Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper outlines transformative approach to practical theology, emphasizing the integration of feminist theologies and trauma-informed research to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis within the Catholic Church. The researcher presents a novel practical theological method that combines qualitative data, trauma theory, feminist insights, narrative analysis, and creative writing. Centering on narratives from survivors of Catholic clergy sexual abuse, the study grounds itself in the real-life experiences of those deeply affected by the abuse crisis. It challenges traditional atonement theories and ecclesiological practices through a critical dialogue informed by trauma and feminist critiques, culminating in a theopoetic re-narration of the crucifixion and resurrection narratives. This methodology offers significant contributions to practical theology, proposing a multidimensional model that not only enriches academic study but also aims to transform ecclesial practices and theological narratives, paving the way for a more empathetic, inclusive, and justice-oriented approach.

Faith communities frequently espouse to welcome all.  But in a world of violence, this hospitable desire is challenging in communities where people have lived/living experiences of sexual and other trauma.  The forthcoming research will address the failure of safe church approaches to attend to the needs of individuals and communities living with the aftermath of violence and trauma.  This contemplative participative theological methodology aims to creatively and constructively interpret and interrupt current ecclesial practices of hospitality.  Prompted by insights from feminist trauma-sensitive theology, members of a faith community will participate in guided conversations unpacking assumptions and beliefs informing the practice of hospitality.  Through contemplative dialogue circles, the inquiry takes seriously a faith community’s communal experience of hospitality and their experience of God’s unfolding invitations in this time and context, offering an opportunity to articulate a theology that fosters trust, truth, justice, relationality, and the flourishing of all.

“Trauma-Responsive Congregations: Equipping Thriving Urban Congregations to Respond to Collective Trauma” is Boston University School of Theology’s 3-year-long research project funded by the Thriving Congregations Initiative of the Lilly Endowment Inc. The purpose of the program is to assist urban congregations in developing models of trauma-responsive care that are deeply integrated into the mission of their congregations and draw upon the organic resources of congregational life. Based on our community-engaged research with two participating congregations in downtown San Diego, the interdisciplinary research team composed of theologians and psychologists looks at how these urban churches respond to the communal trauma of their congregations, namely in the face of systemic poverty, housing crisis, and immigration. This co-presentation examines how these churches develop trauma-informed toolkits and incorporate these psychological and theological tools into various aspects of their ministries in partnership with theologians, mental health counselors, chaplains, and expressive arts therapists.

This session will introduce the practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), an interfaith study practice that gathers people of different faiths around short scriptural texts from the three Abrahamic traditions. The text from the Quran through which we will engage themes of margins is chapter 104, verses 1-7.

This session will introduce the practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), an interfaith study practice that gathers people of different faiths around short scriptural texts from the three Abrahamic traditions. The text from the Hebrew Bible through which we will engage themes of margins is Leviticus 19:5-10.

This session will introduce the practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), an interfaith study practice that gathers people of different faiths around short scriptural texts from the three Abrahamic traditions. The text from the New Testament through which we will engage themes of margins is Matthew 14:13-21.

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The escalating risk of climate change-related disasters serves as a justification for increased American militarism. Despite the United States military being a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, responses to climate threats fail to address its environmental impact. Policies like the Green New Deal frame climate change as a "threat multiplier," integrating military strategies into environmental initiatives. This approach perpetuates a cycle where military intervention exacerbates climate change, reinforcing the need for further militarization. The discourse surrounding oil, security, and the Middle East constructs a narrative of American intervention as necessary for a greener future, perpetuating a dichotomy between the rational West and the racialized Muslim "other." This paper calls for a reevaluation of climate action strategies to avoid reinforcing hegemonic structures and advocates for solidarity across climate, anti-militarism, and anti-colonial movements.

In this paper, I argue that an ethnographic approach to questions of non/a-religion requires moving away from the dominant sociological orientation that treats irreligion as a stable cognitive state and self-ascribed identity category and toward an anthropological orientation capable of registering the shifting tonalities of unbelief. Inspired by Andreas Bandak’s (2012) concept of “tonalities of immediacy,” I argue that questions of unbelief are best approached by examining the processes through which unbelief is foregrounded and backgrounded as a salient category in everyday life. In other words, while many people may be non-religious as a simple matter of negation, how and when is non-religion activated and intensified as a set of beliefs, affects, and sensibilities? Here, I focus on the ways that sensory rituals of religion out of place—religious practices designed to appear improperly public in ostensibly secular contexts—produce irreligion, generating the very thing they seek to challenge.

Reflection upon the role of technology in shaping our understanding—and experience—of time today calls forth tensions and ambiguities within contemporary life that should prompt us to revise widespread and long held assumptions about the meaning of secularity, the nature of religion, and relations between these two within a world now structured and driven pervasively by technology.  Countering the flight from mortal fragility that one can see as much in seemingly secular technologies as in traditional forms of religion, and rejecting the certainties of both dystopian and utopian currents in our contemporary relations with technology, this paper draws on a range of thinkers—from Nietzsche and Heidegger through Michel Serres to Donna Haraway and Mary-Jane Rubenstein—to argue that a vital experience of temporality within today's technological world requires an affective orientation of care or of love toward the transience and insecurity of our social and natural worlds alike.                  

This paper explores the collaborative production of knowledge regarding how to build agency for justice-oriented social change through teaching in religious studies and theology.  It traces a six-year project of experiential research into method for teaching community organizing as a required course in theological education. The project began as a collaborative experiment between a community-based community organizing network and a university-based theological school. Pedagogy included interrogation of the whiteness historically dominant in  community-organizing training. Assessment draws on evaluations by students, faculty, and community organizers, and on three theoretical fields: community-organizing theory developed by feminist and Black women organizers, critical pedagogy, and decolonial theory. Questions arise: What are guidelines for teaching social change arts in academic curricula, and for courses with explicit political agendas? How can such courses address white supremacist undergirdings of theological/religious studies education? What are lines of accountability and reciprocity between community-based and university-based leaders in such courses?

Engaging the largest public university system in the US on two fronts involving the institution's treatment of Indigenous peoples has put me in an awkward but instructive position. In each case issues of law and policy are central. Wearing my good cop hat, I am member of a University of California (UC) campus repatriation committee and find this work compelling and productive. Wearing my bad cop badge, my misgivings pertain to the direct involvement of the UC in the Thirty Meter Telescope project in Hawai`i, about which I have gone on record with the University Regents on multiple occasions. I will describe my work on both fronts, pointing to the ironic way appeals to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples links them. Concluding, I will propose some thoughts about best practices and possible risks when engaging public universities from the inside. 

This paper will critically examine the theologies and knowledges produced through the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism (PCR) in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on archival research, theological analysis, and interviews with church leaders and activists, it will explore the relationship between international networks and local community led responses to social justice. Using the PCR’s work in NZ as a case study, the paper will also reflect on activism as a form of lived theology, which can support contemporary anti-racist strategies and action.

The philosophy of the nonviolent movement as a belief system mirrors the principles of respecting the life and dignity of every person without prejudiced notions, rejecting all forms of discrimination and exclusion, and devoting resources to uplift underdeveloped communities from political and social oppression. In promoting these ideals, King followed the nine fundamental principles of "Satyagraha," namely, focusing on self-reliance, propagating tactics, upholding basic principles of actions, and many others. The paper will explore how the noble, fundamental rules of Satyagraha achieve justice for the Dalit Christians in India who are facing discrimination because of their Christian faith.

"Kinginan Nonviolence and Prophetic Christianity" will examine the religious contours of King's nonviolence philosophy in light of the various commitments to social change and transformation found in Walter Rauschenbusch's "Social Gospel" and the Black Intellectual tradition. The religious language and sentiments undergirding King's nonviolence philosophy signifies his continous grappling with the existential crises affecting the Black American community, a concern for the Protestant faith tradition, and a commitment to outlining a love ethic rooted in justice.

"A Prophet, Nonviolence, and Women's Health" will argue how King's nonviolence philosophy provides an ethical opening to discuss the importance of women's health.

he economic dimensions of King’s work in the Civil Rights Movement offers a practical vision and a prophetic lens that empowers modern believers to meditate on the intersection between religion and civil rights. One way we can adjudicate the present state of civil rights from the vantage point of the aims of the 1964 legislation is through a honest estimation of economic advancement amongst all races of people. Reflections on theology, gender, and race animate the economic question of civil rights and religion because religious institutions have played significant roles in civil rights movements. Theological and economic frameworks influence how people perceive civil rights because they inform economic reasoning and shape moral imperatives. In helping to pass the Civil Rights Act, women have also fought for equal rights. And because racial injustice provides a daunting provocation, the disentangling of King’s theo-economic ethos in his moral leadership offerings is critically important.

In *The New Arab Man,* Marcia Inhorn, a prominent scholar of Muslim masculinities, challenges common stereotypes about contemporary Middle Eastern Muslim men. Her work is significant, for it highlights the emergence of egalitarian Muslim masculinities in the Middle East. However, this paper draws attention to a starkly different form of Muslim masculinity emerging among the young Muslim men of the West. This "Red pill Muslim masculinity" combines the teachings of popular youtubers such as Rollo Tomassi with a simplistic understanding of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. It emphasizes that men and women are situated in a confrontational dynamic due to inherent and immutable evolutionary differences. Red-pill Muslim influencers view women as inferior, hypergamous, irrational, and solipsistic beings who must be controlled by an aggressive, judgemental, and manipulative Muslim masculinity. Crucially, prominent Muslim youtube influencers have begun to frame red pill ideology as “traditional” Muslim masculinity, thereby encouraging young religious men to embrace this trend. 

The digital manosphere has been an object of scholarly analysis for several years. Crucial, but often missing, in the assessment of the manosphere is the role of religious belief and moral framings about the body. This paper intervenes by analyzing how online manosphere elements interact with both religious traditions and forms of political authority in order to produce discourses, technologies, and self-improvement regiments related to Orthodox masculinity. Drawing on three years of research, this paper offers a case study from the online Eastern Orthodox manosphere, showing that this mode of masculinist discourse unites reactionary religiosity with affective energy borrowed from, and recognizable to, participants within the manosphere. In doing so, we argue that manosphere culture, focused on social debate as a normative form of corrective instruction, helps Orthodox men craft vernacular theologies of the body that are inspired by Orthodox theology and manosphere culture but arguably at odds with both. 

This paper emplots the work of Rajiv Surendra, an emerging domestic advisor with a dedicated following, in the longer tradition of domestic advice. By locating his teaching in conversation with domestic advisors like Lizzie Kander of the Settlement Cook Book, the author seeks to reframe the intimate work of teaching homemaking as less stably feminine than presumed and more invested in masculinist structures of prescription and authority. In short, this paper asks, what different conceptions of masculinity, domesticity, and kinship become possible when we imagine domestic advice writing as not simply maternal and feminine but invested in systems of knowledge production that we might differently gender in their underlying paradigms? This paper argues that the Canadian actor-turned-influencer’s recognizability as a domestic advisor—and as a queer, unchaste, wealthy, Tamil man—both modulate and reinforce conclusions we have drawn about Americanization, racial formation, kinship, and gendered discipline through domestic advice writing.

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

Masculinized social media spaces are often associated with forms of oppression like misogyny, queer- and transphobia, and racism.  Without dispelling that reality, my net ethnography of the subreddit r/Hunting uncovers the ethical and religious heavy lifting men do in social media spaces devoted to masculinized practices.  For hunters on r/Hunting, the moment of violence, the kill, is at once the point and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized.  Even more, it triangulates them into relationships with their imagined and known male ancestors, their kin, and the totality of living things.  Indeed, this moment of violence anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies.  Hunting, then, is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.

Mysticism is difficult to define, but, following Bernard McGinn, a robust definition is a unique consciousness of the ultimate reality one perceives. Understanding how the mystic’s consciousness is unique when compared to their community can be difficult, but the 2016 science fiction film _Arrival_ provides an analogous situation that helps illustrate this concept. Through intense preparation and engagement with a newly encountered alien language, the protagonist Louise develops a unique consciousness of time that enables her to save the world. I argue that this correlates to the mystic’s unique consciousness of ultimate reality, also often attained via preparation, that enables them to provide fruitful reflection to their own community. The use of _Arrival_ to help clarify this concept for mysticism points to the potential fruitful dialogue between speculative fiction and religious studies.

In this paper, I examine the mystical aspects of the space opera novel series The Expanse, which describes humanity encountering an alien presence in outer space drawing upon Christian and Buddhist mystical metaphors. Despite the success of The Expanse and space opera novels more broadly, scholarly attention to its religious elements remains scarce. The paper aims to fill this gap by examining how mystical experiences in the series often manifest as erotic or violent, challenging some mainstream notions of space-born spirituality (such as the “overview effect”). It first surveys scholarship on mysticism in popular literature and on religion in science fiction. Then, it close-reads selected passages from the novel series. It concludes by comparing The Expanse to other recent space opera novels that do not imagine mystical unity in a violent or even erotic manner, but as a new default mode of consciousness for a space-borne humankind.

The novelist Jeff VanderMeer has a penchant for plunging his characters into overwhelming piles of decaying stuff. This paper contends that passage through these piles can be read as a form of mystical absorption apposite to the experience of being overwhelmed by climate crisis. Climate crisis is often presented as a problem of scale, yet scale alone cannot account for its maddening, and at times deeply stupefying, particulars. Nor should scale be the sole connection point between climate crisis and the scholarly study of mystical techniques and experiences. I argue that VanderMeer’s recurring motif of piles depicts mystical experiences of excess born not of inexhaustibility but of exhaustion, and thus offers resources to resist transcendentalizing climate crisis in a way that distracts from its politics.

Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912) did not play well with others—so goes the historical record.  Dall’s excision is notable for a number of reasons.  As with many stories of “difficult women,” the leap to cite personality issues as the reason for exclusion by her peers obscures more than it reveals.  This paper argues it was the radical politics born from her Unitarian upbringing, and her continued devotion to that liberal branch of Protestantism, along with her Transcendentalist proclivities that made her difficult to pin down.  More specifically, it will engage in a critical reading of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible with an eye to what is carefully curated passages and commentaries obscure about the kind of biblically-rooted and radical women’s rights advocacy (which included a reimagining of sex work) that Dall brought to light in The College, the Market, and the Court. 

The paper explores the survival strategies of crypto-religious minorities within the forced mono-confessional pre-modern Crown of Aragon. It introduces a novel comparative framework, focusing on the strategies employed by female members: Conversas and Moriscas, Christian women of Jewish and Muslim origin, respectively. These strategies are examined as they navigate the complexities of preserving their contested identities amidst religious violence within the inquisitorial tribunals of Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza from the late 15th to the mid-17th centuries. Employing an interdisciplinary and intersectional methodological approach, the study investigates the strategies adopted by these women to negotiate religious violence and maintain their identities. Through analysis of religious practice preservation, coping mechanisms, and negotiation tactics, the research unveils the resilience of these communities. By shedding light on the challenges faced by women in preserving cultural heritage amidst religious persecution, it highlights the intricate interplay of gender, religion, and social status within crypto-religious minorities.

This paper explores women’s exclusion from Coptic institutions of governance between 1927-1961. Despite a growing consensus that Coptic institutions should represent and be chosen by the people, Coptic women were excluded from participation as voters and members. I argue that women’s exclusion from Coptic institutional governance was rooted in the deployment of paternalistic readings of scriptures and tradition alongside a popular current in Egyptian feminism that stressed the need to educate women so they could raise nationalist sons. These dynamics created a communal discourse that framed women’s position in society in terms of their place in the family, justifying institutional exclusion on the grounds that wives should be subservient to their husbands and should dedicate themselves to maternal responsibilities. In turn, Coptic women mobilized these expectations to demand inclusion given Coptic institutions’ role in family life, as well as to carve out alternative spaces of influence as educators and journalists.

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