Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Since 2018, the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World has invited visitors to the British Museum to experience its treasures and reflect on their histories. The British Museum, and others like the Metropolitan, have turned to border-crossing ideas such as “Islamic art” to style themselves as keepers of shared humanity’s shared heritage. Such moves have provoked scholars critically museums’ reception and retention of the material inheritance of empire. In this paper, I argue that while the Islamic Gallery and similar spaces do serve a vital part in the 21st-century imaginary of the “universal museum,” they should not be simply understood as imperial treasure-troves rebranded as liberal institutions. Through its decolonial co-determination and self-critical representation, the Islamic Gallery rather serves as instruction to visitors in how to be reflective cosmopolitans, disquieted by, and yet at home in, a persistently unequal world.

This paper uses formative and classical Muslim legal sources about who can wash whose corpse to investigate a series of questions about bodies, kinship, and the regulation of sex and gender. Juristic discussions about ghusl al-mayyit, the washing of bodies prior to burial, reveal assumptions about what sort of relationships survive death—for instance, in the question of whether a widower can wash the body of the woman who was, when she lived, his wife. Of the many issues that arise in dealing with the newly dead, the jurists focus only on a small subset. Situating this inquiry within a larger scholarly conversation about how Muslim legal and ethical discourses seek to regulate and manage difference, vulnerability, and hierarchy, I argue that early and classical jurisprudential agreements and disagreements over washing corpses reveal both shared norms and differing priorities between and among jurists about how to relate to the dead.

In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in the interfaith and binational efforts of the “Border Mosque” and “Border Church” in San Diego and Tijuana to express and enact a solidarity with victims of unjust and exploitative immigration systems and practices. The ritual performances by both groups not only served to cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and national lines; they also functioned as a form of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world free of xenophobia and militarized borders. I unpack the moral imagination cultivated by these performances by drawing on the Qur’anic concept of the _barzakh_ to capture a discursive space which _both_ divides _and_ connects and thus opens up ways of conceiving the self and other that neither presuppose stark opposition nor collapse difference in the name of a liberal modernity. Consequently, a _barzakh_ moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.

This paper challenges widespread assumptions about the role of violence in establishing Twelver Shiʿism as Iran’s official religion, by presenting the first systematic overview in scholarship of the early Safavid dynasty’s Sufi teachings (until 1524) and thereby refuting common claims of its supporters’ uniquely “militant” or “extremist” Shiʿite beliefs.  Considered alongside centuries of precedent in military activities by similar nomadic groups, I show that the Safavids’ use of violence was neither particularly exceptional nor inherently “religious,” offering a less sensational interpretation of their armed enforcement of public Shiʿism better contextualized by their history.  Responding to Smith, Asad, Cavanaugh and others, my analysis suggests that a limited rehabilitation of Hodgson’s concept of the “secular” in Islamic history, particularly related to military and administrative practices, may advance more historically grounded theorizations of violence and sectarianism in Islam capable of continued growth in responsiveness to contemporary concerns without being artificially constrained by them.

This project investigates the role of generative AI in fostering ethical development through video games, focusing on the design of non-playable characters (NPCs) to influence players' moral reasoning. Utilizing GPT-4 for both Ethical Assessment AI (EAAI) and Narrative Guidance AI (NGAI), this study aims to evaluate and guide players' decisions within a text-based game, rooted in theological ethical frameworks. By integrating complex ethical dilemmas that mirror moral complexities from religious traditions, the research explores AI's potential in virtue cultivation. The methodology includes developing a simple game interface, employing AI for ethical assessment and narrative adaptation, and integrating theological ethics into game design. Expected outcomes include insights into AI's capability for moral reasoning enhancement and recommendations for incorporating ethical principles into AI-driven designs. This approach signifies a paradigm shift in technology's role, envisioning AI as a tool for personal and moral development.

Using Open.AI’s ChatGPT, I am creating three separate chatbots with three unique specializations and personalities: one St. Francis of Assisi, one St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and one St. Thomas More. I am training these GPTs on information about their respective saint's lives, works, and beliefs using a mix of primary and secondary academic sources. The s[ai]nts will be made accessible through a web app for users to engage in conversation with the chatbot and hopefully find the dialogue meaningful to their religious experience. My paper will detail the development of the s[ai]nts, investigation of their reception within religious communities, and explanation of the results of this project.

The utilization of multi-agent artificial intelligence (MAAI) in modeling religious dynamics, social conflicts, and pathways to peace represents a significant advancement in computational social sciences and humanities. This presentation outlines an MAAI approach used in several international, interdisciplinary research projects, focusing on the integrative process and empirical insights that have emerged in the author's work with the United Nations Development Program in Palestine and Bosnia & Herzegovina, as well as Northern Ireland and South Sudan. Each model was constructed with the help of religious studies subject matter experts, incorporating religious factors and variables into the cognitive architectures and social network interactions of the simulated agents that populate the ‘artificial societies.’ Such AI models provide scholars and stakeholders with a digital laboratory in which they can run simulation experiments to discover the conditions under which – and the processes by which – intergroup religious conflict can be mitigated and peaceful cooperation can be promoted.

This paper examines two literary ornaments from Somadevasūri’s Yaśastilaka–the śleṣopamā or punned simile and the virodhābhāsa or seeming contradiction–to explore the capacity of the poem to produce an ethical subjectivity, cultivated as much through comprehension as through its productive absence. The devices present similar hermeneutic challenges; they frustrate readerly expectations in yielding multiple layers of disjunctive meaning that are juxtaposed without resolution. Thus, the devices force the cultivation of an ethical orientation that defers complete understanding, either provisionally or indefinitely, while at the same time entertaining multiple simultaneous orders of existence. These devices give proof of the astonishing heterogeneity of phenomenal existence and provide a means of coping with it, without diminishing the surfeit of sense that the phenomenal world presents. Thus, each act of understanding, as evinced by these passages, consists of apprehending the sense of an utterance and holding the residue of meaning that resists apprehension. 

This paper builds upon the previous presentation and further explores the intricacies of poetic language in Somadeva’s Yaśastilaka, specifically examining how Somadeva employs the figures of virodhābhāsa (apparent contradiction) and śleṣopamā(punned simile) as methods of exposition in the text. They contextualize the Yaśastilaka within the broader landscape of earlier Sanskrit and Prakrit works composed in ornate prose and, specifically, explore the parallels in poetic language between the Yaśastilaka and two notable works—Bāṇa’s Kādambarī (seventh century) and Śīlāṅka’s Caupaṇṇamahāpurisacariyaṃ (ninth century). This analysis demonstrates that by introducing a level of perplexity and disorientation through literary paradox and punning, Jain authors such as Somadeva and Śīlāṅka create the poiesis of the inexpressible.

This paper looks at the encyclopedism of Sōmadēva’s novel, which he is supposed to have written because he was burnt out from too much philosophy, and needed to exercise his creative muscles. However, old habits die hard. In keeping with his literary predecessors in Sanskrit and Prakrit, the Sanskrit poets Bāṇa and Subandhu and the Prakrit novelists Uddyōtana and Haribhadra, Sōmadēva produced a scholarly novel where the abundant excurses and arcana almost seem to obscure the plotline. His poem is a cabinet of curiosities, rich in material from the “worldly sciences” (laukikaśāstra-s) such as Erotics, Equestry and Economics. This paper will reflect on the particular nature of the author’s polymathy, using his accounts of elephants and feasts; with occasional comparisons to his colleague, the Kannada poet Pampa.

This paper focuses on the philosophical controversy between the Jain monk Sudatta and the Lōkāyata philosopher Caṇḍakarman. Although Caṇḍakarman, who also just so happens to be a Cāṇḍāla, is guaranteed to lose the debate, Sōmadēva presents the Lōkāyata position — which denies karmic retribution, rebirth, and a soul that survives after physical death — in some detail. Sōmadēva’s representation, doctrinally speaking, presents little that we don’t know from other sources, but the literary setting of the debate differs in several respects from similar “literary doxographies” that include Lōkāyata, including Sōmadēva’s model, Haribhadra’s Samarāiccakahā, as well as the Maṇimēkalai and the Upamitibhavaprapañcakathā.

This paper argues for the reframing of friendship as a multidimensional relationship that promotes collective as well as personal wellbeing. Ideals implied by such a reframing extend backwards and forwards in time and include the acknowledgement of kinship, including with Mother Earth. Such ideals—inspired by the wisdom and writings of Indigenous scholars and by learnings through participation in language and culture revitalization studies at an Indigenous university in Aotearoa—are perhaps best encapsulated in the terminology of civic kinship. Practices implied by such ideals include pursuing the well-being of the collective, rejecting paternalism, and promoting the honoring of treaties, as relational bridges between diverse “friendship worlds” that share common aspirations. The reframing of friendship argued for within this paper broadens and deepens the notion of civic friendship I have explored in earlier writings.

Belief in Christ’s bodily resurrection is a central doctrine of Christian faith. But what it means for Christ to be present to those whom he loved following his death as well as what this presence means for the daily life of Christians is subject to debate. This paper uses friendship as the hermeneutical key for interpreting this doctrine. Through an analysis of the works of Carter Heyward, Jules Toner, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that presence-generation (both spiritual and bodily) is a central activity of friendship that continues after death. Friendship prepares for and makes present in spirit what is hoped for someday in bodily form. Identifying presence-generation as an activity of friendship can help Christians to recognize the value of this most basic human relationship, particularly as they await bodily reunion with their lost friends through participation in Christ’s resurrection.

The human bias towards life, along with deep, well-founded theological values surrounding the source of life, the value of life, and the prohibition against taking a life, has rendered some within religious circles intolerant towards death, or at very least awkward towards those longing for their end. It is not for a lack of care but the impulse to convince each other to stay can be at cross purposes with being a tender and supportive friend. However, trauma-informed care, marked by a turning towards our friends, and not just a reaction to ideas about a desire for an exit, allowing for silence and the full gravity of their pain to be known, is preferable to frantic efforts to dissuade them from suicide. These contrasting approaches are delightfully illustrated in the Book of Job, providing an authentic view of trauma, a longing for death, and two differing responses of his friends, which taken together illustrate a meaningful path forward.

While considerations of violence in relation to refugees typically foreground the violence of forced displacement, I extend the conversation to consider the violence refugees face in the U.S. in the forms of poverty, xenophobia, and discrimination. Drawing on Celeste Watkins-Hayes’s concept of “injuries of inequality,” I explore friendships that, I argue, serve to partially mitigate the effects of such injuries. Informed by ethnographic research, I consider the ambiguities of friendship as a response to violence through three case studies. These cases feature Thang, a pastor who practices friendship with the Zo community; “Mama” Enatye, who is a friend to her Ethiopian Orthodox community and to displaced young mothers more generally; and finally, my own embodied experiences as a researcher befriended by Durga, an asylum-seeker from Pakistan. I suggest these cases reveal the necessity of more creative, institutional thinking about friendship while also exposing systemic changes needed in the U.S.

This paper reads Henri de Lubac’s writings on Christian spiritual understanding and Eugene Rogers’ writings on the sexuality of the Christian body to show that figurality is how sexuality and social reproduction are said in Christian thought. Christian figurality incarnates the sexual sense of Christianity through the figure of the Jew who, in the Christian imagination, becomes the occasion for the enfleshed verification of Christianity’s truth. By analyzing how each author frames Jewishness in their expositions of Christian sense and sexuality, I show how anxieties circulate around resolving the crises that would call Christianity’s status as a “living” tradition into question. Staving off this perpetual crisis of continuity reveals the relationship between the social reproduction of a distinctively Christian sense capacity and the sexual securitization of (in this case, Christianity’s) significance through the proper stewardship and management of Christianity’s textual and perceptual life—its erotics of sense.

This paper offers an immanent critique of Klossowski and Lyotard’s work, which shows how their recuperation of a pagan “theatrical” theology of figuration against a Christian “natural” theology of semiotic abstraction, carried out in the name of Varro against Augustine, is a willfully heretical a/theism. Turning to their invocation of late-antique accounts of religion, I contend that their conception of figurality entails something like a materialist anti-Christianity: a Nietzschean polytheism that challenges Augustinian and monotheist idealism. However, this paper also demonstrates that this materialist anti-Christianity still relies upon Augustinian “idol theory” to affirm its radical project of impulsive autonomy and consequently remains beholden to the very Christian theo-logic it claims to resist. I therefore introduce the Surrealist International, which desired the concrete abolition of Christianity, rather than its mere figurative disavowal or parodic transgression, as a “hermetic” and “gothic” alternative to Klossowski and Lyotard’s theater of postmodern a/theology.

This paper considers the reception of Erich Auerbach’s concept of figura in the works of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, especially the way that ‘figural interpretation’ and ‘figuration’ are deployed by Frei and Lindbeck as a means of recovering a ‘classic model’ of reading scripture that—allegedly—avoids the theological and political pitfalls of the logic of supersession. The paper briefly summarizes Auerbach’s theory as it is presented in his 1939 “Figura,” then traces the vicissitudes of figura in post-liberal theological circles. The paper focuses especially on Lindbeck’s text from 1997, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness.” I argue that, far from avoiding, much less dissolving, the problem of supersession, Lindbeck’s hermeneutics effaces the distinctively Christian genesis and structure of figural interpretation as the concrete, historical practice of the logic of supersession, and ultimately repeats the supersessionist gesture at the very moment he claims to repudiate it.

Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche each attend to the role of identity in their existential thoughts. However, what is the role of space – physical and social – in relationship to identity? How does space function and affect identity in the depths of absurdity, in the midst of liberation? In seeking to discern identity in the midst of absurdity, a consistent movement from lament to hope is detected. Looking to postmodern existential thinkers, such as Mariana Ortega, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison, this paper will explore the importance of recognizing the development of one’s identity in this existential movement of lament to hope – an identity that is able to be discerned through spaces of sacredness beyond religion proper. I yearn to turn exclusively to women of color existential thinkers who offer critical viewpoints of euro-centered aestheticism, bringing to the forefront the effects of the diaspora space on those who have multifaceted identities.

This paper explores characteristics of "tragedy" by distinguishing a tragic perspective on evil from an ethical and a religious perspective, respectively. Underlying this three-pronged approach is Paul Ricoeur's analysis of evil in La Symbolique du Mal. Symbolic language can express the ambiguity inherent in experiencing evil due to an intermingling of, in particular, an ethical and a tragic view. These views are studied here in Immanuel Kant (ethical) and Karl Jaspers (tragic). Kant turns out to incorporate a kind of tragic perspective in his ethical view when going into religion. Jaspers’ tragic view however is far less ambiguous. This difference is further clarified by Ricoeur’s notion of the ‘end of evil’ as characteristic of a religious view of evil. Understanding the three approaches in relation to each other gives insight into why evil might be seen as most ‘at home’ in a religious view.  

Recent interest in tragedy in religious ethics—exemplified by Kate Jackson-Meyer’s _Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics_—suggest ongoing interest in the topic. This paper attempts to connect these recent researches with earlier philosophical, theological, and literary debates about tragedy, to argue that irony may offer a clue for thinking about tragedy in ways heretofore underappreciated.  Scholars such as George Steiner, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams and Jonathan Lear suggest important resources.  This paper arguest that a category of irony, deployed by Niebuhr in theological terms and Lear in psychoanalytic terms, offers some insight into how Christianity, with a high providential view of Divine agency as supervening over the human situation, can accommodate the ontological insights of tragedy as a "broken knowledge" alongside a theological claim that such tragedy is always a partial knowledge, thus opening the space of irony for further affirmation and investigation of the phenomena under study.

Species are disappearing from our planet at an alarming rate as we move quickly toward a possible mass extinction event. Loss on such a tremendous scale ought to be recognized not only with grief but also with public acts of mourning. The most popular practices currently employed to mourn species loss are modeled after rituals for grieving human death: funeral rites and the creation of memorials. The grief, then, is focused on species death. In this paper, I argue that we need rituals of mourning species focused not on death but on the ongoing destruction of relationships between species and human communities.

Animals and humans have complex, deep, and meaningful relationships. Throughout history, people have commemorated animals with whom they were close through various mortuary practices. But what about when the human or owner dies first? Based on analysis of Canadian obituaries, this paper explores the ways that people commemorate human-animal relationships. Though hardly ever showing up prior to the 1990s, the last thirty years have seen a gradual rise in obituaries that mention these bonds. Animals appear in these texts in various ways, from people who fed birds in their backyard and lived/worked on farms, to pets who are listed alongside surviving family members. These examples point to different types of relationships, and different understandings of the bonds people form with animals. Overall however, the simple inclusion of other-than-human animals speaks to the perceived importance of these relationships as well as transformations in how people memorialize loved ones.

While the practice of collecting, displaying, and venerating the remains of the special dead is common across different cultural frameworks, the treatment of the bodies of endangered or extinct species as well as charismatic nonhuman-animal individuals in museum settings echoes the treatment of holy relics in the development of Christianity from the early Church up through the Middle Ages. Since the mid-19th century mechanistic revolution in biological research, the preserved and displayed remains of nonhumans have performed the role of a materialist relic, and this has only been augmented as scientists and the general public reckon with mass extinction, climate change, and dismantling the ontological positions underpinning environmental degradation. 

Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.

Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.

Søren Kierkegaard sometimes gestured toward the universally efficacious power of God’s love even while he warned about the ultimate consequences of divine judgement. This session will explore Kierkegaard’s nuanced and unique treatment of the issue of universal salvation. Attention will be given to the roots of universalism in the thought of patristic theologians like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and echoes of these theological voices in Kierkegaard’s work.

I argue that Kierkegaard could and should have been a proponent of a radical form of universal salvation that construes every human as saved here and now. This is part of the soteriology advanced by Marilyn Adams, who interprets Jesus as abolishing the power of the curse of sin by becoming the curse himself. While this line of thinking is at work in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writing Philosophical Fragments, he tends to find the solution to the human problem of sin in divine forgiveness, which he characterizes as a kind of forgetting by God. But this raises the question of whether we can forget our own sinfulness when it keeps manifesting itself, and we see Kierkegaard struggle intensely with this question in his journal entries. I take this to show that his focus on divine forgiveness should have been complemented by the affirmation of universal salvation à la Adams.

This paper traces the birth and journey of the Hindu image, from its inception in English colonial jurisprudence to its hasty and irregular application in post-colonial India. Through a tactful use of ancient Hindu texts, colonial legislations, practices and case laws, this paper argues that the image of the Hindu deity occupies a unique position in Indian society, such that it is unfit to belong or be justified by any of the western theories of legal personhood. It is the hasty, colonial application of these theories and its subsequent development that has today created a phenomenon that can no longer be justified by the contours of law.

The campaign to ‘liberate’ the Baba Budan Shah Dargah in Karnataka from any Islamic history and purify it for exclusive Hindu usage as a Dattatreya Peetha has proceeded through multiple strategies: political, judicial, and devotional. Today the fate of the site remains ambiguous as some tactics gain traction and others become less salient. By examining the ebbs and flows of the spiritual, legal, and partisan approaches to laying claim to this site, this paper will elucidate the tensions and contradictions between the arenas of authority mobilized in the struggle to claim exclusivity at a once-shared sacred site.

Sufi shrines in Sri Lanka are vital nodes of Islamic piety and materiality amidst a landscape of Buddhist majoritarianism and ethno-religious violence against Muslim minorities. Contemporary shrine cultures are a generative prism through which to understand this political, social, and religious context. In my ongoing fieldwork, spanning ten years, I have been mapping Sufi shrines to understand both their historical and contemporary developments, especially in relation to saints (awliya). In this paper, I show that though stories of saints via shrines embed the islands’ geography within Muslim cosmological and metaphysical roots and routes, they are also fragile archives due to the island’s ongoing ethno-religious contestations.  

This paper argues that the seemingly apolitical aspects of religious and social life—prayer, marriage, and domestic rituals—are also expressions of political and moral will.rom December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA is the first time in the post-colonial Indian legal landscape that religion is being used as a criterion for citizenship. When protesters exclaim that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the demands of the state to prove one’s citizenship via documents.