Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

For the German political class, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization and loyalty to the State of Israel constitutes the moral refoundation of the country, indeed its “reason of state.” To question this commitment is tantamount to a heresy that leads to ex communication rituals. Palestinians and progressive Jews have been its principle target. This enforcement of the “catechism,” as I call it, intensified since 10.7. This paper will account for the hold and function of the catechism on German memory culture and politics by tracing its evolution over the part 20 years.

In a brief but pivotal moment during her reporting from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt
suggested that the fact that there were Germans who resisted provides a condition for the possibility of
morals after the Holocaust. Drawing on this idea of the Good German, this paper examines how this idea
was transformed in recent years to reflect positive assessments of German memory culture by figures
such as Clint Smith and Susan Neiman, who use the image of a Good Germany to criticize the memory of
slavery in the United States. Their enterprise is contrasted in the final section of the paper with the
vitriolic debate around Dirk Moses’ German Catechism, showing the great discrepancy between the
discourse in Germany and outside it.

This paper engages the work of Esra Özyürek, A. Dirk Moses, and others in order to delineate a logic of substitution and sacrifice within German Holocaust remembrance. Rather than seeking to compare genocides, this paper argues that the understanding of mass violence must be mediated by robust frameworks with the capacity to hold multiple instances in view at once in order to help reveal, not obscure, both their interdependence and their distinctiveness. It makes a case for enlarging the depth of field, so that not only colonialism, but also medieval and early modern blood libels, witch hunts, and other pretenses for divinely sanctioned violence may be similarly understood in terms of their sacrificial and substitutional logics.

This paper examines the role and impact of Saint Catherine's monastery in the lives of eighth century Christians living in Egypt. By approaching this topic through the lens of material and embodied religion, Saint Catherine's can be identified as a sacred space as well as a tangible testament to the vitality of eighth century Christians in Egypt. This paper specifically examines the structure and location of the monastery, the Ashtiname of Muhammad, and information provided by Father Justin who currently lives at Saint Catherine's. Through these sources, the Holy Monastery is identified as a refuge for Christians in the midst of religious conflict as well as a memorialization of the deeply rooted history of migration, violence, memory, and home-making that Christians in Egypt have experienced throughout the past generations.

In the vicinity of Beirut's Bibliothèque Orientale lies a collection of archives, including those of Louis Cheikho, a leading figure in Oriental studies and manuscript collection. While Cheikho's efforts are often portrayed as mere emulation of European models, a closer examination of the manuscripts challenges this narrative. Through archival research in Beirut and Vanves, France, Cheikho's collecting emerges as a quest to establish a religious and linguistic education framework, grounded in modernity and secularism. His diaries from 1914 to 1918 offer profound insights into the manuscripts' journey during wartime, reflecting on their significance amidst religious and cultural upheaval. This study highlights the intricate interplay between faith, identity, and cultural preservation, emphasizing the pivotal role of manuscripts as repositories of collective memory and agents of societal transformation.

This paper traces discourses on revolutionary politics in the Coptic Orthodox Church during the early Egyptian Republic (est. 1953). I argue that Egypt’s 1952 coup resonated with a Coptic community grappling with material corruption and spiritual decay, prompting a transformation of communal politics and religious thought in line with the period’s revolutionary ethos. This manifested in a populist wave in elections for the Coptic Communal Council and papacy that called for new blood, with a preference for younger candidates whose credentials were piety, spirituality, and ascetism rather than administrative experience. This was accompanied by a communal discourse that emphasized the affinities between socialism and Christianity, with clergy in particular arguing that Christianity constituted the origins of socialism in its purest form. While both currents were apparently inspired by the revolutionary period’s antiestablishment trajectory, I argue that their result was the incorporation of the Coptic Church into the ermerging authoritarian state.

This paper takes two case studies from a contemporary art museum in São Paulo, Brazil, as a critical point of departure for the study of secularism in Brazil. It examines how two shows, by Adriana Varejão and Ayrson Heráclito, both at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, offered different formulations of the relationship between religion and art. This paper takes these two case studies as a key point of departure for studying the secular in Brazil. Building on earlier secularism works, this paper analyzes museums as a secularizing force, analyzing how they direct, discipline, and frame forms of religion for the public. How do practices of creating discourse (e.g. exhibitions, work descriptions, wall texts, catalogs), placing material into space (i.e. expography), and staging encounters between art, artists, and viewers constitute and perform a secular aesthetic? How does this help us understand the aesthetics of the secular in Brazil and more broadly?

In the center of São Paulo stands two megastructures, the Edifício Copan and the Templo de Salomão. The Copan—an Oscar Niemeyer apartment building with more than 5,000 residents that opened in 1966—has been a monument to the urban life imagined by midcentury modernity. The Templo is a replica of Solomon's temple magnified to occupy an entire city block, constructed by an evangelical church for 300 million US dollars in 2014. While the Templo has become a mecca for conservative Christians throughout South America, the Copan decays; its intricate tilework falling into the street below. This paper compares what James Holston calls the “alternative modernities” represented by these edifices to diagnose the slippery hold of secularism in contemporary Brazil. It argues that instead of viewing the post-secular as an inevitable condition of post-modern societies, we should view secularism as a political project in need of intellectual repair.

This presentation argues that what was earlier held as an open “marketplace” of religion in Brazil has broken out of the private sphere to hold sway as a political force in the form of an emergent Christian nationalism. Taking Michelle Bolsonaro’s speech to a crowd on February 25th as its point of departure, I track the transit of three phenomena between religious sites and the public sphere: spiritual deliverance, Biblical Hebrew imagery, and Protestant-Catholic ecumenism. This presentation uses the theoretical concepts of discursive chains of equivalence and charisma to analyze the motifs listed above as tools political actors are using to blur the boundaries between religious authority and secular space. It ends with a reflection on the ways such blurring affects national conversations surrounding secularism, race, and freedom of speech.

Diasporic children's identities negate hegemonic cultural and religious constructs and call for a space that accepts people’s ongoing change, resistance, and assimilation in belonging and flourishing as their God-given right. Pastoral care for diasporic children amplifies how diasporic children’s resistance and resiliency manifest through a hybrid identity that enables them to belong in two spaces – that of their family and that of mainstream culture. Moreover, pastoral care for the diasporic children resists the political and social ideologies that make children's identity formation and flourishing inequitable and calls for hybridity and belonging as the main praxes for theological reflection to participate with diasporic children and affirms the need for hybridity to create a place of belonging for in-between identities in churches, schools, and political and social spaces for equality and equity of all children.

Key Words: Hybridity, Belonging, In-between Religion, In-between Culture, In-Between Political Practices.

This paper identifies and analyzes patterns of ableist attention economies in children’s educational settings within U.S. Protestant ecclesial communities, and offers alternative modes of being and becoming church. Careful examination of popular Christian curricula and materials from parachurch organizations discloses widespread disembodied pedagogical practices, which overwhelmingly lack principles of universal design for learning (UDL) and overlook the needs of neurodivergent child audiences. To address this failure of imagination and in an effort to construct better approaches, the paper takes up interpretations of the Biophilia Hypothesis, related theories of Attention Restoration Therapy (ART), and the science of children’s spirituality. Collectively these fields point to children’s need for nature connectedness and the particular role nature plays in the spiritual formation of children with so-called attention deficits. Because children are also theologically formed by worship, the paper briefly addresses contemporary research on children, disability and worship, championing the need for nature-rich sensory experiences. 

With the conviction that the Kingdom of God belongs to young people, according to the biblical witness, this paper will explore the role of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a critical part of child theology. 

The Convention of the Rights of the Child has shaped child-centred practices in Australia which recognise that children’s wellbeing is positively affected when children have a voice in issues concerning them directly. Advancements in notions of child voice have also influenced the nascent field of the theology of childhood. In this paper, I demonstrate how the gospel of Mark confronts those who seek to find biblical bases for theologies affirming the voice of children. The silence of children in this sacred, authoritative text is salient in Australia where religious institutions address historic issues concerning child abuse within their organisations. These same denominations remain responsible today, moreover, for the wellbeing of children who participate in education, ministry, and social services. The paper illustrates how an *engaged* reading approach to interpreting Mark’s gospel offers a way of conceptualizing children’s voice and children’s silence with implications for theologians of childhood and for child-centred practices in Christian contexts.

Scholars and journalists have deepened our sense of the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis in recent years by illuminating how Native and Black communities have been particularly vulnerable to abuse. This paper builds on this emergent scholarship by examining “problem priests” and sexual abuse in Black Catholic parishes in Chicago in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it asks scholars to consider the politics of archival access, the relationships between scholars and their communities of accountability, and the art of crafting historical narrative, and how all of these factors can conspire to prevent us from telling the truth regarding the ways anti-Black racism and clerical abuse have been constitutive of twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism. In this, the paper is an act of critical self-reflection, wherein the author considers how choices early in their career governed the narratives they constructed of Black Catholic history. 

Despite the global and local increased awareness of (sexual) transgressive behavior in Catholic contexts over the past few decades, historical research on this issue in Belgium remains limited. Moving away from a binary survivor-perpetrator approach, this paper addresses the (national and international) understudied role of historical bystanders in cases of (sexual) transgressive behavior of adults towards minors within Belgian (Flemish) Catholic contexts (1950-1989). The concept of 'bystandership' is used to encompass individuals (with various responsibilities and potential courses of action) who were part of and affected by the Catholic environments in which historical (sexual) transgressive behavior could take place. Through a literature review and the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with both survivors and bystanders, this paper, drawing upon the method of oral history, aims to comprehend how prevailing historical Catholic institutional and socio-cultural perspectives on sexuality and child-adult sexual interactions may have influenced bystander attitudes in the outlined context.

This paper explores the profound silence surrounding childhood sexuality within the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis, revealed through narratives from 15 survivors interviewed under the Fordham University's Taking Responsibility grant. These narratives expose a critical lack of language and understanding around sexuality, significantly contributing to the survivors' vulnerability and trauma. This study challenges the church's reliance on restrictive theological frameworks and the societal taboo around childhood sexuality, advocating for a trauma-informed, survivor-centered theology that respects children's sexual autonomy and dignity. It proposes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theological analysis, trauma theory, and survivor narratives to explore the intricate web of sexuality, violence, and marginality. By addressing the underexplored area of childhood sexuality and the silence surrounding it, this paper aims to foster a more inclusive, just Church and illuminate pathways toward healing and transformation, advocating for a future where children are seen, heard, and empowered.

This paper explores the historically and ethically ambiguous nature of Buddhist notions of social "equality." The Japanese-American True Pure Land priest Yemyo Imamura (1867–1932) identified Buddhism's supposed commitment to caste equality as crucial to its flourishing in a multi-ethnic democracy. The paper focuses on the experiences of Zen master Shaku Sōen (1860–1919) on Sri Lanka under British colonial rule to investigate the genealogy of Imamura's claim. Sri Lankan Buddhism, Sōen argued, fostered inequality along lines of race and caste, undermining social cohesion and abetting the colonial regime. Japanese Mahāyāna Buddhism, in contrast, was predicated on equality and provided the basis for a liberatory anti-colonial politics. Ironically, Sōen's Mahāyāna was based on the apologetics of Singhalese Christians such as James de Alwis (1823–1878), and soon declined into ideological support of Japan's own colonial ambitions. This history throws into doubt Buddhism's capability of generating a robust notion of "equality."

While the Buddhism in the West Unit of the AAR may at this juncture be tempted to re-brand as a Global Buddhism(s) Unit, fittingly inspired by the capacious intellectual space created by the esteemed *Journal of Global Buddhism*, there is a risk of glossing over important fault lines and subsuming our usual “problem space” (to borrow from the anthropologist David Scott) into the same framework, simply enlarged. There are indeed dynamic delineations in the Buddhist world that are worth thinking through, such as majority/minority religion and caste/casteless/subaltern Buddhism, all of which intersect in creative ways with socio-economic status, issues of inter-generational transmission or lack thereof, and, of course, geographical contexts saturated with history. Building on prior scholarship, I draw out the distinctively subaltern modernism of Black Buddhists in the U.S. and the U.K., and suggest that India is in fact the site of a paradoxical “Wild West” of contemporary Buddhism.

Despite their localized nature, North American Tibetan Buddhist communities have begun adapting indigenous Tibetan mountain deity (yul lha) and nāga (Tib. klu) practices to the American landscape. This article will explore some of the potentials and limitations of transplanting place-based religious practices through two lenses: ecology and colonialism. It will begin by analyzing several examples of how Tibetan Buddhists in North America are adapting these practices yul lha and nāga practices to the North American landscape. It will then think through some of the positive ecological consequences of North American nāga pūjās and consider how indigenous Tibetan approaches to sustainability may be imported alongside these religious practices. Finally, this article will think through the complicated dynamics of a diaspora community populating their new landscape with imported religious deities and consider the neocolonial limitations of nāga practice in its ability to work towards socioecological justice.

This paper explores how the engagement of art influences theological research through Michelle Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” monument in Montgomery, Alabama. One mile away from Browder’s work, Montgomery’s capitol commemorates Dr. J. Marion Sims as the Father of Gynecology, even as his discoveries were made by operating on enslaved women without their consent or anesthesia. In contrast to Sims’s monument, “Mothers of Gynecology” enacts the sacred space to remember the true Mothers of Gynecology: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In conversation with theological aesthetics and Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground, this paper will: 1) closely analyze the aesthetics of “Mothers of Gynecology” as a primary source for theological writing and 2) demonstrate how the monument created the space for ongoing activist engagement. Ultimately, I argue that Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” evinces the power of art to act as radical re-education, and thus as a space of necessary theological reflection.

In this paper I share my journey as a documentary filmmaker and photographer documenting the work of Bishop Yvette Flunder and The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries Movement. The movement on the margins of the traditional Black church is happening in this LGBTQ+ community. Over the last three years I have been co-creating with my LGBTQ+ siblings a six part documentary series along with portraits and documentary photos mapping the growth of this movement. This work has transformed me as I have seen God birth the Black church anew in this terrain. In this paper I share how a cisgender, heterosexual Black male was called to do this work and how I found God anew in my new faith home with my LGBTQ+ siblings. Moreover I share the story of this new church and how it is manifesting itself on a global landscape.