All are welcome to explore the professional development of career and life paths in various religious fields of scholarship. Panelists will address challenges and successes within their own career paths. Experiences and tools will be shared how they have used their degrees for sustained financial growth and cultural influence even if not on the tenure path. Panelists represent traditional rank and tenure, careers in academic related fields such as archivists and independent scholarship, artificial intelligence in scholarship, and consulting in the non-profit and for-profit world. There will be allotted time for questions and discussion.
The Status of People with Disabilities in the Professions Committee (PWD) will host a luncheon for scholars and students with disabilities, as well as anyone interested in disability issues in the Academy. The luncheon will offer opportunities for mentoring and informal connections with colleagues. This AAR member luncheon requires an advance purchase. Add this to your registration by MODIFYING your AAR Annual Meeting registration. Tickets not available after October 31.
Both classical and contemporary scholars have raised critical questions regarding the consequences of Nāgārjuna’s analysis of emptiness for ethics and politics. If all distinctions, phenomena, values, ideas—even suffering, karmic fruit, vulnerable sentient bodies, and ethics—are empty of inherent existence, what does this mean for how we act in the world, both as individuals and as members of social and political groups? Does the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness undermine ethics and political values? And if not, what is the basis and motivation right action in a world in which suffering is ultimately empty of inherent existence? Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland: A Teaching for a King (Rājaparikathāratnāvalī), is widely regarded as one of the most important Indian Buddhist texts to address this question of the relationship between Madhyamaka ideas of emptiness and ethics and politics. Despite its stature in Buddhist traditions and contemporary scholarship, it has not received as much attention as other texts attributed to Nāgārjuna. This is perhaps because it is a dense, enigmatic, and provocative text, primarily devoted to addressing leadership and the Buddhist path, integrating philosophy, ethics, politics, and the aspiration to become a bodhisattva.
This panel presents a topically and historically diverse array of papers for the sake of bringing a methodological point into focus. We examine how literary, cinematic, visual, and ritual arts have not merely transmitted but creatively engaged and reshaped Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and so-called popular-religious thought in China from the medieval period to the present. In each case, we consider how the formal and conceptual affordances of artistic media respond to the needs of their respective practitioners. By engaging these affordances, practitioners have synthesized concepts from disparate traditions; redefined or reinterpreted pre-existing concepts; and illuminated ideas in ways that are uniquely accessible through certain art forms. To make sense of such artistic adaptations of religious thought, it does not suffice to have a grasp of the religious traditions at play. Instead, arts should be understood as actively intervening in and contributing to the repertoires of Chinese religions.
Papers
Cao Yanlu, ruler of Dunhuang from 976 CE to 1002 CE, performed a dwelling-securing ritual as a response to a portentous incident that happened in his house. In this paper, I analyze the characteristics of the ritual by noting Cao’s consultation with the occult arts and the practical logic of his religious eclecticism. The ritual is testimony to the complexities of medieval Chinese religious life, in which the occult arts featured prominently. I then propose to take Cao’s dwelling-securing ritual as an instance of household religion that cuts across the distinction between popular religion and elite religion. When we appreciate Cao’s ritual in light of the continuing tradition of household religion in ancient and medieval China, we can go beyond the framework of interreligious interactions in accounting for the inclusion of Buddhist and Daoist spirits in the ritual but rather understand these spirits as new demonological idioms adopted by household religion.
_Soushan tu_ (literally “painting of a search in the mountains”) is a Chinese narrative painting tradition that derives its name from the central scene of a group of ferocious-looking heavenly soldiers expelling animal spirits led by a commanding deity and his retinue in the mountains. The commanding deities featured in the paintings have been variously identified in previous scholarship as the Buddhist protective deity Vaiśravaṇa, a group of Daoist divinities (_sisheng_), Erlang—a “syncretic” deity capable of controlling floods and subduing mountain ghosts, and Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war. This paper examines one little studied _soushan tu_ painting dated to the Ming era. Through iconographical analysis and close reading of the colophon, the paper demonstrates how the painting constructs a visual narrative without a fixed grounding text, and how it may have communicated new religio-mythological and political messages through a creative reworking of pre-existing visual tropes.
In 1626–27, in the wake of court eunuch Wei Zhongxian’s (1568–1627) persecutions, scholar-official Zhang Nai (_jinshi_ 1604) published a multigenre anthology of writings elucidating the relationship between writing and morality. Confucian thinkers had long regarded the former half of this dyad warily, as that which conveyed sagely morality yet risked giving way to personal interest. In this context, writing was a site of contest between the moral mind embodying the Way and the human mind’s inclination to exceed the square and compass of sagely teachings. I show how Zhang Nai and his collaborators engaged the anthology’s formal features to synthesize an aesthetically esteemed tradition of enmity and indignation (_yuan_, _fen_) with sagely teachings traditionally resistant to these extreme affects. In doing so, they redrew the moral mind’s boundaries to incorporate writing’s expressive affordances into Confucian moral discourse, allowing space for the moral mind’s outrage in late-Ming political life.
In _Running on Karma_, the Hong Kong commercial auteur Johnnie To and his partner Wai Ka-fai offer a meditation on the themes of agency and theodicy within a karmic worldview that sheds fresh light precisely through its improbable pastiche of genres and themes drawn from both Chinese and Western cinematic and literary traditions. By framing the tropes of superhero movies and film noir within a karmic universe, To and Wai subvert those genres’ expectations and assumptions to create a Buddhist morality tale for a global, twenty-first century Asia in which force is futile and nihilism is overcome with compassion.
"This roundtable assembles scholars of religion to discuss Leslie Ribovich’s Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools, published in June 2024 in the North American Religions Series with New York University Press. The book is a detailed, skillful excavation of debates in midcentury New York schools, as administrators, school board members, parents, politicians, and other interested parties attempted to navigate desegregation and secularization. Our four panelists, scholars of religion with a variety of backgrounds and interests in the study of education, will highlight and discuss key themes from Without a Prayer that are pertinent to the study of law, religion, and culture. Among these are secularization and public institutions; the entanglements of race and religion, particularly as they intersect with nationalism and national identities; and the complex relationships between moral formation, religious ideologies, and race-making."
The last few years have yielded a body of work in Jewish and Christian thought calling for a (re)turn to the maternal as a rich but marginalized source for thinking about these traditions’ central philosophical, theological, and ethical preoccupations, including obligation, love, vulnerability, embodiment, and care. While this panel shares concern for exclusion and inattention to questions of care, domesticity, vulnerability, and embodiment, it details the ways that the unacknowledged normative starting point informing much of this work, in which maternality is a privileged, paradigmatic lens, precludes the realization of this scholarships' stated goals of challenging dominant categories structuring collective life through the consideration of minoritized subject positions. This panel poses a series of methodological critiques that refigure the possibilities and limits of thinking with “the maternal turn.”
Papers
Feminist turns to maternal experience have emphasized its asymmetries of power, capability, vulnerability, and need against traditional philosophical paradigms of individual subjectivity as ideally invulnerable, self-sufficient, and self-controlled. This paper considers how mother-child relationships have been used in recent feminist thought to develop accounts of obligation from asymmetries of power, vulnerability, and need. It argues that taking maternal experience as an ethical paradigm obscures important questions about domination in care, both because maternal experience might be relatively exceptional, instead of exemplary, with respect to domination and because of the way these projects focus on the immediacy of care, fixing the mother-child relationship as a dyadic encounter. Where these accounts depend on a paradigm of encounter, they recreate some of the problems they seek to resist by fixing complex power relationships in time.
Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (2018) reclaims parental caregiving as a way to rethink relationality in concert with the sources of biblical, rabbinic, and modern Jewish thought. The perceptive reader of Jewish texts, she suggests, may apprehend through the silver traceries of child-rearing deeper insight into the ways that biblical and rabbinic texts think about obligation, love, power, teaching, and kinship. By scoring maternal subjectivity into the catalog of Jewish thought, Benjamin sonorously interrupts “a cavernous intellectual silence [reigning] where centuries-long, voluble conversation ought to have been” (xvi). This paper takes up Benjamin’s invitation to plumb “the constructive possibilities latent within [midrash]” by weaving together the purported binary between abstract thought and embodied ways of knowing, exploring what becomes knowable about rabbinic conceptions of the Torah when we read rabbinic texts through the lens of chestfeeding parental pleasure.
This paper takes experiences of infertility as a methodological provocation, asking scholars to consider what methodological tools need to be developed to theorize the full range of parental experience (in all of its diversely gendered forms). This paper suggests that neither the phenomenological nor ethnographic methodologies used in existing scholarship on the maternal turn have lived up to their promise to make Jewish thought genuinely attentive to the complex relationship between a range of embodied experiences and philosophical reflection.
This paper is an experiment in collaborative authorship and presentation. We utilize the resources of queer theory to stage the problem of reproductive futurism—namely, whether the normalization of reproduction forecloses upon the possibility of radical change. This will be done through a discussion of two distinct case studies. The first reads Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality against some of its invocations by the maternal turn. It offers the natality of abortion—the newness and possibilities opened up by the refusal to reproduce—as a counter-paradigm for the newness and transformative possibilities imputed to birth. The second turns to rabbinic literature to explore figures and categories for birth, reproduction, etc. that emphasize not only important discontinuities between rabbinic categories and our own but also allow us to see the investments in heteronormative reproductive futurity as strange to the rabbinic sources as (many claim is) authorized by them.
The papers in this session explore Bonhoeffer's theological legacy in relation to various aspects of theological education, including decolonial methods, theological formation, and pastoral care.
Papers
This paper describes the experience of teaching Bonhoeffer in Oceania from the perspective of Pacific Theological College in Suva, Fiji, and in turn, the influence of Bonhoeffer on pedagogy and methodology. The paper uses this context to interrogate contemporary issues in contextual theology, dialoguing with Jione Havea’s important chapter, “The Cons of Contextuality…Kontextuality” (2011). It then describes some emerging Pasifika theologies that centre relationality with land and ocean, identifying some resonances with Bonhoeffer’s key notions of sociality, Christocentrism, and ethics of responsibility.
Writing about the “changing landscape of theological education” is nothing new; in fact, it has constantly been changing through various stages over the past millennia. While his context was different, Dietrich Bonhoeffer also experienced a highly structured system on one side and rapid (and deadly) change on the other. His book Life Together details his experiment in intentional communal theological education, and his writings on theology and spiritual care demonstrate what is at stake for the Church in contemporary society, especially among those at the margins. This paper traces Bonhoeffer’s theological and pedagogical insights to offer proposals for the future of theological education, focusing on embracing innovation with humility, prioritizing relational pedagogy, engaging contextually and prophetically, and fostering lifelong learning and vocational discernment.
Bonhoeffer's seminary at Finkenwalde has sometimes been referred to as an experiment in Protestant monasticism. His lectures on Pastoral Care, reconstructed from his outlines and surviving student notes make clear that he believes that Gospel-centered pastoral care requires both intellectual and spiritual formation to achieve its task. For Bonhoeffer, psychological distress comes from a human sin that prevents an individual from hearing the Gospel, and identifying this sin is the primary task of pastoral care. Bonhoeffer also attempts to differentiate pastoral care based on what seems to be a polemical portrait of psychoanalysis. This paper explores the usefulness and limitations of Bonhoeffer's focus on theology and how it might be enriched by greater dialouge with psychological sciences and medicine.
This roundtable considers the actions and afterlives of clearing within the United States and its territories as a form of spatialized violence. Whether through the religious imaginations of sovereignty at play in the conception of terra nullius or the legal justification of eminent domain in urban renewal projects, clearing illuminates entanglements among constructions of religion, race, and space. Thinking through clearing as it interfaces with religious commitments and communities, the participants in this roundtable bring together case studies across a diverse scope of geographies, temporalities, and subjectivities: from the demolition of “blighted” neighborhoods, the draining of swamps, and the filling of land with water to the monumentality of imperial architectures. The roundtable will then open up for an extended discussion of these spaces and how they might inform our study of religion and spatialized violence. This format is designed to maximize meaningful dialogue among the discussants and audience.
