Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

The San Luis Rey Village emerged as a community in the face of Spanish colonization where Luiseño people converged to preserve land, culture, and an Indigenous sovereignty. Spanish missionization influenced the composition of the village, yet an Indigenous understanding of cultural and political space transcended the imposition of Catholicism. As California came under the control of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, the San Luis Rey Village navigated and resisted settler encroachment upon their land. This presentation analyzes key moments in the tribe’s efforts to secure their village, including treaty negotiations and strategic protest, that ultimately set the stage for the tribe’s contemporary pursuit of federal recognition of its inherent sovereignty. 

My presentation will revolve around my work as a Ho-Chunk/Ojibwe scholar in collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (AMTB) to work towards decolonization.  I will discuss our efforts to develop educational curriculum from an Indigenous perspective that can be incorporated into the California public schools. Respectful collaboration with the AMTB is essential, and includes developing a memorandum of understanding, following Amah Mutsun protocol, meeting regularly for feedback, and gaining tribal approval every step of the way.  I will also discuss what allyship means and what it means to be a good ally.  In order to decolonize educational curriculum, it takes Natives and non-Natives working together as allies in respectful collaboration.  I will also discuss that decolonization must also include land back to California Indians.  For this to happen, we must work together as allies of California Indians too.  I will discuss how land was stolen from California Indians to create the UC system so returning land to Indigenous people is of central important for decolonization.

San Diego mission was the site of our largest Kumeyaay rebellion. We burned it several times, killing the missionary Father Luis Jayme and two others on November 5, 1775. The Kumeyaay destroyed missions in San Diego and Baja California, leaving them as rubble. This was a form of strategic resistance focused on systematically destroying the missions. The Kumeyaay still have our Native language because we burned the missions down. One difficult question that remains is why were some groups able to successfully resist Spanish missionization and keep a majority of their culture intact while others succumbed to the foreign missionizing of their people. This paper is based on community knowledge including histories gathered through the use of interviews and conversations with descendants of those who were missionized during a pilgrimage I guided to sites of Indian resistance to Spanish mission on the U.S.-Mexican border. .

This paper uses an historical and ethnographical lens to document the restoration process and restor(y)ing of the Santa Ysabel Mission (Santa Ysabel Reservation in San Diego County). The Mission Myth is a settler colonial fantasy used to justify the eradication of First Peoples, our history, and our land tenure and stewardship. The term “restor(y)ing” is derived from several critical Tribal theories and methodologies. By utilizing oral history and personal correspondence with tribal members, this talk features their perspectives and understanding about local Spanish Mission history to present a critical analysis of California Mission Studies. This talk combines the work of California American Indian community members, academics, allied researchers, and activist partners to establish California American Indian understandings and to center California American Indian perspectives in telling the history of California Indian-Spanish relations during the mission period and the continuing ramifications of that historical era.

California Indian Amah Mutsun response to an early 19th century confessional manual written in Mutsun, an Ohlone language from northern California, by the missionary friar Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta OFM.  Spanish missionaries to the Americas published and disseminated confessionarios, confessional guides or handbooks that priests used to instruct Indigenous people through the sacrament, including in Alta California. In California, the sacrament of confession was also related to the Papal Bulls.  Those that did not convert and practice confession were to be “vanquished”.  What does it mean to be ‘vanquished” in the California Indian context?  At Mission San Juan Bautista 19,421 Indigenous people died between 1797-1823.  3,200 were buried in a tiny graveyard, a mass grave, at San Juan Bautista. The California missions were not about conversion but about punishing a resistant population, about domination and control. The working definition of sin is problematic because it centers the Spanish view. The California Indian voice should become the moral standard in evaluating the crimes of the mission system and the colonizeers. 

This paper examines the mission bell in California as an aural and visual instrument of colonization: from the crucial role of church bells and their sounds at the California missions during the Spanish and Mexican periods, to the processes that shaped the El Camino Real Bell Marker as an enduring presence in California tourism, and the Raincross Bell as emblematic of the business ventures booster-entrepreneur Frank A. Miller in the City of Riverside. I will argue that these historical developments transformed the mission bell into a Native Californian symbol of struggle and reckoning.

This paper explores the promise that a comparative shift in Dalit Theology will hold both for the development of Dalit Theology in the context of its ongoing critiques (of its epistemological binarism, as well as insufficient comprehensiveness), as well as the changing Indian context of growing religious nationalisms, which necessitates significant levels of subaltern as well as interreligious solidarity as an antidote. It takes into serious consideration the changing global theological contexts where liberation theologies are no longer the prerogative of Christians, but are also being articulated by Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim scholars, it lifts up liberative motifs within different Dalit traditions that can transform Dalit Theology. Through a careful reading of the signs of our times, the paper seeks to outline the shape and scope of a comparative theology of Dalit liberation, which would be more aligned with the visions of some of the earliest proponents of Dalit theology.

The Dalit situation in India and its relation to Hinduism has parallels that can be drawn to the slavery and oppression of Black and African Americans in the United States, a country founded on overtly Christian theological sentiments.  Both countries have religious majorities with theological ideals of equality and non-discrimination, and yet both have long histories of oppression and dehumanization of minority populations.  However, the civil rights movement in the United States was ultimately inspired by the reaffirmation of Christian religious ideals; this work seeks to reaffirm Hindu ideals of non-discrimination and equality present in fundamental texts and embodied by figures both historical and modern, from the Alvars in South India (7th-10th century) to 20th century Hindu leaders.  This comparative approach brings the sociocultural scenarios of the U.S. and India into dialogue around issues of oppression and religious ideals, providing a new angle to the often-oppositional Hindu-Dalit relationship.

This research delves into a comparative study of Korean "Han" and Dalit "Pathos" within the framework of Dalit Theology, employing comparative theology to explore themes of injustice, resilience, and liberation across cultural and religious contexts. Examining primary literature and secondary sources uncovers the emotional and cultural depths of Han and Pathos, their historical development, and their theological implications. The study highlights how Han, rooted in Korean spirituality and reflecting a narrative of sorrow and justice, resonates with universal themes within Christian theology, while Dalit Pathos, arising from the caste-based oppression in Hinduism, articulates a profound sense of injustice and longing for liberation. Through a comparative theological methodology, this research seeks to enrich Dalit Theology by integrating insights from Korean Han, emphasizing the importance of inclusive, empathetic, and action-oriented theological frameworks to reaffirm and deepen the Christian commitment to justice and liberation.

This paper places the Reformed theologian John Owen and the fourth Capadocian, Sister Macrina, in conversation to sketch a Reformed account of dying well. Specifically, through resourcing the thought of these two theologians, we present the virtues of faith, hope, and love in the process of dying as a "testimony" to the value of Jesus. The paper begins by examining the theme of "hope" in the thought of Macrina, focusing on its role in her account of the nature of death and in her own death. The second section looks at John Owen's understanding of "faith" through an examining of three sermons that he preaches toward the end of his life on dying well. Finally, we draw on the thinking of Macrina and Owen to briefly construct an account of "love" in the face of death and the validity of grief in the process of dying. 

The doctrine of deification or theosis has experienced something of a resurgence within theological circles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This paper seeks to make a modest contribution to Protestant and Reformed theological consideration of the doctrine of theosis. In it, I retrieve and critically engage Petrus Van Mastricht’s rejection of this doctrine, articulating the theological and Christological impetuses that are at play in his writing. In it, I articulate that van Mastricht’s work helpfully highlights the felt need within Reformed theology to emphasize the creator/creature distinction and the goodness of human, creaturely predicates. Yet his project also risks insofar as his identification and articulation of human, creaturely predicates is disassociated from consideration of the human flesh of God in Christ.  

Recent literature has assessed Jonathan Edwards’s theology of creation, particularly of creation’s beauty, as one that provides the resources for environmental ethics. Understood as a communication of God’s glory, creation in all its beauty becomes a crucial means of human knowledge and sense of divine beauty. However, these accounts neglect Edwards’s eschatology in its exclusion of the non-human creation from redemption, an exclusion that results from Edwards’s definition of secondary beauty. The telos of the creation as a whole becomes subservient to the telos of humanity, and thus, once humanity’s goal of union with God is achieved, the creation serves no other purpose. This paper explores these weaknesses of Edwards’s eschatology and offers a revision of Edwards that seeks to be faithful to his Reformed emphasis on both the effects of sin in the world and the orientation of all creation towards divine glory.  

Reformed critiques of the doctrine of purgatory have typically leaned upon close exegesis of scripture; restrained reception of patristic thought; and the sufficiency of God’s prevenient grace. This direct approach is necessary, but the debate itself has grown stale. In hopes of reinvigorating discussion, this paper takes the indirect route of addressing one ancillary concern, often cited in support of the doctrine of purgatory. A universe without purgatory, it is said, leaves us in a morally intolerable situation. Those who lived lives of sacrifice and those who did not will simultaneously ‘wake up in heaven’ to the equal enjoyment of heaven's rewards. Drawing broadly from the work of Jonathan Edwards, I argue that it is not purgatory which completes earthly human life and upholds God’s justice. Rather earthly life anticipates the unending growth of God’s self-gift and the soul’s capacity to receive it.

Comparative Religious Ethics seeks to promote multiple “encounters with difference,” but what capacities should we be developing, in ourselves and our audiences, to engage genuinely with multiple views? A careful attention to analysis, leading to appreciation though not assent, has marked many of the most interesting efforts in CRE over the past few decades. But some critics think that such efforts fail, and that the protocols of contemporary culture and scholarship turn encounter into consumerist amusement and genuine toleration into indifference, diluting subjects’ own convictions and producing “Don Juans of the myths, courting each one in turn.” This paper directly addresses these challenges, trying to appreciate their power while still proposing that constructive encounters with difference are possible, though they may require more serious self-reflection than scholars have often theorized.

Ethics is not only anemic, but vacant without a modicum of advocacy, as ethics defines the good without remaining starkly neutral. Comparative religious ethics charts real-time communities, facing salient and timely issues. Yet, informed ethics complicates the good by viewing it comparatively. Comparative ethics requires attention not only to textual, traditional, or theoretical factors, but dynamic, historically-rooted social circumstances.  The first case concerns Soto Zen norms during Japanese annexation of Korea in the early 20th century, in which many celibate Korean monastics were required to marry.  By Korean independence in 1945, a small minority of celibate Korean monastics remained.  The second case charts San Francisco Zen Center’s leadership transitions from a beloved root teacher of Soto Zen lineage, Shunryu Suzuki, whose American successor’s misdeeds pushed restructuring of the community to prevent ethical violations. Comparing Buddhist community adjustments after ethical challenges, this study affirms aspects of advocacy in comparative, informed ethics.

This paper will attempt to translate East Asian thinking into a new cultural setting where feminist and pluralist discourses prevail by pointing out certain limitations of Western feminist discourse and comparatively reinventing femininity as an alternative concept. Firstly, Western mainstream epistemology and ontology will be critically reviewed from the gender perspective. The paper will argue Western mainstream thought operates through masculine discourse and that some feminism is actually a byproduct of and reinforces it. Next, it will examine East Asian gendered cosmology, systematically completed in Neo-Confucianism and discuss how the gender binary framework of yinyang can remove the charge of essentialism and modify Western masculine discourse and feminism. It will be argued that the Dao can offer a new feminist paradigm. Here, femininity is not an antithesis of masculinity in the confrontational male-female dichotomy, but an alternative discourse at a larger level that transcends and encompasses that dichotomy.

Convinced of the value of Comparative Religious Ethics as a framework both for conveying foundational concepts and for nurturing multireligious fluency, an ethicist with deep experience in chaplaincy education presents an approach to ethics instruction for professional spiritual caregivers that is informed by interreligious studies, comparative theology, and post-colonial methods and concerns. It is a model through which chaplains-to-be learn best practices of comparison-making as they broaden and deepen their understanding of worldviews and ethical theories beyond their own. At least as importantly, it is a model that facilitates the understanding of the interconnectedness of individual and systemic issues that impede equity; hence it develops competencies that enable spiritual care to be provided justly. Among its goals is to ensure that, when confronted with calls to serve as advocates, chaplains be well equipped to know whether, when, and how to respond.  

The intersection of faith, public policy, and LGBTQIA+ advocacy within the context of the Black Church is a dynamic and multifaceted area of study. This paper proposal aims to explore the challenges faced by the Black Church in advocating for the rights and well-being of the Black LGBTQIA+ community. From the perspective of a Black cisgender gay theologian, we will critically analyze public policies, evaluate advocacy strategies, and delve into the profound influence of Bayard Rustin’s Quaker faith on his work. Additionally, we will imagine how Rustin’s approach to community organizing and LGBTQIA+ rights might have evolved in the late 20th century and beyond.

In response to AIDS, gay theologians reconsidered sex and its relationship to gayness. In the context of AIDS, they asked, is risky sex a self-hating and selfish, homicidal pursuit or an insistence on pleasure and relationship in the midst of death? This paper will approach this discussion obliquely by drawing on fraternity, or brotherhood, as a form of gay relationality open to sexual pleasure. It will consider fraternity as a theological category in the work of Kevin Gordon, a Christian Brother theologian and ethicist who died of AIDS while he was working through his own doctrine of fraternity. Gordon’s work will be explicated in relation to other uses of brotherhood in projects interrupted by death, like Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men, started by Joseph Beam and finished by Essex Hemphill, and The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood by Robin Hardy, finished by David Groff.

Looking to the various sources of anti-gay and anti-MLM/MSM rhetoric, this paper explores the violence, both physical and non-physical, done on gay and queer men’s bodies and how that violence can lead to internal violence, external violence, and counterviolence. Utilizing M. Shawn Copeland’s notion of embodiment to ground the lived experience of gay and queer men with their own physicality and the physicality of those they come in contact with, a framework can be developed for reconciling violence, whether intentional or unintentional, while restoring healthier relationships with the self, others, and community.

This paper will explore the religious dynamics of the Cold War geo-political construction of “brainwashing.” Its analysis centers on two cultural texts—one public, one classified—whose juxtaposition suggests an underexplored religious dimension in apparently secular sites of American geo-political strategy during the Cold War. This paper will examine journalist Edward Hunter’s highly influential exposé, Brain-Washing in Red China (1951) alongside a previously classified script of a CIA training film on hypnosis entitled The Black Art (1953). These two cultural texts rely on Orientalist tropes to articulate mind-control as a secret, mysterious technique of enemy influence akin to malevolent magic. Comparing these two texts thus presents an opportunity to redeploy the ancient concept of maleficium, the magic art of “evil-doing,” as an analytical framework. In so doing, I will argue that reconceptualizing brainwashing as a Cold War maleficium reveals unexamined religious dimensions animating the enduring image of mind-control.

This paper is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the theology of the Appalachian singer and songwriter Tyler Childers and to explore how Childers' music and biography both reflects, and contributes to, constructing contemporary religious, regional, and political identities in the United States. Childers' music and popularity are significant to religious studies because attention to his music, videos, biography, and fan base can help us better understand the complex interplay between religious, regional, class, and political identities at a time when democratic backsliding and authoritarian creep is a significant threat. Childers' theology consistently engages complex religious themes at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, addiction, church, and the afterlife, but does so in a way that is compelling both with the rural white southerners and also embraced by a diverse group of listeners that do not fit the typical country music consumer demographics.

Employing the analysis of professional wresting developed by Roland Barthes in his influential essay, “The World of Wrestling” (1972), this paper contends that American voters, like a professional wrestling audience, are not interested in facts, but desire a public spectacle in which good triumphs over evil. Given the vagaries of the Electoral College, the influence of dark money in elections, and the increasing role of the Supreme Court plays in validating or determining election outcomes, many Americans believe the electoral process, like a professional wrestling match, is rigged. An analysis of the symbols and rituals of professional wresting provides a lens through which we can analyze the American electoral process as a rigged public spectacle intended to reinforce cultural and national narratives of American triumphalism embodied in images of masculinity, violence, and power.

This paper will argue that when a sovereign state recognizes a group as a religion, the laws and customs of the group acquire a special status. This status can enable the ‘religious’ group to escape prosecution for behaviour that would otherwise be deemed criminal. Metzitzah B’peh, or oral suction, provides a dramatic example. Efforts to forbid this act that has caused the death of some babies and inflicted brain damage on others, met with failure in New York City. Orthodox Jewish communities effectively argued that former Mayor Bloomberg, who wanted the practice banned, had to respect religious freedom even though oral suction can be considered a form of high-risk sexual assault on male infants by adult men. Presently, the practice continues with no required restrictions beyond tepid warnings to Jewish parents. This paper examines how such a practice is legitimated by local authorities.

Over the last 20 years, multiple public inquiries across the world have investigated the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults in religious institutions. Two inquiries – the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual abuse and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual abuse in England and Wales - examined smaller religious groups including the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Findings indicate that biblical texts were used extensively in managing complaints of abuse and of perpetrators, compliance with silence and safeguarding policy. The gendered base of this process, from the interpretation of scripture by male leaders, to the management by men of the investigation processes indicate that gendered violence against women and girls was significant. This presentation will examine the gendered use of biblical texts in managing abuse and implementing the recommendations from both inquiries and ascertain the ways in which biblical texts are currently being employed with regard to gender equity.

2 Samuel 20:3 is a devastating denouement to a biblical story of sexual and gender-based violence. It states the fate of the ten concubines David left to ‘look after the house’ in Jerusalem when David and the rest of his household fled to escape his son Absalom (2 Sam. 15.16). Absalom then captured Jerusalem and publicly raped the ten women to demonstrate his power (2 Sam. 16.21-22). When David returned to Jerusalem, he ordered that the women be ‘shut up until the day of their death, living as if in widowhood’ (2 Sam. 20:3). This presentation (1) critically examines the troubling assumptions behind David’s response; (2) describes a contextual bible study that explores 2 Sam. 20:3 as secondary victimisation, and (3) discusses some of the responses and insights on the bible study from the Kuibuka (Arise) workshop for religious sisters in Ghana in 2024.

Sexual and spiritual abuse of and by Catholic religious sisters has been documented since the 1990s but has received only minimal response from the Church, and little attention in the media or in academic research. Kuibuka Africa is an initiative that responds to the harm inflicted, enabled, and silenced in many religious women’s congregations. Kuibika runs workshops on trauma and abuse, and the need for effective pastoral response. Women religious share their experiences of abuse and interrogate the patriarchal narratives and theological foundations that enable violence and silence women’s voices. A pilot workshop in January 2023 welcomed thirty sisters from Central Africa. A second workshop involved forty religious superiors from West Africa in January 2024. The workshops empower women religious to resist injustice and institutional violence and become agents of change. Many participants have used workshop material in their local communities to help in safeguarding their own sisters.

This presentation examines the "proto-biographical roots" of Late-Vedic life stories in the brāhmaṇas and argues how these serve as a basis for narrative expansions into "life scenes" (i.e., stray references taking on greater and greater narrative context). The paper examines the references of several individuals named in these texts, where the references serve as kernels for expansion, both within these texts, but then into later literature where "life scene" may become "life story." Producers of such ritual manuals, of course, did not see their project as "biographical" or "hagiographical," but the paper suggests how a shifting model of textual and ritual authority produced a "biographical impulse" towards teacher-sage life stories in later literature.

This presentation examines genre in sacred life stories through a close study of al-Khutb̤ āt al-Aḥmadīyah (1870), a sīra (biography of the Prophet Muhammad) by Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān. Sir Sayyid directly engages questions about the types of writing that ought to be employed for a sīra, concluding that it should mirror styles resembling the facticity and objectivity of historical writing. This paper historically situates this argument by contrasting it with the writing types and the objectives that sīra have traditionally sought to employ and fulfill. The presentation focuses on two questions. First, how did South Asian scholars read and respond to the conception of sacred biography laid out by Sir Sayyid; second, what impact did this proposal for sacred biography have on three early twentieth-century compositions.

This paper examines the hagiographical structures in social media posts about Rakesh Jhavery (b. 1966), the guru of the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission in Dharampur, Gujarat. The mission boasts the largest online presence of any Jain organization, appealing mainly to upper-class Gujarati Śvetāmbar youth in India and the diaspora. Jhavery’s persona is constructed on two types of posts: (1) YouTube videos and his Wikipedia page, which portray him as a “spiritual prodigy” closely modeled on twentieth-century biographies of Śrīmad Rājacandra (1867-1901); and (2) on Instagram and Facebook using the hashtag #sadguruwhispers. The first employs empiricist language to establish Jhavery’s divine status, while the second uses aphorisms and images to assert his divinity. I will examine three key elements of hagiographical writing in both and show how SRMD's social media posts construct a dynamic archive, contributing to an ongoing hagiographical campaign.

This presentation analyzes the practices and discourses concerning smṛti surrounding experiences with and life stories of Swaminarayan in the nineteenth century. He argues that smṛti, which generally translates to remembering, is the central operating factor in the processes of biography and hagiography production and reception. Examining texts from the community, which include recorded discourses of Swaminarayan elaborating on the topic and several texts by monks who demonstrate the practice, presenter #4 proposes the concept of (re)experiencing to explain smṛti practices in the context of life stories. (Re)experiencing is a generative framework that situates biography/hagiography as a category in a more complex web of material and cognitive practices by which Swaminarayan followers actively engaged with episodes they experienced personally or through some other medium.