Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization, is important in the history of immigrant rights activism in San Diego because of their U.S.-Mexico Border Program’s documentation of human rights abuses against migrants and Latinx people committed by law enforcement. This paper particularly focuses on Roberto Martinez, an understudied local immigrant rights leader strongly mobilized by his Catholic faith who won international awards for his work as the director of the AFSC’s Border Program in San Diego (a position he held from 1982-2003). Martinez and the AFSC combined often secular methods of activism, such as organizing protests and testifying of abuses on a local and federal level, but also organized religious events at the San Diego-Tijuana Border in defiance of the state’s militarization of this space. Sometimes overt but oftentimes subtle, Martinez’s faith was influential and integrated into his work countering state violence and militarization. 

The Catholic, anti-communist, and Mexican nationalist Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS or National Synarchist Union) formed in 1937 to counteract the power of the left-leaning postrevolutionary Mexican state, which embodied anti-clericalism, a strict separation between church and state, secular education, and land reform. While most scholars focus on the UNS within the borders of Mexico, this paper emphasizes the transnational dimensions of the organization in Southern California in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Los Angeles regional sinarquista committee not only established a presence in the city, but established new chapters throughout Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties. This paper argues that the organization established a foothold among conservative Catholic Mexicans across Southern California, utilizing their collective power to attempt to transform the religious and political situation in Mexico from afar.

In this paper, I argue Mexico underwent a religious awakening in the late nineteenth century fueled by borderlands capitalism. I define this as the transnational economic project by which Mexico and the United States melded the cultural flow of ideological imaginaries and commerce to produce the Mexico-US borderlands. With Southern California entrepreneurs leading the way, Mexico experienced drastic changes when Angelino boosters and capitalists profited from investments south of the border. Capitalist formulations in the borderlands negatively impacted Mexicans, inspiring progressives in Mexico to revolt against the state and ignite the Mexican Revolution. My intervention examines the radical religious dimension that contributed to this uprising. I argue liberal Mexican Christians reoriented space in the borderlands to reflect populist priorities. By appealing to cultural memory, progressive Christians combatted the state capitalist project by remapping economic, political, and religious space.

This paper will make two, interconnected, claims: (1) that Modern Jewish thought (hereafter: MJT) must avoid choosing between an engagement with hermeneutics or a commitment to material realism, but must instead commit to both; and, (2) that MJT will be better able to do this if it more firmly brings Melanie Klein, and her work, into the “canon”.

This proposal aims to identify the theoretical connection between moral injury in the religious context and the clinical understanding of multiple self- and God-states in the healing process. Moral injury is painful insofar as one’s moral values are deeply ingrained in the life orientation and sense of self. When people experience a discrepancy between their religious values and the dominant norms of the powerholder or the larger community, like the church, it arouses moral injury that signifies a profound sense of betrayal of what is right. This proposal suggests that the clinical task of healing from moral injury in the religious context is to help the survivor recognize the multiplicity of her self-states and God-states so that she can navigate an alternative model of moral valence that is not intact from the moral transgression but transforms the traumatic religious experiences into a more mature view.

Psychology of religion with or without God? The answer to this question depends on what we mean by “God.” This paper suggests that we go beyond the conceptual fetishism so often associated with the idea of “God” to reflect on the experiences that first give rise to longings, images, or ideas of an ultimate significance, of which the notion of “God” in religions is but one explicit version. In light of paleoanthropological and neurological findings about the origin of the idea of God, as well as clinical material, this paper will suggest that attention to the infinitizing capacity of relational human self-reflective consciousness, which is principally open to harm or health, is key for the psychology of religion. The field of the psychology of religion has been vulnerable to conceptual fetishism when it makes pastoral theological confessional objectivist claims about God based on research on subjective uses of God representations.

This paper theorizes a connection between the Singaporean Chinese religious practice of burning paper offerings and the experience and political project of queerness. This connection is the politics of truth as determined by the logic of debt. By reading the tradition of burning offerings as a mode of servicing debt to ancestors and society, this paper argues that paper offerings reveal a logic of debt that structures social relationships and, necessarily, compulsory heterosexuality. By paying attention to the workings of debt (and credit), guilt, and memory, the paper investigates how subjects incur debts that are repaid via heterosexual performances. A debt-centric analysis reveals new textures for queer praxis within and against the governing structures of filial piety. Queer interventions include a faithful refusal of guilt, active forgetting/creative remembering, and an exploration of methods of accounting under which queer life can flourish.

The Quad Cities Pride in Memory’s mission is to document, protect, and preserve local queer history in the Illinois-Iowa region and its broader significance. Historically, religious groups in this region have organized to make legislative interventions aimed at a more just and equitable society for queer people. More recently, however, queer communities are increasingly distancing from religious ones. With rollbacks on queer rights at record-breaking levels, the stakes are high. Geographer Callum Sutherland uses the term “theography” (religious geographies) to explore religious reflection as it relates to spatial imaginations of transcendence and praxis. Coupled with womanist ethicist Emilie Townes’ concept of redemptive self-love as best expressed through justice-oriented public policy, I argue that religious groups contribute a unique vision for relationships across space and time that equips queer communities to reinvigorate civil rights movements today.

What happens to trans folks’ religious commitments after being pushed out of religious communities? What are we to make of trans populations’ move away from the faith networks into which they were born? To what extent does gender transition affect religious conversion, and what does that relationship have to offer conversion studies? (And vice versa?) In this paper, I aim to bring theorizations of conversion studies—and of queering conversion studies—together to offer an understanding of transgender religious movement in the contemporary United States that adequately accounts for trans and queer people’s often ambiguous and shifting relationships with organized religious traditions. I argue that this contemporary lived-religious dynamic is helpfully characterized both by studies and theories in religious conversion, and in religious studies writ large, in ways that help contextualize current trends of American transgender religious re-identification.

In the proposed paper, I aim to look at the Third Gender (Aravani/Thirunangai/Ali) Christians in North Chennai. The third gender community in India is generally not Christian. Their self-mythologizing is usually Hindu, and they are known to follow syncretic faith practices, borrowing from all religions. To adopt Christianity and have a church to themselves are unique cultural formations that demand study. How has a section of this community come to embrace Christianity? What does it mean to them? How are third-gender Christians seen by the communities in which they live? How do the third gender Christians understand the image of God, and how do they theologically understand their gender? How does their belief help them with their daily sufferings and the systemic marginalization and abuse they face? Studying and writing about the community will offer new perceptions of gender and Christianity in India.

Keywords: Christianity, Conversion, and Syncretism

This paper argues that queer gender performativity can be understood as functioning, ecclesiologically and eschatologically, in a way analogous to sacraments within Catholic theology. The paper begins with a survey of the Church as Sacrament in Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church before placing Dulles in dialogue with Kimberly Belcher and Judith Butler. Through this dialogue, I contend that both gender and sacramentality share a connection of efficacious performativity – both produce the reality they signify. In this light, both queer and sacramental performativity are seen to foreshadow and actualize the eschatological ends of both the human body and the Church. This theological framework results in an expanded view of the 'Catholic sacramental imagination' that embraces queerness as 'sacramentally' revelatory of the age to come.

Greeley writes in The Catholic Imagination (2000) that the priest “is a sacrament” and sets up the priest as “someone special,” locating the priest unstably between intimacy and oddity. Forms of queer sacramentality are not somewhere “out there” in Catholicism but riddle the genealogy of American Catholic studies – “the priest” is an intimately and uncomfortably close queer sacramental site. Often associated with category anxieties (such as between human and divine, masculine and feminine), here I focus on the category anxiety “the priest” precipitates between religious and scholarly authority, or between Catholicism and Catholic studies scholarship (exemplified in priest-scholars like Greeley). I explore the ways that Catholic studies has stabilized a normative classificatory scheme utilizing categories like “the priest” that reproduce gender and sexuality categories from Catholicism. The ambiguities and categorical shiftiness of “the priest” have functioned in Catholic studies to normativize oddity through the admixture of religious and scholarly authority. 

What would a queer Catholic sacramentality look like? Drawing from Andrew Greely’s vision of Catholic sacramentality, recent calls for a more politicized queer theory, and an ethnography of US independent Catholics, this paper illuminates the queer sacramentality of independent US Catholic churches as “sacramental justice.” Sacramental justice provides unrestricted access to the Eucharist and, in doing so, enacts a counterpublic consisting of a communion of bodies across differences sharing sources of material, spiritual, and affectionate abundance. The key aspects of this sacramental justice are nondiscriminatory ordination, radical hospitality, and promiscuous ecumenism. Having elaborated these aspects, the paper concludes by 1) proffering sacramental justice as a critical and politicalized queer practice exemplifying what William Cavanaugh envisions as the Eucharist’s “different kind of politics” and what Susan Ross heralds as the “extravagant affections” of a feminist Eucharistic theology; and 2) calling for the imperative to queer the category “Catholic.”

This paper examines the relationship between U.S. secularism and blackness through an engagement with U.S. Black Muslima thought, focusing specifically on Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), a figure powerfully aligned with Black Muslima life. It identifies three acts of refusal preserved in her mid-twentieth-century archive. Shabazz resisted integration into existing racial, religious, and gendered discourses from her first encounters with the NOI in 1955 to her corrections to Malcolm X’s politics post-1965. Shabazz’s negations rejected the status quo and envisioned alternative possibilities for black life (Campt, 2019). Attention to Shabazz’s refusals allows scholars of religion to see moments where a religiously, racially, and gender-identified subject disagrees with how the world diagnoses their religion, gender, and race. Secularism is the term that I argue integrates Blackness into what is Thinking with Shabazz shows that this integration depends on erasing Blackness as an epistemology for thinking and imagining otherwise in the twentieth century.

Over the last three decades, several American Muslim stand-up comedians have positioned themselves at the forefront of a halal circuit, such as Preacher Moss, Omar Regan, Yasmin Elhady and Moses the Comic. These four comedians share a commitment to clean comedy and have dedicated a considerable part of their career to connecting with their religious community/ies. Research shows how their performances broadly partake in efforts to (re)model a religious community around norms of virtuous conduct in Muslim diasporic contexts (Thonnart 2023). Following their trajectories, this paper examines what it means when comedians make propositions about religious norms to their coreligionists; and 2) argues that these ethico-religious projects constitute a form of *da‘wa*. Building upon the work of anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, this paper seeks to open and deepen the study of socioreligious activism in and through comedy, and critically engage our vocabularies in doing so.

The Pakistani American comedian Kumail Nanjiani stands among the most prominent Muslim storytellers in the U.S. television and film industries today. Through his training in standup, Nanjiani is aware that this body communicates something to be addressed and redressed for audiences immediately – what Jasbir Puar calls the “queer perversity of terrorist bodies.” His comedy routines, shows, and film all articulate and platform Pakistan as a very "Muslim" place; a mythical homogenous home to inequality and suffering, particularly for Muslim women but also for the men who cannot overcome Islam's determinism. Nanjiani names and enacts that deficiency through the seemingly woeful masculinity of a "beta male" body. His 2019 transformation for the Marvel Cinematic Universe reveals the fraught nature of Muslim masculinities that can only temporarily approximate the ideal white masculine form before suspicion and cruel assessments turn, once more, against those bodies from which Islam cannot be extracted.

Both Hannah Arendt and Abraham Joshua Heschel are Jewish-American theorists of civil disobedience. One, a full-time academic, the other, a part-time activist. And yet, not only are they experiencing, observing, participating in, and theorizing civil disobedience as a nonviolent way to refuse the law and the state, they are both thinking civil disobedience in profoundly Jewish ways. I take this theoretical intervention a step further to read Heschel's writings about his experience in the civil rights and the anti-war movements with Arendt's essay to extrapolate covenantal authority as a political and communal practice that can illuminate current political conditions and open a path towards an agonistic politics that holds the multiplicity of individuals and ideas as a necessity.

In recent decades, legal precedents developed by the Supreme Court of the United States and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) have diverged markedly in their willingness to countenance laws regulating proselytism and related forms of religious speech. Whereas the United States grants robust protections to proselytizers in order to guard against content- or viewpoint-based restrictions on speech meant to persuade, the ECHR often upholds such restrictions in an effort to balance the free speech and free exercise rights of speakers with the dignitary concerns of listeners and the state’s interest in maintaining civic peace. This paper seeks to elucidate and analyze the reasons underlying these contrasting doctrinal approaches. In doing so, particular emphasis will be placed on the role that discourses surrounding “human dignity” play in shaping how legal disputes over proselytism are framed, deliberated upon, and ultimately resolved within these two legal regimes.

Religion’s influence in America has recently been bolstered by both new laws and Supreme Court rulings favoring religious citizens and institutions. Simultaneously, religion is insulated by social norms that reject criticism of religion as antireligious prejudice. Responding to these trends, I argue that morally responsible criticism of religion is not only possible but a necessary dimension of public discourse that must be differentiated from antireligious prejudice. This is achieved by distinguishing between religion’s functions as ideology and identity. Religions shape identities in ways resembling race or ethnicity, and criticism of religion in this mode constitutes discrimination. However, religions also entail ideology – doctrines, values, and principles that effect broader society – and these are entirely appropriate for public critique. Morally defensible criticism of religion targets its ideological dimension, while antireligious discrimination targets religion as an identity.