Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

What is the social life of a dead person? Who can they hear? To whom can they speak? And with whom can they be in community after death takes place? A legal discussion in the Babylonian Talmud about exemptions from liturgical obligations for individuals tending to the needs of the deceased prompts the sages to question whether the dead have any knowledge of what takes place in the realm of the living. The Talmud explores this question by recounting four stories of purportedly direct exchanges between the living and the dead. By analyzing this story cycle, this paper will argue that the rabbis imagine the dead to maintain the capacity for a robust existence–one with social, emotional, and perhaps even physical dimensions. This conclusion calls into question how we define life and death, and how starkly we define the boundary between the two.

It is impossible to study medieval Jewish life without being interrupted by death. While Jewish quarters were located centrally, the cemeteries were outside the town boundaries: a distance that allowed for unintentionally public performances of Jewish identity. This paper explores how these acts borrowed, commented upon, and subverted Christian understandings of death generally, and of Jewish death particularly. I survey funeral processions and examine gestural practices: pouring out water upon hearing of a death, and tossing earth behind oneself upon leaving a cemetery. Water-pouring was a silent announcement, while earth-tossing indicated the severing of the spirit from the physical world. To Christians, however, these odd-looking gestures fostered confusion and anti-Jewish sentiment. Examining the rituals that brought Jews from the realm of the living to the quiet of the grave, and comparing Christian understandings of them to their Jewish sources, can deepen our understanding of death and mourning practices in Ashkenaz.

What does it look like to be in community with the newly dead? A painting cycle, consisting of fifteen images, created in the 1780s for the chevra kaddisha (burial society) in Prague can provide us with a more robust picture of the community created between the dead, their caregivers, mourners, and laypeople. The paintings were created while the traditional rites of Jewish burial were under threat from hygiene reforms introduced by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Josef II. The paintings are thus a political and ideological document as well as an account of the embodied intimacy, spatial relations, and inter-communal relationships between the dead and living in late 18th century Jewish Prague. The paintings present a visual document of what it means to be in holy community with the newly dead, and are worth studying, alongside textual sources, for understanding the communal nature of Jewish death obligations when under state pressure.

In vv. 3 - 83 of the Nirālambanavāda chapter of the Commentary in Verses (Ślokavārttika), Kumārila mounts a powerful critique of Yogācāra in the form of a response to the dream argument. This critique engages at the level of both metaphysics and philosophy of language. Kumārila argues that a Yogācārin who denies that our concepts have external percepts, based on the analogy of a dream, can make sense neither of goal-oriented motivation nor of perceptual error. And he turns the dream argument against itself, deftly arguing that its rejection of referential views of language deprives the proponent of the argument of the ability to understand either the argument itself or any aspect of Sanskrit debate. Since participants in South Asian debates were held accountable for representing each other’s arguments accurately, Kumārila’s account of Yogācāra may shed light on scholarly conversations about how to interpret the meaning of key Yogācāra teachings.

In a brief exchange with his Buddhist opponent in the Nirālambanavāda (vv. 154-59), Kumārila argues that (non-referring) expressions like “the horn of a hare” cannot bring about correct ideas. His commentator, Uṃveka, understands this as having implications for the Buddhist conception of upāya, skillful means, and of saṃvṛtisat, conventional reality. Keating's paper unpacks Kumārila’s reasoning and considers its implications for both Buddhist opponents and the Mīmāṃsā hermeneutic project, which relies on arthavāda, motivating speech, that some have characterized as convenient fictions.

This paper explores how defenders of Yogācāra might be able to respond to Kumārila’s critique by drawing on later developments in Buddhist philosophy and contemporary developments in technology. Examples of computer simulations, especially multiplayer games, show that environments in which everything that appears is an illusion can be characterized by both misperception and goal-oriented motivation, so long as they also exhibit intersubjectively robust causal regularities. Meanwhile, the spectacular self-destruction of the dream argument shows that a Yogācārin cannot afford to characterize conventional truth as false simpliciter. In this dialectical context, a key role could be played by the later distinction drawn by Buddhist epistemologists between a cognition’s being non-mistaken (abhrānta) and the distinct property of being non-deceptive (avisaṃvādaka).

It is a central claim of Yogācāra philosophy, defended by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, that a cognition must apprehend itself in order to apprehend an object. Some believe this idea – known as the “self-awareness” (svasaṃvedana) doctrine – also to be central to certain European philosophical traditions (German idealism, Husserlian phenomenology). Building on previous work by Birgit Kellner and Alex Watson, this talk analyzes a key passage from Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika, Śūnyavāda chapter (vv. 179cd ff.), that critiques Dignāga’s so-called memory argument for this thesis – namely, that when one remembers something, one also remembers experiencing it. The passage reveals the complexity and sophistication of a Hindu-Buddhist controversy already at an early stage.

Violence and marginalization are woven through U.S. political life. One critical conversation in recent years centers on normativity in U.S. citizenship, a thread that theologian Keri Day picks up in her 2022 publication, Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging. In Azusa Reimagined, Day explores the Azusa Revival in the context of U.S. racial capitalism and uses queer scholarship to examine Azusa’s anti-normative vision and practice of citizenship. While queer theory and queer theology serve as important resources for the book, I argue that Day’s constructive proposal for political moodiness and a project of radical inclusion, belonging, and intimacy risks shoring up rather than effectively resisting the normativity paradigm it seeks to contest. Ultimately, the project would benefit from deeper engagement with negative theology of queer theologian, Marcella Althaus-Reid, to reframe its conclusions and enrich ongoing discussions around normativity, violence, and U.S. citizenship. 

Intersectional feminism entered mainstream American social discourse at the end of Obama’s presidency. How did two Jewish opinion magazines from different ends of the ideological spectrum, namely the neoconservative Commentary and Tikkun on the liberal left, address this phenomenon? The presentation focuses on the discourse concerning the emergence of intersectionality, which was one of the key elements of the culture wars that took place – mostly online – during the mid-2010s. The presentation shows how the political outlooks of the magazines affected the ways in which intersectionality was embraced, rejected or questioned in their writings. Additionally it offers analysis on how the Jewish background and profile of both publications affected their approaches to the topic.

This paper explores global movements of Christian solidarity with Palestine. Within the theoretical frames of decolonial theory and liberation theology, we delve into the practical application of these approaches within Christian movements supporting Gaza and broader Palestine since October 7th, 2023. Furthermore, we also argue  that confronting Christian Zionism and its roots in empire can act as community-centered decolonial practice in these spaces. Using two case studies, we examine the transformative power of these movements on theology, liturgy, and ritual. Our first case study examines a South African-led delegation of Christian leaders who traveled to Bethlehem to witness Rev. Munther Isaac's sermon "Christ in the Rubble" as a powerful act of solidarity. Our second case study focuses on global Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage during Lent. Together with our theoretical foundations, these examples reveal how Christian communities worldwide are engaging in embodied protest and ritualized solidarity across diverse geographic and cultural landscapes.

This paper will look at how John of Ephesus dialectically looks at the Empress Theodora as the pinnacle of Christendom while also seeing her as a subversive force in relation to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Looking at how John understands her religiously and morally in conversation with Procopius’s Anecdota, we see how hagiographies can construct and deconstruct moral identities within religious spaces. I will play these sources off each other to elucidate the hagiographic method that John applies to earthly power and further understand how people can create hagiographic identities during a person’s life. This paper will look at how the fractured nature of John’s Theodora narrative offers a different lens through which to witness hagiographic identity.

Virtually every study of the monastery of Helfta remarks on the significance of its thirteenth-century Abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn (1223-92) to the extraordinary literary flourishing that took place during her forty-year tenure [N6:6:1, 205] when the  Helfta nuns collaboratively composed the largest body of women’s religious writing of the thirteenth century. When scholars have turned to the Helfta writings, their attention has for the most part alighted on the visionaries at the literature’s center, Mechtild of Hackeborn (the Abbess’ biological sister) and Gertrude of Helfta, her younger contemporary. My paper focuses on the Abbess Gertrude to argue that the Helfta literature presents her as embodying the piety the cloister sought to promote, with its focus on loving well.

The tenth century canoness, Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, drew from hagiographic legenda in search of extraordinary figures, particularly women, to serve as protagonists in her dramas, crafted in the style of the Roman playwright Terence. This is aptly demonstrated in her work, Dulcitius, adapted, with no substantial changes in the plot, from the story of three sisters found in The Passion of Saint Anastasia. While the play begins with these women sentenced to death, the multiple attempts by the agents of the Roman empire to humiliate or assault them are subverted in particularly humorous ways, rendering the men in power and the empire they represent ridiculous. This paper will analyze the levels of transgression found in Hrotsvit’s Dulcitius arguing that a transgressive message of laughter “from below,” as outlined by Jacqueline A. Bussie, can be reclaimed from the work as humor uniquely disrupts dominant ideologies of empire and patriarchy.

This paper considers the academy, i.e., the proverbial ivory tower, as a sort of empire that occupies and overwhelms those in its shadow. Like the Geresene demoniac in the Gospel of Luke, there are many living among the tombs of lost careers and relationships in higher education. The graves are filled with those who could not publish, or publish enough, and have perished. I find myself among the tombs. How does it feel to grieve such a loss? How does one exhume the bodies for an autopsy? Engaging theories of affect in conversation with the Lukan story of the Geresene demoniac, I argue for affective eulogizing that attends to the mourning and open grief of what has been lost. 

Hanna was the name of a character through which The Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany illustrated the shortening of the time the contracts in order to assure innovation, creativity and circulation in a short animation. Hanna was portrayed as a young white, childless, middle-class person. In reaction to this, #IchbinHanna (I am Hanna) was the hashtag created in 2021 and widely used on social media to counter this image and protest increasingly scarce permanent positions and precarisation in the German academy. The precarity is intensified when one has children, performs care work or when competitive and dependent relationships arise between professors and others. One feature of German science is also its claim to ‘neutrality’, which puts any kind of so-called political engagement that restricts the contours of knowledge production. In this talk I give a public/personal account of catching up with ‘Hanna’ from an intersectional perspective.

Centered on the experience of losing oneself while reading, this personal essay explores the relationship between academic time lost when reading for pleasure and academic pleasure lost when reading to maximize time. Emerging out of engagement with the work of Kathleen Stewart (2007), Donovan Schaefer (2022), Sara Ahmed (2010), Margaret Price (2011), and others, it asks: if we’re choosing this academic life out of interest, curiosity, and passion, why do we so often stifle our pleasure? Why do we try so hard to reel in the “ordinary affects” that draw us into unexpected places, encounters, and experiences of time (Stewart, 2007)? While answers like capitalism, neoliberalism, and university-as-business offer insight, none of these click—none satisfy the emotional longing behind this “why” (Schaefer, Wild Experiment, 2022). This essay aims to sit with the dissatisfaction.

Academia often seems overwhelming and potentially created to destroy us. Yet, it can also be a place to explore the possibilities of joy. In this paper, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s concepts of joy as the ability to move. If we think about joy as the ability to move, what possibilities open to us? My experience in the lighting presentation last year crafted a shared recognition of the construction of academia today as a machine that attempts to inhibit our movement. But also, the presentations recognized points of hope, of the ability to make change and movement happen within our oftentimes oppressive systems. This paper will encourage audience members to think through where places of movement exist in their own lives as ways to cultivate and encourage joy.

In this paper, I reframe Cone’s 1969 work as a work of revolutionary theology that reorganizes affect and emotion. Through his theology, James Cone declares war, turning Christian conceptions of love and reconciliation on their heads, putting forth a theological discourse that finds a way to be Christian and Black, and to do so with feeling. By renarrating Christian discourses with suffering Black bodies at the center, Cone creates a Black theological affective economy, placing emotion front and center in the Black theological project.

In the work of American poet Kenneth Patchen, the vision of humanity as a fundamentally unified and interconnected spiritual identity predominates. Concomitant with this is the implication that violence toward any person become necessarily violence done to oneself. From this vision emerges an pacifist commitment to nonviolence, even under the most extreme circumstances. This conviction permeates his Blake-inspired 1941 work *The Journal of Albion Moonlight,* written in response to the breakout of the World War II, and with the explicit intention of combatting it through poetic expression. While many rallied to support the Allies, Patchen saw the war as indicative of a form of human insanity and the loss of spiritual vision. Patchen’s poetic vision represents a challenge to even the most seemingly justified uses of violence, arguing that such force can never be a victory, but only a degradation of humanity and a scar on its own collective body.

The paper explores the modern Spiritualist movement in Sweden during the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between Spiritualism and Christianity. Spiritualists often sought to reconcile their beliefs with the Bible, while critiquing what they perceived as the dogmatism of the church. To illustrate the connection between Spiritualism, Christianity, and pacifism, the focus is put on the Swedish clergyman and radical pacifist Johannes Uddin, who was influenced by the thriving Spiritualist movement in Britain during the First World War. Despite his turn to the occult, Uddin remained a vicar in the Church of Sweden. The paper aims to create a better understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Spiritualism in Northern Europe, focusing on Uddin’s radical pacifism and the Church of Sweden’s response to his Spiritualist beliefs.

This paper describes the artworks of Alan Moore and David B., who share a common interest in esotericism: they have participated in esoteric groups, and in their artistic works they reproduce esoteric symbols and doctrines. Scholars have described the connections between contemporary art and esotericism – the occulture - arguing that artists participate in the commodification of esotericism and are “spiritual seekers” who represent their spiritual quest. This paper goes beyond such a perspective by describing how esotericism has changed in contemporary societies. Esotericism is generally understood as a “rejected”, “absolute”, and “stigmatized” form of knowledge, characterized by elitism and secrecy. The esotericism of these on the contrary became mainstream. Furthermore, it is not “absolute/hidden”; rather, it reveals doubt and deconstructs religion and spirituality, sometimes even challenging or mocking them. For these artists, esotericism is a form of “unsettled knowledge”, a never-ending quest on the transcendence, the unconscious and humankind.