Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

More science communication and top-down policies are not enough to confront the climate crisis, and on their own often leave marginalized communities behind. As such, new modes of information output, research approaches, and knowledge production are needed. One example of such an approach is in Southern California, where a research initiative called the Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network (WUICAN) is attempting to meet the all-encompassing threat of climate change with a networked response that is collaborative, extensive, and attentive to centers of knowledge production. WUICAN is a consortium of Tribal leaders, community-based organizations, university researchers, and faith groups engaged in climate action that centers community needs and challenges hierarchical structures. By developing new models of co-governance, capacity building, and a focus on community-based research, this approach seeks bottom-up collaboration over top-down solutions. A critical component of this initiative is an Interfaith Climate Action Working Group, which I will explore in my discussion.

Drawing from Tweed’s concept of sacred space as “differentiated, kinetic, interrelated, generated, and generative,” I explore how publicly engaged scholars create ‘sacred’ spaces as dynamic meeting grounds between communities and the classroom by bridging knowledge gaps between academic spaces and the public sphere (2014). With the aim of shedding light on marginalized experiences and knowledge, I investigate deliberative pedological practices (Blanchet & Deters 2023; Akin & Talisse 2014) employed in my own classroom as a way of facilitating this middle ground, set apart from the ‘mundane’, that exemplifies the complexities of the humanities in action. I discuss the roles faith-based guest lecturers and anonymous paper exchanges with incarcerated students. Such examples are rooted in community-level responses (religious and secular) and the reinvisioned co-creation of knowledge production through identification of environmental justice issues and the populations impacted by them.

This paper is a case study in community engaged learning in a course on religion and environmental justice taught by the author. It presents and critically analyzes a project carried out in collaboration with multiple stakeholders, including an Indigenous group, the university’s community engagement office, public school teachers, and an interdisciplinary environmental institute. Aiming to begin to fill a gap identified by the Ramapough Lunaape in New Jersey in conversation with the author, the class partnered with the Ramapough to produce curricular materials for New Jersey public school teachers on Native Americans, spirituality, relationship to sacred sites, and environmental justice. This case study describes and analyzes the project and derives several conclusions aimed at informing community engaged coursework in religion and the environment.

The aim of this study is to present current data by examining Muslim immigrants in Korea and their activities, and by investigating how they lead their lives, their interactions within society, and their positions in society. How the Muslim identity was established after the Korean War, including the process of Korea becoming one of the centers of attraction for Muslim immigrants following the success of economic development. Muslim immigrants existing in modern Korea will be researched and their nationality, population, status in Korea, the environment in which Muslim minorities live. While researching Muslim immigrants in Korea, the focus will be on the conditions of the Muslim labor class. The ongoing problems of Muslim minorities in Korea, their impressions in society, Koreans' perception of Muslims, and also the perception of South Korea from the perspective of Muslims will be examined.

The two representative kuts of Korean Shamanism, which are inscribed as National Cultural Heritage, are from Hwanghae-do (a province in North Korea) and Seoul (capital of South Korea). Meanwhile, the shamanic rituals located in-between these two regions are marginalized. They are not researched as well and not listed as cultural heritage. Rather, they are depreciated because their forms are a kind of hybrid of the two recognized heritages. Nonetheless, there are shamans who perform and inherit the ‘Gaeseong kut’ in Seoul. Gaeseong is a city now located in North Korea and is one of the border areas between the two Koreas. In this project, I have three main research questions: first, what is Shamanism in the Gaeseong area? Second, is this locality continued in South Korea? Third, what is the practice of ‘Gaeseong’ kut in Seoul and what makes it have the locality beyond the DMZ?

Korean *ki suryŏn* (氣修練 training related to ki – “life energy”), also referred to as *sŏndo suryŏn* (仙道修練 learning the way of immortality) is a contemporary urban practice, which, similarly to Chinese *qigong* and Indian yoga, is reinvented in modernity on the basis of ancient Asian traditions. Despite been widely spread and popular across the population in South Korea, *ki suryŏn* is severely marginalized in Western academia. Extensive scholarship exists on such practices in China and Japan, however, similar phenomena in Korea have hardly been studied in European languages. Many of *ki suryŏn* practices are based on a Daoist view of the body, but the practitioners come from various religions persuasion, including Christians and Buddhists; the *ki suryŏn* leaders do not advertise *ki suryŏn* as a “religion”, and *ki suryŏn* is usually not included under the rubric of “Korean religions”.

The paper seeks to make the argument that evangelical Christian community’s pushback against LGBT human rights is a key reason that LGBT people are relegated to the margin of South Korean society. It seeks to do so by focusing on evangelicals’ opposition to the introduction of the Anti-Discrimination Bill at the National Assembly in late 2007, a bill introduced by Roh Moo-hyun’s justice department, inspired by the LGBTQ rights advocacy of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. The paper analyzes the theological and other rationale evangelicals espoused as well as the social and political pressure they brought to bear on their pushback.

For the Sri Lankan Catholic community, getting to the truth behind the 2019 Easter bombings has posed a number of discursive and political challenges, especially when evidence emerged of government complicity in the attacks.  The paper first presents an overview of the history of Catholicism in Sri Lanka, then focuses on the Catholic response to the bombings.  Centering on the public pronouncements of Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, the paper argues that what has emerged in the Catholic response is what could be called a Sri Lankan nationalism of the common good, which is simultaneously prophetic and, interestingly, non-sectarian except concerning one particular issue that has vexed Sri Lankan Catholicism just as it has Sri Lankan society as a whole

Being pinay (Filipina) is particularly characterised by an inferiority complex of being brown which makes them feel inferior to "white" people. To imagine a brown pinay Catholicism through devotion to Mary seems unthinkable or outside of the pinay imagination until one considers the Virgin of Balintawak of the Indigenous Philippine Christian Church, Iglesia Filipina Independiente. This paper briefly lays out the intersectional oppression of pinays and the use of Mary in Catholicism to reinforce this oppression. It turns to the Virgin of Balintawak to suggest a brown Catholicism that can not only help pinays reembrace their brownness, but also help them decolonize and reindegenize. Overall, the paper seeks to grapple with Filipin@ migrant Catholic Marian belief as a double-edged sword, a bolo, and to carve this sword from a weapon that perpetuates pinay oppression to a symbol of their resistance against their ongoing intersectional oppressions.

In a small fishing village on the outskirts of Chilaw, Sri Lanka, people pack into a room to seek healing from a woman who channels Mary the mother of Jesus. Thushari, who was 44 when I met her in 2016, heals hundreds, it is believed, and prays over the widows of those who “disappeared” during the Sri Lankan Civil War, holding her hands over the photos of these men and giving their surviving widows hope. Married to a fisherman, Thushari ministers also to women who have lost their husbands out at sea. She has no schooling beyond second standard and claims not to be able to read or write. But for years she has “miraculously” been writing reams of messages that Mary has given her: in Hebrew, English, Tamil, and Sinhalese. This paper investigates Marian devotion in Sri Lanka, particularly in relation to war, and Thushari’s healing and writing practice as she sends these messages to the Pope, seeking Papal blessings.

This paper looks at the religious-urbanization process around the Ashura procession of Karachi, Pakistan, a practice that underlines the magnified visibility of urban religion and its effects on communities, public space, and the city itself. In this heavily religious landscape, the procession presents two interesting elements of the urbanization process: the questioning of how society and the city adjust to and negotiate the increasingly multicultural, multifaith dimensions of their urban society; and the consideration of urban religious aspirations that inspire people’s practices of being in, belonging to, and experiencing the city. In investigating the spatial, social, and religious dynamics that are particular to this interaction between the procession and the city, I explore how religious cosmopolitanism and urban aspirations affecting a multitude of faiths are enacted and transformed through Karachi’s Ashura procession.

This paper examines the intersection of religious place-making practices and material approaches in highly regulated urban contexts, focusing on the case study of The STAR Performing Arts Centre in Singapore. Originally a collaboration between CapitaLand Mall Asia and Rock Productions Pte Ltd, the business arm of New Creation Church (NCC), The STAR is celebrated as one of Singapore's architectural gems. Officially designated as ‘secular,’ it is an integrated retail and entertainment hub while serving as venue for NCC’s Sunday worship services. The analysis explores how The STAR, as a social-material assemblage, intertwines with secular, economic, religious, and cosmopolitan aspirations, serving diverse roles for various actors. The paper argues that distinctions between secular and religious spaces are fluid, challenging conventional categorizations of urban policy makers. Drawing on Marian Burchardt’s concept of ‘infrastructuring religion,’ it demonstrates how NCC’s practices imbue the building with religious significance, navigating zoning policies and bureaucratic classifications.

The dominance of personal passenger vehicles in many regions and cities causes serious ecological and social problems. This paper proposes a theology of mass transit that grapples with the ethical dilemmas around this issue. In proposing this theology, the paper builds on fragmentary and limited engagements that have existed so far to focus on two ethical imperatives: 1) The ecological impacts of automobile dominance on climate change and air quality are disproportionately suffered by poor and marginalized communities. 2) The social externalities of the costs and dangers of personal passenger vehicles are also overwhelmingly inflicted on poor residents. To respond to these issues, the paper proposes the need to account for them in terms of social or structural sin that calls for political solidarity in the development of adequate mass transit, as opposed to a focus on individual choice that would be appropriate in a context of wrongful individual behavior.

The taʿziyas in South Asia are representations or replicas (shabih) of Imām Husayn’s tomb in Karbala. This paper will analyze the production of this Shiʿi devotional object, and innovations in materiality based on fieldwork conducted in Lucknow to uncover the type of materials used in making taʿziya and examine the backstory of taʿziya production. Innovations in the materiality of ephemeral Lakhnavi taʿziyas validate how makers are deluged with love and devotion towards the Ahl-e bait. The different types of materials and embellishments display an act of veneration or an outlet of devotion. This paper examines the devotional labour of taʿziya makers who belong to both Hindus and Muslim community backgrounds and where they situate themselves within the religious complex of Shiʿism in Lucknow in North India. Taking my lead from the conversation with makers and devotees and first-hand observation of the structure and functioning of this craft form; I aim to situate the taʿziya at the intersection between the aesthetic context of a craft form alongside its efficacy as a Shiʿa devotional object.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I contend that members of the Claremont Main Road Mosque community, in Cape Town, South Africa, live out an alternative mode of interreligious camaraderie, not simply tolerance of difference, but rather solidarity with oppressed communities. While interreligious relations are generally cordial in the city of Cape Town, there are moments of tension, especially in relation to the Zionist occupation of Palestinian lands, culture, and heritage. Through a scriptural lens, the mosque leadership opens up an ethics of interreligious action for Palestine with anti-Zionist Jews and Christians. In post-apartheid Cape Town, this praxis, I suggest, subverts a cultural normativity silencing forms of critique of the state of Israel in interreligious spaces. Consequently, Jews and Muslims in Cape Town side-step an orientalist fantasy, framing the conflict and occupation in Palestine on religious difference, and an interreligious anti-colonial politics for liberation is lived out.

This paper examines Turkey’s state-sponsored religious education for conservative women and its role in facilitating their individual-level ethical pursuits as Muslims. Focusing on Diyanet's presentation of the fatwa tradition as a bureaucratized “public service,” the administrative body overseeing religious affairs, it challenges the notion of Diyanet as a mere instrument of secular governance given ordinary Muslims' voluntary utilization of the fatwa. However, the paper simultaneously points out the partiality of the range of Diyanet’s Islamic authority, which springs from Turkey’s secularist past that allows for diverse interpretations of Islam to coexist. Through ethnographic data, the paper analyzes the agency of both fatwa seekers and state preachers revealed in interpersonal fatwa consultations. Illustrating how the interplay of bureaucratic structures and Islamic tradition formulates the agency of those involved in the Diyanet fatwa service, the paper delineates the range and modality of the authoritative state involvement in ordinary Muslims’ religious lives.

Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) is often portrayed a modernist Salafi reformer who sought to rationalise Sunni “orthodox” theology. This paper argues that such a characterisation is misleading: it operates with problematic notions of what constitutes “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” in Islam and fails to capture the intellectual complexity of ‘Abduh’s reformist oeuvre. This paper shifts the focus to his earliest mystical, philosophical and theological writings. While they are often dismissed as early intellectual formations without any further relevance for his reformist work later in his life, this paper argues that they are crucial to understanding ‘Abduh’s approach to Islamic reform. The paper reveals important continuities of certain concepts from his earlier to his later writings. His most prominent theological works and his Qur’an commentary, produced towards the end of his life, re-articulate ideas from his earliest mystical and philosophical writings in an idiom that appears more aligned with Sunni notions of orthodoxy.

This paper examines the revisions Schleiermacher made to the Second Speech (“On the Nature of Religion”) in the second edition of the Speeches (1806). I shall focus on his two most important revisions—changes that arguably reshaped his argument. First, Schleiermacher’s use of the terms feeling (Gefühl) and intuition (Anschauung). Historically, it is this issue that has preoccupied scholars for the past two centuries. I shall revisit the issue from a new perspective. Second, Schleiermacher’s reformulation of what can be called The Three: from metaphysics, morality, and religion (1799) to knowing, acting, and feeling (1806). Where the original formulation was simplistically drawn, the new formulation includes a complex, multi-dimensional typology. Moreover, Schleiermacher takes care in his reformulation to explain the interrelations of The Three. These two revisions also lend more coherence to Schleiermacher’s attempt to explain religion as it relates to violence and non-violence.

This paper interprets a cryptic passage in Schleiermacher’s Second Speech as a provocation for a contemporary rethinking of the relationship between ethics and religion. In it, Schleiermacher simultaneously asserts the autonomy of ethics vis-à-vis religion even as he affirms the ethically salutary - even necessary - relation between religious feelings and the central object of ethics, namely, human action. On this view, religious feelings are not to motivate or rationally justify moral conduct; their proper role consists rather in orienting and accompanying it. And while one’s conduct might be impeccably moral without religious accompaniment, he claims that it remains deficient as human action. Drawing on recent work in philosophy of emotion, I reconstruct Schleiermacher’s early account of religious affections as atmospheric feelings, highlighting their peculiar intentionality, phenomenality, and supra-personal character. I then consider the significance of this ostensibly general feature of human agency for contemporary moral philosophy and religious ethics.

An influential contemporary trend in pneumatology, pioneered by Thomas Weinandy and Sarah Coakley, uses resources from traditions of prayer to explain how the Spirit is equal to the Father and Son. Several thinkers who participate in what Coakley calls “incorporative” pneumatology draw on figures like John of the Cross to argue specifically that the Spirit’s activity in originating other divine persons is equal to that of the Father and Son. Despite the promising novelty of this approach, some have criticized these thinkers for attenuating trinitarian distinction without overcoming trinitarian inequalities. My paper contributes to incorporative pneumatology by supplying two new insights that I take from John of the Cross: his iterative theory of apophatic language and his nuptial framework for examining active trinitarian love. I argue that the combination of these two insights accounts for the equality of trinitarian activity in terms of nuptial love without jeopardizing trinitarian distinction.

Theological talk of the Spirit strikes at the root of the problem of theological utterance itself. To speak truly of God presumes that one speak in the Spirit. Yet, if the Spirit is the Spirit of prayer, then theology is led ever deeper into prayer's region of vast silence. Held within this silence, how can theology open its mouth? The paper considers two styles of theological speech, both of which prioritize the unutterable as touched on in prayer. These are John Caputo's "weak" theology and Sarah Coakley's systematics. It then turns to the desert moanstic tradition, which places theology under the discipline of silence. A contempoary theology that aims to follow after prayer must enter its unsettling silence, as well as those other unsettling silences that surround us: those of voices suppressed, lives cut short, and the ever more likely great silence of the species. 

Although the influence of Paul Claudel upon twentieth-century theology is well known, little attention has been given to the way that Claudel’s oeuvre can help us not only to rethink a kind of sacramental cosmology but also the ways in which pneumatology is bound up with this project and reveals it as something more than just a retrieval of the premodern sacred. Through a reading of Claudel's second Great Ode, 'Spirit and Water', I argue that Claudel’s pneumatology points towards a theological resacralization of the finite that includes human subjectivity and creativity, indeed, one that gives a central place to the body, creaturely finitude, and to the shaping work of the human imagination. In this way, Claudel points us to a robustly theological account of human subjectivity in a sacramental cosmos, an account that escapes the aporetic modern theological shuttle between the epistemological turn-to-the-subject and reactionary reassertions of premodern metaphysics.