Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

It was 1844 in Salem, Massachusetts when the W. and S.B. Ives Company published a provocative new board game: “The Game of Pope and Pagan, or Siege of the stronghold of Satan, by the Christian army.” Likely inspired from The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, this two player, missionary-based game pits the “papal and pagan Antichrist” against the Christian (meaning Protestant Christian) army. According to the board, the white pieces representing Christian missionaries symbolize “innocence, temperance, and hope.” The pope and pagan are in black, denoting “their grief at the daily loss of empire.” Perhaps the makers thought it would just be fun and games, but The Pope and Pagan only fanned the Nativist flames of anti-Catholic and anti-pagan hatred and violence in America.

Wicca has been one of the fastest growing religions in the United States in recent times. Although the rate of individuals being born into the religion is increasing, the vast majority of adherents to the Wiccan faith are converts from other religions. What do these individuals find so appealing about Wicca that they shed their old religious beliefs and convert? The works of Pierre Bourdieu and attachment theory provide a sound basis for answering that question. This paper will look at the reasons given by converts to the Wiccan faith for their decision to convert to the faith, and they will be analyzed using Bourdieu's theory of power dynamics along with attachment theory to identify the psychological factors and motivations behind individuals converting to the Wiccan religion.

Black metal – an inaccessible underground subgenre of heavy metal music – has a controversial relationship to mainline religion and theology. This paper interrogates the theological meanings in the lyrics, compositions, and aesthetics of a variety of contemporary American black metal bands to show that the musical scene is actively engaged in the work of constructive theology. These theologies employ a variety of wisdom traditions including Romantic philosophy, pre-Christian polytheism, occultism, Gnostic theology, pantheism, and surrealism. I argue that the contemporary black metal scene in America is currently describing a complex, participatory, pagan theology, inspired by pre-Christian religion as well as the Romantic movement in Europe and America. Finally, I will suggest, through specifics examples in the music, that this Romantic paganism proposes important ecological and ethical perspectives that are relevant in our era of extractivist ecocide.  

Witches on social media are not only redefining the boundaries of their traditions, they are eschewing the category of religion entirely, adopting the language of secularism to describe their magical identities. Secular witches compose a rapidly growing presence on sites like TikTok, Tumblr, and Instagram, and their perspectives are making their way into traditional publishing, sometimes to the bewilderment of both other witches and scholars alike. When witches of previous decades have fought so publicly to be members of a “religion,” how do practitioners who actively defy this categorization fit into these movements? With an understanding of religion as an inherently political category, this paper affirms the efforts of secular witches to recast their craft by using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to think about not just how we define religious groups, but how we consider groups that insist that what they are doing is firmly not religion.

In her essay, S. Lily Mendoza  grapples with the question: What happens when the “one true story” encounters other faith stories? Subtitled "Christian Formation Meets Indigenous Resurrection," her work in this volume tracks her autobiographical journeying out of the absolutisms of her born-again Christian formation into the radicalizing challenge of her schooling into deep ancestry and indigenous tutelage.

As a white settler colonial educator/poet, partnered with a diasporan Filipina activist/scholar, and schooled by Black activist challenges over more than three decades of living and working in inner city Detroit, my work seeks to learn from the margins. In this piece, indigenous Filipino wisdom in re-baptizing a local Manobo community in older traditions of dwelling on Mount Apo, provoke a re-imagination of Jesus’ own “immersion” in his local ecozone, claimed by a storm, guided by a dove, tested by rocks, as the prerequisite to resisting settler colonialism in Roman occupied Palestine.

Jamina's chapter in this book outliness the deployment of major Marian narratives at different stages in the Philippines' political development, with a special focus on how they impact, but are also claimed by, Filipinas.  She shows how Marian motherhood promotes but can also exclude Filipinas' empowerment in both public and private, with the latest iteration of these dynamics at play in the OFW phenomenon as well as the latest national elections.

This paper delves into the distinct spiritual expressions of autistic individuals by examining the life and writings of Julian of Norwich. I consider three elements of Julian’s spiritual life that correspond to key features of autism. Although it is speculative to interpret historical figures through contemporary concepts like autism, Julian as a model illuminates the importance of recognizing diverse ways of experiencing Christian spirituality. Such an exploration is necessary to broaden understandings of autism in theological discourse. First, I examine her life as an anchorite as a divergent social path that nonetheless allowed her to be in community on her own terms. Second, I explore the intensity of her focus as exhibited by her writing. Last, I consider her mystical experience in terms of heightened sensory sensitivity. Reconsidering Julian through the lens of autistic experience provides a fresh perspective on neurodivergent expressions of Christian spirituality.

This paper examines the practices of tracing and praying to crip ancestors among key disabled activist-writers. Through analysis of their essays, poetry, and memoirs, I argue that such practices function in part to resist a curative social imaginary that erases disability from our collective histories and futures. I contend that Christian theologians might learn from disabled activist-writers’ embodied attention to the past as a resource to reimagine the future without disability’s erasure. This paper develops a negative theological hermeneutic in which the search for crip ancestors in the archive and in scripture exposes the violence of the past that prevents the recovery of disabled lives. Ultimately, I argue, following Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, that our stumbling upon and seeking crip ancestors “in the void of not always knowing… what their legacy means” generates desires for liberated futures.

This paper reads Julian of Norwich’s 14-15th-century visionary text A Revelation of Love alongside Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013). Kafer’s notion of “crip-time” provides a lens through which to theorize an “else-when” of disability in the medieval past and elucidate the mode of temporality deployed in mystical writing. Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation ––in its deep engagement with illness, impairment, and paralysis––has been read by scholars in religious/disability studies as a devotional and theological model of a disabled person experiencing God. However, considering the role of time in medieval mystical literature through disability studies exposes a complicated––perhaps theologically necessary––ambiguity between the somatic experience of illness and the curative temporality of Christian soteriology, inviting us to question whether the political goals of disability studies can work in tandem with the “crip” and curative temporalities of medieval mystical traditions.

Within the theological study of disability, prayer has most often been discussed in the context of creating inclusive liturgy, deconstructing harmful approaches (prayer used to “heal” someone with a disability), offering complimentary therapy to manage pain or promote psychological well-being. Prayer, as an individual spiritual practice by disabled people, remains underexplored within the field of disability theology. Prayer as a way to transcend the physical pain and social isolation that often accompanies disability (due to the social construction of disability). My paper explores the liberative aspects of prayer (transcendence) for disabled people. Drawing on her personal experience of disability, Susan Wendell articulates the need for transcendence from the “rejected body.” Simone Weil expands Wendell’s conception of spiritual transcendence, offering prayer as a mode of spiritual transcendence from affliction. I argue that prayer can lead to spiritual transcendence, which alleviates suffering for disabled people through union with God.

This paper explores a sub-genre of premodern Japanese Kannon setsuwa known as “tales of poor women (貧女譚).” Unlike early Chinese Guanyin miracle tales, Japanese Kannon setsuwa are notable for their explicit focus on female sexuality, as well as their frequent (and approving) depiction of female protagonists of low social standing seeking wealth and other worldly benefits. By examining how such tales of marginalized women both shaped and were shaped by Buddhist institutions in 10th and 11th century Japan, this paper will explore how gender and marginality came to be intertwined with issues of pilgrimage, karmic efficacy and even literary genre in early medieval Japan. It also demonstrates how such narratives served as a medium through which underrepresented women influenced the history of Kiyomizudera, one of the best-known Buddhist institutions of Japan’s Heian period (794-1185).

This project follows Chinese Buddhists who traveled to Japan studying Esoteric Buddhism from 1910 to the 1930s, returning to China spreading their teachings among monastics and laity. It will start with Gui Bohua’s (桂伯華 1861-1915) turn to Esoteric Buddhism to deal with the death of his family and then consider a series of monks and laypersons who sought ought initiation at the Shingon headquarters of Koyasan 高野山. These Buddhists sought not only to study a lost part of Chinese Buddhism but also to develop a potential alternative to western modernity. They spread Esoteric Buddhism throughout the Chinese Buddhist landscape while simultaneously improving Sino-Japanese relations during the spread of Japanese colonies throughout the Sinosphere. Finally, a case study of Taixu’s 太虚 Wuchang Buddhist Studies Academy *foxueyuan* 武昌佛学院 highlights its lay community’s shift from academic to Esoteric Buddhism.

This paper discusses the complex cultural and intellectual situation in the early phases of Japanese modernization by studying certain occult metahistorical tendencies that developed at the time, with special attention to interactions with similar tendencies from the West. In particular, I address a metahistorical discourse about the alleged relationships between Japan and the Jews, based on the concept of ultra-ancient history (chōkodaishi) that flourished from around 1930 to 1945 and is still partially influential today. As a window into occult metahistory, I will especially explore texts by Ogasawara Kōji (1903-1982). It appears that there existed a sort of “Dark Side” of Japanese modernization, deeply influenced by spiritualism, occultism, and theosophy imported from the West, which produced alternative discourses about Japanese identity and nationalism based on discredited Western ideas combined with creative interpretations of Japanese cultural texts.

The evangelistic efforts of American evangelist Billy Graham in Japan were met with enthusiasm by Japanese Christians. Despite the small Christian population in Japan, Graham's crusades may have been viewed as a proxy for the U.S. in the context of the Cold War. In 1956, Graham visited Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, who was also a Christian. The significance of this meeting is particularly noteworthy within the context of the postwar U.S.-Japan alliance. This paper aims to analyze how Japan responded to Graham's crusade by examining articles about his visit to Japan from non-religious newspapers. Through this analysis, the study seeks to determine how Japanese non-religious newspapers, and by extension, Japanese society, viewed Graham and his message. This research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between U.S. diplomacy and politics in Asia, as well as the role of American evangelism during the Cold War.