Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper seeks to understand Mills' racial contract theory and extend it in the context of the U.S. More specifically, this paper will augment Mills’ racial contract theory by asserting that this contract is not just one that exists between Euro/white persons, but also between those that they subjugate, namely black people. To do this, this paper will engage Mills’ formulation of the racial contract alongside classical contract theory and various authors’ work on secularism in the United States. The core thesis of this paper is that rather than the racial contract being an agreement between white men, it is in the context of U.S. jurisprudence, an agreement between whites and blacks where the magic (that is: the religious force/violence) of the law is deployed to articulate that blacks have always already assented to their subjugation and as such have no legitimate legal claim to relief.

This essay looks at the question of Blackness as an anti-relational position insofar as social death organizes the landscape of being-in-the-world. I will turn to Morrison’s exploration of her character Sula to examine how black religious notions of sociality does not consider the ways that antiblackness configures Blackness as the ultimate symbol of abjection and positions the social death of blackness as the threat to all communal aspirations. How does a an inability to be organized into coherent legible communities maintain the aporia of  social contracts,and represent the specter of violence structuring all claims of love, culture, and beloved community. Is Sula violent because she betrays or is she violent because she is inherently anti-relational and therefore can never stabilize the social contracts that are fundamentally built upon opposing her abject position in the bottom?  To Whom can Blackness belong in community with, and what can be gleaned from understanding relationality itself as the violence that structures Blackness’s anti-relational positionality.

This paper develops a paradigm of anagrammatical liturgics as a mode of revolutionary suicide. It begins by introducing liturgy through Giorgio Agamben’s profanation of its theological economy, rendering it an inoperative praxis that puts its transfiguring potentialities to a new use. It then constellates this with Christina Sharpe’s notion of anagrammatical Blackness to theorize the way Black thought induces the collapse of one’s Human coordinates. Before elaborating this through David Marriott’s treatment of revolutionary suicide, the paper excavates his adoption of Werner Hamacher’s notion of afformative violence, yielding an im-performative praxis that destitutes the historical continuum and withdraws the singular into the multiple as the pure means of justice.

Thinking from the position of racial slavery and its concomitant questions surrounding emancipation, freedom, and sovreignty, how do we think violence beyond “means and ends”? This question emerges as a critical engagement with Benjamin’s brief yet groundbreaking examination of the fundamental question “What is violence?” It’s importance lies in an interrogation of the assumptive logics undergirding the subject of Benjamin’s conception of law and subsequently “divine violence.” By focusing on the antagonisms between the constitution of this subject and Du Bois’ subject in Black Reconstruction, one may find that the problematic of racial slavery not only augments but distends the appearance of divine violence-qua-general strike.

Clergy sexual abuse and misconduct in ungodly, deeply wrong, and extremely harmful not only to the victims but entire communities and diocese. Clergy sexual abuse happens in the Orthodox Church and it is hardly a rare occurrence. According to some reports, 20% of pastors (of all Christian groups) have misused their power and position to sexual abuse or sexually harass victims in their congregations. It is estimated that 90-95% of victims of clergy sexual abuse are adult women congregants, although most media stories report child victims of clergy sexual abuse. Women are abused three to four times more than children by clergy, making women the “silent” majority used as prey for abusive shepherds. I propose to address this issue in a multi-step process including truth telling, naming the harm, accepting the suffering, and relying on Maximus the Confessor’s practical advice and modern methods to bring restoration and healing to all.

A taxonomy of worth which attributes greater value to rationality and independent agency is often assumed of Patristic figures like Maximus the Confessor. This taxonomy renders persons who do not display independent agency—including those who rely on caregivers, medical or ambulatory devices, or other daily supports—less than fully human. Such a taxonomy is a feature of Aristotelian virtue ethics, so even disability theologians like Shane Clifton and Hans Reinders contend with hierarchical representations of human capacities and scales of value for achieving eudaimonia. I argue that Maximus does not replicate the Aristotelian taxonomy of worth, but instead inverts this model, creating a model for agency which emphasizes the mediation of others in the facilitation of each person, distributing agency to trusted others. I argue that Maximus’ distributed agency forms a latent social model for disability that could provide an alternative disability-positive virtue ethic from the Christian East.

The paper considers the Holy Spirit’s “groaning in labor pains” in Paul’s letter to the Romans in light of Irenaeus of Lyon’s trinitarian image of the Son and Holy Spirit as “the Father’s Two Hands,” and of his maxim, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive, and the fullness of life is the vision of God.” How do these mutually related principles of God’s revelatory action and humanity’s response function when the path of faith is blinded by suffering and life is experienced as tragically less-than-full? The thesis is that the Spirit freely enters into a “vulnerability” in solidarity with the world that is analogous to the suffering Christ’s, which constructively enlarges the scope of Irenaeus’ two principles. Sergei Bulgakov’s reception of Irenaeus’ “two-hand” trinitarianism is compared with that of Hans Urs von Balthasar and then expanded in dialogue with Sarah Coakley and Shelly Rambo.

Recent work in the field of ritual studies, notably Molly Farneth’s The Politics of Ritual, has taken up the theoretical lens of performativity in order to emphasize the ways in which rituals effect change in the social world. Yet the field has not sufficiently engaged with the performative work of rituals gone wrong. This paper is organized around an extended example—a story that Emil Fackenheim tells in his To Mend the World about a Yom Kippur fast in Auschwitz that took place on the wrong day. Relying on Farneth’s analysis of rituals as performatives, I argue that Fackenheim’s Yom Kippur story is an example of an infelicitous ritual that is still efficacious. It evidences that Jewish thought can survive after the Holocaust even though, or perhaps precisely because, the ritual breaks from normal procedure.

An international tourist phenomenon, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela brings hundreds of thousands of people to Europe each year. An historically Catholic pilgrimage, its religious history is downplayed today, with organizations like UNESCO focusing instead on its status as a repository of “cultural heritage.” This paper proposes the term “Camino modernism” to describe this transformation, tracing its origins in the work of nationalistic scholars in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its present deployment in advertising, literature, and academic writing on the Camino. I conclude by showing how the paradigm of Camino modernism permeates the study of pilgrimage more widely. Pilgrimage is often presented or described as an opportunity for affective transformation, a journey with transcendent potential. Thus it is vital to continue to ask how Camino modernism might color the meanings we make or identify in others.

     Shenzuo originated from the veneration of vacant seats in ancestral temples and burial sites, where decorated empty spaces, adorned with canopies and coverings, were used to accommodate the descent of the deities and conduct religious ceremonies. After Eastern Han period, this practice began to be incorporated into various belief systems such as deity worship, Taoism, and Buddhism. On one hand, they adopted the practice of "preparing an empty seat for the divine", and on the other hand, they developed diverse practices. Therefore, the ritual practices in Buddhism and Taoism were also influenced by ancestor worship, sharing similar ritual resources with other indigenous beliefs.However, Buddhist practices were primarily limited to lay Buddhists, while monks and monasteries were less influenced, highlighting the existence of different practices within the same belief system among different communities.