Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Religious healing has long been a subject of interest in both the sciences and humanities disciplines. How do rituals, prayers, and ceremonies—meaning-making experiences without an obvious western biomedical intervention—lead to real therapeutic results including pain relief, remission, and recovery from illness? This paper draws on the "bio-looping"model of embodiment to examine the connection between meaning-making activities and health in late antique Palestinian rabbinic literature. Situation these texts within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine, this paper will explore the rabbinic conception of embodiment developed in these texts.

While scholarship in Jewish thought and beyond has attended to the literary aspects of midrash, midrash as a practice of speech which forms a public rhetorical culture and individual subjects within it has not been thoroughly explored. This paper approaches the topic through the lens of democratic theory on public discourse, with specific attention to critical scholarship on affect. By analyzing the phenomenology of midrashic interpretation through the writings of Avivah Zornberg and Michael Fishbane, this paper argues that performing midrash allows a subject to be indulgent regarding desires and passions—to imagine particular narratives and publicize them expressively—while still developing the humility required for a collective discursive project. In this way, midrashic rhetoric offers a model for rethinking current conversations around the ethics of citizenship in political speech, as they struggle to square the liberal demands of accountability to a public and the demands of the affective subject.

Medieval kabbalists devoted significant energy to explaining historical misfortunes. This paper will describe how medieval kabbalists used the image of the sarim, or heavenly archons of the nations, to explain Jewish subjugation to Christian and Muslim nations, and how they understood gilgul, or reincarnation, as the hidden mechanism whereby Jewish souls carry out their secret mission over the course of multiple lifetimes across the long arc of Israel’s exile. And finally, mention will be made of the ways that kabbalistic texts situated these strategies for reading Jewish history within a macro-historical concept of multiple successive worlds, according to which the present world is the most difficult of all possible manifestations of the cosmos. This paper will argue that the strategies evident in these discourses, despite their focus on negative historical events, suggest that medieval kabbalists sought to imagine Jews as the proactive agents of world history.

In recent decades, Leigh Eric Schmidt and others have demonstrated the extent to which modern mystical discourse has reflected not only Protestant sensibilities but also the modern project of liberalism. In this paper, I examine the politics of mysticism through a lens of Jewish cultural history in order to shed new light on both the category of mysticism and modern liberal politics, including different formations of modern Jewish politics. While scholars such as Leora Batnitzky, Aamir Mufti, and Sarah Hammerschlag have shown how attention to the “Jewish question” illuminates foundational blind spots, complexities, and dangers of liberalism, this study builds upon that scholarship through demonstrating how representations of Judaism among the architects of modern mysticism reveals a great deal about that very category and its entanglements with liberalism. My study refracts these materials through the prism of three different pathways in modern Jewish politics: assimilation, nationalism, and diaspora.

This paper considers at least some of the pneumatological dimensions of redemption through a particular focus on what Bernard Lonergan called “the just and mysterious law of the cross,” with an eye towards the subversion of notions of redemptive violence. Elements of Lonergan's trinitarian theology, and particularly the way in which the missions of the Word and Holy Spirit elevate human beings to share in the life of the Trinity through charity — the same charity that informed Christ's redemptive act, and which is given to the redeemed in and as the Holy Spirit — provide the fundamental theological basis. This is further refined by M. Shawn Copeland's womanist appropriation of these categories, calling for a eucharistic solidarity, which keeps alife the dangerous memory of the lynched Jesus, thereby undercutting any recourse to sacral violence, while also recognizing the reality of violence within history and the redemption enacted in history.

The last months have witnessed a worldwide spike in antisemitic and Islamophobic violence as communities are scapegoated for events thousands of miles away. This reality demands a response from theologians, especially given our historical complicity in such violence. Queer and political theologians have begun addressing scapegoating violence, but their proposals do not explain theology’s significance beyond the ecclesial community. I argue for a political theology that deploys practices of mourning to position the church (as Christ’s body) against the political powers responsible for victimization. The goal is twofold: first, that religious communities liberate themselves from the privilege enabling them to enact scapegoating violence; and, second, that believers would be formed into people who stand in solidarity with, or even in front of and in defense of, other victims. Normed by Christ and trained by the eucharist, Christians “complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” by suffering for others’ sake.

Contextual theology, by drawing attention to the ways in which context affects theology, has critically reshaped the way we do and think about theology. From a contextual perspective, theology is merely speculative or naively subjective unless theologians acknowledge the contextual underpinnings of their work. But the concept of “context” itself warrants critical examination as well. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with Adivasi (indigenous) Christians in India, this paper offers a critique of the way context functions in contextual theology and proposes a new way of understanding the revelatory capacity of our contexts. Building upon the work of Kathryn Tanner and Kevin Hector on the mediation of the Spirit, I argue that the Spirit works through our negotiation of diverse perspectives on context. My emphasis is on the disruptive potential of the Spirit, who draws us into relationship with others who interpret and engage with our contexts in different ways.

In conversation with Amos Yong, Ashon T. Crawley, Keri Day, and J. Kameron Carter, I present my own account of an ethical pneumatology describing the Spirit's work to bring upheaval to communities suffering under injustice. In support of that account, I trace the pneumatologies at play in the Azusa Street Revival. Yong notes that phenomenological pneumatologies were utilized to sanction white supremacist attacks against Azusa, while ethical pneumatologies were cited by Azusa’s leaders to justify the countercultural character of their worship. Crawley contends that where Azusa did affirm aesthetics, it was in the privileging of incoherence— through the gift of glossolalia—so that persons and communities might be liberated from the settler colonial logics developed to justify white supremacist dominance. By engaging these analyses, I consider the ongoing entanglement of aesthetic pneumatologies with white supremacy and articulate how ethical pneumatologies can better resist the same. 

Since the first century, some Christians have brought dead bodies back to life through prayer. While hardly ubiquitous, dead-raising is part of the supernatural landscape of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. According to William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival, Jesus commanded it. This paper explores dead-raising around Bethel Church, a charismatic evangelical California megachurch with international influence. I argue that dead-raising offers scholars a rich, albeit unnerving opportunity to examine our frameworks for studying time, death, and religious bodies. When the dead rise, the forward march of time is reversed. Moreover, dead-raisers argue that the imperishable resurrection bodies of the distant future—the “eschaton”—become available now such that nobody has to die, full stop. To examine dead-raising is to pursue the breadth of Christian supernatural practice and Christians’ always shifting engagement with death. It is to resist burying the sources of our discomfort in the religious worlds we study.

According to Euro-American discourse, fat people, and fat women in particular, lack a future. Not only are fat persons more likely to die prematurely, fatness presents as a threat to the future of the nation comparable with Covid and the climate crisis. Within this narrative, fatness emerges as a ‘biopolitical problem’ (Evans, 2009) that takes shape in the present through the futurizing of fatness. Lurking behind such dreams of a fat-free future is a set of misogynist and racist assumptions as well as the entrenched fat phobic belief that fat people, especially women, are disposable. However, such a futurizing of fat is also resourced by Western Christian ideas about eschatological bodies. Through an engagement with Augustine’s presentation of fatness and future heavenly bodies, I explore how the theological futurizing of fat can incentivise a hearty celebration of fatness, opening up history to alternative possibilities to the fat-shaming present.  

The Christian hope for the future body is of perfection on the other side of resurrection—but what does embodied perfection entail? Many people in Christian faith communities share the assumptions of modern Western culture, uncritically absorbing and reproducing its stigmatising assumptions and body-shaming practices. This shapes their expectations of what the perfected resurrection body might look: slim, beautiful, and non-disabled. I will use a multi-layered account of identity to propose that the continuity of identity-forming embodied features is required to safeguard the continuity of identity through the transformation of resurrection. While we must admit a modest agnosticism regarding the actual outcome, the possibility of persons with disabilities and bodies of all sizes, shapes, and colours flourishing in the new creationchallenges our underlying assumptions about what bodies are good bodies. I will argue that human flourishing lies not in aesthetic flawlessness but in the fulfillment of the body’s *telos*.

This paper explores how racialized and gendered meaning-making occurs online by engaging feminist theorists in phenomenology, digital anthropology and biotechnology. This paper then considers the pedagogical implications of how the virtual bodies of women of color are located, perceived, and acted upon in the virtual learning landscape of theological education. These understandings are crucial to the application of engaged pedagogy in the virtual leaning landscape. Recognizing that to show up as one’s full self is to become vulnerable to violence, this paper concludes with an invitation to pedagogical promiscuity, an embodied learning approach that aims toward liberation for all learners.

In Alberta, Canada, current Premier Danielle Smith banned bottom surgery for transgender youth, despite the fact that no kids have received bottom surgery. Smith’s policies create the trans youth body as a site of panic and of parental control. “Body” and “flesh” are laden with Christian history, which marks some bodies as sinful and claims flesh as the defining characteristic of family bonds. Read through Hortense Spillers and the incarnation, flesh becomes a site of generative possibility, of interdependence. Interdependent flesh persists where the legal and normative family fails, allowing the wild creativity of gender diverse children to flourish as part of queer community.

The Spiritist Movement, organized by Allan Kardec in the second half of the 19th century, has seen remarkable involvement of women, both historically and in contemporary Brazil. This article addresses Spiritism's absence of hierarchy, emphasis on charity work, and mediumship nature, which align closely with traits traditionally associated with femininity, making it a feminist religion. Furthermore, millions of women throughout Brazil, victims of all types of violence, are assisted by Spiritist Societies through massive charity work organized mainly through women.

In January of 1932, the military government of El Salvador systematically killed around 30,000 people, mainly Nahua-Pipil, in the Western region of the country over several weeks in massacre called “La Matanza”, or “The Killing/Slaughter.” As El Salvador reckons with violences past and present, Nahua-Pipil communities resist state oppression and call attention to ancestral meanings of justice and dignity for Indigenous communities. In this paper, I highlight the connections between decades of state-sponsored violence including the 1980 assassination of Monseñor Romero. I will also discuss ceremony as an embodied and sacred memory praxis for both liberation theologists and Nahua-Pipil communities in honoring ancestors in the aftermath of massacre, and across space and time. What will be shared about La Matanza of 1932 in this talk details a public commemoration ceremony in Izalco, El Salvador as well as observations from the beatification and canonization of Monseñor Romero.

Some church music scholars have recorded the effervescence of interdenominational, nationalistic, and ecumenical liturgical projects between the 1960s and 1970s (Hawn 2003; Silva Steuernagel 2021). Most trace the influences of the Vatican Second’s liturgical reformation to Latin American liberation theologians (Elias 2021). Few scholars, though, have considered if indigenismo—an early twentieth-century Latin American political and ideological movement that utilized essentialized notions of indigeneity (Nielsen 2020)—plays a role in the theological and musicological debates that led to the Sacrosanctum Concilium. This paper investigates how early Latin American twentieth-century indigenista musical projects influenced projects of Latin American liberation theologians. By providing a historical account of Indigenismo and cross-referencing hymnological literature on early twentieth-century church music, I argue that broader cultural, socio-economical, and political trends, as well as indigenismo, are imbricated with the theological projects articulated in the Sacrosanctum Concilium.

In this paper, I seek to illuminate the relationship between the doctrine of sanctification and the community of the sanctified, giving particular attention to the role of the Black woman within scholarship on the sanctified church. At least since Zora Neale Hurston, scholars of Black pentecostalism have understood the sanctified church as an identity-in-protest to one or more of the forces inimical to Black life—whether patriarchy, antiblackness, capitalism, or homophobia. However, given the biblical-historical-theological contours of the doctrine of sanctification, as well as the socio-political realities facing Black women, I argue that the doctrine/identity of “sanctification/sanctified” forms a grammatical enclosure within which the flesh/body must abide. In light of the stronger associations of Black pentecostalism with conservatism (relative to progressivism), I question whether the grammar of sanctification forecloses the Black pentecostal church’s ability to escape the enclosures of colonial modernity.

I comparatively analyze two contemporaneous freedom fighters: the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. radical Civil Right’s activist—also known as, “the apostle of nonviolence” —and Frantz Fanon radical Algerian anti-colonial activist—also known as, “the apostle of violence”. In popular historical memory, the former is invoked as formally religious and the latter officially secular, but each are mislabeled as conventionally operative within the religion-secular binary that subtends the terms of order. Through examining their significance to the Black Freedom Struggle, their considerations of anti-Black racism and colonialism as a theological problem, and visions of the radical Black sacrality of their theorizing/praxis, I consider a significant convergence they carry, even with vast ideological divergences in tactics, which pushes forward the discussion of religion/politics, and sheds light upon alternatives to move beyond impoverished binary views of alterity, of policing and governance: religion/politics, sacred/secular, violence/non-violence, and so on.

The American carceral system–from policing and plea bargaining to probation and parole–is a system of personal and communal fragmentation. The paper argues, first, that this is the product of an essentialist carceral anthropology that disproportionately condemns race, gender, and class minorities to preserve the American neoliberal social order. The paper then argues that a Christian apophatic, non-essentialist anthropology destabilizes this carceral system. Apophatic theologians from antiquity to the present insist that humans must be figured with reference to their relation to an infinite divinity. If God is the ground of all things, one's relation to God opens the human to infinite relations to divine, human, and non-human others. This infinite relationality creates abolitionist possibilities, rejecting final decisions about one’s raced, gendered, and classed essence, resisting the neoliberal reduction of infinitely relational beings to self-interested individuals, and challenging attempts to punish wrongdoing through forced removal from communities.

This text discusses the interaction and relationship between a local ritual master and a spirit medium. It includes a case study of a spirit medium named Hu Guanglin, who turned to a local ritual master (fashi 法師) for a solution when he was having trouble maintaining a stable connection with his deceased patriarchs (yinshi 陰師). Master Wu proposed a ritual known as Consecration, Confinement, and Stabilization (kaiguang fengding 開光封定) to stabilize Guanglin’s connection. Master Wu showed his autonomy from Daoism and authority over spirit mediums. However, using Daoist characters and bureaucratic communication methods in their talismans and documents suggests a Daoist influence. The masters of the Mount Mao Divine Arts (maoshan shengong 茅山神功) exhibit their power over low-ranking spirits and spirit mediums, demonstrating a continuation of the “master of gods” phenomenon within Schipper’s hierarchy of gods, ritual masters, and Daoism. 

Recent studies suggest that evangelism beyond social networks is more important for spreading religion in China than previously thought. Drawing upon neglected English- and Chinese-language sources and the author’s own interviews, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of how outreach to strangers in China occurs by examining the methods used by Hare Krishnas since 1977. It argues that the proselytization strategies employed by members of unofficial religions, like the Hare Krishnas, often differ significantly from those utilized by practitioners of state-sanctioned ones. While the latter rely on “strategies of attraction”—techniques designed to lure individuals to sacred sites where they can be engaged legally, the former actively seek out potential converts in secular spaces and at sites belonging to other religious institutions. It is difficult to generalize about religion in China as a whole, but comparing official and unofficial religions shows promise for making discussions more manageable and productive.

Building the Road to Modernity within Tradition:  The Construction and Consecration of Vajra-bodhi Stupa in Chongqing in 1931

By focusing on the case of the Vajra-bodhi Stupa constructed in Chongqing in 1931, this research examines how Buddhism navigated its way between tradition and modernity to reconstruct its identity in Republican China (1911-1949). The stupa was built under the patronage and supervision of  Pan Wenhua (1886-1950), a lay Buddhist and the mayor of Chongqing. To modernize the city, Pan ordered the relocation of thousands of tombs in order to build roads and improve transportation in the city. In response to the local residents’ tradition of ancestor worship and fear of dislocated haunting ghosts, the stupa was built. This paper will discuss how Buddhists creatively intergrated traditional views and practices into their conception of modernity in Republican China through the construction and consecration of the stupa.

This project follows Chinese Buddhists who traveled to Japan studying Esoteric Buddhism from 1910 to the 1930s, returning to China spreading their teachings among monastics and laity. It will start with Gui Bohua’s (桂伯華 1861-1915) turn to Esoteric Buddhism to deal with the death of his family and then consider a series of monks and laypersons who sought ought initiation at the Shingon headquarters of Koyasan 高野山. These Buddhists sought not only to study a lost part of Chinese Buddhism but also to develop a potential alternative to western modernity. They spread Esoteric Buddhism throughout the Chinese Buddhist landscape while simultaneously improving Sino-Japanese relations during the spread of Japanese colonies throughout the Sinosphere. Finally, a case study of Taixu’s 太虚 Wuchang Buddhist Studies Academy *foxueyuan* 武昌佛学院 highlights its lay community’s shift from academic to Esoteric Buddhism.

The incorporation of Buddhist temples into urban redevelopment within China’s market transition became phenomenal after the 2000s. Domestic and international real estate developers collaborated with local governments and state-owned-enterprises in the construction of commercial complexes by converting under-used spaces around renowned Buddhist temples. Among these scattered projects of temple-centered redevelopment across China, this article identifies two during which the Hong Kong-based developer, Swire Properties, consecutively built open, low-density shopping centres in Chengdu and Xi’an around the Daci temple and Jianfu temple respectively since 2010. Named as the “Taikoo Li”, these two projects attest to unique logics of planning and operation, while nurturing discursive, cultural, and material practices, religious as well as non-religious, in people’s everyday life. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic study in urban contemporary China, this article bridges a dialogue with postsecularist debates in Euro-American contexts, and proposes a methodological experiment that reinvents "postsecularity" as plural, contextual, and subjective.

Even as Americans’ racial attitudes grow increasingly egalitarian, racial injustices persist. One recent attempt to address this attitude-act gap has been to posit the existence of implicit racial bias (IRB), that is, an attitude that operates outside conscious attentional focus and disposes individuals toward discriminatory behavior. The Race Implicit Association Test (RIAT) is most often used to measure IRB. Yet studies of the RIAT reveal that it is too inconsistent, too susceptible to irrelevant factors to gauge IRB. Situations attempt to salvage the notion of IRB by alleging that it is a feature of situations rather than persons. But this is question-begging. This presentation aims to preserve the concept of IRB by positing IRB as a local trait—that is, as a trait that activates in very particular contexts. This in-between position preserves the importance of both structural analyses of social ills and theologies that emphasize individual moral formation.

This paper argues from research on cognitive social psychology and cognitive sociology that some of the difficulties of explicating and achieving the common good emerge from the relationship of individual people’s schemas to widely held positions of moral concern.  Challenges to common understanding and enactment of the social good occur, in part, because individuals’ schemas, their mental constructs of perceptions and knowledge, develop through individualized yet partially shared experience of social norms and multi-dimensional experiences of feeling, perception, knowledge, and practice. Hence when we speak to one another about the common good, or make efforts to enact it, one person’s multi-dimensional schemas intersect with another’s similarly concatenated ideas. To highlight this, the paper highlights how schemas are not two-dimensional like the images that represent them in textbooks. The common good turns out to be less a tidy picture than a creative collision and ongoing mixing and shifting of schemas.

The enactment of violence on a collective scale requires that coercive power be structured in both referred and direct ways. While religiously hued authority is often implicated in mass violence, it is not always well-understood how theology itself—highly specific doctrinal reasoning particular to a given religious expression—can serve as a crucial structuring force in coercive violence. Taking the recently theorized notion of “theologized trauma” as a starting point, this study engages the medieval Christian inquisitions through the lens of christology. When inquisitors engaged in Christianized acts of torture, what was their operative view of Jesus Christ and his seemingly irenic message? In exploring this difficult question, fresh dimensions of theologized trauma and communal violence are unearthed. In dialogue with ongoing work on collective trauma and the social construction of meaning, a threefold relation between religious doctrine and structured violence is documented and defended.