Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

If Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance human morality, could AI also enhance spirituality? In considering the relationship between AI and spirituality, this paper examines the potential benefits and risks of moral enhancement through AI and relates some of these arguments to Hugh of St. Victor’s notion of the ark of wisdom. I argue that while AI can indeed assist morality, a key aspect of spirituality, there are other key facets in the cultivation of morality such as the practice of memorization and the internalization of reading that belongs exclusively to the human agent. If Hugh’s spirituality as depicted in the ark of wisdom is sound, then it follows that while AI can enhance spirituality, it only does so to a limited degree. While AI and spirituality should remain partners, they must remain partners by delineating key practices of spirituality.

A famous poem by R. S. Thomas, “The Empty Church,” one of the poems that widely associates him with Holy Saturday, describes an existential search for God in a post-religious age. But today, the poem also captures something telling about spiritual life in our era of artificial intelligence—indeed, perhaps the spiritual life of artificial intelligence itself. This is because, in addition to its existential theme, the poem takes the form of a broken sonnet. The sonnet form evokes completion, closure, harmony, though in “The Empty Church” its fracture instead registers as noise, mimicry, simulation. The poem thus functions as an allegory of artificial intelligence, mimicking the quest for God in a search for the poet who might complete or repair its busted form. Thomas’s poem helps us understand the emergence of AI as a neural network with its own pathologies, its spiritual life a weakened version of our own.

Christian spirituality is inherently relational. As a discipline, Christian spirituality is devoted to the study and practice of being in relationship with God, oneself, others, and all of creation. The development of artificial intelligence and the anticipation of future, more advanced, artificial intelligences, raises questions about the practice and scope of Christian spirituality. This paper explores cautionary and constructive possibilities for partnerships between human beings and artificial intelligence. For example. how can the development of potential artificial consciousness expand the understanding of not only how, but who or what, may practice contemplative Christian spirituality? This appraisal draws upon several ideas and sources, including the 14th century mystic, Richard Rolle, Walter Wink’s social theology, Michael Burdett’s theology of technology, and the practice of contemplative prayer.

Images created by generative AI have raised controversy in the art world, where critics question the ability of AI to be creative since generative programs base their output on that of previous artists.  The formulaic nature of icon painting would seem to make it ideally suited to generative AI.  Nor would the virtual world preclude the veneration of icons.  Yet most Orthodox theologians remain suspicious of digital technology.  Theologically, AI generation raises fears of a new Docetism that separates spirit and matter.  A second concern is rooted in the role of both icon and iconographer within the temporal community and the community of saints.  Through prayer and contemplation, an icon establishes a relational triad linking iconographer, saint, and viewer.  AI severs the relationship between iconographer and saint and has the potential to mislead viewers, since it is embedded in neither the community of the faithful nor of the saints. 

The enduring legacy of Wesleyan principles and theology within the Black Church tradition and Womanist Theology in particular, is not often named and celebrated. The connection of the budding Methodist church in the United States at the same time African American Folk Religion was established are paralleled. The Great Awakening in the United States with its Methodist and Baptist roots saw numerous African Americans adherents. Germane to the descendants of Africans was the Wesleyan understanding of acts of mercy and personal piety, along with a diversity in scriptural interpretation that have been guiding practical theological values for the Black Church traditions. As Womanist Theology and Theological ethics took form and continues throughout different waves, this Pan-Methodist employment can be seen in the tenets of womanist principles and scholarship that undergird the field to this day.

This paper investigates the Methodist Student Movement (MSM), a significant yet often overlooked chapter in Methodist history, which replicated the original Wesleyan movement’s zeal for social holiness. Emerging in the late 1930s, the MSM mobilized young Methodists through innovative campus ministry, leadership development, and social activism. By understanding the historical context and legacies of the MSM, this research seeks to identify how students received Wesleyan theology and formation and activated it into advocacy for the racial integration of The Methodist Church. 

After almost a century of division, the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century saw the gradual achievement of ‘home reunion’ in British Methodism, as sundered denominations came together in the Methodist Union of 1932. The legend and legacy of the Wesley brothers mattered to all the branches of divided Methodism, but the journey to reunion showed how differently the Wesleys were received and understood by the negotiating groups. This paper will explore the theology, narratives, pedagogy, and practices of the Methodist denominations, using the journey towards and on from the 1932 Union as a case study for the reception history of the Wesleys.

Justo Gonzalez launched the first volumes of the Spanish translation of the Works of John Wesley into Spanish in October of 1997—more than one hundred years since the arrival of Methodism in Latin America. Early Methodist missionaries had evangelized, planted churches, social ministries, educational institutions and trained native-born pastors without access to the founder’s writings in the vernacular. This paper examines three main questions: 1) What were the theological sources consulted by Latin American Methodism prior to the translation of Las Obras into Spanish? 2) Now a quarter of century has passed since the launching of Las Obras and this paper assesses the reception. How has the availability of Wesley’s writings impacted seminary training for Methodist pastors? 3) The paper concludes with unanswered questions and future opportunities for Methodist Studies in the Spanish-speaking world.

Although peacemaking has concentrated on resolving armed conflict, it can further climate justice when appropriately amended.  For example, Glen Stassen’s religious version of just peacemaking prioritizes efforts to realign economic incentives—now climate justice’s foremost obstacle—by reforming regulatory regimes.  Such reform is crucial to redressing climate change because the slow violence of this change can only be remedied through long-term coordination.  Nevertheless, Stassen’s reliance on mutual self-interest and economic interdependence for such regulatory reform leads him to emphasize prudence.  This emphasis compromises his peacemaking’s ability to mitigate climate change, since as conventionally understood prudence intensifies the intergenerational conflicts of interest that accelerate such change.  However, religious traditions have resources to broaden conventional understandings of prudence and render interests unrelated to one’s own worthy of consideration.  Religious peacemaking that harnesses these resources may thereby moderate the slow violence of these intergenerational conflicts and so advance climate justice. 

Drawing on over three decades of in-depth ethnographic and archival research, in this presentation I will review the main watersheds in the history of radical environmentalism, focusing especially on Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front, but also illuminating continuities between these radical environmental forms (including their nature spiritualities and apocalyptic expectations) and the more recent emergence of Extinction Rebellion. I will analyze the factors that precipitated the eruption and implosion of Earth First! and the ELF, including the critically important role of the 'dark green' nature spiritualities that animate most of its activists, consider the movement’s current forms and future prospects, and whether Extinction Rebellion represents a new, and possibly more effective chapter, in the history of radical environmentalism.

Recent high-profile activism, especially by the group Just Stop Oil, has increased attention to radical environmental groups. Responses have typically ranged from derision to anger, with some calling for the group to be considered a terrorist organization. In this paper, I apply William Stringfellow’s theology of the powers and principalities as a useful heuristic for interpreting radical environmental activism, to demonstrate that such activism is an example of truthful action in the face of systems of deception and death. I turn to Stringfellow because of the explanatory force of his treatment of the powers and principalities. In ways that track closely the tactics of the fossil fuel political economy, this New Testament imaginary reveals the essential connection between systems devoted to death and the deceptive and dehumanizing tools that perpetuate those systems, and it shows the feebleness of activist efforts that fail to recognize the systems for what they are.

The apocalyptic future of the climate crisis looms large in the cultural imagination: news reports, opinion pieces, dystopian fictions - all project to a not-too-distant future where human civilisation collapses, or the world-as-we-know-it ends. Yet there is another concept, also drawn from the study of religion, relevant to the climate crisis: one that points us not towards the future - but rather the past. This paper will explore the utility of the concept ‘fundamentalism’ in understanding the social effects of climate change. Whilst acknowledging its limitations as a descriptive category, scholarship on ‘fundamentalism’ nonetheless identified a key fault line in 20th century society - reaction against the destabilising trends of modernity. In the 21st century, climate change is fast displacing modernity as the destabilising force. This paper considers what we can learn from fundamentalism about identifying emerging social fault lines and conflicts in the era of climate change.

This paper offers a brief intellectual history of a Cold War era classic of ecotheology: Sallie McFague’s 1987 Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. I argue that it provides an imaginative portal to a moment of recent history that may have some lessons for us, as we live differently into similar forms of possible danger: world obliterating violence, and environmental crisis. I focus on McFague’s suggestion that these dangers threaten to end the idea of the future, and her argument that theology is a form of fiction that creates imaginative pictures. Cold War era ecotheology can be read as a form of speculative fiction offering speculative visions of a thriving future earth life. One lesson scholars of religion and ecology might learn from  this Cold War era ecotheology is the importance of imagining (and re-imagining) our relationship to power, and to the future (which does not yet exist but can be imagined).

This paper examines the role of music in the work of 20th-century Jewish philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch. Within his philosophical work, nostalgia emerges a malady that is paradigmatic of the human condition. It is something like an affective response to our own finitude, and thus can never be cured once and for all. However, music reflects our—temporal, irreversible—situation, and in so doing makes it bearable and perhaps even beautiful. 

In this paper, I will analyze the significance of the concept of intuition in the context of the philosophy of religion by examining the relationship between intuition and the role of improvisation in jazz music, with particular reference to the intersection of musical and religious intution in the work of John Coltrane. Improvisation, like philosophical intuition, is a rationally grounded practice through which a soloist freely interacts with the musical themes of the composition, composing "on the fly" on the basis of the melodic and chordal qualities of the composition, and yet not strictly constrained by those qualities. Particularly within the bop and avant-garde genres, the soloist may follow their musical intuition far beyond the musical base defined by the chorus of the composition, seeking ever deeper expressions of musical truth revealed within the composition.

In 1819, Anglo-American architect Benjamin Latrobe observed an “Assembly of Negroes” in New Orleans, engaging in singing, dancing, and drumming. Dismissing the event's sacred and social dimensions rooted in Africana religious practices, he characterized it with terms such as “noise” and “brutally savage.” This paper leverages affect theory to reinterpret this historical moment, highlighting the non-discursive interplay between race, religion, and music. Affect theory, which posits knowledge as emerging from the junctures of thinking and feeling, unveils new analytical avenues for 1) deconstructing the economies of white racialized “logic,” and 2) framing Afro-diasporic music and rhythm as intellectual and corporeal counterpoints to the logic of racial oppression. It argues that Latrobe’s account exemplifies how racism is rationalized through affective means, and positions Afro-Creole rhythm as a multifaceted and embodied affirmation of black life, capable of articulating political, scientific, and social ways of knowing against the denial of black humanity.

Agamben wrote, "Just as, for a soldier, the trumpet blast or the drumbeat is as effective as the order of a superior (or even more than it), so in every field and before every discourse, the feelings and moods that precede action and thought are musically determined and oriented." Such theorization of music, or perhaps, a musicalization of theory, has been taken up productively recently by thinkers like Fred Moten in his In the Break, and CJ Uy’s deployment of free jazz to theorize the dizzying rhetorical stylings of Sa‘d al-dīn Hammuya. In this paper, I would like to propose an exploration of the sonorous foundation of the Arabic maqām tradition (employed in the recitation of the Qur’an, poetry, and classical Arabic music) in the works of Ibn al-‘Arabī and Ibn al-Fārịd, the most influential Sufi authors of Arabic prose and poetry, respectively, followed by an investigation of that of Yorùbá ritual music used for òrìṣà worship in Yorùbá cosmologies as expressed in festivals and the performance of Ifá divination.

This paper develops jazz as a theoretical framework for the study of medieval Sufism. Recent work by Paul Berliner, Ingrid Monson, Fumi Okiji, and Dan DiPiero frame jazz improvisation as a way of being that unfolds fluidly across embodied, social, affective, and theoretical dimensions of diverse musical contexts. The paper will bring these insights to bear on the work of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), a renowned Sufi shaykh whose writing left an indelible impact on almost all dimensions of Sufi thought and practice. By reading Ibn ʿArabī's Sufi training manuals, litanies, hagiographies, and philosophical treatises in dialogue with jazz, the paper will explore methods for textured analyses of the interwoven textual, embodied, and social performances of medieval Sufis. Put simply—if read training manuals as exercise books and philosophical treatises as scores and transcriptions, how might we imagine (and analyze) the dynamic improvisations of lived Sufi knowledge?

Exorcisms, whether portrayed in ancient texts or practiced in contemporary churches, imply violence. Rooted in an ontological hierarchy which both privileges human life over spirit (i.e., demon) life and also defines the demon as dangerous and worthy of expulsion, exorcisms utilize this hierarchy to justify shockingly violent action against any spirits who threaten the boundaries of this established order (e.g., by possessing a human). Inspired by this year’s AAR theme of “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margin,” as well as by the ontological implications of critical posthumanism(s), this paper explores how exorcisms perpetuate violence upon a particular figure at the margins of ontology: the demon. Moreover, the paper analyzes the New-Testament roots of this violent response towards the marginal Other, as well as options offered by other traditions (e.g., Candomblé) for interacting with nonhuman spirits in nonviolent, and even cooperative, ways.

Muslim environmental ethics has been largely defined by competing versions of stewardship ethics (i.e. khilāfat al-arḍ), which is based on the Qur’an and is arguably the main ethical modality in the history of the classical Islam sciences at-large (i.e., theology, law, mysticism). While there are some who argue for moving away from this model (Tlili 2015, Gade 2019), the stewardship of the earth model remains the most cited and practically-used model for environmental ethics in global Muslim environmental discourse, activist organizations and environmental justice movements. The arguments against the khilāfa model are important to consider, especially in relation to issues such as anthropocentrism and speciesism. However, there is a need to not only critique the model for its perceived or actual limits, but to reclaim it from a radical ecoliberation theology perspective. In this paper, I argue for an ecoliberation theology approach to the question of Muslim environmental ethics and the stewardship of the earth model, particularly as it relates to human/nonhuman relations and hierarchies of being.

“Violence and Moral Hierarchies of Victims in Buddhist Thought”

This paper illustrates Buddhist hierarchies of moral status that inform ethical approaches to violence. It offers new light on an ancient legend deployed in the current dehumanization of the Rohingya. The arhats’ designation of enemy casualties as mere animals, pasu, in the Mahāvaṃsa’s legend of King Duṭṭhagāmaṇi, derives from Vedic sacrifice, evolves into a standard Dharmaśāstric term for slain warriors, and is the Pāśupata Śaivites’ nomenclature of self-identity. By reference to Vinaya, the theory of the “five Immediates,” Mahāyāna sūtras and tantric sādhanas, we can see that the Buddhist ethics of killing is informed by a sliding scale of inauspiciousness gauged by the moral status of the victim in which harm against saints is the greatest sin possible, but killing those who would harm the Buddha may be no more inauspicious than killing ants.

This presentation will deal with the relationship between Buddhist Psychology and Dis/ability. This will be done by examining the history of Buddhist Psychology (late nineteenth and early twentieth century) within a Western psychological discourse and then looking at how this influenced present-day conceptualisations of mindfulness meditation as a form of treatment for disabilities and mental illnesses. I argue that any conceptualisation of disability within this discourse remains to be based on a hierarchisation of bodies and minds within an ableist discourse. This ableist discourse stems from Theravada Buddhist conceptualisations of disability and illness as bad karma as well as eugenicist and evolutionary thinking within early psychology. A short glimpse into recent theories of Dis/Ability will be used to find constructive ways of criticising this ableist basis of Buddhist Psychology.

This paper examines the ways religious texts and artifacts have sought to mitigate the danger of childbirth. Noting that pregnancy and pregnancy related complications have the ability to lead to lifelong physical and psychological changes as well as death itself, I investigate how religious thought and practice has sought to mitigate these realities. Specifically, I begin with an account of a dangerous parturiency from the sixth-century Coptic Life of Aaron and then explore the way religion has historically sought to address the dangers of childbirth and the perinatal experience using non-medical practices including prayer, amulets, and ritual. Together, I endeavor to highlight how religion cultivates healing discourses that complicate modern notions of healthcare and medicine.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the conceptualization of disabilities in the Christian Synoptic Gospels and the Messiah Sutra, a harmonized retelling of the story which emphasized the fundamental teachings of Nestorian Christianity in China. The choice of these particular texts relate to their focus on embodiment and healing, combined with the Messiah Sutra’s blend of Christian, Confucian, and Buddhist concepts. The paper proceeds in three parts. The first part briefly addresses the historical context of the synoptic Gospels and addresses the formation of Nestorian Christianity. The second then highlights the birth of Jesus, noting how these texts convey the notion of embodiment and sacredness. The third section addresses the descriptions of disability in the Messiah Sutra, with examples from biblical texts. The conclusion then explores how the Synoptic Gospels and the Messiah Sutra together create space which complicates the conceptualization of disabilities in the field of Religious Studies.