Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

In November 1666, an illustrated book arrived in Edirne, Turkey, captivating its Ottoman spectators with peculiar images, including an image of a hybrid monster that theologian Muḥammad bin ‘Abd al-Rasūl al-Barzanjī (1630-1691) documented in one of his works. A close examination of al-Barzanjī's description led to an intriguing discovery: the images were Western astronomical maps that illustrated the trajectory of two comets that appeared in the years 1664-65, printed in Polish astronomer Stanislaw Lubieniecki's (1623-1675) Theatrum Cometicum. The appearance of these comets sparked scientific enthusiasm and apocalyptic fears in European and Ottoman lands, as reactions spread through the communication paths of the “Republic of Letters,” a community of intellectuals who exchanged ideas via correspondence. By delving into the intersections of science, religion, culture, and imagination, this paper explores this cross-cultural “encounter” and seeks to unravel the adaptability of celestial narratives and their impact on diverse audiences.  

The tempura-on-panel predella was painted between 1467 and 1469 for the Confraternity of the Corpus Domini and their oratory in the Corpus Domini church in Urbino. It consists of six panels detailing an account of a popular antisemitic legend focused on the desecration of the host. While the work represents a set of intimate interiors, the scale of the action is cosmic, involving humans, angels, and demons interacting over the injury to God's body -- a suite of moments that simultaneously reflect ordinary urban interactions and a cosmic struggle. The cultural centrality of the Eucharist during this period, the somatic nature of Communion, and the positioning of the artwork within the church all contribute to the emotional impact of the depicted events -- an impact that derives from complex entanglements of culture, the senses, and sensemaking.

This paper theorizes ibbur (mystical pregnancy) as a model for ritual, cultural, and cosmic synthesis in Jewish kabbalistic works from the 16th-20th centuries. Over time, we see that while the porous, open models of body and cosmos are relatively consistent, both the body and the rituals to impregnate it absorb more and more so that it literally becomes pregnant with the entire cosmos, with different religious practies, and with new cultural and scientific discourse. This state of absorption is understood as a constant and idealized as spiritual, religious and psychological health.

Lovecraft Country is a genre-bending television series created by screenwriter and director, Misha Green, which spans the categories of speculative fiction, horror, historical fiction, fantasy, and drama. I will interrogate Lovecraft as an instrument of metaphysics that exposes the way power, violence, coloniality, anti-Blackness, and kinship function in religious and cultural imaginations. In the face of unyielding gratuitous violence—physical and psychic—against Black people, I contend that “making a way out of no way,” a core assumption in womanist methodologies, is a practice of transubstantiating reversal magic against intractable colonial sorcery/colonialcraft, which is illustrated throughout the limited HBO series. This portal of speculative fiction offers an exploration of magic that seeks to seed possibilities for releasing the discursive grip on the humanist axiological framework, as we remember and recollect sources of imaginational, lingual/linguistic, sensorial, material, affective, and divine power which are not dependent upon legibility as “human.”

The question that Jameson poses to utopian literature, “Can culture be political?” incites an understanding of cultural embodiment informing the consideration of ritual. While many utopian novels in the period of their late 19th century popularity seem essentially anti-artistic and anti-religious, Jameson’s criticism prompts us to examine the formations and transformations of the body that utopian fiction also explored. In this paper, I argue that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s *Herland* and William Morris’s *News From Nowhere* imagine aesthetics as a ritualized embodiment of the societal ideal, by which a sacramental power is afforded to everyday utopian life. I aim to elucidate a broader *fin-de-siècle* paradigm in which utopia’s internal and productive challenges were mobilized toward the progressive, political reinvention of the human, by way of the reinvention of religion and art.

The proposed presentation uses three works of science fiction to explore significant characteristics and demands of being human today: self-transcendence is analyzed with the help of Arrival, the importance of simulation and artificiality through Blade Runner, and the temptation to exercise prophetic authority at the expense of others with Dune. These works compel readers/viewers to nurture understandings of religion and the supernatural transcending superstition, notions of the human and education overcoming unilateral rational control of the body, in favor of embracing the inherent indeterminacy of natural and human evolution and history. Human finitude can indeed be conceived and embraced as responsible openness to the transcendent welcoming the other/Other in its/her difference, enabling the formation of authentic community and communion.

Is it possible for the concepts of Karma and Time to coexist harmoniously within a single worldview? From a perspective of the doctrine of cyclic time (kālavāda) as developed in Hinduism, particularly in the epics, there is a noticeable tension between these two notions. According to this system, Time is a power that effectively governs the degree of righteousness (dharma) in the world through cosmic cycles (yugas) determining human destiny and afterlife. Conversely, the karmic law is also viewed as a force that decides the afterlife, rebirth, and liberation of humans based on their actions. However, the two concepts in their preliminary form coexisted in the Vedic worldview. Multiple time-related Vedic notions, such as ṛta, ṛtu, and saṃvatsara, were congruously connected with karman, the ritual action. In the Vedas, it was Time that determined the destiny of a person and governed ritual actions by putting them in a sequence.

Among the earliest extant Tibetan writings from Dunhuang, there is a text that belongs to a cult that prays for the coming of an apocalypse known as the Tempest. This Tempest will put an end to the present Evil Age and usher in a new Good Age, at the beginning of which believers and their ancestors will live again. Though the cult seems not to have survived, it was the target of a Buddhist polemic that railed against how the Tempest allowed people to escape the logic of karma. The polemicist inveighs, "the coming of the Tempest will not expunge your sins!" Drawing on both this cult and the polemic against it, this paper queries the extent to which time itself can be a liberating force that acts upon a given group of people, and the putative threat that such an idea poses to certain Buddhist understandings of karma. 

Based on Vasubandhu’s Vyākhyāyukti, this paper delves into the debate on the proper way to interpret the narratives detailing the karmic connections between the Buddha’s past and present lives. On one side of this debate is a realist interpretation, which views events in Śākyamuni’s past lives as real causes that lead to tangible effects in his present life. Conversely, an anti-realist interpretation, advocated by Vasubandhu, contends that the narratives of the Buddha’s lives do not posit real doers and real karmic actions and results. Examining the realist and anti-realist interpretations, the paper focuses on Vasubandhu’s anti-realist stance, grounded in the Mahāyāna concept of Śākyamuni as an emanation. The paper argues that, according to Vasubandhu’s anti-realist interpretation, the narratives of the Buddha’s lives are not descriptions of real events and individuals, but teachings crafted for specific audiences with shared karma which predisposes them to perceive buddhahood as a temporal progression. 

The Vessantara Jataka, which tells of the Buddha’s penultimate life, is of particular importance in Thailand where it has been closely tied to popular merit making practices. This paper analyzes the relationship between Vessantara Jataka art and merit making. It compares case studies from three different periods—the nineteenth century, mid 1960s, and today—to argue that both the form of artistic production and the specific artistic details within each piece influence donor-merit relationships, co-opting, incorporating, or displacing community. The pieces present different relationships between narrative time and place, and the time and place of the recitation, which, in turn, inform the kinds of merit and karmic entanglements these artworks generate. Ultimately, this paper argues that close analysis of the visual and material aspects of these Vessantara Jataka ‘texts’ are integral for understanding how they produce merit and for whom.

In January 2024, the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray had her/their visage minted to the back of a US quarter. This act is only the latest, high-profile piece of memory work around Murray, once a little-known civil and women’s rights lawyer, activist, and priest. Much of the discourse surrounding this upswell of memory is suffused with future-oriented, colonial language that frames Murray as a “trailblazer” and “pioneer” who was “ahead of her/their time.” The author contends this framing conceals as much as it reveals. Specifically, it obscures how crucial the past was to Murray and her/their activism. In conversation with Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman, and Anne Karpf, the author contests this concealing rhetoric by analyzing the key role history and memory played in Murray’s legal and religious activism and in her/their survival in a white supremacist, heteronormative society as revealed in her/their family memoir _Proud Shoes_.

Coptic hagiographical texts from Islamic Egypt record a curious miracle—Christians prayed for a mountain to move, and it did! The earliest account comes from the tenth century and the accounts continued expanding until the 18th century, gaining more fantastical elements in the meantime. Over time, it entered the liturgical calendar, ritual fasts, and sacred geography, thus ensuring its embeddedness in Coptic cultural memory until today. In this paper, I argue that the development of this narrative over time—textually, ritually, and materially—was a function of the politics of religious memory. Using the theories of Jan Assman and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, I trace the role of politics in the formation, preservation, and transformation of this narrative as it developed and became embedded in Coptic cultural memory.

This paper draws on ongoing ethnographic research on the samadhi or burial site of Rupa Goswami (1489-1564), a venerated saint belonging to the 16th-century Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition.  It uses observation, interviews, photos, and video to provide a first-hand account of memory-making practices performed by devotees.  Three modes of remembrance will be explored:  kinesthetic, narrative, and material relics.  The paper will seek to argue that a generative link exists between memory and place using the theoretical principles of memoryscape and place-memory drawn from the emerging fields of memory and landscape studies. The significance of this paper lies in advancing the field of samadhi studies and growing our understanding of how guru-centered ritual practices are captured in architectural settings.

In late antiquity, several hagiographies of assigned female saints who presented themselves as men were popular among Christian audiences. One such saint, Matrona of Perge (5th century), entered a monastery in Constantinople as a eunuch named Babylas. In the earliest version of Matrona’s hagiography, Matrona was given permission to found her own monastery and to wear traditionally male habits. Moreover, she was made an *episkopos* (overseer/bishop) and given the power to lay on hands. The use of male habits and this level of authority held by someone assigned female has yet to be fully examined. Through the use of transgender studies, this presentation will argue that authority can be understood as yet another form of masculine embodiment represented through male habits, rather than view masculine presentation as a way for Matrona to gain authority.

This paper examines the cisnormative passage that the representations of Baphomet go through, from a dually-sexed, androgynous, anthropomorphic goat-person drawn by Éliphas Lévi to a rebellious figure connected to Satan/Lucifer with his breasts intentionally removed by the Satanic Temple. This removal, an intentional action of censorship, is then mimicked in popular television and popular culture. The removal of the breasts of the Baphomet by TST demonstrates a rejection of gender variance, an embrace of the masculine cisgender body, and a production of gender complementarity. Challenging historians of the devil like Jeffrey Burton Russell, this paper disrupts this expected outcome of Satanic figures as usually male (and occasionally female), and instead reintroduces the historically genderfucked Baphomet figure. This paper concludes by thinking through how the erasure of gender variance in the archives by contemporary Satanists provides an opportunity for Evangelical religious communities to claim sole ownership of a trans Baphomet.

Through an analysis of the image and legend of St. Wilgefortis, the folk princess saint who prayed to be delivered from a forced marriage arranged by her/their father to another pagan king and received a beard as her/their answer, this paper will explore the ways the bearded crucifix of St. Wilgefortis is a dangerous figure that transgressed gender boundaries and social norms with God’s blessing to become a symbol of hope for the oppressed. Analyzing the image and legacy of St. Wilgefortis through Elizabeth Grosz’s work on the pliability and plasticity of bodies, this paper argues that St. Wilgefortis is a model case to demonstrate that masculinity does not belong maleness and that masculinity’s definition and cultural location is malleable and not fixed.

This proposed paper explores a crisis of masculinity and heteronormativity in the University of Oregon’s Keith Stimely Collection on revisionist history and neo-fascist movements from the former chief editor for the *Journal of Historical Review* (JHR) which promoted revisionist historiography, most notably Holocaust denial. This critical discursive analysis highlights one of the more unexpected parts of the story Stimely’s archive tells us about American and European far-right political movements and networks in the 1970s and '80s which disseminated their ideas under the guise of scholarly discourse -- how a crisis of masculinity fueled inter- and intra-group hostilities at the Institute of Historical Review (IHR) after fellow organization leaders discovered that one of IHR founders was involved in gay porn. In doing so, I consider the historical spread of far-right fears involving sodomy, ‘gay infiltration,’ and/or ‘takeover’ during the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic through the means of late-stage print propaganda. 

Sacred and devotional art turns the invisible of religious devotion and doctrine into material reality, reflecting both the theological and cultural ideals of a religious community. The art of Arnold Friberg has been used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to craft an idealized Muscular Mormon Man. The carved physiques of Friberg’s subjects highlight a fascination with the male form, celebrating hypermasculinity by exaggerating sexual difference: hard versus soft, active versus passive, and male versus female. Friberg created male figures which not only adhered to but superseded western standards of male beauty and virility, homoerotic in their careful and loving detailing of the male body. His work gained prominence in the mid-Twentieth Century at a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was making efforts to assimilate into mainstream American culture and provided a template for creating idealized Muscular Mormon Men.

This paper will analyze the life of Servant of God, Dorothy Day, through the hermeneutical lens of liberation theology. Although Day was not an explicit liberation theologian, her work through the Catholic Worker Movement exemplifies liberative qualities. I will parallel the liberation between Base Ecclessial Communities in Latin America and the Houses of Hospitality in the Catholic Worker Movement, arguing that liberation for those on the margins stems from first offering safe places for the creativity of the marginalized to flourish. It is safety that thus leads to creativity - to a restoration of one’s agency and an affirmation of one’s voice and dignity - that can then lead to a stable and sustainable liberation.

G.K. Chesterton, renowned for his literary genius and staunch Catholic faith, has left an indelible mark on literature and education.  His works encompass various genres, from detective fiction to essays, imbued with his distinctive wit, wisdom, and profound insights into human nature and spirituality.  The establishment of the Chesterton Network of Schools reflects his enduring influence on education, fostering a curriculum that integrates faith, reason, and classical education principles.  This paper proposal aims to explore the hagiography of G.K. Chesterton, examining his life, works, and legacy while also delving into the Chesterton Network of Schools and its significance in promoting Chestertonian ideals in education and exploring why they chose Chesterton as their namesake.