their reimagining of the role of mother, their symbolic naming of the self, and their location in lo cotidiano. The final section explores how placing the work of Frida Kahlo and Isasi-Diaz into conversation can create an expanded and empowering conception of motherhood that addresses the embodied liminality of Latina women. This gives legitimacy to the varied experiences of Latina women, liberating their real, everyday experiences from the category of the unimportant.

This presentation analyzes masculinity within a Latin American-Caribbean colonial context, exposing the enduring impact of historical gender norms on contemporary male identities. Analyzing colonial biases favoring male virility and the cultural legacy of the penis as a symbol of masculine honor, I argue these historical views continue to shape male behavior and expressions in Latin American-Caribbean cultures and contribute to gender violence and sexual abuse. This historical context sets the stage for employing Anzaldúa's Borderlands theoretical approach as a framework for rethinking masculinity and uncovering vulnerability and fragility as sources of male identity. Drawing from personal experience, I advocate for a new understanding of what it means to be a man transcending oppressive structures of colonialism and heteropatriarchy, paving the way for transformative religious practices. I aim to demonstrate how, within the Borderlands, men can transcend traditional conceptions of masculinity to foster unconventional and refreshing experiences with the divine

It is often assumed that Abhidharma Buddhists hold the same essentialist view of gender due to their shared belief in the existence of material sex indriyas that are powerful over the arising of sex characteristics and gendered behaviour. In my paper, I demonstrate based on passages in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya that this is not the case. While Vasubandhu agrees with his Vaibhāṣika interlocutors that the sex indriyas are material in nature, he draws on Sautrāntika and Vijñānavādin arguments to provide several objections to the Vaibhāṣika account. He proceeds to redefine the sex indriyas and reduce the scope and nature of their causal powers, resulting in a deflationary account of sex and gender.

This discussion will explore how the metaphysical realism of the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma affects their understanding of the third gender and contributes to the perception of queerness as a vitiated form of incarnation. The dualistic and hierarchical concept of gender, which is solely defined through corporeal traits that are considered in the context of metaphysical realism, influences how queerness is perceived. Within this context, gender faculties (puruṣendriya and strīndriya) are examined on an atomic level and considered to be independent of the mind. The disposition (āśaya) of queer individuals is pre-determined by their physical base (āśraya). Queer corporeality is considered to lack the steadfast will and mental sharpness that are necessary to obtain enlightenment. Exploring the role of metaphysical realism in the formation of the heteronormative and condescending attitude toward queerness within Sarvāstivāda can help us to better appreciate later Mahāyāna developments such as Yogācāra.

In this presentation, I explore how we can expand contemporary gender metaphysics by drawing on Yogācāra philosophy. With a focus on the writings of Xuanzang (c. 602–664) and his disciple Kuiji (632–682), I investigate how the Yogācāra theory of consciousness-only can be read as a gendered account of non-duality that informs a critical and constructive reconceptualization of what gender/sex is. As I will argue, Yogācārins like Xuanzang and his disciples present gender/sex as an embodied performance that sentient beings can enact in different ways. While regular sentient beings have been conditioned to enact their gender/sex in an essentialist manner, they can also collaborate to re-enact their illusory gender for problematizing dominance. I refer to such a gender metaphysics as the Yogācāra dialectics of gender that does not explain gender away but rather furnishes sentient beings, especially the practitioners, a set of vocabularies in disposal for promoting social justices.

This paper examines the ways that stories about semi-divine pretas operate within several tensions between Brahmanical gender norms, the patriarchal householder society, the ideals of the celibate sangha, and the everyday gendered realities of men and women. It focuses on tales in which semi-divine pretas engage in sexual relationships with human partners. Following Amy Langenberg’s suggestion that scholars employ a feminist hermeneutic that attends to alternate viewpoints of female sexuality, this paper pushes beyond a conclusion that preta narratives attempt to relegate gender transgression to the realm of the non-human by comparing the preta to female domesticity and beauty. While these narratives attempt to regulate women’s sexual capacity, the preta world itself, as a realm of distinctly unregulated female sexuality, operates in tension with the text’s own normative frameworks. As such, these tales open possibilities for a transformative space that contests the patriarchal heteronormative imperatives of the marriage economy.

My dissertation, “Objects of Enchantment: The Life and Afterlife of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) Hidden Secret,” centers on an Arabic manual of ritual magic written by famed theologian and philosopher Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. The first half of the dissertation provides the first close analysis of Rāzī’s sources, showing how he imagines the pre-Islamic ancient past as a repository of enchanted knowledge and enfolds this knowledge into an Islamic cosmology. The second half of the dissertation traces the circulation of this text, its translation into Persian, and its reception in a variety of contexts, including the Delhi Sultanate and early Ottoman courts, early modern Cairo, and in colonial manuscript libraries. In illustrating the vast popularity of this text, the dissertation both demonstrates the centrality of this genre to Islamic intellectual and political history and also theorizes the meaning of enchantment and disenchantment in a premodern context.

Through a close examination of unstudied Sunnī ziyāra liturgies like those found in Ibn Farhūn’s (d. 1397) Kitāb Irshād al-Sālik, my dissertation challenges the prevailing notion that ziyāra as scripted liturgy was restricted to Shīʿī sources. In my dissertation, I explore the disjunction between premodern and modern Sunnī ziyāra practices and answer: In what contexts did ziyāra liturgies emerge and develop? How did pilgrims engage with ziyāra liturgies? How can we compare ziyāra across sectarian lines? How did ziyāra liturgy communicate certain norms and ideals to spiritual participants? This project highlights several understudied aspects of ziyāra such as the study of female saints and women’s ziyāra to shed light on broader questions of sectarian identity development. My research draws on methods from ritual, material, and gender studies and illustrates that reading ziyāra literature across sectarian divides grants key insight into an understanding of intra-religious relations and sectarianism in the Middle East.

Thousands of Shiʿas gather annually for the Ashura procession in the megacity of Karachi, putting a multitude of languages, practices, and communities on public display whilst signaling power through unity. Karachi’s Ashura procession reflects the complicated entanglements of urbanization, violence, religious and ethnic identities, as well as constantly-changing spatial dynamics in the city. Claiming public space, asserting identity, and operating within a complicated politics of visibility are tied with a major act of religious devotion. The yearly tensions around Karachi’s Ashura procession distill a broader set of contemporary issues about public space, urban religion, and the place of religious minorities in this majority-Sunni postcolonial nation. My dissertation considers the question of minority religion practices in public space amidst a complex context. Centering the Muharram procession as a key element of the city’s urbanization process, I argue that Karachi’s Shiʿas negotiate the relationship between public presence (visibility) and silence (invisibility) as a means to understand and negotiate their positioning in the city and within a larger discussion of what constitutes a “Pakistani Muslim.”

This paper explores the Sufi philosophy known as the “Unity of Being”(waḥdat al-wujūd) in the early modern Ottoman and Mughal Empires. In the 17th century, debates surrounding this system of thought can tell us much about Sufism as well as the history of empire, changing religious demographics, and contests over political and religious authority. This study examines  adherents to the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd like Şeyh Bedreddin (d.1421 c.e.), Mughal prince Dārā Shikūh (d. 1659 c.e.), and ‘Abd al-Ghanī Nābulusī  (d.1731 c.e.) against Aḥmad Sirhindī’s (d. 1624 c.e.) intervention rejecting this doctrine. By exploring these case studies it becomes apparent that anxieties over the demarcation between Islam and non-Muslim religions are at the crux of what makes this philosophy so controversial, and that its defenders attempt to navigate a course between the particulars of Islam and the universalizing worldview of mystical monism.

My research analyzes the al-Kitāb al-Muʿtabar of Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, a key figure in the later development of Avicennism in the Islamic world. I explore how his theory of perception (idrāk) give us an alternative epistemology than Avicennan rationalism and the skepticism that is used to attack it. I look to Abū l-Barakāt’s criticism of Avicenna’s theory of intellect, where al-Baghdādī claims that knowledge consists not in intellectual grasping of forms via the Active Intellect, but in direct perception of the world, the scroll of existence (ṣaḥīfat al-wujūd). I explore whether and how Abū l-Barakāt’s epistemology therefore rejects the traditional contrast between immediate (badīhī) and acquired (iktisāb) knowledge, and so sets up a form of empiricism that does away with the epistemic paradigms of certainty put forward by al-Fārābī, kalām, and Avicennism.

Taqyīd al-mubāḥ (restricting the permissible) refers to the ability of Muslim rulers to restrict acts that the sharīʿa permits in order to prevent a social harm and secure a public benefit. Since the late nineteenth century, this concept has been used to justify the state’s restriction of legally permissible acts such as slavery, child marriage, and verbal divorce. My paper identifies the nineteenth-century Egyptian discussions on polygyny as an instance in which scholars also debated taqyīd al-mubāḥ. This debate reflected the evolving role of the state. Early in the century, scholars didn’t advocate state intervention due to limited power. By the late century, as state control over courts increased, some scholars saw an opportunity to restrict polygyny for the public good, while others argued for limited state intervention and the privacy of marriage. This highlights the tension between the legal tradition and social change, showcasing the strategic use of Islamic legal principles to navigate these challenges.

The proposed paper responds to Michelle Voss’ 2009 invitation to test the wider applicability of her mapping of humility in the writings of Mechthild de Magdeburg onto a nine-level organizational schema. Using a comparative methodology, this paper will expand theological understanding of the trope of humility in the autobiographies of 8th century Tibetan Buddhist visionary, Yeshé Tsogyal. In doing so, it claims that an embrace of humility can further our own journey on the path to liberation.

This paper is a philosophical examination of Kierkegaard’s approach to truth and existence in relation to Tibetan Buddhist thought represented by Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). A problem that seems to surface for the close reader with some familiarity with both thinkers is whether Kierkegaard’s truth as subjectivity is similar to truth as non-duality in Tibetan Buddhism as lacking a subject and object distinction between the knower and what is to know (the referent). Adopting a comparative method based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in cognitive linguistics, my study embraces an investigation that is in effect an argument favoring a similarity between truth as subjectivity and truth as non-duality. This research implies that Tibetan Buddhism offers the resources for our contemporary inquiry into the relevant issue in Kierkegaard’s thought. It contributes to work in inter-religious dialogue and comparative theology, deepening the dialogue between the two faith traditions or cultures.

I argue here that Paul’s understanding of pneuma and pneumatic life is fittingly compared with Tibetan understandings of the “subtle body” and associated phenomena. Late-ancient Mediterraneans commonly understood pneuma as rarified embodiment. Central for Paul is to be metamorphosed from our present mode of embodiment—psychē-animated, material embodiment—into the mode Jesus accomplished in the resurrection: pneuma embodiment. This metamorphosis is indistinguishably physiological and “mentalistic:” It is a change in “hidden” physiology (in kardia, the seat of nous, where pneuma enters and circulates the body) which causes changes in nous and phronēma (mindset). It occurs through intensive embodied experiences and is accompanied by paranormal manifestations. I point to two Tibetan parallels: (1) theoretical discussions, where subtle embodiment is the order at which mind-becomes-physiology and physiology-becomes-mind; and (2) hagiographic and practice-manual references to paranormal phenomena associated with subtle body changes. These parallels helpfully transform our understanding of early Christianity.

Using unpublished archives from the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva and the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Chambésy, this paper relates the history of Orthodox Christianity’s initial entrance into and ongoing place in Jewish-Christian dialogue. After briefly recounting the post-WWII origins of modern Jewish-Christian dialogue, from which Orthodox Christians were almost entirely absent, we examine the story of direct attempts by the WCC, primarily in the early 1970s, to fill the “Orthodox gap.” These attempts, however, generally failed, not because Orthodox representatives at the time were resistant to dialogue with Jews per se, but because they were resistant to pursuing such a dialogue with the same political and theological assumptions with which it had unfolded elsewhere. In fact, around the same time, Orthodox Christians, under the sponsorship of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, began their own bilateral relationship with Jews, outside of the auspices of the WCC. Surveying the history of these bilateral meetings, from their beginnings in 1976 to the most recent in 2022, this paper concludes with an analysis of what the “official” Orthodox Christian-Jewish bilateral relationship has thus far achieved and what it still lacks.

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While Orthodox Christian-Jewish dialogue often and necessarily centres on elements of anti-Judaism within Christian preaching, teaching, and worship, this paper focuses on some of the enriching insights that can be gained through this engagement. This paper will address three broad themes: (1) the recovery of the full narrative of God and Israel — and a truer christotelic rather than a limited christocentric typology; (2) the illumination and deeper understanding of existing Orthodox Christian liturgical and faith practices through a Jewish perspective and interpretation; and (3) the retrieval of a more vital sense of living patristic tradition reflecting the dynamic “Talmudic” approach to seeking truth through dialogue, debate, and the application of heuristic methods. Through engagement and dialogue with the Jewish community, Orthodox Christians stand to gain fresh insights into the living tradition of the church, and rediscover neglected aspects of faith and practice.

In recent years, flesh has emerged as a rich and significant analytic for thinking about corporeality, especially concerning race, violence, and politics. It also becomes useful for illuminating the social and political consequences of violence in postcolonial states like the Philippines — the main focus of this paper. First, I delineate what I found helpful and compelling from various interpretations of flesh in black feminist thought. Then I examine how flesh emerges in Filipino peoples’ sense-making through the aswang concept in Philippine folklore. Lastly, I theorize how the aswang as flesh both furthers and complicates our understanding of state terror in the Philippines. By converging these points into a conversation about violence and its agentic role in Philippine political life, I contend for a postcolonial theory of flesh that invites new sense-makings of material, affective, and discursive encodings of violence and makes room for new iterations of politics to emerge.

Diasporic Filipino Americans, dwelling at the heart of the American settler colonial project, have gravitated toward constructions of identity that have used cultural nationalism as its primary resource. As a result, contemporary notions of Filipino cultural identity have tended toward myths of pure and essentialist self-understandings resulting in exclusionary, often depoliticized discourses due to an infatuation with what Gayatri Spivak terms a “nostalgia for origins.” This presentation attempts to recover consciousness of the hybridized figure of the Chinese Mestizo in Filipino society in the time of Spanish colonialism, and argues that this complex history which encompasses religious, economic, and racial processes, disrupts the allure of cultural nationalism for Filipino Americans today. Exploring notions of hybridity, migration, and diasporic subjectivity, this presentation explores theological critiques of nationalism that press Filipino American diasporic subjects to consider the limitations and possibilities of cultural nationalism in a settler colonial context.

My paper will show that in the situation of evolving and extended colonialism, the capacity to dispense and use violence is part of the process of recovering political subjectivity. The capacity, desire, and inspiration to inflict disruption to the quotidian processes can be ascribe to as political subjectivity. This is my paper’s claim following a constructivist grounded theory approach to the work of the politically underground movement in the Philippines called Christians for National Liberation (CNL).

I will focus on CNL’s sources and ways on drawing justification on the violence produced by the armed struggle they support. Violence, as a theological unit of analysis, took different shape when viewed from the discursive practices of decolonial movements experiencing the effects of evolving colonialism. From the ground, the CNL’s capacity to enact violence is an indication of their capacity to recover themselves as political subject that has the capacity to create a kind of future that they themselves imagined and will create.

This essay compares ideas of nature, divinity, and history in late sixteenth-century colonial New Spain. I reconstruct the ecological, religious, and political contexts of this period to compare the emergence of two related discourses: Christian Utopian and Apocalyptic institutions, as well as transformations in contemporaneous Nahua ecological, spiritual, and political thought. These developments occurred during a time of significant climate change known as the “Little Ice Age,” exacerbated by anthropogenic catastrophes wrought by colonization. The differences and occasional dialogues between Christian millenarianism and Nahua intellectual productions highlight how the former, ironically, understood human relationships to nature in relatively static and unchanging terms. Nahua texts, by contrast, demonstrated a critical sensitivity to the contingencies of climate change and catastrophe. These insights add critical dimension to recent studies of indigenous religious traditions in colonial Mexico. They also suggest that indigenous traditions themselves should be understood as context-specific, undergoing constant negotiation and adaptation.

Tibetan Buddhist historiography tends towards a “borderland complex” that fueled fascination with, and pilgrimage to, holy sites in South Asia. Yet, focusing on central Nepal—as both a destination for devotees and a periphery from the perspective of the major sites of the Buddha’s life—problematises applying such discourse to modern times. Kathmandu’s Boudhanath Stūpa has on its own periphery a newly created “Ghyoi Lisang Peace Park” expressing Tibetan, Newar, Tamang and other Himalayan identities as part of its architecture, iconography and used by pilgrims, tourists and locals; but is also a leisure destination run by municipal administrators. This presentation analyses its ecology in relation to older dynamics of pilgrims creating and reading space, identifying the “sacred” and negotiating holy sites. Further, it sheds light on how religio-economic power between China and India manifests here, in not only in mundane bricks-and-mortar business but also online through Instagram and Google reviews. 

In the nineteenth century, Tibetan nomadic pastoralists in Amdo defied the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911), conquered the Qinghai Mongols, and settled the grasslands surrounding Lake Tsongön (Tib. Mtsho sngon; Mong. Kökenuur; Ch.: Qinghai hu). After decades of conflict, Qing officials acquiesced and recognized their right to live in these grasslands. The communities then built their own permanent monasteries, established relationships with territorial deities, and affiliated their monasteries with larger monasteries in farming regions in the east. I argue that these processes constituted a form of Buddhist place-making. The monasteries they built and the regions they settled often took on the communities’ names. Through affiliating their monasteries with large monasteries in farming regions, they established religious teaching networks, pilgrimage circuits, trade networks, and political alliances with eastern Amdo monasteries. By establishing different pastoralist communities as patrons (Tib. lha sde) of the same monastery, they facilitated ties between communities.

What is the relationship between Buddhist beyul (Tib: sbas yul) revealed valley refuges and oral folktales about invisible, inhabited villages that are sometimes revealed through tragedy or error? Drawing on oral storytelling traditions in the Tibetan region of Gyalthang and literature about beyul, this paper scrutinizes the tensions between revelation through transgression and revelation through realized vision. Accounts abound in Gyalthang of hidden villages, locally pronounced zi göh, and their revelation through acts of transgression, inversion, or mischief. Both beyul and zi göh are about relocation, discovery, rendering the invisible visible, and the idea that there was an amazing place that we could not see until something wondrous happened. I argue that the older concept of zi göh deeply informed and rendered intelligible the Buddhist dynamic of beyul revelation. How might we assess a hypothesized morphological relationship between seemingly contradictory tales of paradise lost and of paradise found?

This paper discusses non-Buddhist animal sacrifice practices carried out by the Lhop and Monpa communities in Bhutan, and the attempts of Buddhist practitioners to ban these based on the Buddhist principle to not take life. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper looks at the ongoing efforts to prohibit animal sacrifice in the Lhop community, and the abandoning of these practices with the Monpa in the past. It lays out the arguments, the progress of events, and the power relations between the minority groups and members of the mainstream Buddhist culture within the nation state of Bhutan. Understanding animal sacrifice as a key practice to connect to their protective deities, the paper considers the effects of this interruption of human-deity relationships and asks if the banning of animal sacrifice might be the stimulus event for full conversion to Buddhism.

In a context of landslides, rampant and unplanned urbanization, and unreliable roads, different communities in Sikkim have turned to their local divinities, narratives, and repertoires of “sacred landscapes” to take protective measures. Using competing narratives, collected from multiple informants from different communities, this paper examines stories, conflict reports, and the display of religious symbols, objects, and materials at various sites that serve to negotiate 'sacredness.' It asks question such as Whose landscape is it? Who has the authority to form a sacred site? By doing so, the paper illustrates how local communities merge, transform, and make sacred landscapes by negotiating beliefs and performing rituals.