Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper centers Black religious placemaking as a strategy of survival and meaning-making on the part of members of a Holiness/Pentecostal church in Tivoli Gardens, an inner city community in Kingston Jamaica. It examines the boundaries of belonging and identity amongst the seven subdivisions that constitute Tivoli Gardens, as Tivoli Gardens itself has largely functioned as an extralegal economy governed by a local don, or enforcer supported by the neoliberal Jamaica Labor Party. The process of Black religious placemaking, I argue, is a fraught and agonistic process that entails shifting solidarities within a postcolonial milieu deeply shaped by underdevelopment and American imperialism. These global processes simultaneously create economic and political instability, enacting chronic precarity and heightened stakes of survival. Employment and religious language, framed by evangelical Christian theology authorizes claims to political and spiritual sovereignty. Religious placemaking, then, is an embodied and ideological act of claiming space and authority to secure human flourishing.

This paper examines the 1978 police raid of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black radical religious organization, as a clash of competing spatial imaginations. Tracing the conflict between the secular spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s carceral governance and MOVE’s insurgent approach to cultivating sacred space, I demonstrate the secular spatial logic encoded in zoning laws and their carceral enforcement by analyzing MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of urban space as a direct challenge to secular spatial order.

Drawing on geographic approaches to urban consumption, this paper analyzes the margins and centers of halal consumption in Philadelphia. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research and digital mapping of halal businesses, I make two central claims: (1) there are multiple concentrations of halal consumption in the city that are racially, socio-economically, and devotionally distinctive; (2) in addition to Islamic institutions, these concentrations of halal consumption take shape in relation to gentrification, infrastructure, and urban renewal. I focus on two geographies of consumption in Philadelphia—one in West Philadelphia and one in North Philadelphia—as case studies of infrastructure's and urban renewal's effects on halal consumption. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that attention to the everyday urban process that shape Islamic tradition clarifies the anti-Black and capital-driven forces that marginalize enactment of Islamic tradition in Philadelphia, as well as the ways that Muslim sustain devotional practices and forge convivialities across difference.

As organizers and scholars explore the intimacies between Israeli and US nation-building projects, the phrase, “Palestine-Mexico Border” has emerged to capture the way that US and Israel collaborate through militarized surveillance and ecological extractivism to reassert their national borders. Overlooked, particularly in the US context, is how religion and religious space are important technologies and processes that justify and entangle national borders in global context / imperial borders. This paper explores the relationship between Jewish sacred spaces in Southern Arizona, and the intimacies of racio-religious geographies across and between US and Israel border zones. 

K-pop singer Zior Park's "Christian" song, reaching 11 million views in 2023, critiques religious hypocrisy within Christianity. This paper examines the impact of related religious memes on understanding religion in South Korea and fostering religious dialogue. Situated within the framework of memes, mediatization, and lived religion, the study analyzes how "Christian" sparks discussions on Korean religious piety, gender norms, and materialism, challenging both believers and non-believers. Through exploration of diverse memes, from Buddhist interpretations to critiques of North Korea, it reveals the multifaceted nature of religious discourse on South Korean social media. Moreover, it highlights the role of religious memes in promoting open discourse, blurring sacred and profane boundaries, and inspiring creative memetic expressions on religious matters. By studying Zior Park's "Christian" and its associated memes, this research offers insights into the evolving dynamics between memes, mediatization, and lived religion.

In this presentation I examine how American evangelicals reproduce and mediate the demonic supernatural and link it to non-Christians and political opponents. I examine one case in particular—the case of US Army Lt. General Jerry Boykin, who fought in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu and brought home supernatural photographs of the conflict. Boykin took photographs from a helicopter that seemed to show a shadowy figure in the sky over the city.  Back home in the U.S., he spoke at several churches about this. In this presentation I will talk about how Boykin and other evangelicals produce visual evidence of the demonic, how they (then and now) sometimes link this kind of visual evidence to Islam, and how related media (such as the film Black Hawk Down) all combine to create a representational regime that buttresses evangelical identity, rationalizes Christian missionary failures in Muslim-majority countries, and justifies ongoing western spiritual and political intervention.

In the twenty-first century, online media help U.S. Christian nationalists to divorce eye-catching, quasi-medieval imagery from its historical narrative. The internet’s relative anonymity encourages U.S. Christian nationalists to remake themselves in the (fictionalized) image of the crusader. By portraying themselves and their political ideals as the direct descendants of the Western ordo militaris (e.g., Knights Templar), Christian nationalist crusaders imbue their cause with a sense of historical authenticity, and themselves with the chivalric splendor of the martial aristocracy. This paper observes alternative “free speech” social media platforms (e.g., Gab, Truth Social) to analyze the role of medieval ethos in U.S. Christian nationalism. In conclusion, the paper suggests that popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, combined with the plasticity of social media identity formation, foster an environment in which U.S. Christian nationalists construe themselves as continuing a cultural struggle that dates back to medieval Europe.

The proposed essay will utilize textual analysis of several of the more successful examples of Evangelical anti-pornographic media, as well as a brief exploration of the fundamentals of porn studies and feminist film theory.  Through the combination of these fields the essay will use the proliferation of Evangelical anti-pornographic media to define and analyze the ‘Gazeless Male Gaze’, emphasizing on the importance of women’s agency and the dangers of symbolic annihilation.

In 1975, Laura Mulvey defined the Male Gaze as the voyeuristic objectification of women within cinema for a perceived all male audience by male filmmakers. (Mulvey, 58-69)  The Gazeless Male Gaze maintains the same patriarchy and the same objectification within cinema as Mulvey’s Male Gaze with the voyeurism removed.  Evangelical Anti-Pornographic films may not be literally gazing upon women, yet by patronizingly removing their voices from the subject of porn studies these films continue in women’s objectification.  

This paper investigates how narratives of Islamophobia, specifically the trope of the violent Muslim man, appear in two comedy-drama series created by Muslim producers: Ramy (2019) and Man Like Mobeen (2016). Previous scholarship has attended to anti-Muslim bias in entertainment media by situating them within discourses of sympathy. These analyses have attested to how show producers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, uphold multiculturalism and inclusivity as Western liberal values, and present instances of racism as exceptions rather than the norm (Shaheen 2006, Alsultany 2012, Conway 2017). I argue in this paper that performances of Islamophobia in Ramy and Man Like Mobeen, function as a critique of the limits of liberal inclusion for Muslims and lay bare racism as endemic, rather than exceptional, to American and British societies. Moreover, these series demonstrate how Muslim masculinity is necessarily formed in tandem with the image of the violent Muslim terrorist. 

The Andalusī grimoire known as the Aim of the Wise One or Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (ca. 4th/10th c.) was famously translated century by Alfonso X el Sabio of Castile (d.682/1284). Relying on bilingual Jewish intermediaries, Alfonso created the mysteriously-named Castilian Picatriz and Latin Picatrix, monikers he took as the author’s name. Bursting with planetary prayers and gory rituals, the idiosyncratic and influential Ghāya/Picatrix is, like most occult texts, erased from mainstream intellectual history. I argue that the text, in both Arabic and Latin, uses Ancient and foreign lineages to legitimize its project of the production of magical knowledge. In other words, both the Muslim author and Alfonso located the origins of occult knowledge with peoples who were temporally and culturally Othered (the Arabs of Picatrix, and the Kurds, Nabateans, and Ethiopians of Ghāya) even as they claimed magical authority for themselves.

This paper traces and analyzes a theory of comparative magic that circulated in premodern Arabic bibliographic and magical texts: that there are four schools of magic, each identified with a particular nation or group of people. The four groups are the Indians, the Nabateans, the Greeks, and the monotheists—referred to as Hebrews, Copts, and Arabs. My analysis focuses on one particular application of this theory by Muḥammad al-Kashnāwī al-Sudānī (d. 1142/1741-2) in his text titled al-Durr al-Manẓūm, a commentary on and expansion of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) popular handbook of practical magic, the Book of the Hidden Secret (Kitāb al-Sirr al-Maktūm). The paper argues that Kashnāwī’s discourse of comparative magic conceals a theory of comparative religion. His four schools describe different religious groups and their practices. By labelling them magic, he enfolds those practices into an Islamic framework, thereby accounting for their efficacy and enabling their use.

Historians, both contemporary and medieval, have regarded the Fāṭimid conquest of Egypt as merely one stop on their path to a worldwide Shī‘ī empire. The Fāṭimid Ismā‘īlī dā‘īs (missionaries), however, tell a different story. For Ja‘far b. Manṣūr al-Yaman in particular, Egypt was not an intermediary stage nor a layover on the way to Baghdad and Constantinople, but a land of divine magic where God's connection with His chosen regents was particularly strong, where miracles could take place, and where God's favor upon His imams was most strongly felt. Ja‘far’s notion that a particular land could be more favorable for prophecy may have influenced the writings of the Andalusian Jewish thinker Judah Halevi (1075 – 1141), who argued for a proto-nationalistic view of Israel as a land where prophecy descends on God's elite (ṣafwa) and where the shekhinah, or divine presence, can be most strongly felt, highlighting the already-established intellectual exchange between Fatimid Ismaili and Jewish thinkers

Translating the Arabic khāssah, the Hebrew segulah had multiple valences: It could signify a characteristic property in Aristotelian taxonomy. More commonly, it signified an “occult” property of some natural object, verifiable by empirical experience but inexplicable according to the laws of Aristotelian science. While scholarly investigations of segulah have contributed to understandings of medieval Hebrew astral magic and medicine, I suggest they simultaneously obscure an important dimension indexed by segulah, suggested by the term’s appearance in the Biblical text itself: as a modifier for the Israelite people—viz., as indicative of Jewish chosenness. Accordingly, this paper traces shifting deployments of segulah from the 13th–15th centuries. Asking not what kind of property is a segulah, but rather, what kinds of things have segulot, I argue that the concept of segulah functions as an index for changing ideas about Jewish particularism in medieval Hebrew literature.

In the early twentieth century, a Senegalese Sufi scholar named Musa Kamara composed a short work in Arabic entitled Sharḥ al-ṣadr fī kalām ʿalā’l-siḥr. Kamara addressed his work to a French colonial administrator, Albert Bonnel de Mézières, with the goal of explaining practices that fell under the category of sorcery (siḥr) in “lands near and far.” The Sharḥ al-ṣadr itself pulls from an earlier debate at the turn of the nineteenth century between two Saharan Muslim scholar, who disagreed over the permissibility of certain practices related to the realm of the unseen (ʿālam al-ghayb). Musa Kamara directly cites the work of these two figures, but recontextualizes their debates within a new constellation of discourses about race and rationality. My paper uses the Sharḥ al-ṣadr to examine the process of translation that stripped a pre-colonial debate of its cosmological foundations and brought it into a colonial-era debate about logic and rationality.

How is the subjective experience of demons different from the experience of benevolent spirit companions? This presentation explores how negative emotional valence, lack of control, and high-arousal characterize malevolent agent encounters. Moreover, the ways we respond to malevolent spirits, both spontaneously and in religious/therapeutic contexts, resemble strategies for responding to (e.g., resisting or reconciling with) hostile agents in real life. Benevolent spiritual companions, much like friends in real life, diminish the perception of hostile spiritual forces, and can be summoned as allies in spiritual struggles. The dynamics of Cognitive Companion Construction (CCC), both hostile and benevolent, reflect an amplified imaginative process of social-cognitive simulation – in which the mind synthesizes negative and positive agent encounters into a symbolic (generalized) form, so as to update and generalize our responses to social actors (including the self) in real life.

This paper explores the phenomenon of alien abductions and other sustained personal relationships with aliens—what I term “alien interfacings”—through the lens of Cognitive Companion Construction (CCC), an approach which seeks to understand the cognitive underpinnings allowing the human mind to construct and perceive an ostensibly external agent through internal mechanisms. Aliens are one such type of constructed companion. Through combined factors of expectation, cultural priors, and sensory deprivation through hypnosis or meditation, experiencers generate dense narratives of alien interfacings which often bear powerful transformative results in their lives. These narratives, and the alien interlocuters with whom experiencers build relationships, are created by a combination of cultural and cognitive mechanisms. This paper seeks to better understand the internal narration mechanism, the mental vocabulary upon which it draws, and what such a narrative says about the culture in which it is generated.

Cognitive Companion Construction (CCC), as a provisional model, suggests the examination of the preceding factors in encounters with immaterial beings or agents often deemed supernatural. A meditation tradition rising out of the internet in the past decade offers a seemingly novel exposition of how one might create a persistent encounter with an immaterial being or supernatural agent. Tulpamancy prescribes a training curriculum of visualization and narrative development that is equal parts excogitation and phenomenological creation of the imagined agent. Through the lens of CCC, the agents encountered in Tulpamancy are situated as cognitive constructs. The emic terminology and prescriptive practices of Tulpamancy resemble an experiential model supported by the CCC framing, in which a Tavesian building blocks approach and predictive coding theory structure the agent encounter as trainable, repeatable, and companionate as a result of cultural priors both inherent and explicit in Tulpamancy practice.

The presentation discusses Cognitive Companion Construction (CCC) within shamanism, drawing on insights from CSR and addressing traditional and neo-shamanic practices. Methodological challenges in studying shamanism cross-culturally are acknowledged, emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary approaches. Cognitive capacities observed in shamanism include altered states of consciousness, symbolic thought, narrative construction, and the search for meaning. Research suggests that such experiences are facilitated by cognitive processes like hyperactive agency detection and theory of mind. Cultural contexts significantly shape the expression of shamanic practices, with variations reflecting societal understandings of the cosmos and social cohesion mechanisms. Distinguishing between collective and distributive modes of effervescence on a continuum, the paper theorizes the mechanisms that contribute to the emergence and expansion of novel practices like contemporary neo-shamanisms. The conclusion emphasizes the interplay between cognitive capacities and cultural contexts in shaping CCC within shamanism, contributing to a deeper understanding of religious beliefs and practices within CSR.

This paper builds upon a research project with New England congregations over the last five years, giving particular attention to congregations pursuing callings to justice. Even as their justice-seeking has borne fruit, many congregational leaders are weary. Drawing on interviews and a series of Sabbath retreats with congregational leaders, this paper explores how Sabbath-keeping supports congregational leaders as they embody and sustain vocations to justice. The paper begins by reflecting theologically on the relationship between Sabbath, calling, and creating just and peace-seeking communities. It then presents key ways that congregational leaders are practicing Sabbath as a means for reconnection, repair, and resistance, as well as identifies some of the challenges leaders face in engaging rest, including challenges related to systemic injustices. It concludes by discussing some implications for helping congregational leaders engage practices of Sabbath and rest as a way to support - and even enact - their callings and commitments to justice. 

This paper explores theological education as a methodological approach and academic discipline within practical theology, emphasizing its role in understanding and catalyzing transformation within individuals’ lived experiences and faith. Drawing from practical theology focuses on reflexive praxis, the research focuses on the teaching-learning environment of a theological school in Madagascar, contextualized within socio-political complexities. Employing critical qualitative research methodologies, practical feminist theology, and liberative transformative paradigms, the study assesses religious education’s alignment with a vision of justice and the efficacy of its practices. The paper advocates integrating theological inquiry with social scientific research methods, promoting dialogue, critical listening, and collective action toward justice within the theological school community. By bridging theory and practice in religious education, this research aims to foster positive societal change, with implications extending beyond geographical boundaries to address systemic oppression and advance justice globally.

This paper makes use of Freirean theory and decolonial theory to investigate the role practical theology can and must play in shaping pedagogy, especially in places like Haiti, where violence is systemic and all-pervasive. Framing coloniality as a disease, it argues for a pedagogy of decolonial healing that builds from a Boulagan reimagining of the Gospel.

Drawing from critical ethnography in urban, faith-based food assistance in Finland, this paper investigates 1) how and what kind of social inclusion (and possibly, exclusion) emerges in food assistance through the politics, practices, and lived experiences, and 2) what kind of lived urban theology these dynamics denote? The data was collected in 2020–2021 in six faith-based food banks aiming for social inclusion and community development. The data is analyzed by employing the theoretical concepts of social in- and exclusion and utilizing the lenses of lived urban theology. The findings propose that the participants perceiving themselves as socially excluded identify themselves as the ‘Others’ also within food assistance. Different framings, social distances, and power hierarchies further contribute to the dynamics of social in- and exclusion, addressing that the food banks are yet hesitant to imagine themselves as a source of liberation, that would challenge structural, epistemic inequalities.

Research in psychology, pastoral care, and peace studies has increasingly recognized religious communities as vital sources of resilience and healing for immigrants. Religious communities can also empower immigrants in their process of reconstructing the losses experienced in the trauma of displacement. Focusing on the Afro-Cuban tradition of Santería, this paper delves into how Judith L. Herman’s healing stages model can be used to assess how the Cuban diaspora addresses the trauma of displacement. Santería’s role in fostering collective healing from the traumas of displacement and advancing social justice are also examined in this study, specifically how it addresses trauma by emphasizing relationships and social contracts and, therefore, healing trauma.