In Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, Ralph H. Craig III explores the place of religion in the life and career of pop culture icon Tina Turner (1939-2023). To explain her religious beliefs in articles, memoirs, interviews, and documentaries, Turner drew on a synthesis of African American Protestantism, American metaphysical religion, and Nichiren Buddhism. This book reads across her public archive to provide a genealogical study of Turner’s religious influences and of her as a religious influence in her own right. This roundtable brings together scholars from the subfields of Buddhist Studies and African American Religions to consider the implications of Craig’s book for the study of religion and popular culture, Buddhism in the West, American Buddhism, and African American Religion.
Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book
In Black, Quare, and Then to Where, Jennifer Leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Maât the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth. Brandon Thomas Crowley’s Queering Black Churches explores Black open and affirming (ONA) congregations and their congregants and, in doing so, offers a critique of Black heteronormativity as well as a contextual approach to Queering African American churches. This panel invites Leath and Crowley to engage in discussion around their new books focusing on themes of black queer religious subjectivity, black sexual ethics, queer and quare critique, and the intersections of history, ethics, ethnography, and theology in the contemporary study of black religion and sexuality.
In Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), Christophe Ringer explores the pernicious and persistent presence of mass incarceration in American public life. He argues that mass incarceration endures largely due to the religious significance of animalizing and criminalizing black people in times of crisis. Ringer demonstrates how vilifying images of black people contribute to racism and political economy, creating a politics of death that uses jails and prisons to conceal social inequalities and political exclusion. This session assembles scholars of religion who also engage in abolitionist social, political, artistic, and ecclesial practices to reflect upon and respond to Ringer’s work.
This session brings together a panel of commentators to discuss the recent volume of essays published by the “God and the Book of Nature” group. Some of the panelists are contributors to the project, others offer a critical overview. The book develops views of the natural sciences in light of the recent theological turn in science and religion and science-engaged theology. Centered around the Book of Nature metaphor, it brings together contributions by theologians, natural scientists, and philosophers who explore complementary (and even contesting) readings of the Book of Nature, particularly in light of the vexing questions that arise around essentialism and unity in the field of science and religion. Taking an experimental and open-ended approach, the volume does not attempt to unify the readings into a single “plot” that defines the Book of Nature, still less a single “theology of nature,” but instead it represents a variety of hermeneutical stances.
In this book, Nathanael Homewood examines the frequent and varied experiences of spirit possession and sex with demons that constitute a vital part of Pentecostal deliverance ministries, offering insight into these practices assembled from long-term ethnographic engagement with four churches in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Relying on the uniqueness of the Pentecostal sensorium, this book unravels how spirits and sexuality intimately combine to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries. Ultimately, Homewood argues for a distinction between colonial demonization and decolonial demons, charting another path to understanding being, the body, and sexualities. Panelists on this panel will engage Homewood’s text, methodology, and findings in a wide-ranging conversation with the author.
What insights do the epigraphic sources reveal regarding the roles of female Buddhists, including monastics and laywomen, in the development of Buddhism during medieval China? The incorporation of epigraphy for studying Buddhism offers the potential for a radical re-envision of our understanding of Buddhist women from the Northern Wei (386–534 CE) to the Tang dynasty (619–907 CE). This panel seeks to employ innovative methodologies in interpreting epigraphy to unveil the social roles and religious practices of these Buddhist women, which were overlooked in mainstream Buddhist scriptures and historical records, providing fresh insights into gender studies within Chinese Buddhism. Additionally, this panel examines the dynamic interactions between Buddhism and indigenous religious traditions like Confucianism through the lives of Buddhist women. It addresses the challenges and conundrums encountered by analyzing specific cases and texts and illustrates how contemporary Buddhists reconcile the conflicts between Buddhism and Confucianism, achieving a harmonious coexistence.
Papers
In this presentation I raise the question of the value that entombed biographies hold for the study of Buddhist women given that, as a genre, these texts were commonly written by men whom historians typically identify as Confucian. I argue that rather than dismiss these invaluable biographies because they were written by elite men with limited access to institutional spaces demarcated for Buddhist women, that we instead adopt a methodology of reading that seriously considers the ways in which Confucian men wrote about the virtues of Buddhist women even when those women’s virtues ran counter to traditional Confucian ones. I draw from three case studies of such biographies written for women who served the Northern Wei court in Luoyang in the early 6th century to reveal how Buddhism provided Confucian authors with a mechanism for appraising the public works of women in a time of intense cultural reinvention.
Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have shown how Buddhist nuns were depicted as ideals of filial women in the Biographies of Bhikṣuṇīs, and in epigraphical texts, as a Buddhist response to the criticism from Confucians. Most of the nuns’ impressive filial deeds in the hagiographies that have been discussed occurred before their renunciation. By employing examples found in the Continued Biographies of Bhikṣuṇīs and other epitaphs of Chinese Bhikṣuṇīs, I introduce more roles Chinese Buddhist nuns played and the efforts they made as filial women in the confrontation of these two traditions, highlighting how nuns maintained their images of filial women after their renunciation. This study sheds light on more aspects of Buddhist nuns in the transformation of leaving the family from an unfilial action to a filial behavior in China, and on how these women undermined the boundary between the religious and the secular spaces in this reconciliation.
What are the last words of Buddhist women who resided and were interred in Luoyang, one capital of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE)? Why did they hold an unconventional attitude toward the burials of their bodies, in which they prioritized Buddhist identities above their roles in Confucian society? To address these inquiries, this study examines three primary sources: epigraphical materials, encompassing donative inscriptions that convey their viewpoints and epitaphs capturing their final words; Buddhist caves and images patronized by these women; and archaeological evidence from their burial sites, offering insights into the actual execution of their funerary choices. This paper aims to reconstruct the funerary practices of these Buddhist women and reveal their Buddhist thoughts, practices, as well as the religious networks they were involved with, while also addressing the dilemma faced by their executors and their eventual resolutions when Buddhist ideas conflicted with Confucian norms.
This roundtable panel is inspired by the late work of Rebert Bellah, especially through engaging with the new edited volume Challenging Modernity (Columbia UP, 2024), in which social theorists and scholars of religion debate the question of religion in modernity, which has been central to Bellah’s work. The theme of the panel is the seeming contradictions between the transcendent aspirations of religion and the social and political perils we now face in the global 21st century. How to deal with the tension between the transcendental, universalizing ambitions of democracy and the restricting exigences of time, place, and function? What does transcendence mean when it is nurtured by for-profit capitalism? What is the relationship between political, religious, economic, and intellectual classes in the global Muslim communities? The panel includes two original members of the “Habits of the Heart” group as well as three leading sociologists of religion.
A roundtable discussion using Marianne Moyaert's recent work, Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other: a History of Religionization (Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), aiming to explore its broader applications in interreligious studies, religion-racialization, and comparative theology. Moyaert's book traces the genealogy of religionization, examining how Christians historically established religious normativity and created categories of non-Christian "otherness." Addressing various processes and contexts, the work analyzes the intersections of religionization with racialization, sexualization, and ethnicization. The interdisciplinary panel will extend the discussion, evaluating religionization's significance for interreligious relations and its applicability beyond Christianity. Delving into North America's approach to religious diversity, particularly amid color-based racism and white Christian hegemony, the panelists will reflect on the interplay between religion and race. Exploring theological implications, the panel will discuss integrating religionization into interreligious dialogue and anti-racist theologies. Lastly, the pedagogical impact will be examined, discussing effective ways to teach the history of religionization in theological and interreligious settings. The interreligious and interdisciplinary panel aims to foster a comprehensive discussion, critically engaging with religionization's broader implications for understanding interreligious relations, drawing on perspectives from comparative theology, interreligious studies, and critical race studies.
Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979) posed a raised which has yet to be answered by the liberal audiences to which it was directed: In what world is there no argument when an entire people is told that it is juridically absent, even as armies are led against it, campaigns conducted against even its name, history changed so as to ‘prove’ its nonexistence? This roundtable reckons with the ongoing implications of Said’s question for scholars of religion. Fifty years after he posed it, amid genocidal violence against Palestine that is itself underwritten by the erasure of Palestinian life and history in our academic discourse, we ask: How has religious studies figured Palestine in different contexts? Toward what political and intellectual horizons? With what stakes and consequences?
In this roundtable, panelists will constructively, critically, and creatively engage Hanna Reichel’s After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023). In After Method, Reichel rejects, on theological grounds, the possibility of doing theology right—of theology adequately justifying itself. Putting constructive theology (via Marcella Althaus-Reid), in conversation with systematic theology (via Karl Barth), Reichel argues that theological method, nevertheless, has use, and considers how we might do theology better. Reichel proposes an understanding of theological work as conceptual design, and offers an approach to theology as one of cruising outside the gates.
Papers
This paper theorizes doubt as a type of disruption to theological meaning and examines whether it may be harnessed as a theological method in pursuit of a “better” theology. To do so, it reads doubt through the lens of Hanna Reichel’s proposal for an “after method” theological approach, holding in tension insights from systematic and constructive theologies while resisting the urge to synthesize them. Drawing on several interlocutors—including Karl Barth and Marcella Althaus-Reid, whom Reichel deploys in their own project—this paper will position doubt in two main ways: as a tool that contributes to (and benefits from) Reichel’s model of theology as conceptual design, and as a means for queering theological method by subverting expectations that method must be simultaneously stable and absolute. Ultimately, this paper draws upon Reichel’s project to ask whether doubt may contribute to better models of theology without necessary lionizing doubt as a virtue.
Empirical research has traditionally been absent in and is still a foreigner to systematic theology. Yet, the turn towards practices in studies of religion and theology implies that empirical research methodologies cannot be deemed irrelevant to systematic theology. This paper explores Hanna Reichel’s theory of theology as design, focusing on how she understands theology as practice and possible implications for the relevance of empirical methods to systematic theology. Bringing Reichel’s concept of theology as practice into dialogue with Geir Afdal’s concept of distributed normativity, the paper makes the case that the question of the affordances of a doctrine is not only an imperative theological question but also an empirical question opting for empirical research methods.
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