Since the 1990s, building on a broader turn towards the study of practice, American religious studies scholars developed the approach of “lived religion,” a methodology that approaches religious practice as it is enacted, perceived, experienced, and embedded in everyday activities. This roundtable will bring together four scholars of Jewish life who work within, utilize, or theoretically consider lived religion as a methodological approach to Jews and Judaism in the United States for a state-of-the-field discussion that will reflect on the intersection of American Jewish studies and lived religion. How has lived religion helped Jewish Studies scholars to reimagine or reconceptualize the religious worlds that Jewish people make? This panel will consider whether a lived religion approach has democratized the study of Jews and Judaism, whether it has the potential to do so, and whether there are other models that would serve us better.
Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book
Over the course of the long twentieth century, developments in academic and popular managerial knowledge transformed the task of managing organizations from a set of skills learned on the job to a “science.” Paramount to this science was the notion that the manager should convert the objectives of the organization into the personal goals of each worker, making the workplace a site of self-actualization. This roundtable brings together scholars from religious studies, history, and theater to highlight the unexpected circulations of management knowledge and religious ethos between the U.S. and India. It aims to address the questions: How did religious ideas and practices inform the development of management theory? How did this reciprocal influence converge with self-help genres to produce new formulations of both business and church? What happens as management theory and the religious forms it has influenced circulate outside American and predominantly Christian contexts and back again?
The Platonic tradition has, throughout history, offered a radically alternative understanding of the relationship between humans and nature and between humans and non-human animals. This panel invites papers that explore historical and contemporary instances of the Platonic conceptualization of nature. We encourage contributions that explore this tradition's contemporary application for reconceptualizing our collective understanding of nature. Exploration of the relationship between Platonic realism across multiple religious traditions and constructive proposals for inter-religious ecologies are encouraged. Papers may draw upon sources from antiquity to the present, ranging from philosophical, theological, poetic, and artistic. We also highly encourage the submission of papers relating to the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions generally, in both historical and constructive contexts. Papers on the metaphysics of participation are particularly encouraged.
Papers
According to Origen (c. 185-253), a Christian Platonist of the early church, creation is a location of paideia — the place in which the fallen soul, through education and development, can return to their original immaterial existence through the Logos. By inscribing the material world with the function of paideia, Origen betrays a moral, rather than scientific, interest in the examination of nature. I will draw on Origen’s structure of relation between the natural world and human person, and the Platonic principles that undergird it, to elucidate the function of paideia in view of the soul’s journey of return into God. I will conclude on a contemporary ecological note to suggest that Origen offers a non-exploitative and anthropocentric image of the relationship between the human person and the cosmos, making him an ideal candidate for a theological and theoretical consideration of contemporary ecological reform.
Understanding Thomas Aquinas’ Neoplatonic theology of ‘participation’ as μέθεξις is key to interpreting his broader theological system––especially the relationship between the doctrines of God and creation. In this paper, I first retrieve classical Aristotelian (κοινωνία/Koinonia) and Neoplatonic (μέθεξις/Methexis) articulations of the doctrine of participation. I then show that Thomas affirms a unique version of the Neoplatonic notion of participation via an exposition of his commentaries on the Liber de causis and Dionysius’ De divinis nominibus. Once a clear genealogical and textual foundation is laid, I perform an analysis of the ontological structure of Thomas’ rendering of participation. This involves a discussion of items such as divine simplicity, actus purus, creation, and his famous essence/esse distinction. From this, I perform a critical analysis of the relationship between Thomas’ doctrines of actus purus and participation, suggesting that a contradiction may be derived from concepts of infinity. I call this the “Argument from Infinity.”
This paper explores the reinterpretation of classical philosophical figures, such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato himself, by Neoplatonic philosophers during Late Antiquity, with a focus on the Neoplatonists Iamblichus and Proclus. It examines how they reimagined these wisdom figures from ancient Hellenic tradition as semi-divine beings, also drawing on the *Chaldean Oracles*. The study highlights a shift from the traditional portrayal of philosophers as mere rational thinkers to special souls endowed with the ability to save humanity through philosophical discourse. Their unique mode of participation in the divine allows them to ascend the divine hierarchy to establish themselves at the ontic level of angels. To support this thesis, the speech will explore theological concepts such as "establishment" and "revelation," challenging conventional views on the metaphysics of participation in Neoplatonism and arguing that Neoplatonists viewed true philosophers as theurgists, capable of uniquely participating in the divine realm.
It’s widely assumed that whatever interest Plato has in nature is entirely subordinate to his manifest interest in transcendence or “becoming like God.” This paper aims to show that in the Republic, Symposium, andTimaeus, Plato is equally interested in transforming our understanding of nature itself, and that he does this by transforming our understanding of transcendence itself. In these dialogues, Plato suggests that we “become like God” only when we understand both ourselves and nature in general as pointing beyond and (often) striving to go beyond merely materialistic or mechanical ways of functioning, toward rational self-government. Transcendence, as we see in the Romantic poets and Hegel and Whitehead, is nature’s self-transcendence. And people who see this kind of transcendence everywhere, as Plato and these writers do, aren’t likely to despoil nature as we currently do.
This companion studies the Life and Legacy of Guru Hargobind (1590-1644), the sixth Guru of the Sikh tradition. It highlights the complex nature of Sikh society and culture in the historical and socio-economic context of Mughal India.
The book reconstructs the life of Guru Hargobind by exploring the ‘divine presence’ in history and memory. It addresses the questions of why and how militancy became explicit during Guru Hargobind’s spiritual reign, and examines the growth of the Sikh community's self-consciousness, separatism, and militancy as an integral part of the process of empowerment of the Sikh Panth.
This panel brings together presentations by five early-career scholars of Buddhist philosophy. Some presentations offer new perspectives on well-established problems, exploring Nāgārjuna’s tetralemma, Vasubandhu’s idealism, and omniscience in Abhidharma. Other presentations bring Buddhist philosophy into contemporary contexts, exploring Buddhist philosophy through the lens of quantum physics, or the philosophical pedagogy of the Tibetan monastic Geshe curriculum in the United States.
Papers
Nāgārjuna is difficult to read. But in what way? This paper articulates the difficulty of Nāgārjuna as first and foremost a difficulty of form. I argue that by attending to the form of his texts—particularly, his use of authorial, first-person voice—we can make progress in interpreting his texts’ appearances of assertoric content, and above all concerning the ‘doctrine of emptiness.’ For more basic than the question of whether the doctrine of emptiness is (conventionally, ultimately) true is the question of whether the doctrine says anything. Traditionally, the latter question has been understood in terms of the Prasaṅgika/Svataṅtrika dispute. But the dispute rests on an assumption: that if all Nāgārjuna is doing is tetralemmic reasoning (prasaṅga), then he holds no thesis and only nihilates theses. Challenging this assumption, this paper seeks to hold space to see how Nāgārjuna might assert nothing independently of whether his tetralemmas succeed.
Use of the term “idealism” in relation to Vasubhandu’s Vimśikā, Triṃśikā and Trisvabhāvanirdeśa has provoked controversy. I endorse the view that the term “idealist” applies to Vasubandhu insofar as his citta-mātratā theory constitutes a variant of epistemic idealism—the view that knowables are mental—along with the view that Vasubandhu is only an epistemic idealist “in the realm of conventions” (Gold 2011). The mental construction of appearances as mind-independent objects is not, for Vasubandhu, equivalent to the nature of ultimate reality. Vasubandhu does not positively argue for the non-existence of anything not-mind-only at the conventional or ultimate level. I will avoid the pitfalls of presupposing that “early Yogācāra was a homogenous and distinctly defined doxographical entity” (Tzohar 2018) to which the concept deployed in the term “idealism” does or does not correspond, by narrowing my analysis of Vasubandhu’s language and to evaluation of Gold (2011; 2015) and Carpenter’s (2014) commentaries.
This paper argues that the Buddha’s purported omniscience through direct perception is a phenomenological shift in his experience, which is difficult to account for based on the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika conception of omniscience (sarvajña), and two of their accepted means of knowledge (pramāṇas): perception and inference.
First, the paper discusses the scope of the Buddha’s omniscience in Abhidharma Buddhism. Second, it discusses the path toward omniscience according to the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika school. Third, it briefly summarizes the Sarvāstivādin theory of perception, showing that the Buddha cannot be omniscient through perception under the Sarvāstivāda model due to their metaphysical commitments. Following this, the paper considers whether the Buddha can be omniscient through inference and show that inference does not rescue the Sarvāstivādin view of omniscience by appealing to both Vasubandhu and Dhammapāla. Last, it posits that the Buddha’s omniscience is a phenomenological shift in his experience due to prajñā and not fully comprehensible through pramāṇa theory.
The alleged convergence of quantum physics and Buddhism has been a main standpoint of dialogue between science and Buddhism since its incipience in the 1980s. Notably, proponents of such ‘parallelism’ have argued that there is an underlying interconnectedness of the universe which bridges quantum theory and Buddhist philosophy through entanglement and interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda). Such conjecture is however not sufficiently informed by the considerable array of interpretative theories of quantum phenomena and various schools of Buddhism, which could invalidate the argument. This paper will investigate the object of ongoing research devoted to a comparative two-layered analysis of such compatibility for interconnectedness, through relational versus holistic theories (that is between Relational quantum mechanics and Nāgārjuna on the one hand, and David Bohm’s holism and Hua-yen Buddhism on the other). While both theories fall under the interconnectedness criteria, they differ substantially in promoting either the relationalism or interpenetration of all things in reality.
This paper explores the monastic philosophical curriculum of the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. The curricula of the Gelug monasteries are rooted in the presentation of the 14th century scholar Tsongkhapa, who emphasized the importance of the classical Treatises (rgya gzhung). These texts were written in Sanskrit by great Indian scholars (paṇḍitas) between the 4th and 6th centuries CE and translated into Tibetan beginning in the 9th century CE. Upon completion of the curriculum emphasizing these great texts and their Tibetan commentaries over a period of eighteen to twenty years, monastic graduates receive the title of Geshe (dge bshes). Since the late 1960s, Tibetan monastic scholars have been teaching Buddhism in contemporary secular societies such as North America. This paper will examine how the Geshes present subjects of an ancient philosophical curriculum to diverse modern audiences, and the challenges they face in the process.
Followers of the Buddhist reformer Nichiren (1222-1282) have made his willingness to strongly admonish people and practices deemed slanderous of the true Dharma, no matter their power or status, into a core feature of Nichiren Buddhism. This panel brings together three researchers who consider ways Nichiren Buddhists from the thirteenth century to the present have influenced Japan’s religio-political order through risky rebuke. The papers introduce contrasting applications of Nichiren Buddhist admonishing that reveal how uncompromising confrontations with heterodoxy both destabilize and construct institutions and their practices. By considering how adherents’ defense of orthodoxy inspires self-legitimizing claims that invert doctrinal and temporary authority, and by analyzing examples of self-sacrificing admonishing from a wide historical range, these papers suggest ways attention to Nichiren’s rebukes helps us understand how religions take shape through conflict.
Papers
During Japan’s medieval period, Nichiren Buddhist clerics engaged in kokka kangyō (“admonishing and enlightening the state”): direct remonstrations with the shōgun, his representatives, or local officials to abandon support for all other teachings and embrace the Lotus Sūtra alone. Such acts reenacted precedent set by the sect’s founder, Nichiren (1222–1282), who had remonstrated to this effect with the Kamakura shogunate. Famine, earthquakes, and other catastrophes ravaging Japan, Nichiren argued, stemmed from neglect of the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha’s highest teaching; conversely, faith in the Lotus would make this world an ideal buddha land. At great personal risk, Nichiren’s successors established a tradition of such remonstrations, especially in times of widespread disaster. Kokka kangyō asserted the dharma’s claims over those of worldly rule. It illustrates how remonstrations with authority articulated from the margins in the name of a transcendent truth can symbolically invert power hierarchies and solidify group identity.
By focusing on Tanaka Chigaku (1861–1939), one of the key figures in modern Nichiren Buddhism, this paper sheds light on how the medieval practice of kokka kangyō (“admonishing the state”) was revived and refashioned in the Meiji era (1868–1912). This was the period in which Japan’s Constitution of 1889 guaranteed freedom of religion, establishing it as a matter of personal choice, and, barring civic responsibilities, excluded from government affairs. Drawing on “media event theory,” I argue that the Meiji Constitution’s parameters guided Tanaka’s kokka kangyō efforts to target ordinary subjects rather than the government itself. His remonstration strategies involved the conspicuous circulation of his self-published tracts that are best understood as a type of media event: intentionally preplanned and staged as “extraordinary” and “historic,” advertised in advance, and intensively reported on and experienced by engaged adherents who turned state remonstrating into a form of proselytizing via print media.
Over the last decade, the lay Nichiren Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai has seen a new constituency of adherents invoke Nichiren’s tradition of admonishing authority to confront administrators within their own religion and elected officials in its affiliated political party Komeito. This paper considers ways Gakkai members critical of the religion and party are returning to Nichiren’s “admonishing of the state” (kokka kangyō) to leverage the practice into a rebuke of Nichiren Buddhists by Nichiren Buddhists. The presentation will consider the position adopted by these critical members against a religion now undergoing dramatic transformations, the tactics they are employing to admonish while mitigating public suspicion about religious expressions, how they rely on doctrine to guide fellow adherents and inspire institutional reforms, and what their inversion of Nichiren’s admonitory practices into an internally aimed critique may tell us about the nature of religious rebuke.
This roundtable panel centers on two books being published in 2024 on Augustine, slavery, and race: Toni Alimi's Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton University Press) and Matthew Elia's The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale University Press). The topic of slavery Augustine's thought has been understudied, despite the prominence of the lexicon of slavery and mastery (metaphorical as well as scriptural) that Augustine deploys and his own positioning on the issue of Roman enslavement. Both of these works draw critical attention to this pressing topic and promise to advance the scholarship in field-changing ways.
This panel brings together four papers exploring religion and social transformation across Southeast Asian contexts. The first paper “Blue Lives Matter: Ocean, New Materialism, and Ecotheology analyzes how “blue” ecotheologies complement “green” environmental movements globally – and particularly in Southeast Asia – by re-centering the ocean as a sacred site that gives and sustains life. The second paper, “Contesting Religious Violence and the Indigenization of Islam in Indonesia,” examines how leaders of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul “Ulama” address the challenge of extremist ideology by appealing to Islam’s virtues of tolerance and grassroots peacemaking initiatives. The third paper “The Dharma Transmission Trope in Medieval Vietnam: Syncretism and Cultic Appropriation in the Invention of a Buddhist Rainmaking Cult,” complicates narratives of how Vietnamese Buddhism has developed historically through a close examination of medieval textual resources. Finally, “Chinatown as a Hybridized Socio-Religious Space for Chinese Christian Diaspora in Southeast Asia: An Indonesian Case,” analyzes how Christianity affects Chinese diaspora experiences in Southeast Asia.
Papers
In theology, "Green" is also often used in discourse on environmental issues, but for Elia Maggang, a blue-ecotheologian from Indonesia, believes that Green Christianity still seems landbased and pays little attention to the context of coastal communities and marine life. To what extent does color play an important role in a term? In this proposal, I argue that Blue Ecotheology can be a framework for ecotheological reflection in the context of Southeast Asia. I believe the blueness is not simply a sea color but a sign of life, and this requires a chain reaction of marine microorganisms, photons, water, chemical reaction, and other possibilities towards restoration of ocean value.
This paper will examine the efforts of the leaders of the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ in addressing violence in the name of Islam. As one of the biggest socio-religious organizations, the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ has spearheaded the acculturalization of Islam to meet the social, political, and cultural demands of Indonesia’s multicultural communities. Abdurrahman Wahid pioneered the indigenization of Islam as the key to making Islamic teachings relevant in contemporary Indonesia and paved the way for Muslims to address critical challenges posed by sectarian and violent forms of Islam. After discussing the emerging violent conflicts in the post-Soeharto regime, the paper will examine how the leaders translate Islamic teachings into the vernacular of Indonesian Muslims. In doing so, it will evaluate how the leaders of the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama’ address the challenge of violent extremist ideology and actions by mainstreaming Islam’s virtues of tolerance, moderation, peace, grassroots peacemaking initiatives, and interfaith talk and walk.
The Vietnamese Buddhist rainmaking cult of the Four Dharma Buddhas (Tứ Pháp) is said to date to the 3rd century CE. There are two extant versions of the story of how a "savage maiden" (Man Nương/A Man) miraculously gave birth to a baby that was transformed into a rock lodged inside of a tree which would eventually be carved into four Buddha images. In this presentation, I focus on the supposedly earliest version of the story, showing how it is in fact the latest. Moreover, l use other medieval Vietnamese textual sources, namely tales of Buddhist deities and wonder-working monks, to shed light on the invented history of the Four Dharma Buddhas cult, showing how the textual making of this cult fit into two larger, medieval Vietnamese patterns of the Buddhist appropriation of local deity cults, one which I call syncretic appropriation, and the other, subordinate appropriation.
This session explores contexts and practices regarding resistance and the oppression of people on the move across diverse countries. The cases examine a spectrum of circumstances including resistance against deportation, countering hate crimes, and the decolonialization of refugee relief. Throughout these contexts, the theological agency of people on the move is presented, including their choice to change religions through conversion. The papers in this session highlight theological agency as a core concern for ethics, politics, and the study of religion.
Papers
Although the current academic discussion on religious conversion predominantly considers conversion as a process, the number of empirical studies that explore the same converts in different points in time remains limited. Also, there is still little research on the asylum seekers’ conversions from Islam to Christianity following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. This article provides a longitudinal perspective through revisiting the experiences of Iraqi forced migrants in Finland, first interviewed in 2017–2018 and then six years later in 2023–2024. While religious conversion has been defined in various ways in different academic fields, faith traditions and societal contexts, this study takes a data-driven approach and analyzes what conversion means in these data. The results show that conversion can signify different things to different individuals, as well as the same individuals at different times, providing perspectives useful to academia and societal actors dealing with religion and forced migration.
This paper investigates the intersection of immigration and hate crimes within the United States, focusing on the analysis of hate crime incidents motivated by race and religion across 32 gateway cities from 2015 to 2019. It aims to illuminate the patterns of hate crimes in areas with high immigrant populations using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program. By examining these incidents in metropolitan areas known for their significant immigrant populations, the research provides insights into the prevalence of hate crimes targeting immigrants, offering a crucial contribution to the discourse on hate crimes and immigration in the U.S. This exploration, underpinned by a quantitative methodology, not only highlights the significance of scrutinizing hate crimes in the context of rising diversity and immigration but also serves as a crucial resource for policymakers and community organizations striving to create a more equitable society.
Deportation today can be deadly. Since 2016 there have been dozens of cases where migrants have been killed shortly after being deported from the United States, and for some citizens this is an appropriate punishment and payment for the sin and “dishonor” of violating borders. However, I argue we have the mandate to change what we cannot accept by standing in for the migrant; we are called to interrupt immigration violence existentially as the new focus of punishment; politically as voices for those unable to speak; and viscerally by interjecting via loving protest and spiritual care. In this paper, I use Anselm’s theory of satisfaction to offer a necessary alternative to the theory of penal substitution that predominates our immigration discourse today, and I call on K. Anthony Appiah’s discussion of honor to explain how this need of society is very present yet often unacknowledged in immigration discourse.
Popular movements in the United States that center undocumented migrants from Latin America invite us to challenge wisdom received from some Christian religious traditions, retrieve knowledge that is confined to the margins of elsewhen and elsewhere, and reason in ways that contribute to struggles that disrupt and transform. This presentation outlines several key insights emergent from engaged research with a nonviolent movement fighting for dignity and respect for immigrants in the United States, Movimiento Cosecha. It is a part of a broader project focusing on people in popular processes in the United States as agents under duress. In keeping with 2021 collaborative research agreement, the project aims to articulate an alternative to approaches to immigrants oriented by the helper/helped logic, an alternative that is rooted in immigrant lives and movements for justice.
This panel explores the dynamic role of religious music in addressing societal conflicts across various contexts and historical periods. One paper examines the use of religious music and practices among war-displaced Syrian Melkite Christians in Germany. Another delves into a hymn composed during the American Civil War by an alumnus of Shaw University that articulated a narrative of hope and resilience that resonated within the African American community during tumultuous times. And a third focuses on the period from 1880 to 1920, where Muscular Christianity influenced the portrayal of Christ in religious hymnody, transforming Christ into a militant leader. Together, these studies illuminate how religious music not only reflects but actively shapes responses to conflict, reinforcing community bonds, providing spiritual solace, and redefining identities.
Papers
This paper explores the role of religion in community-building and healing among the Syrian Melkites in Germany as they strive to overcome the atrocities of the war and displacement and rebuild their lives in exile. Drawing from Kenneth Pargament’s theory of religious coping during stressful life events (1997) and from recent scholarship on the relationship between religion and wellbeing among refugees and forced migrants (Dorais 2009; Ennser et al. 2018; Shubin 2012), I argue that faith and faith-based practices can support the moral and mental wellbeing of war-displaced Syrian Melkites by providing them with a sense of community, spiritual support, and coping mechanisms. Furthermore, I argue that the performance of musical and ritual practices of the Syrian Melkites are more than a religious need; rather, they are intertwined with a subculture strongly linked to a homeland from which these migrants have been uprooted and will help preserve their cultural identity.
The Anthem of 1865: The Musical Response to the Violence or the Civil War and Birth of Shaw Universtiy.
Hymnody and religious music within the Christian church has often overlooked the wide array of genres related to the African American experience. Violence imposed upon people of African descent has birthed a very specific subset of Christian music, negro spirituals and anthems written by African American composers. This paper seeks to explore the "back story" of the Anthem of 1865, written by an alumnus of Shaw University, the one of the oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the South. The musical score was written to the tune of Nun danket alle Gott (Now Thank We All Our God), by a fellow alumnus of the same institution. The verses tell a specific story of the pain and violence the students of this institution had to endure, yet the anthem speaks to the hope and "bright future" of all who have been educated within it's sacred walls. A review of literature in hymnody, sacred texts, African American history, and violence during the period of Reconstruction will ground this research.
From 1880 to 1920 Muscular Christianity reconfigured the image of Christ into a celebrity persona, forsaking his divinity and recasting Jesus as the ultimate Nietzschean superman. The calls to refashion the image of Jesus, led to a reconfiguration of the musical literature that was to be sung regarding the Son of God. Jesus must no longer be represented as a servant in the lyrics of worship but sung out as a warrior and general who leads his troops to battle. Hymanals were created such as one created in 1910 titled, "Manly Songs for Christian Men." As the hymns and hymn books became disseminated in churches, no longer was the emphasis of church and Christ to be seen as a place where men were to serve and love their neighbor. Rather, with Christ as their model, they were to go forth as the ultimate American man and battle their enemies in the world.