Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper examines the driving concerns behind Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh as they developed what became World Christianity’s “translation principle”: as Christian scriptures can be translated into any language, Christianity can be “translated” into any culture. For instance, they shifted scholarly attention from “Western” missionaries to the agency that new Christians (often in the majority world) exerted in “indigenizing” Christianity into local cultures, making Christianity their own. Arguing that this is how Christianity had always spread (even Europeans had “indigenized” Christianity into local cultures millennia ago), they contended that new, indigenous forms of Christianity were authentically Christian. This paper offers three brief examples that Walls and Sanneh give of how Christianity was “translated” into new cultures. It also explains why Walls and Sanneh considered Christianity’s translatability to be *sui generis*, detailing the facet of the “translation principle” that this panel places into a comparative perspective.

For the tradition at large, Buddhism’s truth claims are universally valid. As recorded in the canonical scriptures, Buddhism is understood as providing a collection of objectively true teachings. These, in turn, can be directly experienced and verified by anyone who wishes to wholly engage with them. Because the tradition’s claims carry universal validity, Buddhist truths can readily translate into any socio-cultural settings. In this perspective, the question is not whether there may be a Buddhist equivalent of the “translation principle.” Rather, this paper contends, we should consider what we mean by translation, from what perspective, and to whose benefit. Ultimately, we must distinguish two opposing approaches to cross-cultural translation: an emic Buddhist one, for which Buddhism is translatable because of its universalist claims; and an etic scholarly one, for which cross-cultural translation of Buddhist truths is incommensurable with a social-scientific approach to comparison.

It is no longer a novelty in Religious Studies that translations play an integral role in questions of (inter-)cultural contact, comparison, and identity. But the question of what translation means, how it relates to interpretation, and the role of text, language, and practice has not been adequately addressed. In recent years, feminist historical research has published some ground-breaking work addressing this very question. This paper uses a cross-disciplinary (literature studies, feminist translation studies, and religious studies) approach to examine four different *Rāmāyana* versions in late colonial Ceylon and India (1900–1930) written by the Theosophists Annie Besant, Marie Musaeus Higgins, and Leelawathy Ramanathan for the purpose of girls’ education. The differing portrayals of Sita as the “perfect wife” will be used to highlight the importance of theories of translation for the study of global religious history.

Andrew Walls’ “translation principle” argues that the Qur’ān’s status as the “fixed,” unalterable speech of God stands as a primary obstacle limiting Islam’s translatability. The historical activities of premodern South Asian Muslim actors would appear to confirm Walls’ point: Qur’ān translations into Indian languages were exceedingly rare, suggesting Muslims’ overwhelming preference to maintain their scripture in its original Arabic language. And yet, Walls’ argument pushes beyond mere “linguistic” translation, insisting that a religion’s fullest translation must also reach into the domain of *cultural* translation. On this front, Walls’ argument for Christianity as the preeminently translatable religion becomes less compelling. To test this claim, I turn to three premodern instances of Islam’s “translation” into local South Asian contexts and into a predominantly Hindu lexicon – the Sufi epic romance (*premākhyāna*), the poet-saint Bulleh Shāh, and the Sufi tomb-shrine – aiming to illustrate the processes of Muslim-Hindu religio-cultural translation at work.

Drawing from thirty-seven in-depth interviews, this paper examines how Sikhs make sense of their religious identity and practice in the context of the US as both a demographic minority and a minoritized faith. Although undertheorized by scholars, processes of religious minoritization can influence not only how Sikhs practice their faith, but also how they engage with the broader society. Further, it compares two Sikh communities to study these themes: a community of Indian Sikhs in the US and a community of people who converted to the Sikh faith and are part of a New Religious Movement known as 3HO/Sikh Dharma. Through this comparison, this paper considers how different Sikh communities make sense of the Sikh faith, engaging in a reinterpretation of Sikhi situated in the cultural and structural context of the US through a multifaceted process of agentic assimilation that adapts, and sometimes resists adapting, to U.S. socio-cultural mores.

This paper will explore the dynamics of Free Zone Scientology, an umbrella term for all Scientologists practising outside the institutional Church of Scientology (CoS), in the digital age. The relationship between the Free Zone and CoS is marked by tensions surrounding the legitimacy of each group's application of L. Ron Hubbard's 'spiritual technology'. Indeed, the CoS positions the use of Scientology outside its remit to constitute the heretical act of 'squirrelling'. Drawing from my ethnographic research of Freezoners who primarily practise Scientology online, I will demonstrate that digital applications of Scientology have significantly transformed how Scientology is practised and understood by contemporary Scientologists. These innovations point to key issues for scholars - including the ways in which established new religious movements transition and transform in online spaces, breakdowns in routinized charisma, and how the intentions of the CoS have been subverted by those practising in fluid and non-heirarchical digital envrionments. 

This paper analyzes capitalist spirituality and digital orientalism on Gaia.com's subscription-based streaming video service. Gaia's content creators primarily map East and West onto three dualities: intuition versus rationality, present in their fraught portrayal of science; spiritual versus material, present in their discussions of financial self-help; and collective versus individual, present in their descriptions of social crisis and imminent upheaval. To resolve the contradictions created by their circular logic of capitalist spirituality, Gaia’s writers draw from orientalist tropes to show that capitalist individualism can be redeemed by Eastern spirituality, and need not be challenged. On Gaia.com East redeems West, transforming it into something more sacred, more moral, more aligned, and allows spiritually receptive viewers to transcend the fears associated with capitalism while participating in it. Gaia.com is a rich archive for observing online religion, Carrette and King's concept of capitalist spirituality, and the aspirational, affective orientalism described by Jane Iwamura.

This paper presents a new theory on secular religiosity called Kidcore Spirituality. This new form of religiosity is linked to the Kidcore fetish and lifestyle that has become popular among a demographic who were raised in the 1980s and 1990s. Replacing and mimicking explicit religious upbringing and education, I shall highlight and argue how cartoons facilitate what religion has typically been expected to represent - moral teaching, community, ritual, salvation, and icon veneration. From Care Bears and He-Man to Spongebob and the Powerpuff Girls, multiple examples are shown to implicitly facilitate religiosity among children, and for adults, who grew up in the late twentieth century watching these cartoons and now aesthetically and nostalgically venerate and commemorate them. In my analysis I will present ethnographic examples of how such Kidcore Spirituality is demonstrated through tattoos, clothing, conventions, altars, and even through specific new religious movements.

The colorful Urantia movement grew up around The Urantia Book, a lengthy and mysterious tome that was first published in 1955 in Chicago and has since sold over one millions copies worldwide. The Urantia Foundation is the receiver of the original manuscript that it claims is authored by higher angels, and three rival “fellowship” organizations have arisen around this phenomenon since the 1990s, many of whom are educated professionals. Most adherents believe that the new revelation, said to be authorized by Christ himself, will bring about the radical reform of the Christian church. The three competing groups are now engaged in an intriguing power struggle—the key focus of my paper because it reflects sincere but conflicting responses to a rare claim of epoch-making revelation. I show how each response clusters around *one* of the classic three levels of interpretation of scripture first identified by Origen of Alexandria, who distinguished the literal, moral, and spiritual dimensions of scriptural texts. This influential NRM has distinctive, idiosyncratic, and often baffling social and literary characteristics requiring much more scrutiny by scholars.

Contemporary religion in the Philippines reveals the sticky residues of a long history of cultural mixing, multiple colonialisms, international commerce, and a global citizenry.  A nexus between empires and geographies, the 7,000+ island chain hosts the spectrum of religious and spiritual forms -- from international Roman Catholicism and Fo Guang Shan Buddhism to local village shamanism and local NRMs.  More recently, traditional beliefs and practices around magical objects (*anting-anting*) have coalesced into an NRM focused around the mythology of the Infinito Dios, a primordial deity whose identity is presumed to be a concession between the power and insistence of indigenous traditions and the imposition of Iberian Roman Catholicism.  This paper examines key aspects of the myth of the Infinito Dios and speculates on the origins of a narrative that, on the surface, appears as syncretized Indigenous beliefs in the creator god Bathala with the Roman Catholic *Dios*, but may in fact have origins in gnosticism and/or Manichaeism.

This paper will examine a genre of literature which I term “yerbería books,” with respect to the growing religion of Santa Muerte. I define the genre as a type of book sold in metaphysical shops of Latine communities (yerberías). They usually contain (1) biographical information on divinities, (2) prayers, and (3) ritual procedures. I will argue that this body of literature has been historically underexamined in scholarship despite being a fixture among devotees. In Section I, I will show how the yerbería literature produces specialized biographies of Santa Muerte which cater to the needs of devotees. In Section II, I will examine continuities in prayers derived from Roman Catholic models. In Section III, I will examine common ritual procedures, which usually take the form of hechizos (spells). In the conclusion, I will show how these elements document the religion’s historical and practical concerns over the past thirty years.

How do FAs act in the reception and integration of Latin American queer refugees in Spain and the US? This presentation focuses on how the intersections of forced migration, religion, and SOGIESC can be addressed from a sociological perspective to understand FAs’ role comprehensively. The paper elaborates on conceptual categories that make a sociological approach to FAs’ agency feasible. It discusses how they enable and constrain diverse aspects of the reception and integration of Latin American queer forced migrants by (in)visibilizing SOGIESC and religion in their narratives about their agency.

The predominant academic framework for understanding Donald Trump’s Christian support (and the Christian manifestations during the January 6th Capitol Riot) is “white Christian nationalism.” But what about non-white Christians who were closely involved in the Trump administration and January 6th? This paper highlights a particular set of Latino/a Christian leaders who were advisers to the Trump administration and many of whom helped mobilize Christians for the Capitol Riot. Strikingly, nearly all of the Latino/a Christian leaders in Trump’s orbit came from a particular strand of modern Christianity sometimes labeled the Apostolic and Prophetic Movement. This diffuse neo-charismatic movement forms transnational apostolic networks of nondenominational churches intent upon “discipling nations” through evangelizing/collaborating with like-minded national leaders. Though not directly part of white Christian nationalism, we can understand these leaders as participating in an aggressive form of Christian internationalism, which sometimes dovetails with American white Christian nationalist interests.

This paper explores the pneumatological-sociological picture of the Holy Spirit that appears in much contemporary theology, in which the Spirit is strongly associated with local communities and social movements, and decidely not with "institutions" (complex formal organizations). This picture is elaborated through reference to several examples and illuminated by a discussion of its socio-political context. The picture fits a neoliberal context in which national and international political economies are protected from democratic contestation. The paper also responds to moral, political, and theological worries about institutions in light of concerns that the neglect of institutions undermines resistance to neoliberalism. Finally, an alternative picture is sketched in which human "ritual play" generates a variety of organizational forms that potentially participate in the Spirit.

This paper turns to means the Holy Spirit employs to orient one to Christ’s person-forming work. Drawing out the narrative significance of bodily limits, as depictions of one’s need for God’s help, God’s power to provide, and enjoyment of divine gifts, shows that Protestants, like Luther, Wesley, and Calvin, deployed figurative language and metaphors of disability. These narrative deployments emphasize the Spirit’s use of sensation to stimulate awareness of divine activity. Indeed, analyzing disability’s textual function reveals how *hearing* the Word, the *taste* of faith, and pleasing *visions* construct a sensorial habitus. The Spirit, then, uses this habitus to carry one to the Word, restore relationships, and inspire fellowship. In contrast to criticisms of the Protestant tradition as overly intellectual and disinterested in sensation, the paper concludes to gesture towards a pneumatology that unearths Protestantism’s surprising compatibility with disability justice through its attention to sensation.

In *Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit*, Elizabeth Groppe argues that Congar’s distinctive contribution to pneumatology lies in his integration of anthropology and ecclesiology. This paper builds upon this insight and uses Congar as a foundation from which to construct an integrated pneumatological theology of preaching. Theological reflection on the activity of the Spirit in preaching continues to lack a robust integration between anthropology and ecclesiology, often focusing on the individual preacher at the expense of the community. What if we instead began with the Spirit-filled community as the starting point for a theology of preaching? A coversation between Congar's pneumatology and the practical field of homiletics, this paper approaches preaching not only as an application of theology but also as a source of theological reflection. I reveal how reflecting more deeply on the Spirit's activity in the community gathered for the preaching event can help advance our pneumatology.

In this paper, I propose an approach to a theology of social transformation in dialogue with Irenaeus’ thought, bringing the aesthetic concept of glory—divine and creaturely—into dialogue with theo-political societal transformation.

Irenaeus’ view of the power of divine glory to transform humans and humanity may provide conceptual raw material for a constructive political theology and theo-political aesthetic of sustainable systemic transformation. Drawing on Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses, Epideixis, and other extant writings, I begin by sketching the theocentric character of Irenaeus’ understanding of politics and his embrace of symphonically-differentiated unity. I consider the socio-political implications of Irenaeus’ juxtaposition of paradigmatic models of change—Christ’s radical work of recapitulation—and progressive models of growth—the Holy Spirit’s multivalent work of fostering spiritual progress in human lives across the spectrum of the divine οἰκονομία and in the collective homo by whom Irenaeus tells a communal story with a unified protagonist.

Aiming at developing Pope Francis’s call to attend to the gaze of Jesus (Laudato Si’ 96-100) this paper offers a reflection on St. Ignatius Loyola’s “Contemplation on the Incarnation” from the Spiritual Exercises alongside poet Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” to explore the possibility of acquiring a “green gaze” for the earth as the broken body of God. Such an approach acquires the (possible) gaze of Jesus, but shifts attention away from Francis’s emphasis on praise and wonder at creation, and towards the need to respond to brokenness and suffering. Taking a cue from Shire, this paper argues that Francis’s ecological vision can be strengthened by stronger attention to theologies of liberation which in their own way echo Shire’s poetic question “Where does it hurt?,” and likewise facilitate an experience of the world’s response: “Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”

Christian theology has traditionally spoken of creation as a book, a means of revelation that can be metaphorically read by human creatures for a variety of purposes. The thirteenth century theologian Bonaventure takes up this tradition, giving the Book of Nature a significant place in his theology. This paper considers Bonaventure’s theology of the Book of Nature in conversation with the concept of the hospitable text, articulated by Rowan Williams. Read in this way and along with Bonaventure, creation becomes a text that invites the reader to pray, both in contemplation and in petition. This paper argues that creation’s invitation to petitionary prayer calls on human creatures to fulfill their priestly role in relationship to creation, even as it grounds humanity in humility. Human creatures are invited to plead with God for creation as it groans under the curse, to recognise their complicity in the cause of its groaning, and to seek creation’s redemption. This paper concludes by considering Bonaventure’s exemplar of St. Francis as one whose response to creation’s invitation demonstrated a life of prayer that integrated contemplation and action.

Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical *Laudato Si’* reignited theological attention to conversations in *deep incarnation,* ecotheology, and Franciscan spirituality. In the face of the environmental crisis, calls for ascetic renunciation and divestment imply that solutions to the crisis reside in spiritualities of self-discipline and mastery. Yet, *Laudato Si’*s account of St. Francis of Assisi’s spirituality of asceticism suggests that the logic of self-mastery is tied to the mastery of others insofar as both involve displacing or diminishment. My paper contrasts an asceticism of mastery and necrophilia with an asceticism of kinship and joy in order to illuminate how St. Francis’s cosmic spirituality is oriented toward communal and ecological wholeness. Francis’s asceticism of kinship culminates in joyful healing and praise. In order to offer an account of St. Francis’s asceticism of kinship I explore *touch*points between *Laudato Si’*, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of sight and “flesh,” and Bonaventure’s cosmic Christology.

Our ongoing ecological crisis is rooted in global economic arrangements that use quantitative measures of value as the sole determinants of a good life. Paradoxically, these measures are both anthropocentric and, in their carelessness of our animal happiness, antithetical to the flourishing of human beings. Modern Christianity’s familiar dualism of soul and body, spirit and matter, inhibit its power to disrupt this engine of alienation from our creatureliness. In this paper I argue that where this conceptuality fails, Christian spiritual disciplines can nonetheless succeed in offering radical forms of resistance. I draw from Br. Paul Quenon’s memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, to explore the material consequences of joyful liberation from reductive measures of utility. To reject utility is to discover the harmony between our animal happiness and our participation in “the cosmic dance,” while exposing and deactivating the ecocidal lie of “a good life” under contemporary economism.

On June 5, 2023, Shantanu Gupta’s graphic novel for children Ajay to Yogi Adityanath: Fascinating Story of Grit, Determination and Hard Work was launched across Uttar Pradesh. This statewide launch earned the publication recognition in the Asia Book of Records and the comic continues to be launched across the globe. Influenced by the widely popular Amar Chitra Katha (the Immortal Illustrated Tale) series, Gupta’s book aims to educate Indian youth about Yogi while stressing the Hindutva values to which children should aspire. Employing comic panels, Ajay to Yogi Adityanath emphasizes Yogi’s radical commitment to cow protection and, in particular, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. My paper examines how Gupta’s graphic novel––marketed to upper-middle-class and middle-class children––attempts to normalize Hindu extremism and, through games and activities printed in the book, sell Hindu fundamentalism to a younger generation.

In Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah novels (2018-22), a bestselling fantasy series published by Disney-Hyperion under the “Rick Riordan Presents” imprint, the prototypical fantasy quest is remolded so that the protagonists—the Pandava “soul sisters,” middle-schoolers in Atlanta who also battle demons in a Hindu mythological Otherworld—do not encounter a new fantasy world so much as they develop new relationships with a familiar one. In the novels, Hindu knowledge is framed as subjective, emotional, and interpersonal. Hence the second novel showcases the Otherworld as a socially accommodating space: queerness is a given, gender is a construct, marriage is a problem, and the category of “family of origin” is questioned. Contrasting with conservative models of Hindu education, the Aru Shah novels adopt the Riordan ethos of “different is divine” to paint a progressive portrait of American Hinduism—and try to show that it has been there in Hindu mythology all along.

The last decade has seen an explosion of Hindu mythic fantasy literature. This paper examines one such example, Kevin Missal’s trilogy Kalki: Avatar of Vishnu. Kalki is most well-known as the tenth, future avatāra of Viṣṇu. The Kalki Purāṇa, a secondary or upa-purāṇa, narrates the future life of Kalki. Missal’s series reimagines this story, combining elements of the Kalki Purāṇa with story elements from American and British movies and television like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, The Dark Knight, and Terminator 2. This kind of narrative mixing reflects the cosmopolitanism of twenty-first Hindu elites who are fully at home with English language media and are reimagining Hindu narrative, incorporating story elements from outside of Hinduism that have shaped their worlds and have become part of their religious lexicon. Missal’s books also reflect the “telling/selling” symbiosis of global markets and an ambivalent relationship to Hindu nationalist discourse.

This paper discusses the mythologies and iconographies of Hindu goddesses such as Durgā, Kālī, and Śakti as they are presented in one popular graphic novel series—Shekhar Kapur’s Devi (Virgin Comics, 2006-8). How does the Devi series—which is explicitly aimed at a global audience—transmit, popularize, (re)interpret, and consolidate earlier understandings of these goddesses? What methods of storytelling and visualization are used to reach audiences who have little or no prior knowledge of Hindu goddess narratives? And how have these strategies landed with audiences? In addressing these issues, we explore how Hindu goddesses’ fights against demonic (male) forces are blended into contemporary urban settings, how the novels are marketed through celebrities (Shekhar Kapur, Priyanka Chopra), how the novels’ central figure is portrayed as an affectionate, reflective, “all-too-human Goddess,” and how audiences have responded to the novels in reviews and other forums of public discourse.

The “mutual cursing” (mubāhala) episode in Āl ‘Imrān (3:59-64) has provided Muslim commentators a topos for probing the early Muslim community’s relation to Near Eastern Christians, as well as for understanding the Sunnī–Shī‘ī split. The language of “curse” and “witness” that pervades sūra 3 recalls formulae used in Deuteronomy 28 and Joshua 24 to renew the Mosaic covenant. In this essay, I argue that the biblical renewal ritual, which involves placing a collective curse on covenant breakers, forms the biblical subtext of the mubāhala. By reading sūra 3 against Deuteronomy and Joshua, we see how the Qur’ān as a text (oral and written) takes on the role of the Torah in the renewal ritual: a witness to the constitution of the Islamic covenant community that, unlike the a prophet or a cultic site, is both portable and duplicable. 

This paper draws a comparison between the treatment of the figure of the Jew in the Pauline Epistles and the Qur’an, with the goal of illuminating the necessarily polemical nature of historical, revealed monotheism. It begins by providing some background as to why such a juxtaposition has been only seldom attempted, explains how the author came to see these two texts as related, and briefly suggests how the parallels might have come about. It then develops a more detailed comparison and contrast, laying the groundwork for a conclusion that draws out some implications for our understanding of monotheism, in critical dialogue with Jan Assmann.

Through an exploration of the word mustaqarr (a place of settling) and associated terms, I will argue in this paper that the Qur’anic concept of “home” refers to a state of being settled on the land, in one’s self, and with God. The search for home thus ties together three journeys: the physical search for one’s homeland (especially after exile), the inward search for peace within one’s heart, and the spiritual search for God. These journeys are intertwined through the idea of mustaqarr, which, the Quran suggests, can only be found at the place where all three searches find their conclusion. Thus, so long as any of those journeys remains incomplete, then you are not at home: you are in a temporary resting-place (mustawda), and the journey must continue.

The passage from Q 37 As-Saffat in the Qur’an, verses 75-148, is a significant text that presents the stories of prophets Noah, Abraham, Moses and Aaron, Elijah, Lot, and Jonah. It is particularly noted for its detailed account of Jonah and the unique narrative of Abraham’s binding of his son, which has sparked debates on the son’s identity. The text’s structure, which has been remained obscure in the scholarship, revolves around two themes: the deliverance of prophets and their kin, and the fate of their communities, contrasting Allah’s chosen messengers with their deviant followers. This structure is not chronological but thematic, separating the prophets’ salvation from their people’s outcomes. The analysis aims to clarify the literary structure, showing how the dual theme informs each prophet’s story and addresses narrative complexities within these verses and how this new reading would contribute to our understanding of the Qur'anic reception of the Bible.

Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (Q 3) derives its name from the mention of the descendants of ʿImrān in verse 33. Although the ḥadīth sources remain largely silent regarding their identity, the exegetes of the Qurʾān commonly identified them as Moses and Aaron and occasionally interpreted them as Mary and Jesus within the Christian context. Conversely, certain modern scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity have emphasized the religious significance of Jesus’ brothers and the existence of their descendants, known as the desposyni (Greek: kins to the lord), whose lineage can be found by the third century CE. In this paper, through a critical re-reading of verses 33–36, and the analysis of their intertextuality with early Christian sources, I propose that the progeny of ʿImrān, beyond Mary and Jesus, may also encompass Jesus’ half-siblings and their progeny through Mary’s marriage with Joseph.