http://www.aarweb.org/meetings/annual_meeting/Past_and_Future_Meetings/2006/abstracts.asp
AAR Abstracts
November 18-21, 2006
Washington, DC, USA
A17-2
Chairs Workshop – Personnel Issues: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Sponsored by the Academic Relations Committee
The workshop will deal with a multitude of personnel issues that come up within departments and will address individual, departmental, and higher administration concerns. In addition, it will address life-cycle, legal, and conflict issues that arise at each level. Plenary, panels, and interactive break-out sessions are featured, including an address by a Georgetown higher education attorney.
You may register for the workshop here: www.aarweb.org/department/workshops/2006Washington/default.asp.
A17-3
Religion and Media Workshop - The "Muhammad Cartoon" Controversy: Perspectives on Media, Religion, Law, and Culture
This year’s media and religion preconference will be an interdisciplinary conversation setting a broad scholarly context for understanding the meanings and emerging consequences of this event. Brief formal presentations will focus on such things as visual culture, religious authority, media representation, local and global identities, and emerging ideas about human rights and expression. The meeting will be structured to maximize interchange and dialogue among presenters and participants.
Questions about the workshop should be directed to Stewart Hoover, hoover@colorado.edu, Michele Rosenthal, rosen@research.haifa.ac.il, or S. Brent Plate, b.plate@tcu.edu.
A17-4
Women's Caucus Workshop
Includes three mini-sessions on Strategies for Women in the Profession; Women and Academic Freedom Issues; and Women’s Health Issues in the Academy.
A17-100
Arts Series/Films: Dawn of the Dead
Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
Through its witty and pointed criticism of consumerism, materialism, and other sins such as racism, sexism, and violence, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead rises above the average horror movie, or Hollywood movie in general, to become a timeless classic of social criticism and theological reflection. For Romero, it is not the zombie’s bite that turns us into monsters, but materialism and consumerism that turn us into zombies, addicted to things that satisfy only the basest, most animal or mechanical urges of our being. This is repeatedly shown throughout the movie in the behaviour of both the zombies and the human characters.
Directed by George Romero, 1978, 128 minutes, R rated (color, USA)
A17-101
Arts Series/Films: Les Maîtres Fous
Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
Les Maîtres Fous (The Masters of Madness) is a documentary film produced by the prominent French anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch on the possession ritual of the Hauka movement, which was practised by Songhay migrants from Niger in Accra, Ghana, during the time of French colonialism. In 1954 Rouch was invited by the Hauka to make a film on their possession ritual, which became a classic in the history of French cinema. It is currently known as one of the most prolific contributions to the cinéma vérité. Even though this film turned out to be a major point of departure for the rise of visual anthropology in the 1970s, it is continuously neglected in the field of religious studies in general and even in the field of what is recently called “visible religion.”
Directed by Jean Rouch, 1954, 35 minutes, unrated (color, France)
A17-103
EIS Center Orientation
The EIS Center orientation will feature a short presentation which will include an overview of the center, an explanation of how to best utilize the center, and a question and answer session. After the presentation, the center will be open for use, with the exception of the Interview Hall. Employers will be able to review candidate credentials, leave messages for registered candidates, and make reservations for booth space. Candidates will be able to pick up their copy of the Annual Meetings Special Edition of Openings, and leave messages for employers. The center will also
accepting onsite registrations at this time. Employers and candidates are encouraged to participate in orientation but are not required to attend.
A17-104
AAR Program Unit Chairs and Steering Committee Members' Reception
Program unit chairs and steering committee members are invited to a reception in their honor hosted by the Program Committee.
A18-2
International Members' Breakfast
All AAR international attendees are invited to an information session and continental breakfast hosted by the AAR’s International Connections Committee.
A18-3
Regional Officers Breakfast
Networking Breakfast for AAR Regional Secretaries and AAR Regional Officers.
A18-4
Theological Education Steering Committee Meeting
Carey J.Gifford, Acting Chair
A18-5
Student Liaison Group Annual Business Meeting
Appointed and elected Student Liaison Group members will gather to discuss business.
A18-7
Special Topics Forum
Theme: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the On-Campus Interview
Sponsored by the Graduate Student Committee
So you finally get that coveted on-campus interview—now what? Come hear advice from seasoned interviewers on what they are looking for (and what they are not). This is an invaluable behind-the-scenes look to help doctoral students in religion conquer the process of interviewing for a professorship on campus.
A18-8
Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section
Theme: "When You See the Teacher on the Road, Kill Him": Contemplative Practice as Pedagogy
A Practical Approach to Mysticism
Ramdas Lamb, University of Hawaii, Manoa
My proposed paper will address my methods and approaches in teaching a course entitled “Mysticism: East and West.” In it, student participation and experience are integral to their understanding of the subject matter. The course is taught every summer and typically has a waiting list of students to enroll. Over the years, I have added a number of homework assignments meant to stimulate students into a more “practical” approach to the subject. These include a 24-hour fast and day of silence. Students are also taught a basic breathing practice and method of concentration. Additionally, religious teachers and practitioners from a variety of traditions are invited as guest lecturers to help bring a more comparative approach to the material. As a result of this methodology, students find they are better able to perceive and appreciate mystics and mystical traditions and have a more practical and experiential understanding of the topic.
Contemplative Exercises in an Undergraduate Buddhism Course
Andrew O. Fort, Texas Christian University
I propose to describe and then discuss two experiential exercises which students undertake in my junior/senior level seminar called Buddhism: Thought and Practice. First, students are asked to do a week-long exercise which introduces basic Theravada vipassana (noticing) meditation, during which they keep a daily journal. The second exercise is an opportunity to reflect on the attempt to follow the first five ethical precepts of the Buddhist tradition. These exercises seek to give students a flavor of Buddhist contemplative practices in a liberal arts university setting, providing an alternative, ideally more Buddhist, mode of inquiry or “learning style,” which allows better realization of two goals of liberal education: a more accurate understanding of others’ worldviews and increased reflective “self”-awareness. Students report that these exercises are valuable in gaining a more “lived” understanding of the Buddhist tradition. I hope to hear feedback from colleagues: recommendations, reservations, and experiences with similar exercises.
Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Silence and Social Action
Stanford J. Searl, Union Institute
This paper will explore the connections among silence, education and social action, with particular attention to a Quaker perspective. The paper will be experiential, in the sense that it will offer a worship sharing approach to knowledge, meaning a way to develop a communal and experiential understanding of silence, contemplation and education. The presentation draws upon the theoretical perspectives from the literature, based upon a theoretical literature as presented by Kalamras (Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension), Mack (Visionary Women), Dandelion (A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers) and Searl (The Meanings of Silence in Quaker Worship).
Contemplation in Creativity and Inspiration
Richard M. Carp, Appalachian State University
'Creativity and Inspiration' is an elective class for upper division undergraduates. Students shuttle back and forth from personal experiences of contemplative practice to studies of creativity. These seem to connect creativity (phenomenologically and theoretically) with the personal experience of contemplation and with the world revealed therein (to the extent that these can be separated) or with the non-dual unity of self/world uncovered in contemplation.
This challenges the heroic, individualistic, 'talented genius' view of creativity with which most students begin the class. It also engages students' religious histories, personal spiritual experiences, current grapplings with religious issues, and ongoing contemplative experience during the semester. Because the class is not explicitly about religion, and because students engage in contemplation as an experiment in enhancing creativity (not, explicitly, for religious purposes), they are remarkably open in disclosing their experiences and reflecting on them and in accepting and responding to others' experiences and reflections without judgement.
A18-9
Buddhism Section
Theme: Omnibus Panel: Critical Perspectives on Interpreting Buddhist Texts and Traditions
Transdiscursivity: Japan’s Shōtoku Taishi as “Author” of Buddhist Texts and Tradition
Mark Dennis, University of Wisconsin
In describing early Western studies of Buddhism and its founder, Charles Hallisey argues that “knowing the biography of the Buddha was an essential part of any attempt to understand the Buddhist texts which were attributed to him.” This approach, common in the field’s “classical paradigm,” is also evident in studies of other “founding” figures in Buddhist history, including Japan’s Shōtoku Taishi (574-622). Modern studies of Shōtoku and the Sangyō-gisho (three Buddhist commentaries attributed to him) have sought to recover the “authentic” Shōtoku, and scholars have expended great effort trying to prove the truth or falsity of his authorship of these texts. This paper will draw on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Alexander Nehamas regarding texts, authors, and tradition as a means to offer an alternative angle of critical vision to this established approach.
Alternate Ways of Categorizing Buddhist Doctrinal Systems: The Textual Organization of Qixinlun in Commentaries
Tao Jin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
As a part of a larger study on the exegetical tradition of Qixinlun, this paper looks at the textual organization, or kepan, of Qixinlun by both the author and the commentators, and, particularly, at the latter’s elaborate and amplified reconstruction of the authorial version. By examining and delineating the intricate and complex processes of such acts of organizational innovation, this paper distinguishes between the authorial and the commentarial in terms of kepan and, in doing so, clarifies certain thematic misconceptions about Qixinlun. In the meantime, such an examination/delineation also demonstrates how kepan structurally transforms the original text, an act that allows us to appreciate and show the extent of sophistication in the writing of exegesis, and thus presents an instance of Buddhist scholasticism in the exegetical tradition of Qixinlun.
Jodoshinshu’s Two-Truth Theory and the Politics of Religion in Meiji Japan
Mark L. Blum, State University of New York, Albany
The Meiji period (1868-1912) in Japanese history turned government policy against Buddhism for the first time, resulting in persecution, loss of land and a felt need to justify the value of Buddhism for society. The combined branches of Jodoshinshu made it the largest form of institutional Buddhism, and it was particularly suspect because of its deep roots in rural communities. Both intellectuals and church leaders frequently voiced an earlier strategy of fusing the Buddhist doctrine of two-truths, one ultimate and one historical, with ancient norms of the harmonious balance of Buddhist "law" and king's "law." But because the original Buddhist formulation was not dierected at secular doctrines, these statements varied in defining the relationship between these two truths, and in doing so they reveal different presumptions about the relationship between religious authority and political authority.
Literatis' Interpretations of the Suramgama Sutra in Seventeenth-Century China
Jiang Wu, University of Arizona
This paper explores the role of Buddhist texts in a special cultural and social environment. It will focus on literati commentaries on the Suramgama Sutra written in the seventeenth century. In the late Ming, this text was extremely popular among Confucian scholars because its sophisticated theory of mind echoed the growing interests in Wang Yangming’s Learning of the Mind. Based on my analysis of these commentaries written by the literati, I will point out the intellectual connections between the Suramgama Sutra and Chinese thoughts: the concern of knowledge in this sutra echoes a long-standing intellectual/philosophical issue in Chinese intellectual history, that is, the relationship between knowledge and action. I suggest that the Suramgama Sutra, which also concerns the issue of knowledge and practice, met Chinese intellectuals’ demand for a more sophisticated solution of this issue.
Keeping Milarepa in Mind: Tibetan Biography as Autobiographical Revelation
Andrew H. Quintman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
If the eleventh-century Lord of Yogins Milarepa is commonly referred to as Tibet’s preeminent saint, credit is no doubt largely due to the biographical work of Tsangnyon Heruka (1452-1507), the so-called “Madman of Tsang.” Although written some four centuries after the yogin’s death, Tsangnyon’s Life of Milarepa quickly gained canonical status as the authoritative representation of the yogin’s activities. This paper will examine the sources of Tsangnyon’s biographical authority, probing the boundaries between biography and self-written lives by understanding Milarepa's Life as a work of autobiographical revelation. As both biographer and autobiographical subject, Tsangnyon maintains a position not only to shape the past in the present, but to do so from the position of ultimate authority. From this location literary genres blur, bios becomes autobios, and the life story, a hidden treasure waiting to be unearthed. And like a treasure, Tsangnyon’s story of Milarepa’s life surfaces as revelation.
A18-10
Christian Systematic Theology Section
Theme: Economies of Hope: Confronting Globalization
Economics of Hope: Church Life in a Global Era
Timothy Harvie, University of Aberdeen
This paper explores the impact of eschatological thinking on the church's involvment in the economics of globalization. It will examine the impact of divine promise, and its creation of a 'between-space' as an eschatological sphere for ethical action. After outlining the ethical import of such an eschatological construction, the paper will compare the derivative effects such a conception of the church has on the moral involvement of Christians in the economic realm. Comparing and contrasting the monetary activities of varying Christian proposals for economic involvement in an era of globalization, this paper will conclude with a constructive proposal for Christian engagement in the economic sphere within the globalized framework of contemporary life. These pragmatic suggestions will aim to be firmly grounded within an eschatological milieu that allows for creative praxis which creates liberating equity among all humanity.
Consumerism, Personhood, and Christian Political Witness
Luke Bretherton, King's College, London
There is little engagement by either contemporary political theologies or systematic theology with the relationship between consumerism and Christian witness. What analysis there is tends to be wholly negative. However, the negative construal of the relationship fails to account for how the churches are a key catalyst for constructive engagement with consumerism. Examples include the promotion of ethical consumption and the fair trade movement, both of which utilize consumer mediated forms of association, communication and mobilization. This paper will give a critique of the relationship between consumerism, personhood and Christian witness via a theological evaluation of the involvement of churches in the fair trade movement. Drawing on a Trinitarian theology of personhood and recent debates in ecclesiology, the paper will assess whether consumer modes of political action are hospitable to or productive of the deepening of personal agency, the flourishing of human solidarity, and the good ordering of society.
Redeeming Catholicity for a Globalizing Age: The Sacramentality of the Church
Paul D. Murray, University of Durham
This paper will focus on the way, prior to any social teaching or action, the very being and life of the Church – discussed here under the category of catholicity – should be sacramental of a globalization for the good. The paper will move through three phases. First, the challenge posed to Christian social thought and action by the emergence of a global capitalist economy will be identified. Second, via brief reflection on the character of Christian hope, the authentically sacramental character of Christian activism will be identified and illustrated. Third and most substantially, attention will turn to exploring the ways in which a redeemed performance of the catholicity of the Church has the potential to disclose afresh to the world what it might mean to exist as a global communion, the health of which presupposes the health of all its parts. The argument is traced here in outline.
Why Barth Makes a Difference in the Globalization Debate
David Haddorff, Saint John's University
This paper draws especially on Karl Barth’s theology as a way to assess the current discussion about theology and globalization. This paper is divided into two sections: 1) globalization and theology; and 2) theology and the market economy. In each section, I develop a Barthian dialectical principle of relating theological and non-theological sources, particularly the social sciences, through relating and differentiating without either complete identifying or separating. This position is contrasted with Radical Orthodoxy, which unlike Barth, repeatedly loops back to the Christian community and not to the Word of God, which transcends the church. Unlike this unilateral position that privileges the ecclesial sphere against the secular world, Barth argues that the church stands neither ‘against’ the secular nor ‘for’ secularism, as the hegemonic power in the world. Instead, the church stands ‘with’ the world, which encourages a more positive evaluation of globalization, as a place too where God’s grace may be found.
A18-11
Comparative Studies in Religion Section and Religion in South Asia Section
Theme: Powerful Objects: Materiality and Metonymy in Four Religious Communities
Most religious traditions feature a set of revered objects perceived as bearing sacred power. In South and Central Asia, ‘powerful objects’ include those central to everyday ritual life: sanctified liquids such as water, milk, honey, foodstuffs, ephemeral consumables such as smoke, ritually invested images and structures, historically significant objects, and so on. Objects can be revered for their ability to embody and manifest divinity; alternatively, other modes of representation de-emphasize divine presence. When viewed comparatively, the various “lives" of South and Central Asian powerful religious objects (in Richard Davis’ terms) raise questions about materiality, metonym, and identity. This interdisciplinary panel explores these themes through textual, biographical, ethnographic, and filmic examinations of four types of powerful objects: prasāda (divine exuberance/plenitude) in Purāņic and Epic literature; the Guru's weapons in post-colonial Punjab; lobān (ritual incense) at South Asian Muslim shrines; and sacrificial food used among Central Asian Buddhists and shamanists of Buryatia.
Form from Plenitude: Prasāda in Classical Sanskrit Literature
Andrea Pinkney, Columbia University
In contemporary Hindu practice, prasāda is often understood as material and edible, taking the form of sweetmeats, flowers or other such ephemeral items. However, in classical Sanskrit literature, prasāda is much more than just an object -- typically it is an outpouring of emotion or energy which always blesses its recipients; and less frequently is it identified as material. Presenting new research on prasāda, or ‘divine plenitude’ in Sanskrit literature, the foundational concept of prasāda is explored and understood as both material object and divine energy, or, as ‘affective’ force, which animates a wide range of transactions between humans, gods and other beings. Based on newly translated primary source material, this paper documents references to the ‘abstract’ and ‘material’ forms of prasāda in representative Epic and Purāņic literature and considers how analysis of the exchange of prasāda in these texts offers insight into the classical norms governing human-divine gift economies.
The Guru's Weapons
Anne Murphy, The New School
Sikh objects are powerful in multiple ways. Unlike such objects in many other religious traditions—paradigmatically, the Buddhist and Christian traditions—the embodiment of religious presence is not a central aspect of the power articulated through the Sikh object. Most importantly, these objects represent the Sikh past. In doing so, these objects also narrate the relationships that constitute the community, both with the Guru and his followers, and among these followers (or “Sikhs,” literally meaning the “students”) of the Guru. This paper examines the biography of a set of Sikh objects and investigates their “powers” in religious as well as political terms, in relation to their representation of Sikh past(s) and the relationships they express in the present. The overall goal of the paper is to hold the religious and political meanings for these objects in productive conversation, to understand the work of these objects in both realms.
Got Lobān? Effacement, Abundance, and the Cross-Tradition Appeal of Indian Islamic Healing Centers
Carla Bellamy, Columbia University
The powerful object next under consideration is a particularly Indian Muslim substance which figures prominently in the ritual life of dargāhs, or Muslim saint shrines: lobān or ritual ‘incense’ (an Arabic-derived Urdu term). Muslim saint shrines in northern India enjoy a general reputation of being centers of healing; however, the reasons for their appeal to members of other South Asian religious communities have, until now, been relatively unexplored. Based on extensive ethnographic research at a previously unstudied pilgrimage center, this paper situates the burning and consumption of lobān in relation to dargāh patients’ narratives of healing and recovery; and suggests that lobān’s cross-tradition appeal derives in part from its participation in several pan-South Asian cultural forms. Understanding lobān as a powerful, ritually invested object, this presentation offers insight into the cross-tradition appeal of Muslim Saint shrines through identifying the Islamic, South Asian, narrative, and non-narrative elements of lobān’s character.
Food for the Gods: The Matter of Sacrifice among the Shamans and Buddhists of Buryatia
Anya (Anna) Bernstein, New York University
Based on research with the Buryats of Central Asia, this paper-and-film presentation considers how people interact with sacrificial food to convey specific religious meanings, and demonstrates how food itself sustains and negotiates specific religious identities. Methodologically based within the framework of 'material religion,' food is understood not as a window onto a particular religious world but as a potent, edible object, which itself becomes meaningful within specific patterns of human-object relationships. In Buryatia, the moral and intellectual differences between the Buddhist and shamanist communities preclude the possibility of considering them complementary parts of one religious system – despite their many commonalities and high degree of mutual interpenetration. This presentation argues that the meaning of 'powerful food' in Buryat sacrifical ritual is contingent on how it is used and by whom, showing that two above communities – Buddhist and shamanist – endow the same foods with strikingly different meanings.
A18-12
Ethics Section
Theme: Evangelical Initiatives/Women's Bodies
Globalizing "The Word": The Influence of Faith-based Organizations on US Anti-sex Trafficking Policy
Lucinda J. Peach, American University
The trafficking of human beings for prostitution and other forms of commercial sex work (hereafter referred to as CSW) has become a multi-billion dollar global industry in recent years. The United States, especially under the current Bush administration, has been a prominent player in the “war against sex trafficking.” As part of its efforts, it has promoted and financially supported the anti-trafficking activities and agendas of so-called “faith-based organizations” (FBOs), as well as adopted particular policies favorable to FBOs. After briefly summarizing the influence of FBOs on US anti-trafficking policy, this paper will address some of the morally problematic aspects of this relationship, and conclude with some recommendations for policy modifications better designed to protect women's human rights.
Desire and "Health": Making Bodily Change in Two Evangelical Ministries
Lynne Gerber, Graduate Theological Union
Ex-gay ministries and Christian weight loss groups are important contemporary examples of religious experiments in bodily discipline pursued in a moral context. Based on participant observation, interviews with ministry members and content analysis of organizational material this paper will examine the uses of 'health' in the justification of these programs. It will argue that the discourse of health emerges as a way to mediate between an individualistic ethical orientation that informs evangelical culture and the socially oriented moral concerns these ministries raise by addressing socially marginalized groups with disciplines of conformity to dominant norms. It will explore how health in these contexts comes to have new religious and moral force in ways that are both specific to evangelicalism and reflective of larger cultural concerns.
Lobbying for Abstinence: Gender, Race, and the Politics Surrounding the HPV Vaccine
Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand, University of California, Santa Barbara
Both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline plan to release vaccines this year that in clinical trials have proven 100% effective in combating four prominent strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV). These four strains are responsible for 80% of all cases of cervical cancer, which infects 10,000 U.S. women each year, killing 3,700. While many in the medical community are hailing this as a triumph and pushing for the mandatory inoculation of girls ages 10-14, conservative Christian abstinence groups criticize the plan as sending a message to young girls condoning promiscuity. This paper explores the sexual ethics of abstinence advocated by a particularly powerful Christian lobbying group, the Family Research Council, and how their sexual ethic, when applied to the public health policy surrounding the distribution of the HPV vaccine, reinforces negative gender and racial stereotypes.
A18-13
History of Christianity Section
Theme: Author Meets Critics: Review of Lyndal Roper's Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale University Press, 2004)
In this session panelists will review Lyndal Roper's book Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (2004).
A18-14
North American Religions Section
Theme: The Washington, DC Mall: Living Civil Religion or Museum Artifact?
Religion on the Mall
Elizabeth McKeown, Georgetown University
The U.S. Congress has designated 2006 the Year of the Museum. This presentation will celebrate the occasion by identifying some of the resources offered by museums for the scholarly study of religion. Two museums on the National Mall in Washington–the National Museum of the American Indian and the United States Holocaust Museum–will provide data for a “local” venture into a much larger enterprise–the comparative assessment of “museums and American religion.”
Washington, DC: Sacred Capital on the Banks of the Potomac
Eric Mazur, Bucknell University
Analyses of American civil religion have tended to focus on rhetoric, paralleling Protestantism’s privileging of words and beliefs over actions. Spatial- and ritual-based analyses of American civil religion are more productive, overcoming an ideological blind spot related to the changing status of public Protestantism therein. Such a spatial- and ritual-based analysis of "official" Washington, D.C. (the federal government complex, as well as the museums, memorials, parks, and roads) reveals the foundations of a republic where the few are empowered to make decisions for the many. Coupled with an analysis of the federal government’s evolution from its dependence on Protestantism to its relative independent from it, this approach reveals the dynamic of an American civil religion that is more than just a reflection of its Protestant dominant culture.
A18-15
Philosophy of Religion Section
Theme: Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Religion I
Between Belonging and Estrangement: Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas on the Question of Religious Identity and Tradition in a Post-Secular World
Ronald Kuipers, Institute for Christian Studies
In Faith and Knowledge, Jürgen Habermas appeals directly to Judeo-Christian semantic resources as part of an attempt to assess the socio-political dangers inherent in newly developed reprogenetic technology. In order to understand the cultural dynamics at work in this appeal, this paper will place Habermas’ appropriation of religious themes in the context of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the dialectical interplay between traditional belonging and critical estrangement. While Habermas’ ongoing appreciation for the semantic potential present in religious culture and tradition tempers his persistent allergy to religious traditions (as insufficienly critical and communicative), he still resists a full recognition of the existence and operation of such a critical-dialectical moment within religious traditions themselves. Once we appreciate the critical capacities inherent in the ongoing donation and appropriation of religious traditions, however, the need for communicative rationality to mark an autonomous moment in the history of human discourse becomes anything but apparent.
Ricoeur, Levinas, and the Problem of Suffering
Jennifer L. Geddes, University of Virginia
This paper will reconsider the project Ricoeur proposed in The Symbolism of Evil, that is, how to revitalize philosophical thought about evil, in light of the problem of suffering--a move that Ricoeur himself suggested as one shaping his own later work. Moving from thinking about evil as sin to thinking of it in the context of suffering marks Oneself as Another, where Ricoeur takes on, among others, the task of articulating a phenomenology of suffering, akin to what Levinas does in Useless Suffering, though differing in important ways. These phenomenologies reframe the problem of evil for both Ricoeur and Levinas, suggesting ways that philosophical thought about evil might, indeed, move beyond its stalemates on the topic, particularly those involved in theodicy.
An Odyssey of Interpretation: Ricoeur's Latest Works
Dan Stiver, Hardin-Simmons University
Ricoeur's two latest works — Memory, History, Forgetting and The Course of Recognition — appear to be a return to his first love, namely, phenomology. These new works are also, however, closely related to his later hermeneutical emphasis. What I propose is not only to connect these works with Ricoeur's previous work, especially his hermeneutical and narrative arcs—but also to connect them with two other related threads that wind consistently through Ricoeur's thought. One is the recognition of a break or limit to cognition. The other is the turn to “attestation,” which allows one to make judgments in light of such ruptures. The first part will thus show how these latter works deepen the hermeneutics of his earlier works. The second part will bring out the theme of discordance. Lastly, I draw these themes together under the idea of an odyssey of interpretation.
From Verdict to Voice: Ricoeur's Reconstruction of Conscience
Diane M. Yeager, Georgetown University
In 2002, Routledge and SUNY issued collections of essays celebrating Ricoeur as a moral philosopher. Neither included an essay focused on the analysis of conscience with which Oneself as Another concludes. Addressing this lacuna, I will show that his phenomenological analysis (“mov[ing] against the current of moralizing interpretations”) is not only a distinctive contribution in itself but also allows us to better understand the philosophical and theological variations in the way others have interpreted and invoked “conscience.” Focusing then on Ricoeur’s substitution of credence/attestation in place of “self-founding knowledge” and his insistence on the intersubjective character of conscience itself, I will argue that recent efforts within the Roman Catholic and ELCA communions to associate conscientious dissent with rootless modern relativism exemplify the very dangers of moralizing conscience that philosophers have exposed and, even at their best, fail to match Ricoeur’s success in defending the association of injunction with attestation.
A18-16
Women and Religion Section
Theme: Dorothee Sölle Retrospectives
“How Do We Live Whole Lives in the Midst of a Death Machine?”: Dorothee Sölle and the Empire of Full Spectrum Dominance
Ann Herpel, Union Theological Seminary, New York
In the era of full spectrum dominance, Dorothee Sölle’s answer to her query, “how do we live whole lives in the midst of a death machine?” becomes more ethically, theologically, and politically relevant and urgent. In this paper I will examine Sölle’s answer to that question, looking at her theological assumptions, her political activism in the peace movements in Europe, and the biblical and theological resources she used to pursue a life of “real faith” in a rich and despairing world. I will argue that Sölle offers us living in the American empire of full spectrum dominance a theology of resistance that chooses life in face of the death-dealing dominating powers.
"Bound into the Web of Life": Remembering Dorothee Sölle’s Mystical-Political Vision of God through the World
Dianne L. Oliver, University of Evansville
To read Dorothee Sölle’s theology is to recognize that for Sölle all theology is done in the shadow of Auschwitz, the event that forced her to question the traditional understandings of God that contributed to such a horrific event. The result for Sölle was a revisioning of God through the world. This vision begins with a radical critique of authoritarian religion that lifts up power-over and obedience as key ideals because such values created the environment where Nazism and Auschwitz could occur without enough opposition to stop them. This paper highlights the results of this critique, showing how Sölle embraced a mystical-political vision with its move away from an otherworldly transcendence. Rather than an authority external to the world controlling the world, Sölle offered a vision in which 'transcendence is radical immanence,' connecting us to God through our experiences in the world, through our politics.
Confronting, Consoling, Contemplating: Dorothee Sölle's Theology of Suffering
Denise Starkey, Loyola University, Chicago
In her classic 1975 work, Suffering, Dorothee Sölle delivered a prophetic critique of masochistic Christian theologies of suffering that privilege the suffering of Jesus as unique and that portray suffering as a sadistic form of Divine retribution. A significant resource in Sölle’s revisioning of suffering was the contemplative tradition of Christianity and other religions. Sölle’s theology, grounded as it is in the contemplative tradition, brings to the foreground the “sinned-against” who too often find their questions and their lived experience met with a deafening silence which does further violence. Sölle’s contribution to political and feminist theology offers a consoling demonstration of solidarity for women survivors of childhood violence. A luminous aspect of Sölle’s theology of suffering is a theological and ethical progression from muteness to lament to expression embodied as resistance which is committed to the “abolition of conditions” under which the senseless suffering of women and children endures.
Dorothee Sölle Retrospective: Significance of Theology of Suffering for Women’s Spirituality
Sumi Jeung, University of Toronto
The purpose of this presentation is to explore the significance of Sölle’s theology of suffering for the spirituality of women. Sölle sees only spirituality rooted in a mystical vision of suffering has the power to correct the detrimental effects of patriarchal theologies. We will begin by exploring the personal roots of Sölle’s theology within her personal biography, then, move to consider her criticisms of traditional theologies of suffering. From there, we will investigate her core theological account of suffering as a developmental movement: from alienation toward relationship, from absence of God toward presence of God, and from apathy toward solidarity in action. It is suggested that Sölle’s theology of suffering may elicit both a paradigm shift for spiritual theology and a profound experience of renewal for the spirituality of women.
Becoming a Drop in the Sea of God's Love: The Radical Christianity of Dorothee Sölle
Krishana Suckau, Boston University
Dorothee Sölle was a theologian, mystic, feminist, poet, and peace activist. In this paper I will focus on formative experiences in her theological development as well as highlight the major tenets of her theology. I will then examine her thoughts about death, primarily drawing on her unfinished book, Mystik des Todes. In conclusion, I will point to ways in which her theology has on-going significance.
A18-17
Afro-American Religious History Group
Theme: Variegated Faces: Non-traditional Histories of Black Islam
Fashioning a Religion: Domestic Workers and the Lost Found Nation of Islam (1933-1942)
Malachi Crawford, University of Missouri, Columbia
How did women in the early Nation of Islam (1933-1942) experience their religion on an everyday basis? Until very recently, much of the literature on the meaning of religious experience in the Lost Found Nation of Islam (NOI) had focused almost exclusively on the often male experiences of pimps, hustlers, gamblers, and drug addicts. This study seeks to illuminate the religious experience of another group of NOI converts—female domestic workers—by looking at the propagation efforts of women in the NOI. Female converts to the Nation of Islam constructed a cultural apparatus centered on bake sales and Islamic dress to transmit core ideas and values of their religious community to African American society. Specifically, this study argues that prior to the well-established tradition of newspaper salesmen in the NOI, the uniforms of women in the NOI served as an essential means by which the NOI propagated its version of Islam.
Moorish Magic and Noble Drew Ali’s Temple of Hip Hop: Hip Hop Music and the Legacy of Black Nationalism in America
Paul Easterling, Rice Universtiy
What is the religious force that drives Hip Hop music? Some argue it is Islam, some argue for Christianity and some claim it is humanism; I argue that it is more. The religious traditions of the Moorish Science Temple, founded by Noble Drew Ali are a key element of the religious expression in Hip Hop music. Hip Hop lyrics are a method of conjuration used to speak to the spiritual needs of African people in America and to engage in spiritual warfare against European domination. These spiritual understandings come from the religious understandings and practices of the Moorish Science Temple. Hip Hop lyrics, like Noble Drew Ali's spiritual messages, are a powerful weapon as well as a spiritual healing agent in hip hop music, which conjures the spirit of Noble Drew Ali through lyrics that reflect the legacy of his teachings.
Death-Angels and Muslim Sons: The Question of White Five Percenters
Michael Muhammad Knight, Phelps, NY
The Nation of Gods and Earths (Five Percenters) is a New Religious Movement that began with a small cluster of exiles from the Nation of Islam in 1960s Harlem. The NGE retains an intellectual dependance on the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, most importantly the Supreme Wisdom Lessons which claim that the white race was created by an evil scientist named Yacub. Five Percenters follow the NOI doctrine that all black men are gods and all white men are devils. However, Allah, the founder of the NGE, taught NOI Lessons to a white youth that he named “Azreal,” and there have been scattered instances of white Five Percenters throughout the NGE’s 40-year history. Through the history of the Nation of Gods and Earths and the specific experiences of white Five Percenters, I will discuss how dynamic modes of authority have created flexibility in determining the role of whites through the Lessons.
A18-18
Confucian Traditions Group
Theme: The Religious Status of Confucianism
The religious status of Confucianism has been controversial at least since the work of James Legge in the 19th century. The forerunners of the field of religious studies (e.g. Max Muller) included Confucianism in their concept of "world religions," but through most of the 20th century the predominant view was that Confucianism was "not really" a religion. Most North American scholars in Confucian studies today take it for granted that the religious dimensions of Confucianism are abundantly evident. Yet, despite the growing sophistication of non-Eurocentric theoretical understandings of religion since the late 20th century, there is still widespread disagreement on the issue in the field of religious studies at large, and even more so in other academic fields. This panel will examine the theoretical aspects of this problem and the religious status of Confucianism in premodern and contemporary China, Korea, and Japan.
Confucianism as Religion/ Religious Tradition/ Neither: Still Hazy after All These Years
Joseph Adler, Kenyon College
The religious status of Confucianism has been controversial arguably since the Chinese Rites Controversy of the 17th century, and certainly since the 19th century work of James Legge. Despite the growing sophistication of non-Eurocentric theoretical understandings of religion in the late 20th century, there is still widespread disagreement on this question. The numerous theoretical problems raised by the issue include the definitions of both 'Confucianism' and 'religion,' the distinction between 'institutional' and 'diffused' religion, problems introduced by the cross-cultural application of such concepts as transcendence and immanence, and other problems introduced by the Sino-Japanese translation of the Anglo-European words for 'religion' (zongjiao/shukyo). This paper will survey the history of this debate and will offer some concrete suggestions for its resolution.
Confucian Li and Family Spirituality: Reflections on the Contemporary Korean Tradition of Ancestral Rites
Edward Y. J. Chung, University of Prince Edward Island
In South Korea, Confucian rituals (ye; or li in Chinese) influence family values, moral education, and religious thinking. This paper presents the Korean family tradition of ancestral rites, especially its modern meaning and trends. My approach engages some practical experience and comparative perspectives after discussing the relevant textual sources of the topic. This tradition embodies Confucian li understood as a source of cosmic-moral truth, personal cultivation, and family spirituality; i.e., the secular and the sacred are believed to meet through ritual practice. Its vital religious nature reveals a distinctive heritage of Confucian ethics and spirituality, which should not be confused with the old shamanistic pattern of “ancestor worship.” Does this have any implications for our teaching of Confucianism as religion? What about the Korean phenomenon of Confucian-Christian assimilation or dialogue? These kinds of questions are indeed important for a better and deeper understanding of Confucian religiosity.
The Metaphysics of Ancestor Worship in Early-Modern Japan
John Tucker, East Carolina University
'Ancestor worship' is the Western term for various family-based forms of reverence offered to deceased family members, most typically the family’s male line. Studies of Japanese religion often explain ancestor worship in relation to Shintō or Buddhism. When discussed as a Confucian phenomena, it is typically linked to teachings of filial piety, respect for elder brothers, and the overall family-centered perspective characteristic of Confucianism. This paper, however, explores the metaphysical foundations of ancestor worship in an effort to clarify some of the more distinct yet often neglected Neo-Confucian nuances of that form of religious practice in early-modern Japan. Textually, the paper analyzes philosophical discussions of 'Ghosts and Spirits' (kishin) in writings by Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), Yamaga Sokō (1622-85), Itō Jinsai (1627-1705), Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728), and Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725) to reveal how various Confucians understood the metaphysical relationship between family members and their ancestors.
The Latest Development of the Controversy on Confucian Religiosity
Yong Chen, Vanderbilt University
The question of whether Confucianism is a religion is one of the most controversial issues in the scholarships of Confucianism and Sinology. As an integral part of the more general concern about the vitality of Chinese culture in modern times, it has carved a deep but irritating mark on the intellectual landscape of modern China. W. C. Smith has once claimed that it is a question the West has never been able to answer, and China never able to ask. Smith’s concern reveals the very challenge of applying the Western concept of religion to Confucianism that is intrinsically defiant of generalizations derived from Western experiences. This presentation introduces the latest development of the controversy in Chinese academic communities during the past several decades, and reflects on its significance to the understanding of Chinese tradition and modernity in post-Confucian times.
Is Confucianism a Religion in China? Intellectual Controversies and a Preliminary Ethnographic Study
Anna Xiao Dong Sun, Kenyon College
Is Confucianism a religion? This question has been debated for centuries by historians, philosophers, religious studies scholars, and social scientists, both in China and in the West. However, since the debates have mainly centered on historical and theoretical arguments, they become intellectual disagreements about the categories of religion, or even the very definition of religion. In this project, I first discuss two intellectual controversies (one taking place in the late 19th century, the other in the beginning of the 21st century) over the classification of Confucianism as a religion; I then focus on locating and understanding Confucian ritual practice in contemporary Chinese society based on my recent ethnographic work in China.
A18-19
Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Group
Theme: Beyond Binaries: New Feminist Perspectives on Christian Themes
Sexual Ethics beyond Sexual Difference
Wesley Barker, Emory University
Sexual ethics demands a discussion of bodies, and bodies cannot be addressed or, for that matter dressed, without the tools of signification. Christian sexual ethics must ask how the discursive limits of sex have unethically delimited bodies through a silencing of their pleasures. Highlighting this relationship between bodies and Christian discourse on sex, this paper reads the body of Christ as a textual body in order to deconstruct sexual difference and dislodge it from its generative role in sexual ethics—erupting into an ethics of bodies as sites of the endless play of erotic excess beyond the material-discursive divide.
The Hairball We Cannot Swallow: Religious Readings of "Feeling Dirty" in Victimization
Amy Carr, Western Illinois University
Although androcentric assumptions about the relative purity of men and the relative impurity of women abound in religious discourse, eliminating androcentric purity rhetoric will not in itself prevent feelings of impurity or defilement from arising in victims of rape or sexual abuse. The spiritual dynamics of victimization are persistent and intense enough to warrant our developing a more nuanced analysis of the rhetoric of purity and pollution in connection with religious concepts of sin and salvation—a way that challenges androcentric connotations of purity language, while articulating the theological and anthropological purchase of purity language with respect to experiences of sinning and of being “sinned against.” Mary Douglas’ anthropological study of purity and pollution distinctions, Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic depiction of abjection, and Simone Weil’s meditations on affliction and liturgical purification all yield resources for clarifying distinctions among androcentric purity associations, pollution feelings amid victimization, and senses of stain in sinners.
Power Plays: Victimization, Innocence, and Agency in Christian Narratives of Redemption
Flora A. Keshgegian, Brown University
This paper will explore the ways in which traditional Christian narratives of redemption construct the relationship of victimization and innocence. It will argue that, in their insistence on the innocence of victims, these narratives complicate the dynamics of agency for the victimized and so undermine resources for transformation and empowerment. Although the paper will pursue the line of argumentation offered by feminist theologians who are critical of atonement theologies for the ways in which they valorize suffering and sacrifice and contribute to violence against women, it will also draw upon trauma theory, feminist theory and victim studies to probe deeper into the logic of atonement theologies, especially to reveal the ways in which connections are drawn between innocence, victimization and agency. The intent of this study is to reveal how the dynamics and logic of Christian theological ideas function and what practices and claims they make possible and/or preclude.
On the Altar: The Vagina Monologues as a Site for Ritualized Liberatory Narrative
Elizabeth Gish and Sarah Peck, Harvard University
This paper explores two lines of religious and theological thought related to Eve Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues. We critically analyze the context and impact of three sold-out performances of The Vagina Monologues in the sanctuary and on altar of a divinity school chapel. What does it mean, and how did it impact those involved, to bring stories of orgasms, menstrual blood, systematic sexualized violence, and non-virginal birth to the altar through voices of women themselves? The second part of the paper situates the annual, worldwide, and widespread performances of the Monologues in the context of Catherine Bell’s work on ritual as a strategy for the negotiation of power. We suggest that this ritualized performing of the Monologues has developed in response to the need for a feminist intervention into the dominant kyriarchal narratives about women, their bodies, and their sexuality.
A18-20
Japanese Religions Group
Theme: Japanese Religiosity from Tokugawa to the Present
This session focuses on the wide-ranging expressions of Japanese religiosity from the seventeenth century to the present. Although Japanese culture is often portrayed as homogenous, a closer examination invariably reveals extraordinary diversity in religious practices particularly within different social and institutional settings. The papers in this session will explore religious expressions such as Buddhist mortification rites, healing rites, and manga, while also touching on internal debates concerning magic, superstition, and the very definition of religion itself.
Mortification Practices in the Japanese Ōbaku School
James Baskind, Yale University
With some notable exceptions, mortification practices never substantially took root in Japanese Buddhism. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, a group of Chinese monks arrived in Japan and established the basis of what was to become the Ōbaku school. These monks brought with them contemporaneous Ming Buddhist models that included such mortification practices as: burning off a finger as an offering to the Buddha, copying out sutras in blood, the practice of absolute confinement for a period of three years, and in the most extreme case, self-immolation by fire. For a period these practices were part of the landscape of Ōbaku Zen, although they faded out as the flow of Chinese masters came to a halt, suggesting that such practices were perhaps incompatible with Japanese religious sensibilities.
A Japanese Nativist Healing Debate: Magic vs. Medicine
Wilburn Hansen, Stanford University
Hirata Atsutane’s medical text Shizu no iwaya written in 1810 showed his medical theory was highly dependent on Japanese mythology. He held the conviction that healing depended on faith in the Japanese kami. Ten years later in his Senkyo ibun, Atsutane played the recording ethnographer role with a mysterious young boy called Tengu Boy Torakichi as his supernatural informant from the Other World. Among the many fantastic tales and fascinating facts about the Other World revealed by Torakichi are serious and detailed instructions for healing a number of troubling human ailments. Most importantly, a great many of his cures are reliant upon Chinese herbal medical practices. Even though Atsutane considered Torakichi’s healing techniques to be inferior in quality, his own attitudes toward healing were evolving toward a Daoist understanding of diseases and their cures.
The Revival of Nikko Shugendo
Gaynor Sekimori, University of Tokyo
Shugendo has twice disappeared from Nikko, and twice been revived. Each time the revival has been hampered by loss of records, and so new traditions have emerged or been created, and absorbed into its identity. Early Meiji religious policy ensured that the traditional institutional and economic basis was no longer in place when the second revival happened in 1995. Moreover, questions of validity have occurred, which were not previously an issue, and this is an issue which applies to all contemporary Shugendo groups. Justification has been stated largely in ecological terms: Shugendo has a special relationship with nature that makes it a fitting practice for a world beset by environmental problems. This paper is based on a two-year study of the revived Nikko Shugendo and utilises themes of reidentification/ re-labelling, absorption of non-traditional elements, and recreation of purpose.
Manga as Living Visual Narratives in Kōfuku no Kagaku
Mark Wheeler MacWilliams, St. Lawrence University
This paper explores how Ōkawa Ryūhō’s Kōfuku no Kagaku, one of the more prominent Japanese new religions, uses manga to express its spiritual vision as a “world religion.” Like other Japanese new religious movements, Kōfuku no Kagaku has its own publishing house which produces numerous comic books designed to explain key doctrines and teachings of the group. This paper examines some of these texts (e.g. Manga de aru “Kōfuku no Kagaku,” Komikku enzeru, etc) to reveal how, through story telling and the graphic imagery of manga, they articulates a powerful new mythological vision that seeks to be universal and global. What new “textures of meaning” can be found here, and what makes these visual narratives different from traditional forms of mythology? How are these tales emblematic of some of the religious trends of new religious movements cross-culturally?
A18-21
Korean Religions Group
Theme: Aesthetics and Social Context in Korean Religions Today
In modern globalized South Korea, visual rather than text culture has emerged as a primary means for the communication of meaning, identity, and value. No less than the text culture that it challenges, visual culture can be paradoxical and dangerous. It can reify and reduce meaning, identity, and value to the static immediacy of the image and its context-laden form or it can liberate meaning, identity, and value from the tyranny of local history, tradition, and social function by juxtaposing new images of deliberate ambiguity into social discourse. How religions in South Korea are affected by and address the challenges of modern visual culture is the focus of this panel.
Iconoclasm, Cultural Space, and Aesthetics: From Fear to Celebration, Focusing on Contemporary Cases in Korea
Iconoclasm, Cultural Space, and Aesthetics: From Fear to Celebration, Focusing on Contemporary Cases in Korea
Jung Myung Won Raymond, Graduate Theological Union
My paper, then, has a dual aim: to shed light on the cause of iconoclasm as related to its context in the history of Korean Protestant Christianity and to explore reconciliation from the perspective of aesthetics. In an era of visual culture, iconoclasm is a locus in which religious and cultural geography is embodied. Iconoclasm is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a relational phenomenon in which the dynamic multiplicity of socio-cultural and religious dimensions play an ongoing role. It has become a sizzling socio-cultural issue in contemporary Korean society. In exploring the recent patterns of iconoclasm in the context of Korea, this paper will be limited to a consideration of the visual aspects of this issue, from the physical violence of iconoclasm as fear to visual aesthetic dialogue as celebration. Also, I will limit myself to outlining cases in contemporary Korea and Korean Protestant Christianity.
Buddhism, Orientalism, and Zen Ethnography in Korean Cinema
Hyangsoon Yi, University of Georgia
This paper concerns a new subgenre of Buddhist films in Korean cinema which I call “Zen ethnography.” Represented by Chu Kyǒng-jung’s A Little Monk (2003) and Kim Ki-dǔk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring (2003), films of this category present a “slice” of Korean Buddhist monasticism in an exquisite visual language. While their focus on beautiful cinematography and time-honored monastic customs enrich the cinematic texts, these films tend to erase the historical dimension of the local religious tradition for a global appeal. Using Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring as a prime example, I will examine various critical issues raised by the “secondary Orientalism” of these films.
Minjung Theology Revisited: Christian Religion in the Context of Socio-cultural Changes in South Korea
Volker Kuester, Kampen Theological University
In the 1970s South Koreas minjung movement spoke up for the observance of human rights, social justice and democratization, and regarding the division of the country for national self-determination and re-unification. In the minjung, the oppressed people, the activists had discovered the subjects of Korean history. Subsequently, a hermeneutical struggle on Korean history and culture was waged between the dissidents and the military and administrative elite. With the democratization process and the rise of globalization in the 1990s the South Korean society underwent deep changes. The paper will re/construct these developments by bringing into dialogue works of leading minjung artists like Hong Song-Dam, Lee Chul-Soo and Kim Bong-Chun with the contributions of Christian Minjung theologians. It will not only demonstrate the artists view on the role of Korean religions but also put forward the implicit challenges for the theologians.
What Do Unbelievers Believe?
Michael Ralston, Fort Meade, MD
Most analyses of data that tracks changes in religious belief in Korea over the last twenty years focuses on Protestants, Catholics, or Buddhists and the changes between or within these groups. Examining the characteristics of a fourth group, unbelievers, will shed light on an aspect of the religious landscape that is usually ignored in studies of religion in Korea. Specifically, examining the changes and interaction of unbelievers with Protestants, Catholics, and Buddhists and comparing their respective motivations and characterizations of religion will give us a better understanding of the role of religion in contemporary Korean society.
A18-22
New Religious Movements Group
Theme: Theorizing New Religions: Looking Backward, Looking Forward
The academic study of new religious movements is at a crucial juncture in its development. The significant work that has been done by the first generation of new religions scholars laid an impressive foundation on which the next generation may build. Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, this session will highlight the shifts that have (and are) taking place within the field.
Discourses of Difference: Examining the Unity School of Christianity as a New Religious Movement
Jeremy Rapport, Indiana University, Bloomington
This paper uses a case study of the religious group known as the Unity School of Christianity in order to analyze two recent typologies of New Religious Movements presented by J. Gordon Melton and Eileen Barker in their respective articles in the July, 2004 issue of Nova Religio. Using important moments in the development of Unity as examples, the paper analyzes and compares the major elements of the two typologies in order to identify the explanatory power and utility of each typology when it is used to examine a particular religious movement. The paper also seeks to make clear what aspects of Unity each typology emphasizes or deemphasizes. Thus the paper also demonstrates how each typology might work to clarify or to mask certain aspects of a specific religious movement. The paper argues that neither typology alone is adequate to explain a particular religious movement.
Resistance to Charismatic Authority
David Bromley and Rachel Bobbitt, Virginia Commonwealth University
Max Weber identified three types of authority: traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charismatic authority. Charismatic authority refers to certain quality of individual personalities by virtue of which individuals are set apart from ordinary people and treated as endowed with extraordinary or supernatural qualities. Various qualities typically associated with charisma indicate that charismatic authority might be quite resistant to challenge; others suggest that resistance is possible or likely. However, there has been no systematic investigation of the nature, source, and consequences of resistance to charismatic authority. Based on an examination of case studies of contemporary new religious movements, this paper identifies the most likely sources, characteristics, and consequences of three major sources of resistance: inner circle coup, bureaucratic insurgency, and grassroots resistance.
The Problem of Ideal Typologies for the Study of Liminal Religious Groups
Marie W. Dallam, Temple University
This paper examines a problem raised by the use of ideal typologies in the study of NRMs: the academic consequences of taxonomies that divide religions into sociological groupings, such as “churches” “cults,” and “storefronts.” I will examine this issue theoretically by sketching out the state of the field and the nature of the problem, including discussion of related concepts that may be useful for evaluating social change within religions. I will then use the particular example of the United House of Prayer for All People to demonstrate the effects of ideal typologies. This religious group has spent the majority of its existence in an academic interstice somewhere between hard and fast categories. I will explore the consequences of this interstitial existence on scholarship about the church, past and present, as well as its effect on the church’s self-perception, in order to elucidate the larger problem within Religious Studies.
New Religion Studies — Whither and Why?
Lorne Dawson, University of Waterloo
The contemporary study of new religions is reaching a cross-roads. It is facing some serious challenges as a transition is made beyond the first wave of significant scholars who shaped the field. Interest in the questions that galvanized their attention has waned, yet significant gaps remain in our knowledge. This papers schematically summarizes the significant advances in our understanding of key aspects of the study of new religious movements (e.g., who joins them, how and why?), while demonstrating the need to establish a more systematic agenda of empirical and theoretical tasks for the next generation of scholars. At this juncture, meaningful development of the field depends on the effective consolidation of knowledge and the more precise specification of research tasks.
A18-23
Nineteenth-Century Theology Group
Theme: Contributions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Major Concerns of the Nineteenth Century
Coleridge's Dynamic Construction of Consciousness as the Promotion of a Philosophical Position and a Moral Disposition
Liberty Stewart, Emory University
The theological and philosophical writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge often made consciousness a central theme. Coleridge’s musings on the faculties of reason and understanding explored, in particular, the dynamic potential of human consciousness. By focusing on the productivity issuing from the dynamic synthesis of and tension between the faculties of reason, faith, and will, Coleridge bridged the divide that debates between faith-centered and reason-centered thinkers of his time had enhanced. Coleridge argued that human flourishing issues not from the stagnant use one faculty, but from the activity between faculties. This paper argues that Coleridge’s portrayals of the multivalent interaction of human mental faculties became a means for him to stress the dynamism of consciousness both as a subject and a prescriptive object of his writing. That is, Coleridge viewed his meditations on consciousness not as mere philosophical ramblings, but as practical motivational tools for the spiritual formation of his readers.
Defending Spirit: Symbol and History in Coleridge’s Theological Hermeneutics
Joel Harter, University of Chicago
This paper will engage Coleridge’s symbol within the context of his theory of history and his theological idealism. Symbol is often approached as an aesthetic or literary concept, but Coleridge’s most famous definition of symbol occurs in the context of a discussion of history and its interpretation. Coleridge formulates symbol in direct response to the Lockean materialism of modern historiography and political economy. Coleridge defends the moral and spiritual significance of history. He argues that we need to read modern history the way we read biblical history — as symbolic of deeper meaning — and modern attempts to de-mythologize scripture, history, or nature diminish our ethical and spiritual nature as human beings. His idealism finally defends spirit and redefines reason to include faith and imagination. The importance of history and hermeneutics distinguishes Coleridge’s idealism — and his symbol — from that of Kant and Schelling.
Coleridge, Christology, and the Language of Redemption
Jeffrey W. Barbeau, Oral Roberts University
One of Coleridge’s most important contributions to nineteenth-century theology was his critical study of the Bible. Among some of his contemporaries, however, Coleridge’s unique combination of literary criticism, speculative metaphysics, and German biblical criticism proved problematic at best, especially with respect to his treatment of Christology. As Coleridge explained in the Biographia Literaria, one of his earliest religious difficulties came in the attempt to reconcile personality with infinity: though his “head” was with Spinoza, it was the biblical wisdom of Paul and John that ruled his “heart.” In this paper, I suggest that an examination of Coleridge’s Christology in his notebook commentaries on the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul provides an important means of conceptualizing his understanding of Christian redemption.
An English Church for a British Nation: Coleridge’s Ideas of Common Law, Customary Right, and Cultural Memory
Pamela Edwards, Syracuse University
The paper will consider Coleridge’s mature writings on the constitution and the common law as providing an institutional structure for the advancement British identity. It will set Coleridge’s historicist jurisprudence within the framework of his conception of the English Church. The Church, in Coleridge’s account, remained an essentially English vessel containing a fluid and increasingly hybrid British identity: if you will, new British Wine in old English bottles. I will argue that Coleridge’s constitutional writings on Church and State were profoundly historicist and idealist and yet, anchored in active institutions and events, rooted in an empirical understanding of history and progress.
A18-24
Religion and Disability Studies Group
Theme: Deaf Culture and Religion
This session spotlights papers that focus on Deaf churches and Deaf culture, particularly those that highlight the significance of the Washington, DC area.
Sacred Signs: Religion among America's Founding Deaf Community
Meredith Filiatreault, Gallaudet University
From its inception, the American Deaf community has identified closely with churches, and missionaries have strongly shaped its outlook and strategies for uplifting individuals. Between 1817 and 1917 religious people played a central and varied role in deaf cultural history. They did so through establishing deaf education, deaf churches, and deaf social networks. Religious people and a missionary spirit literally provided the resources and means by which a cultural deaf community came into existence in America.
A Journey to the Promised Land: Examining Quasi-Religious Metaphors in Deaf Cultures in Relation to Gallaudet University
Kirk VanGilder, Boston University
This paper examines the unique social location of Gallaudet University as the only four year liberal arts University in the world specifically designed to meet the needs of Deaf and hard of hearing students. Historically, Gallaudet has been held in high reverence as a ‘promised land’ of hope and education at the center of the Deaf world. This reverence takes on a quasi-religious tone at times that echoes a similar mytho-historical understanding of the origins and journey of Deaf communities in America. Paddy Ladd has proposed the possibility that this sort of understanding may constitute a “Deaf spirituality” that transcends the particularities of Deaf communities worldwide. This paper seeks to examine that possibility from a theological vantage point to determine its commensurability with Christian theological narrative as a potential area for Deaf theological development.
Christianity and Deaf Culture: Philosophical and Social Issues — A Consideration of the Apparent Conflict between Christianity and Deaf Culture
Elizabeth Parish, Baylor University
There is a prevailing perspective within Deaf studies regarding Christianity and Deaf Culture that they are ideologically in conflict. Little to no research has been done attempting to analyze this idea of a contradiction between Deaf culture and Christianity. This presentation will discuss my thesis, which has both a research and ethnographic component. I will present, using American Sign Language, justification for the research and explanation of its importance, the key arguments that comprise this apparent contradiction, and an investigation of several concepts that shed light on these arguments. This investigation includes a word-level analysis of ‘deaf’ in the Bible, the writings of St. Augustine and their relevance to the topic, the character of Jesus and his interactions with oppressed people groups of his time, an explanation of the ethnographic portion of the study and what these interviews yielded and contributed to the paper, and recommendations for further research.
A18-25
Religion in Latin America and the Caribbean Group
Theme: Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean
Africa has a long standing presence in what we typically refer to as Latin America--the very name of which plays a role in how non-Latin groups, languages, and cultures are perceived in the region. This panel explores different expressions of the spirituality and religion of Afro-descendent populations in Latin America and the Caribbean. The panelists explore Christian revivalism and the "marvelous realism" of Vodou. They also seek to understand uses and misuses of African spirituality in colonial contexts and the role of the African presence in the formation of national identities. The contexts explored include Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Peru and the United States.
Understanding Haitian Vodou through Marvelous Realism: Avoiding Postcolonial Eurocentrism
Shelley Wiley, Morningside College
In September 1956, at the first Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, Haitian intellectual Jacques Stephen Alexis presented a paper entitled “On the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians.” His use of Marvelous Realism was based on Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s 1943 description of Haiti as a place where one encounters the marvelous in the real; Alexis theorizes Marvelous Realism as a critique of the relationship between oppressors and the oppressed and as a source of strength in which Haitians can draw on their American, African, and European heritage. Drawing on Alexis’ work, and others such as Caribbean scholars Michael Dash and Shalini Puri who have developed it, this paper argues that Marvelous Realism can be an explanatory paradigm for understanding Haitian Vodou, and that using it allows scholars to avoid Colonial and Christianized readings of the Vodou tradition. The worldview, rituals, and history of Haitian Vodou will provide examples.
Race, Religion, and Identity: The Afro-Cuban Contribution
Michelle A. Gonzalez, University of Miami
This paper examines the intersection of Latin American, Black, and Latino/a culture and religiosity through the study of Afro-Cuban religion. Cuban/Cuban-American culture is characterized by an Afro-Cuban component, in its history and religiosity. My presentation brings forth the challenges that Afro-Cuban identity and religiosity pose to contemporary contextual theology and Christian communities, especially regarding the paradigms of Black, Latin American, and Latino/a constructions of race and ethnicity in religious and theological studies. One cannot understand what it means to be Cuban, regardless of one’s race, without addressing the Afro-Cuban. The contemporary era is one where the Afro-Cuban has become so engrained in the broader culture that it is part of the dominant Cuban culture. However, Cubans and Cuban-Americans have an ambiguous relationship with their Afro-Cuban identity, ranging from glorification to vilification. A study of Afro-Cuban religiosity reveals the intersection of race, religion, and identity-formation.
Misunderstanding African Healing Practices in the Dominican Infirmary: A New Look at St. Martin de Porres
Alice Wood, Bethune-Cookman College
Bernardo Medina’s Vida de Fray Martin (1663) is the only seventeenth century life of Martin de Porres, a mulatto Creole who became a Dominican tertiary in colonial Lima. It includes details omitted from later biographies and these details point to Martin’s conscious use of West African rituals and healing practices. The combination of African ritual elements with Christian symbols and prayers not only demonstrates religious hybridity within convent walls but also contributes to an ongoing misinterpretation of these African elements. The St. Martin held up to North American blacks coming to Washington D.C. in 1866 was no longer a healer but only an obedient, humble, and self-effacing black man holding a broom.
Religious Transition in the Periphery: The Case of Revivalism in Fort Charles, a Rural Community in Jamaica
Ennis B. Edmonds, Kenyon College
Revivalism, a folk religious tradition in Jamaica, is currently undergoing a transition in which its African elements are being eliminated, and in which its character is becoming more Pentecostal. The changes taking place in two Revival congregations in Fort Charles, a remote community in rural Jamaica, illustrate this transition. My research identifies at least four factors contributing to this transition: media exposure to a type religiosity that proves to be attractive, especially to their younger members; pressures for change brought by the institutional affiliation of one of the congregations with the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church; educational/class mobility of some younger members, leading to a desire to leave behind those elements of Revivalism considered backward or primitive; and an attempt to repudiate the questionable legacy of a former leader. Further research on a wide cross-section of Revival congregations will be necessary to detemine the breath and depth of the current transition.
A18-26
Religions, Medicines, and Healing Group
Theme: Healing Movement: Techniques, Philosophies, and Implications for Healing and Religion
Avoiding and Inviting Madness in Hindu Traditions
Marcy Braverman-Goldstein, University of Judaism
This paper will first explore the concept of madness (unmåda) in the Indian Āyurvedic medical treatises (ca. 3rd-7th centuries C.E.), where it is an undesirable condition. Next, the paper will look at the later nondual Śaiva yoga traditions of Kashmir (ca. 10th-11th centuries C.E.), wherein the state of intoxicated devotion (bhaktimada) became a goal of practice (sådhana). Thereafter, the paper will explore various physical practices used to achieve the desired religious experience. In the 10th century, meditation involving breath control was used as a means to achieve healing. In the 20th-21st centuries, Śaiva devotees who date their lineage back to the 10th century Kashmiri traditions, have incorporated singing and chanting into their meditation practice as additional ways of seeking the intoxicated devotion of their gurus.
Adjusting Body and Spirit: The Science, Art, and Philosophy of Chiropractic Manipulations
Candy Gunther Brown, Saint Louis University
This paper analyzes chiropractics’ philosophical framework for how physical movements of the spine produce illness or healing. I argue that the religious assumptions that inform chiropractic philosophy are essential to understanding healing practices that most interpreters have framed in terms of mechanical techniques and physiological effects. Chiropractics’ “discoverer,” Daniel David Palmer (1845-1913), embraced a vitalistic understanding of the cosmos that presumes the existence of a force Palmer termed Innate Intelligence thought to govern the human body through the nervous system. Palmer intended chiropractic adjustments to remove subluxations of vertebrae that alter nerve tension, thereby restoring harmony between the individual and Innate. Drawing upon the writings of chiropractors and historians, clinical studies of chiropractics’ effectiveness, and religious critiques of chiropractics, this paper suggests that chiropractic philosophy is inextricable from its science and art of healing movements, making chiropractics one of the most widely practiced physical religions of healing.
Spiritual Healing through Physical Practice, Physical Healing through Spiritual Practice: Native American Canoe Traditions and Community Health
Dennis Kelley, Iowa State University
In Indian Country, many cultural practices carry with them the assumption of both balance production and health maintenance, at times as epiphenomenal to their overt meaning, and contemporary Native communities have often turned to these traditions in the overall process of healing the people. This paper will articulate a meaningful analysis of the practice issues surrounding the American Indian religious revitalization phenomenon using an example from my research with the maritime traditions of the Chumash Indians of central California and the Makah of Northwest Washington State, and argue for the understanding of the return to cultural traditions in the contemporary Native American context as a functioning paradigm for the analysis of healing through spiritual identity construction and maintenance generally. This mode of theorizing can provide insight into what I believe forms the basis of modern religious behavior: ritual and its continuing centrality in the realm of religio-cultural practice.
Taiji in America: From Healing Technique to Religious Practice and Back Again
Elijah Siegler, College of Charleston
Taiji is a body practice originating in China that is growing in popularity in the U.S. It is said to have Daoist origins and to result in health and vitality. This paper argues that, in the U.S., taiji’s image as a Daoist practice originates from a particular moment in the history of the counterculture: the birth of the human potential movement. Then, this paper will analyze the relationship between taiji, healing, and religion to American practitioners. In China, Taiji’s origins do not lie in Daoism but in the 18th century Chinese military. In the U.S. taiji became associated with Daoism after it began to be taught at Esalen, the center associated with the human potential movement. Today, Taiji is taught in nursing homes and community centers by teachers uncomfortable speaking about religion at all. But Daoism continues to make implicit promises about the healing power of taiji.
Falun Gong: Exercises for Perfect Health and Enlightenment
John T. Adams, University of California, Santa Barbara
My paper will examine the “technologies of the self” found in the new Chinese “religious” movement Falun Gong that aim at individual transformation as taught by the group’s founder, Li Hongzhi. Through a process of “cultivation practice” that incorporates the regular performance of five physical qigong-esque exercises, Li claims that practitioners will not only be cured of all illness but will, more significantly, transform their “human flesh-bodies” into an immortal “Buddha-body.” My paper will consider the ways in which Li claims for his Falun Gong an ancient heritage that includes teachings and methods of practice derived from Chinese Buddhism, Daoism and qigong movements. Moreover, I will also examine how Li attempts to present his Falun Gong as a superior form of transformational practice to those with which he links his “cultivation practice.”
A18-27
Roman Catholic Studies Group
Theme: Catholicism and Sex
Is Abortion the New Hubris? Recent Catholic Anthropology, Gender, and Public Policy
Nancy Dallavalle, Fairfield University
While acknowledging some interconnection among ethical issues such as abortion, capital punishment, poverty and euthanasia, recent statements by Roman Catholic bishops have privileged the opposition to abortion -- the 'right to life' -- as a foundational commitment grounding other ethical claims. At the same time, numerous statements by Pope John Paul II gave new theological and doctrinal emphasis to 1) the notion that humanity (men and women) before God is best understood as female, as the spouse of Christ the bridegroom; and 2) that the deepest story about being female is, as with the Marian fiat, a story about maternity. This paper will ask about the emerging emphasis on abortion as the 'foundational sin,' exploring the extent to which John Paul II's theological innovations re-shaped (and 'gendered') a variety of theological concepts and contributed a powerful but problematic subtext to the current public re-consideration of abortion policy in the U.S.
Intrinsically Homosexual: The Vatican’s New Instruction on Gays in the Priesthood in the Context of a Living Tradition
Gerard Jacobitz, St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia
The author takes the recent Vatican instruction on gays in the seminary as an invitation for input from gay Catholics, and to that end proposes six areas most in need of further discussion: reception and interpretation of the instruction; problems with “intrinsically disordered acts” and “objectively disordered desire” as coherent terms in the magisterium’s wider teaching on homosexuality; natural law versus interpersonal criteria for sexual ethics; inauthenticity and self-deception as obstacles to the instruction’s implementation; increasingly widespread cultural and clinical acceptance of the evils of silence and the closet; and evidence for a development of doctrine in the area of sexuality and love culminating in Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est.
Celluloid Sex: Filmic Contributions to a Theological Discourse on Sexuality
Stefanie Knauss, Karl-Franzens University
Recently, a number of films have explored the theme of sexuality in an explicitness never before seen outside of porn cinemas. Yet, I suggest in my analysis of the films Romance, Intimacy and 9 Songs that there is more to the films than a pornographic depiction of sexuality: far from being 'immoral' or degrading, all three of them are reflections on the need for human relationships, the part that sexuality plays in them, and the importance of an integration of all dimensions of the human person in a relationship. In a dialogue between these films and Catholic teaching and theology, the filmic language can help to understand and put into words what sexuality means for human beings, thus renewing theological thinking about it and assisting in the development of a theological language of sexuality beyond the traditional discourses of power and restriction.
Grief and Sexual Symbolism in Early Twentieth Century French Catholic Thought
Brenna Moore, Harvard University
Using the works of Raïssa Maritain as a test case, this paper explores how devotions to the Virgin Mary, saints and mystics were revitalized in highly sexualized and emotive terms among French Catholic intellectuals in the years surrounding World War I. Raïssa Martian describes that this renaissance catholique looked to an erotic, affective Catholic past in order to imagine a new present in the face of the grief and tragedies of the early 20th century. Analysis of the gendered and sexualized dimensions of this ‘Catholic renewal’ points to aspects of this movement often overlooked, and ultimately, I argue that it cannot be simply dismissed as a chiefly masculine desire to reconcile itself with alterity, but is connected to a tradition of writings by both men and women who retrieve from a mystical golden age in emotive, erotic terms as an impetus for theological and philosophical creativity.
A18-28
Science, Technology, and Religion Group
Theme: Stem Cells: The Scientific Frontier and the Ethical Debate
The theological and ethical debate over research on human embryonic stem cells (hES cells) follows the frontier of a rapidly developing science. In this session, we explore the ways that theological and philosophical understandings of human dignity and wellbeing are challenged by and challenge the science and practice of stem cell research. This session will begin with an overview of the history, the science, and the competing religious positions in the stem cell debate, led by Mr. Bennet and Drs. Lebacqz and Hewlett. This will be followed by a panel addressing the various theological positions , which will include a theological and ethical analysis from Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives. Ted Peters, Karen Lebacqz, and Gaymon Bennett are co-authoring a new book summarizing the stem cell debate tentatively titled, Immortal Lines: Theologians Say “Yes” to Stem Cells.
A18-29
Biblical/Contextual Ethics Consultation
Theme: Scriptural/Ethical Reflections on the Use of Political Power
Revealing a New World: Power According to Biblical Apocalyptic
Ted Grimsrud, Eastern Mennonite University
In face of problems of global poverty and other crises, Christian theology is challenged to re-examine its understandings of power. Present political values reflect assumptions that power is best used to benefit the already powerful - a dynamic that likely will continue to exacerbate these large problems. A fruitful, though heretofore little utilized, theological resource for articulating an alternative approach to power may be found in biblical apocalyptic. In contrast to two recent construals of biblical apocalyptic, the 'future-prophetic' view of pop-theology and the 'failed-expectation' view of critical biblical scholarship, a careful examination of biblical writings such as the Book of Revelation may actually reveal a this-worldly transformative understanding of apocalyptic. This transformation is best understood more in terms of the formation and sustenance of counter-cultural communities that embody the nonviolent power of the Lamb than the catastrophic mega-violence usually associated with apocalyptic.
The Arrest of Jesus and the Use of the Sword: Critiques of Power Used By and Against Authorities
Betsy Perabo, Western Illinois University
Ethical analyses of the arrest of Jesus have traditionally highlighted Jesus’ statement in Matthew that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Yet the four gospel accounts of the arrest present a far more complex portrait of the relationship between Jesus, his followers, and the authorities than this statement might suggest. In these accounts, Jesus raises a number of other issues pertaining to political power. He critiques the way in which the authorities themselves use their power; he talks about God's capacity to use power against the authorities; and he explains the importance of allowing the authorities to use their power so that prophecy can be fulfilled. This paper will examine these accounts, as well as the contexts in which they were written, in order to bring to light the complexity and diversity of early Christian views of power.
Blast with Both Barrels: Dualism and Essentialism in the Use of Scriptural Warrants for Political Ends
Tam Parker, University of the South
One reason for the vociferous debate around scriptural use in the poltical realm is what Freud rightly called religion's 'cultural currency.' This paper addresses how holy texts are used as assets in the formation and enacting of religious and political identities, and within intra-religious discourses regarding religiously-motivated or condoned violence. The poltical cash-value of appealing to scriptural warrants for human doings finds much of its buying power in essentialist readings of texts; in appealing to a core, a canon within a canon, the tradition is reduced to a pungent yet easily digestable formula that can be extracted and applied. In addition to hermeneutical strategies, this paper addresses issues of textual authority and the seemingly unadvoidable recourse to dualistic thought and interpretation as a tactical resource in the political realm. Analysis focuses on issues of torture, kidnapping, assassination and the non/state sanctioned uses of violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Ban(herem), Genocide, and Tribalism: A Historical and Socio-Cultural Investigation of Amalek in the Old Testament
Pong Im, Graduate Theological Union
Amalek is the archetypal enemy of Israel, ultimately becoming the symbol of anti-Semitism as the “longest hatred.” In Jewish tradition, Amalek became the typus of the irreconcilable enemy of the Israelites, to be wiped out from the world. All the great persecutors of the Jewish people across the centuries are regarded as descendants of Amalek, including Antiochus, Titus, Hitler, and recently Sadam Hussein. The question is, why are the Amalekites singled out when so many nations attacked and oppressed Israel? It is surprising that there is no divine command to eradicate any nation except Amalek, regarding as irreconcilable evil. However, the logic that the other is wrong or evil could be used for legitimating of any hostile action against others. Tribal conflicts caused by social-cultural differences were common phenomenon in the ancient period so that they cannot be the same as the genocide hostility of the modern concept of the anti-Semitism.
A18-30
Contemporary Islam Consultation
Theme: Islamist Discourses and Issues
Abdullah Azzam on Sura 9: From Tafsir to Takfir to Tirade
Rosalind Gwynne, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Abdullah Azzam was bin Ladin's teacher in Saudi Arabia and collaborator in Pakistan supporting the Afghan jihad; he was killed by unknown assassins in Peshawar in 1989. With two degrees from al-Azhar, Azzam was both a fighter and a scholar. Azzam's exegesis of Sura 9, among the most militant in the Qur'an, comes from a series of transcribed lectures, of which this paper examines three elements: (1) his knowledge of classical tafsir (exegesis), both philological and legal; (2) his lack of hesitation in calling other Muslims infidels (takfir) and thus legitimate targets for Islamists; (3) his long and colorful tirades against everyone from Qadhdhafi and Sadat to Pope John Paul II.
Does Islam Value or Reject Innovation? Qaradāwī’s “Modern” Interpretation of Bid‘ah
Raquel Ukeles, Fairfield University
This paper juxtaposes two radically different Muslim perspectives on the concept of bid‘ah in the shadow of a 1983 Qatar court case. Bid‘ah, translated either as innovation or as deviation from the Prophet’s normative practice, has become symbolic of the ills of Muslim society in contemporary Salafī writings. Husayn Ahmad Amīn, a noted Muslim liberal thinker, wrote an article criticizing the rejection of bid‘ah as a pre-Islamic principle and asserting that the Prophet himself was a great innovator. Amīn’s radical reinterpretation of bid‘ah led to the entire journal being banned and so infuriated Yūsuf Qaradāwī, the leading Sunnī jurist in Qatar, that he devoted a lecture to refuting this approach. By analyzing Qaradāwī’s own treatment of bid‘ah in light of Amīn’s challenge, I aim to show that Qaradāwī reinterprets the sources both to retain an Islamic rejection of religious innovations and simultaneously to assert that Islam is innovative and progressive.
Good Hejab, Bad Hejab: Khomeini and Women’s Imperfect Obedience in Iran
Elizabeth Bucar, University of Chicago
Drawing on fieldwork and a series of essays published in Zanan magazine, I argue that the legal obligation of Hejab in Iran created new possibilities for the construction of gender by women. I focus on two distinct veiling practices. First, through performing “Bad Hejab,” women have brought western conceptions of beauty and sexuality into traditional practices of religious dress. They have thereby shifted both the parameters of local femininity and the criteria sufficient to fulfill the particular gendered moral duties of modesty and political obedience. Second, with “Good Hejab,” women have materially marked themselves as religiously pious, allowing them to participate in new ways in the political debate about women’s proper roles in the Islamic Republic. I argue that the practice of Hejab in contemporary Iran both enacts an imperfect obedience to the local gender norms and simultaneously acts to shift those norms.
Hanifi Traditionalism: An Alternative to Salafism in Chechnya
Mark J. Sedgwick, American University, Cairo
Hanifism or “Hanifi Traditionalism” was developed by Khodj-Ahmed Nukhaev, a Chechen resistance leader and intellectual, as a radical alternative to Salafism. It contends that the proper Islamic society should be based on the Constitution of Medina, and that the state–in any form–is bid’a. A truly Islamic society must instead be tribal. The paper examines the diverse origins of Hanifism, which range from Nuhkaev’s own experiences of Chechen society and politics to the work of a French Muslim philosopher and a Polish Muslim theologian from Oxford. It then argues that Hanifism shows how surprising alternatives to Salafism and Wahhabism may be developed, how globalization can impact the development of Islamic thought in unexpected ways, and how politics can interact with religious doctrine.
The Role of Islamist Rhetoric in the Perpetuation of Violence against Muslims: The Case of Hassan al-Turabi and Genocide in Sudan
Jacquelene Brinton, University of Virginia
The Islamist transformation of traditional religious concepts into terms of modern political functioning plays a major role in their perpetuation of violence. To understand this role it is crucial to examine how traditional religious concepts have been transformed in the modern era, and then to grasp how they are used currently in their particular ideological setting. This will illustrate how religious ideology has come to be used as a tool for violence and destruction in the present context. This comes from the reification of Islam, conceiving of it as a unity under which is formed a derived concept of what it means to belong to this notion, and out of which comes something akin to the invention of “imagined communities” or “identities”. It is this switch, from a diverse interpretation to a unified identity that ultimately allows violence to be perpetuated by Islamists like Hassan al-Turabi against Muslims in Sudan.
A18-31
Religion, Media, and Culture Consultation
Theme: Wrestling with Method: Case Studies in Religion, Media, and Culture
The study of religion and media is best described as an interdisciplinary endeavor—pursued by historians, ethnographers, religion scholars and communication scholars. With religion and media as the focus of their inquiry, these papers approach their materials from different methodological angles: history, cultural studies, rhetorical analysis, and qualitative reception research. Each focuses on a different medium—from print culture to documentary film—and each illuminates a different aspect of the relationships between religion, media and culture. The respondents will focus both on the contents of the papers, and on the authors' methodological and theoretical choices.
A New Mediation of an Old Art: Documentary Film as Memento Mori
Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, Catholic University of America
Memento mori (L. 'remember that you must die') pictures are images that instruct, sometimes vex, and ultimately move viewers toward a new course of action in the face of mortality. That new course involves a conversion, religious or otherwise, toward an alternative way of life. While previously the concerns of memento mori were taken up primarily in painting, today they are employed in other media. I take instances from film--the genre of documentary film in particular. Drawing upon the work of Bill Nichols, Allan Casebier, and Vivian Sobchack, I suggest that documentary film is a new form of memento mori picturing designed to offer a transformative experience for the viewer-as-mortal.
Media and Religion in the Making of Identities of Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Vocation
Curtis Coats, University of Colorado, Boulder
This paper will present an ongoing investigation into the ways in which men negotiate mediated public scripts and symbols about manhood into constructions of masculine identity. It will evaluate the interplay among religious ideals, broader socio-cultural ideals and material circumstances that play a fundamental role in identity construction. Specifically, this paper will focus on so-called “Red-State” men, long thought to adhere to the essentialist masculine constructions offered by a range of “masculinist” and “headship” discourses, e.g. Promise Keepers or Robert Bly’s mytho-poetic approach. The authors will explore how these normative constructions intertwine with other mediated resources and material circumstances in the construction of the masculine Self for these men. By examining data from in-depth interviews, the authors will offer insight into how masculinities are created by men, paying particular attention to the various complementary and competing resources used in these creations.
Poster Art and the Promotion of Religious Reading in America, 1921-1948: Constructing a Visual Piety of the Printed Word
Matthew Hedstrom, Valparaiso University
This paper explores the role of images in the efforts to promote religious reading in the 1920s and 1940s. The posters used to promote the Religious Book Week campaigns of the period constitute the primary visual “texts” of religious middlebrow culture, which arose in these years. I contend that these images helped define the proper relationship of reader to text and the place of reading in religious practice, and therefore became a constitutive element of the meaning made in the act of reading. The shift in the visual rhetoric of these posters from the 1920s to the 1940s was part of a larger, concurrent cultural and economic transition from the producer ethic of “character” to the consumer ethic of “personality.” The kinds and ways of reading promoted by liberal religious leaders in this period shaped American middle-class spirituality and sense of self in later decades.
“I Know There Is Wrestling in Heaven”: Eddie Guerrero, Wrestling Fans, and the Transformation of Mourning
Lynn S. Neal, Appalachian State University
In the world of professional wrestling, where the boundaries between the possible and impossible are constantly tested, the death of wrestler Eddie Guerrero presents one more way for the WWE and its fans to interrogate this relationship. In this paper, I analyze how a fan memorial site and two WWE tribute shows narrate the grief of Guerrero’s fans and co-workers. Placing these narratives within the context of a continuing WWE storyline about Guerrero, I argue, reveals how WWE writers have transformed the mourning of this wrestling superstar into a larger media-driven melodrama. As wrestlers, fans, and writers battle to define the meaning of Guerrero’s death and life, we can better understand the back and forth negotiations that occur between entertainment fans, media technology, and capitalist industry.
A18-32
Tour of “African Voices” Exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History
Sponsored by the Arts, Literature, and Religion Section, African Religions Group, and Anthropology of Religion Group
The African Voices exhibit examines the diversity, dynamism, and global influence of Africa’s peoples and cultures over time in the realms of family, work, community, and the natural environment. The exhibit includes indigenous art, textiles, pottery, and examples of oral literature, songs, and prayers. Anthropologist and curator Michael Mason will give an introduction to the exhibit, highlighting its religious features. For further information, contact Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton: (chh3a@virginia.edu or http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/.
A18-33
National Museum of the American Indian Tour
Sponsored by the Native Traditions in the Americas Group
Opened to great fanfare in the fall of 2004, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian is the most recent addition to the Washington Mall, and as such will provide a novel experience for many AAR attendees. The handsomely-designed museum displays objects, works of fine art, and performance pieces that tell of the histories, cultures, arts, and religions of more than 500 Native nations; but what is remarkable is how Native communities have asserted cultural sovereignty and artistic control of the NMAI’s representation. In this latter regard, the museum is a milestone in the history of representation, and as such, of particular intellectual interest to scholars generally. Gabrielle Tayac, a Native sociologist who has served as a NMAI curator will act as the tour guide.
A18-34
Plenary Address
Theme: Karen Armstrong -- Religion after September 11
A former Roman Catholic nun and instructor at London’s prestigious Leo Baeck College for the Training of Rabbis, Karen Armstrong is the author of the international bestseller The History of God and participated in Bill Moyer’s PBS series on religion. She is also the author of The Gospel According to Woman; Muhammad; The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and Islam: A Short History. In her new book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, Armstrong returns to the ninth century BCE to examine the roots of four major spiritual traditions of the world: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Despite some differences, there was a remarkable consensus in these religions’ call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today.
A18-35
Special Topics Forum
Theme: ATLA Career Alternatives Luncheon for Doctoral Students in Religion and Theology
Sponsored by the Graduate Student Committee and American Theological Library Association
Doctoral students in religion and theology often find creative and rewarding alternatives to being a professor. If you are a doctoral student, please RSVP online at www.aarweb.org/annualmeet/2006/RSVP/ATLA by noon on Wednesday, November 15 to attend this informative session about career alternatives in religion and theology.
A18-51
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Reporting on Religion from the Nation's Capital
Sponsored by the Public Understanding of Religion Committee
Washington, DC is a unique setting for reporting because of its complex politics and the presence of so many newsworthy people and events. This session will explore the behind-the-scenes mechanics and politics of reporting in the nation’s capital. A panel of scholars and reporters will discuss the various ways in which stories are chosen, what kinds of issues and problems are involved with researching their stories, how long it takes to work on particular kinds of stories, and the ins and outs of the editing process.
A18-52
Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section and Ritual Studies Group
Theme: Teaching Ritual: What We Learn
This panel draws on contributors to the forthcoming volume, Teaching Ritual, in the Teaching Religion Series published by Oxford/AAR and edited by Susan Henking. Panelists will focus on experiences they have had teaching ritual and how these experiences have refocused their teaching style and material. Their stories are idiosyncratic and very worth telling. Not only is it unusual to approach religion through ritual, but we have found our way to this approach through many routes. The panel is composed of experienced scholars pushing the boundaries of the classroom and running all the time on the doubts and mistakes that we usually keep to ourselves. In unique voices, these panelists, like their colleagues filling out the book, provide a good introduction to the field of ritual studies while airing the convictions, successes, and real-life messes that come with reorienting the classroom presentation of religion.
A18-53
Arts, Literature, and Religion Section and Religion in South Asia Section
Theme: Popular Devotional Art in Modern India
From the early forms of visual reproduction in India such as color lithography through to the Internet, Hindus have rapidly employed new technologies to tell stories of the Hindu deities and to make them visually, physically present. In the process they have brought changes. Mass reproduction allows mass access, without mediation by religious specialists. As Lawrence Babb put it in his introduction to Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, "new media have increased the capacity of religious symbols to penetrate social barriers and to bypass social bottlenecks that have inhibited their propagation in the past." This panel will continue that volume's inquiries into the history and ongoing developments of South Asian religion and modern communication media, focusing on visual arts and religious devotion. Our papers will look at Parsi theater and early cinematic mythologicals, Amar Chitra Katha comics, chromolithography, and interactive Hindu devotional imagery on the Internet.
"Mythologicals" and Devotion: Betab's Mahabharata in the Parsi Theatre
Kathryn Hansen, University of Texas
This paper analyzes the contribution of dharmik or “mythological” plays in the Parsi theatre to the development of the inter-ocular field of late 19th and early 20th c. India. New equations between visuality, religious authority, and political consciousness are plotted with reference to an influential stage version of the Mahabharata, first performed in 1913. Looking at the play’s lengthy textual and performance history, I argue that Betab embedded within the conventional narrative certain legends and theology from nirguna bhakti traditions then current among low-caste and Dalit groups. In so doing, he converted Draupadi and Krishna into agents of radical social change, creating cleavages within the theatrical public even as he established the popularity of the new genre.
Radiating a Spiritual Force: Indian Comic Books as Devotional Art
Karline McLain, Bucknell University
Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is India’s leading comic book series, featuring hundreds of mythological titles about the Hindu gods. In studies of modern Indian devotional art, comic books have been largely neglected. And yet, since its inception in 1967, this comic book series has been one of the primary means by which millions of Hindu children (within India and the diaspora) have learned the sacred stories of Hinduism. For many, reading these comics is a devotional act; in the words of one fan, these comics 'radiate a spiritual force.' Some producers, as well, have undertaken the creation of these comics with a devotional attitude. Drawing upon my interviews with comic book producers and consumers, I will discuss the sacral nature that many perceive in these comics. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the sacrality of these comics for the academic study of Hinduism.
Representing Namdev in Punjabi Poster Art
Susan Prill, Hamilton College
This paper examines portrayals of the Maharashtrian bhakti saint Namdev in poster art found at two Punjabi shrines: one at Ghuman, which draws mainly Sikh devotees, and one in Bassi Pathana, which has a predominantly Hindu base. The two communities make competing claims about Namdev’s life story and personality. Posters published at Ghuman tend to show Namdev as an older bearded figure and often resemble portraits of Guru Nanak. Bassi Pathana, however, uses portraits of Namdev as a younger, moustached, short haired Hindu widely available in Maharashtra. The Ghuman shrine asserts that it is the location of Namdev’s samadhi, while the Bassi Pathana temple states that Namdev is buried in Pandharpur, Maharashtra. The portrayals of Namdev available from Ghuman reaffirm specifically Punjabi and Sikh statements about his life story and teachings which are not found in either the literature or the art of the Hindu Namdev temple at Bassi Pathana.
Temple in a Frame
Richard H. Davis, Bard College
Throughout the history of the genre of popular chromolithographs known as 'framing pictures' or 'God posters,' these two-dimensional images have regularly figured as recipients of devotion. And throughout the genre's history, artists have found ways to accommodate this devotional use. They have developed visual strategies to free the gods from narrative contexts and assimilate them more to enshrined icons, like a temple image encased in a frame. In this talk I will look briefly at some of the formal results of this ongoing artistic response to devotional usage. I will begin with some of the early and influential experiments by Ravi Varma and his successors, notably the Nathadvara poster artists, as well as later South Indian poster artists like Silpi, Kondiah Raju, and Subbiah. Among the strategies I will illustrate are frontality, eye-centricity, inclusion of puja paraphernalia within the image, representations of existing enshrined images, and depictions of puja.
Digital Deities, Online Puja, and Virtual Pilgrimage: An Ongian Reading
Natalie Marsh, Ohio State University
Web and internet technologies are transforming Hindu religious practice and identity. A devotee can now access a virtual shrine to conduct puja before an image of almost any Hindu deity—clicking-and-dragging flowers to place on the deity image, and, in like gesture, circling an animated set of incense sticks around the deity, lighting ritual lamps, ringing virtual bells, and so on. In a valuable essay, Stephen D. O’Leary considers online religion a significant development in the history of religion, drawing on the seminal work of Walter J. Ong, who proposed an “evolutionary theory of culture that focuses attention on the modes of consciousness and forms of communality enabled and promoted by communication technologies and practices, from oral speech to written discourse to printing, radio, television, and computer-mediated communication.” Following O’Leary’s work, I intend to explore the ways in which web-based puja practices may support Ong’s far-reaching theory.
A18-54
Ethics Section and Childhood Studies and Religion Consultation
Theme: Children's Rights and Responsibilities: Interfaith Perspectives
This session features four papers that draw particular attention to religious responses to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, freedom of religion and children, and roles and responsibilities of children within families and communities, with a response by distinguished legal scholar and human rights activist Robert F. Drinan, S.J.
Should the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Be Ratified and Why?
Don S. Browning, University of Chicago
Why is the United States, along with Somalia, one of two countries in the world that has not ratified this 1989 United Nations Convention? There are reasons - some cultural, some religious, some political, and even some that may be constitutional. But do they hold? This paper contends that if the Convention is interpreted in light of earlier human rights documents, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it should be ratified. It further argues that such an interpretation is justified.
Children's Rights and the Common Good in Catholic Social Teaching
Mary M. Doyle Roche, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
This paper will explore the issue of children’s rights and responsibilities from the perspective of the common good in Catholic social teaching. As full, interdependent members of the many communities of which they are a part, children claim the fruits of our common life together and are called to ever increasing participation in that life. The language of children’s rights provides a way to critically assess the concrete well-being of children. Though Catholic teaching has made a more robust commitment to the rights of the family, children’s flourishing demands both protection and participation which can only be guaranteed through the cooperation of the many levels of society. The common good’s insistence on distributive justice and participation, guided by the principle of subsidiarity, can provide a solid foundation for a commitment to children’s rights that will be tested in the context of children’s participation in economic life.
Muslim Children: Problematics and Prospects in Light of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
Zayn Kassam, Pomona College
There are a range of issues facing Muslim children in the world today, including militarization of male children and rape as a weapon of war, increased incidence of HIV/AIDS, female genital cutting, child marriage, and child sexual and labor trafficking. What kinds of Islamic ethical responses could be made in such instances, and how do they support or impede the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?
Human Rights in Light of Children: A Christian Childist Perspective
John Wall, Rutgers University
This paper joins conversations in childhood studies about 'children's rights' and argues from a Christian ethical point of view that such rights need neither be rejected nor wholly accepted but rather reinterpreted in what is termed a 'childist' way. That is, in analogy to movements like feminism and womanism, a Christian childism takes the perspective of children in all their agency and diversity as helping to shape in new ways Christian ethical methods and norms as such. It is argued that the Christian moral tradition contains several precedents for such an approach, but also that a fully Christian childism will interpret human rights in a new way as dispruptions of assumed moral horizons and calls to love and hope as forms of assymetrical, self-creative moral responsibility.
A18-55
Study of Islam Section
Theme: Patterns of Religious Authority and Reform among African Muslims
This panel seeks to correct recurrent misconceptions about Islam in Africa by highlighting how African Muslims have defined and practiced their religion, and continue to do so, in a permanent dialogue with religious traditions in the wider Islamic world, and in a continuous interaction with their own social contexts. Rather than reproducing the picture of a “vulgarized” version of Islam, as much scholarship has done throughout the colonial and early postcolonial period, the contributions present case studies from four different regions of sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana/Burkina Faso, Northern Nigeria, Somalia and Kenya) that are more nuanced. While the inquiry into patterns of religious authority gives us the opportunity to approach questions of leadership and religious legitimacy from a comparative perspective, the focus on religious reform allows us to draw a more accurate picture of the processes, discourses, and interconnections that have shaped Muslim communities in Africa both past and present.
Debating the Equality of Souls: Social Status, Religious Authority, and Sufi Hagiography in Italian Colonial Somalia
Scott Reese, Northern Arizona University
Using hagiographies, religious poetry, theological texts and oral traditions this paper will examine the role of religious authority in debates over social inequity within Somali society of the early 20th century. Taking as its starting place the debates over kafa’a or “equality of status” found in Somali mystical literature, it will explore social status as an issue that became increasingly important as both Italian colonialism and reformist religious discourses began to have an increasingly important impact on the local social landscape. More importantly it will examine how religious leaders both influenced and even defined such issues through religious texts. This paper, in short is an exploration of religious works as living texts that are as much about the immediate worlds of the living as the deceased saints they seek to memorialize.
Between Tradition and Reform: The Hadhrami Model of Islamic Learning and Religious Authority in Contemporary Kenya
Ruediger Seesemann, Northwestern University
For centuries, Muslims from the Hadhramawt (southern Yemen) have played a leading role in the spread of Islam in many parts of the Indian Ocean world. Previous studies have drawn a contradictory picture of the Hadhrami tradition in the East African context. While Hadhrami scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have often been portrayed as religious reformers, the more recent representatives of Hadhrami scholarship appear as the champions of “popular Islam,” whose “traditional” beliefs and practices are challenged by a new brand of Islamic reformism that propagates Salafi and Wahhabi ideas. This paper examines the dialectics of tradition and reform as reflected in the recent development of Hadhrami-run institutions in Kenya. It shows how contemporary scholars within the Hadhrami network draw on new intellectual sources and methods in order to respond to modern challenges reassert their authority and counter the increasing influence of reformist groups.
Western Educated Muslim Elites and the Development of Ahl al-Sunna Reform Movements in Ghana and Burkina Faso, 1960-1990
Ousman Kobo, Gettysburg College
This paper highlights the contributions of Western educated Muslims to the spread of Ahl al-Sunna/Wahhabi movements in Ghana and Burkina Faso in order to tease out the effects of colonial education on the movements’ development. An examination of the role these elites played in the diffusion of Ahl al-Sunna/Wahhabi ideas allows us to shift our analytical focus from merchant and Arabic elites to other Muslims whose perceptions of religious purity as well as their socio-religious outlook were shaped by their experiences in colonial and post-colonial secular institutions. For these Western educated Muslims, Ahl al-Sunna/Wahhabi doctrine provided the framework within which they could address problems of social injustice and inequality fostered by the dominant elites in terms of Islamic “orthodoxy.” By examining a group of actors that has been almost completely neglected in previous studies, the paper attempts to further our understanding of Islamic reform movements in the West African context.
Some Sociological Aspects of Dan Fodio's Nineteenth-Century Reforms
Zakyi Ibrahim, University of Winnipeg
In 1804, Shehu Usman Dan Fodio, a Muslim scholar from what is today Northern Nigeria, mounted an attack against Hausa chiefs, and together with his companions, established an Islamic state in the region. They introduced religious reforms and effected changes in the social sphere. Specifically, this study is a sociological analysis of Dan Fodio's opinions on marriage, women's movement, and their education. I argue that although Dan Fodio's ideas on marriage reflect traditional orthodoxy when it comes to polygamy and loyalty, his rejection of the competition for the hands of women, forcing young women into marriages, and the inequality among co-wives is revolutionary and pragmatic. I also argue that Dan Fodio's writings and calls for educating one's own daughters and wives are original and penetrating. The study concludes by highlighting Dan Fodio's new image as a pragmatic and social advocate, even if he may also have been strict.
Popular Revival as Political Reform: The Northern Nigerian Ideal of Islam in a Corrupt Society
Shobana Shankar, Lafayette College
This paper argues that, contrary to the image of Muslims passively following clerics who espouse religious politics as opposed to secular paths, religious models of reform in Nigerian society are dynamic and have found inspiration in many bodies of thought and practice. The paper traces the idea of reform from the nineteenth century, when jihads led to the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate to the present-day, to demonstrate the importance of religious figures as leaders emerging from outside politics to spark social reform. From Muslim clerics to Christian missionaries, their migratory and ascetic qualities are seen to stand in stark contrast to centralized power. Using written and oral sources, this paper shows that Nigerian Muslims have defined reform and corruption in constant conversation with a variety of communities and traditions. This very dynamism has inspired debates amongst Muslims over the power of religious personnel, texts, practices, and history.
A18-56
Theology and Religious Reflection Section
Theme: Empire and the Other
Empire Meets Eros: A Queer (De)Construction
Thomas Bohache, Episcopal Divinity School
Empire facilitates the colonization of bodies, while Eros involves the empowerment of bodies. This paper will argue that the U.S. Empire manifests itself not only in its (mis)treatment of nations and peoples outside the U.S. and racial and ethnic minorities within the U.S., but also in its “colonization” of queer persons through a process of what this presenter calls “heterocolonialism,” a systematic fashioning of society, culture, and religion on the basis of heteronormativity and presumed heterosexuality. The presentation will examine how gay men have expressed themselves erotically and discuss recent efforts of queer theorists and theologians to avoid a full-scale “sex panic” through greater concentration on sexual ethics rather than emphasis of specific sexual behaviors. The presentation concludes by discussing how gay men might formulate a “postcolonial” sexual theology of spiritual eroticism that does not exalt conformity at the expense of authentic erotic feeling.
Empire(s), Religious Fundamentalism, and Religious Construction of Gender
Namsoon Kang, Texas Christian University
Generally speaking, colonialism/imperialism is about power and ruling, and thereby about domination and subjugation. The empire-mentality, which is firmly grounded on the “ethics of absolute power and domination,” is often accompanied with the religious fundamentalism. The surge of religious fundamentalism, since the 1970s and especially after the 9/11, in culturally distinct areas of the globe has raised concern and interest among scholars and citizens. Religions of the world that have witnessed the rise of religious fundamentalism are diverse. While permeating all aspects of social life and organizations, fundamentalist movements have paid more attention to politics and family. In the paper, I would like to explore the nature of empire-mentality; and how it has constructed gender and mobilized women as wives and mothers to maintain its hegemony, which has also often used religions as justification of the multiple colonizations in a form of religious fundamentalism.
Kraemer vs. Kraemer: Empire and the Construction of Religious “Others” in the Dutch Theological Tradition
Jan Pranger, Concordia College, Moorhead
This paper makes a contribution to the development of a postcolonial theology for Europe and elsewhere by critically exploring the construction of religious “others” in the Reformed theological tradition within the context of Dutch colonialism. It focuses especially on the work of Hendrik Kraemer, whose role and contribution is contextualized within the Dutch colonial relationship with Indonesia. Kraemer’s timely project was to uncouple Christian faith and the West amidst the anti-colonial nationalisms and the looming decolonization in the first half of the 19th century, but ironically ended up reaffirming Orientalist views of the East’s dependency upon colonial Western forms of Christianity. The paper distinguishes a theological, a comparative religious, and a sociological dimension in Kraemer’s representation of religious “others,” and links each of these dimensions to specific Orientalist concerns and colonial experiences.
Foucault and Empire: A Poststructuralist Model for Doing Feminist Theology in a Postcolonial Age
Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Oberlin College
Western feminist theologians are increasingly rejecting the authority of the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition, opting for doing theology accountable instead to the experience of women in their particular communities. Antagonism to the hegemony of creedal orthodoxy is a theme in postcolonial feminist writings as well because it has been a weapon for legitimizing Western missionary colonization. This paper explores two sets of questions: 1) What theoretical resources are available for Western feminist theologians to continue to engage the creedal tradition in ways that support women’s agency and empowerment? I attempt to demonstrate how aspects of Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist views on power provide helpful resources. 2) What are the possibilities as well as the limitations of this western-oriented poststructuralist proposal for postcolonial feminist (and other) theologians, and would such a proposal be, in effect, a further encroachment of empire?
A18-57
Women and Religion Section
Theme: Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Women in Dialogue
With an unfinished agenda, the ancient stories of Hagar and Sarah reverberate in contemporary discussions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These stories challenge the grand narrative of Abraham as the founding and unifying father of the three religions; they stir up issues of ethnicity, class, and gender; they confront the treatment of "the other" by the ruling group; they raise questions about the exiled and the disposable; and they upset established rubrics of power and difference. As avowed children of Hagar and Sarah and as scholars committed to the relevance of these figures for academic, social, and political thought and action, the members of the panel will wrestle with the stories as they impinge upon interfaith explorations. Their wrestling will revolve around the newly published book entitled Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children and includes essays by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women writing from feminist and womanist perspectives.
A18-58
Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Group
Theme: Asian/Asian American Women Negotiating Power and Authority
Religion beneath Mother Tongues: Religious Practice and the Act of Writing in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
Min-Ah Cho, Emory University
Since the 1990’s the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), a Korean American performance artist, filmmaker, and poet, has drawn attention from a number of Asian-American feminist writers. While these writers mostly discuss and emphasize Cha’s concerns with female agency and cultural identity, they largely ignore the influence of Christianity, which immensely affected both her thoughts and writings. The purpose of this paper is first to supplement the feminist conversation by examining this Christian influence; and secondly, to discuss the implications of the act of writing as a transformative tool that discloses the cultural displacement of Asian-American believers. Exploring the ideas of “writing” and “translating” in her book Dictee, this paper traces the way Cha weaves the culture-gender disjunction of the immigrant journey into the everydayness of religious practice.
Progressive Politics, Conservative Practices: Re-thinking Gender in Asian American Church
Karen Yonemoto, University of Southern California
Contrary to the assumption that evangelical churches reinforce conservative social politics, a growing number of Asian American churches in Los Angeles are promoting progressive politics of race and gender. However, despite their progressive rhetoric, case studies of Asian American churches suggest that they in fact observe conservative gender practices that keep women in positions of subordination and marginalized spaces. This paper will address the tension between the progressive rhetoric asserted by church leaders and the conservative realities experienced by church congregants. Based on discourse analysis of sermons, participant observations, interviews and archival research, the paper suggests that the use of progressive language merely masks conservative church practices thereby protecting male privilege and power. It also discusses the ways that lay women and men create subversive spaces to define and re-define new politics of gender and power, and ultimately re-shape church culture through the embodiment of new gendered and racial selves.
Gender as an Analytical Tool of "Sin and Redemption": Women, Religious Fundamentalism, and Homosexuality in the Asian Pacific American Community
K. Christine Pae, Union Theological Seminary, New York
Through the lens of gender, this paper analyzes the religious rhetoric, 'sin and redemption' in relation to the power structure of Christian fundamentalisms in the APA community. Christian fundamentalism uses gendered expression to reinforce its religious significance and power among its followers. The most powerful Christian rhetoric of sin and redemption defines who has power (domination) to redeem sinners (submission) as well as who is in and who is out. This rhetoric hides discrimination against women by directly attacking homosexuality. Many APA women oppose homosexuality without critically examining the connection between oppression of women and that of sexual minorities. Furthermore, the fundamentalist rhetoric supports the current U.S. policy while distancing people from the political arena. Christian fundamentalism simplifies ethical criteria for multiple-layered individual and social issues with the rhetoric of sin and redemption. Christian fundamentalism appeals to many APAs because of their physical, cultural, and emotional isolation from the larger society.
A18-59
Augustine and Augustinianisms Group
Theme: Augustine and Biography/Augustine and the Holy Spirit
In the Company of Augustine: The Postmodern Self and the Unauthorized Life of a Saint
Felix B. Asiedu, Middlebury College
The paper uses J. J. O’Donnell’s recent biography of Augustine as a point of departure for a number of reflections on the nature of biography and its relationship to the writing of history, and what is entailed in writing the “unauthorized life” of a saint. The paper begins with a number of recent interpretations of Augustine that define themselves as postmodern. It then moves to O’Donnell’s specific contributions to the subject in three different works: his much earlier book in the Twayne Series on Augustine, the 3-volume Commentary on the Confessions, and finally the new biography. The third part of the argument deals with a couple of Augustine’s contemporaries and the kinds of biography they would have written if they had had the opportunity to do so. This third part allows us to re-engage O’Donnell’s new biography methodologically and critically.
A Critique of O’Donnell’s Augustine (2005) and Lancel’s Saint Augustine (2002)
Jane E. Merdinger, Greenbelt, MD
This paper will critique James J. O’Donnell’s new book, Augustine: A New Biography (HarperCollins, 2005). I shall examine several themes in the volume and comment on O’Donnell’s methodology. Though the principal focus will be on O’Donnell’s book, I shall contrast it occasionally with Serge Lancel’s Saint Augustine (Eng. Trans., SCM Press, 2002). Peter Brown’s revised edition of his biography of Augustine (2000) will figure only incidentally here. From my remarks, it will become clear that Lancel and Brown present a more accurate and balanced portrait of the bishop of Hippo. Primarily a literary study of Augustine, O’Donnell’s book concentrates chiefly on the Confessions until finally expanding into a more scholarly survey of Augustine’s life. I shall demonstrate that scholars and general readers alike will deem O’Donnell’s work disappointing, while specialists will find Lancel’s superb historical and archaeological account of Augustine and the African Church richly rewarding.
The Unction of Christ with the Holy Spirit as a Difficulty for Augustine's Pneumatology
Dennis W. Jowers, Faith Seminary
Scriptural statements to the effect that Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit seem to conflict, as Augustine himself recognizes, with Augustine's belief that the order of the divine missions uniformly corresponds to the order of the intra-divine processions. In our paper, we intend, first, to analyze the various responses Augustine proffers to this difficulty throughout his corpus; second, to argue for the inadequacy of each of these responses; and, third, to show that, in spite of Augustine's failure explicitly to resolve this difficulty, his understanding of the Holy Spirit as the mutual love of the Father and the Son supplies a viable means of reconciling his views on the relation between temporal missions and eternal processions with the scriptural accounts of Christ's unction with the Holy Spirit.
Augustine's Pneumatological Theology of Grace
Aage Rydstrom-Poulsen, University of Greenland
While Augustine is defining grace as forgiveness of sins christologically, he is explaining the realization of the process of salvation pneumatologically. In his teaching about the process of salvation, Augustine explains that faith and righteousness are divine gifts, and in his interpretation of Romans 5:5 he maintains that love even is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the human person. By this, Augustine provides the basis of a theory of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit which becomes very successful in the Western Augustinianism until the end of the Twelfth Century.
A18-61
Bonhoeffer: Theology and Social Analysis Group
Theme: Bonhoeffer Ethics: A New Edition
The new translation and edition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, volume 6, Fortress Press, 2005) has sparked renewed scholarly interest in this fascinating fragmentary work. This session's papers will address questions spanning some of the range of the Ethics itself: from theological/conceptual questions of conscience and responsibility, or the distinction between ultimate and penultimate concerns, to particular ethical questions such as conscientious objection, euthanasia, and political dialogue. The papers draw connections between Bonhoeffer's writing and questions of, e.g., 20th century South African reconciliation and 21st century U.S. health care, while simultaneously pointing out questions or resources yet untapped among these ethical fragments.
Bonhoeffer’s Conscience Clauses: Ethics and the Ethics of Refusal
Nancy Berlinger, The Hastings Center
This paper will engage the newly translated Ethics to explore Bonhoeffer’s relevance to contemporary debates over conscientious objection by health care providers and consumers. After an overview of conscientious objection in health care, with attention to “conscience clause” legislation and ethical questions, the paper will discuss Bonhoeffer’s extended treatment of “conscience” in “History and the Good [2]” with reference to contemporary cases. It will examine the new translation’s extensive commentary on Bonhoeffer’s own actions and remarks concerning conscience-based resistance to conscription, and discuss the relevance of the conscription analogy to conscience-based refusal in other contexts. It will conclude with observations on the responsible use of Bonhoeffer’s highly contextual writings on the issues that, in our own political and religio-cultural context, are fueling conscience-clause legislation and related activism, and offer proposals for using Bonhoeffer’s “conscience” material as resources for a theologically-grounded understanding of the ethics of refusal in our own culture.
“Nobody Can Altogether Escape Responsibility” – Bonhoeffer’s Call for a Responsible Life in His Ethics
Christine Schliesser, Fuller Theological Seminary and Tuebingen University
“This life, lived in answer to the life of Jesus Christ [...], we call ‘responsibility’” (Ethics 254). For Bonhoeffer, responsibility is nothing less than the claim to one’s entire life. Throughout Bonhoeffer’s life, his understanding of responsibility played a pivotal role not only for his theology and ethics but also for his personal life. For Bonhoeffer, “nobody can altogether escape responsibility” (Ethics 258). Throughout his Ethics he thus calls his readers – us – to a life lived in responsibility. In my presentation I will first briefly sketch Bonhoeffer’s understanding of responsibility. This will be followed by a short outline in how far each of the different constituents of responsibility has played a role in Bonhoeffer’s decision to join the political resistance. Lastly, I will seek to draw the consequences for us of Bonhoeffer’s call for a responsible life by examining how Bonhoeffer’s understanding of responsibility can be applied today.
Promoting a Genuine Dialogue between Religion and Politics: Bonhoeffer's Ethical Distinction between the "Ultimate and the Penultimate Things"
Ralf Wuestenberg, Freie Universität, Berlin
By way of exploring Bonhoeffer's contribution to the dialogue between religion and politics the presentation will focus on the essence of Bonhoeffer's ethical insights in the manuscript 'the ultimate and the penultimate things' and its applicability to current political issues such as the political changeover in South Africa. Where are the connections between ultimate things, such as eschatological reconciliation or justification by grace alone, and penultimate things, such as the political will to organise forums like Truth Commissions in order to make reconciliation possible? How do we get at the connections between political and eschatological reconciliation with the help of Bonhoeffer's ethics? What can we learn from this example of “dialogue” between religion and politics for conflict-resolving strategies?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Critique of Nazi "Euthanasia" as Reflected in His Ethics, Two Letters, and a Sermon
LeRoy Walters, Georgetown University
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his discussion of 'euthanasia' in January of 1941 while he was living at a Benedictine abbey, Ettal, near Munich. His critique of 'euthanasia' had an immediate relevance, for the Nazi program of killing adult inmates of asylums -- the T4 program -- had been initiated a year earlier. This centralized program had been preceded in late 1939 by the emptying of multiple asylums in Pomerania and western Poland and the killing of their inmates through shooting or the use of poison gas. This presentation will explore the context for Bonhoeffer's 'euthanasia' discussion in Ethics, analyze his arguments, and seek to demonstrate that his moral critique of 'euthanasia' was totally consistent with his thinking since at least 1933. I will also suggest that Bonhoeffer was aware of the memorandum on 'euthanasia' that Paul Braune, after consultation with Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, had submitted to Hitler in July 1940.
A18-62
Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection Group
Theme: Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection: Theoretical Concerns and Practical Applications
Academic Buddhist Studies as a Resource for Buddhist Communities: Problematics and Possibilities
John J. Makransky, Boston College
The goals of academic Buddhist studies are not the same as those of Buddhist practice communities, and this tends to keep each at a distance from the other. Academic Buddhist studies critically analyzes the historical, cultural and social conditions behind Buddhist formulations and institutions. Buddhists must learn to appropriate such critical findings if they are successfully to find their place in the modern world and to speak authoritatively and knowledgably within it. Yet most traditional monasteries and dharma centers remain largely uninformed by such findings. Can Buddhist studies scholars serve both the interests of the modern academy and the interests of Buddhist communities in their need to find new ways to meet modernity? This talk explores some of the problematics and possibilities of relating academic study of Buddhism to Buddhist practice and service to Buddhist traditions.
Vexing Weber: Critical Buddhist Scholarship as a Vocation
James Mark Shields, Bucknell University
Is it possible to pursue the academic study of Buddhism in deep relation to, or even as Buddhist practice—practice here meaning not simply individual meditation but ethical and political activity based on Buddhist precepts? What are the contours or limits, if any, to such ‘engaged’, ‘faith-based’ or ‘prophetic’ scholarship? In this paper I will clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the hermeneutical strategies employed by Critical Buddhism (hihan bukkyō)—in particular the issue of objectivity—with respect to the goal of establishing a form of Buddhist scholarly praxis. To this end, the methodology of Critical Buddhism will be compared and contrasted to hermeneutical and methodological issues raised in recent Western debates on scholarship in religion. A thorough investigation of criticalism in terms of scholarship and religion itself can benefit not only modern Zen and Buddhist scholarship, it may also contribute to 'constructive studies' in religion more generally.
An Engaged Buddhist Response to John Rawls' The Law of Peoples
Sallie B. King, James Madison University
InThe Law of Peoples, John Rawls constructs a set of basic principles and norms for international law. Importantly, Rawls claims that his Law of Peoples could be accepted by a “decent” society that does not embrace Western liberal political theory. Thus Rawls implicitly invites consideration of his Law of Peoples from the perspective of other cultures. In this paper I take up this invitation from the perspective of Engaged Buddhism, the socially and politically activist form of Buddhism that developed largely in the 20th century. While Engaged Buddhists would take a generally positive view of Rawls’ Law, we find that contrary to his claim, Rawls’Law is not entirely free of the bias caused by commitment to a particular metaphysical view. Buddhist emphases upon interdependence and human development do yield a somewhat different framework for conceiving international relations.
Toward a Pure Land Buddhist Conception of Truth: Shinran’s Jinen Honi in Comparison with Heidegger’s Essence of Truth
Dennis Hirota, Ryukoku University
Japanese Pure Land Buddhist tradition has commonly been grasped in the West within a framework "explicit or implicit" of traditional Christian assumptions and perspectives. Among scholars of religious studies, Jodo Shinshu in particular has been widely characterized as primarily a “simple doctrine of salvation through faith.” The displacement, in some currents of twentieth century philosophical thought, of the subject-object dualism as the central paradigm of knowledge and philosophical issues may provide tools for an alternative approach to clarifying the nature of entrusting oneself to Amida's Vow (shinjin) and the significance of the act of saying Amida’s Name (nembutsu). I will focus on Heidegger’s conception of truth in his pivotal essay “On the Essence of Truth” as possessing distinct resonances with basic concepts and structures of Shinran’s thought and thus affording means for articulating a broader and more illuminating approach to the Shin Buddhist heritage and the nature of faith in Mahayana tradition.
A18-63
Comparative Religious Ethics Group
Theme: Authority, Justice, and Compassion in Comparative Perspective
Beyond Bully Pulpits: The Persuasiveness of Clerical Authority
Elizabeth Bucar, University of Chicago
I explore the practical justifications of authority within two traditions, Roman Catholicism and Shi`a Islam, through the writings of two important clerical leaders in the twentieth century: John Paul II and Ayatollah Khomeini. I argue that John Paul and Khomeini share a view of authority as a dynamic interplay between leader and laity. They differ, however, on the extent to which they qualify their own authority, the role of the common believers in authorizing clerical authority, and the possibility of dissent to authority. Authority is thereby in both cases a second order operation that relies on each leader’s persuasive ability to tie his teachings to the prior assumptions of his particular community.
The Fatwa and the Epistle: Genres of Consultation and Advice-Giving in Christianity and Islam
Betsy Perabo, Western Illinois University
This paper will consider the similarities between Islamic and Christian approaches to genres of consultation and advice-giving on moral matters. One means of formal response in Islam is the fatwa, a legal judgment issued by a mufti in response to a specific question; a somewhat similar genre in Christianity is the epistle or letter. After reviewing the origins of both traditions, I will consider the continuing influences of these genres.
Comparing Senses of Justice: Kongzi, Rawls, and the Nature of Comparative Ethics
Erin Cline, University of Oregon
This paper addresses the question of why we should do comparative ethics by examining the idea of a “sense of justice” in the work of John Rawls and in the Confucian Analects. I begin by discussing the account of a sense of justice in Analects, focusing on the way in which this capacity fits into the larger program of self-cultivation that is advocated in the text. I then turn to Rawls’s account of a sense of justice, focusing specifically on the moral psychology that supports his conception of justice. Next, I compare the way in which both accounts present a three-fold program of moral development, beginning with the family, extending to the community and then to society as whole. Finally, I discuss the way in which this comparative study deepens our understanding of both Rawls’s work and the Analects, and serves as an example of what comparative ethics can accomplish.
The Role of External Goods in Benevolence and Compassion: Applying Śāntideva's Thought to the Work of Martha Nussbaum
Amod Lele, Harvard University
This presentation applies the views of the classical Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva to those of the contemporary ethicist Martha Nussbaum on external goods, compassion and benefitting others through gifts. It shows that Śāntideva asks similar questions to Nussbaum's but provides answers that differ from both Nussbaum and her Roman Stoic interlocutors. Śāntideva, unlike Nussbaum and Marcus Aurelius, claims that a gift’s main benefit to the recipient does not come from the gift given, but from the goodwill that the act of giving produces toward the giver. He also puts forth a view of compassion that does not depend on valuing external goods, a view opposed by both Nussbaum and Seneca.
A18-64
Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group
Theme: Religion through the Senses
This session presents historical research that interrogates the place of the senses in religion. A number of streams of thought (e.g., anthropology/sociology of the senses, histoire des mentalités, critiques of textuality) have argued that paying attention to all the senses provides us with a broader range of source materials, fuller descriptions and novel perspectives of our subjects, and new methodological and theoretical challenges. The three cases in this session (touch in 11th-century Hinduism, the senses in fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddhism, and smell in early Christianity) move beyond issues of visuality/orality to explore some of the substantive, methodological, and theoretical issues that arise when the senses are emphasized in the analysis of historical materials.
Embraced by Being: Abhinavagupta's Recovery of the Sense of Touch
Kerry Martin Skora, Hiram College
In this paper, I employ a “hermeneutics of touch,” emulating a similar mode of interpretation practiced by the Kashmiri Hindu Tantric sage Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025 C.E.) in his tantric discourse. I move away from a hermeneutics centered on vision and cognition to one based on the sense of touch, underlining Abhinavagupta's liberation of bodily-felt sense in the process of recollecting Being. My argument proceeds in three phases, focusing on (1) tactile sensitivity, where I discuss the primacy of the sense of touch in Hindu traditions prior to Abhinavagupta; (2) tactile oppression, where I discuss the oppressive strategies enforced on tactility by the Brahmanical orthodox culture of light and purity in which Abhinavagupta was embedded and which he resisted, and (3) tactile liberation, where I discuss Abhinavagupta’s understanding of the path of liberation as one recovering the primordial sense of touch, as the body becomes re-embraced by Being.
Soteriology of the Senses in Tibetan Buddhism
Holly Gayley, Harvard University
By the fourteenth century, a distinctive soteriology of the senses was emerging in Tibetan Buddhism whereby certain texts, relics, images, and sacred substances—as well as objects consecrated according to particular rituals—were ascribed the power to liberate through direct contact with the senses. Related to a category of revealed texts and objects, called terma or 'treasures' (gter ma) said to be discovered in the Tibetan and Himalayan landscape, this phenomenon developed into the rubric of the 'six liberations' (grol ba drug), namely liberation upon seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, wearing and recollecting. The six liberations raise important questions about materiality as a conduit for transcendent aims and also about the range of expedient means to liberation offered through tantric ritual as it developed in Tibet. Precisely what type of liberation is promised and how it is understood to be achieved through sensory contact will be the topic of this paper.
Why the Smells Matter: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Brown University
This paper explores theoretical implications of research into smell in ancient Christianity. This focus corrects two sorts of biases in the recent scholarly literature: a tendency to define "body" as "sexual body" (where primary sources focus more on sensory experience and the physicality of religious practices); and a focus on visuality and aurality/orality in relation to textuality (which neglects the prominence of olfactory practices and imagery in the primary sources). Beyond broadening our consideration of a larger sensory situation, considering smell requires us to reconfigure a number of familiar views of ancient Christianity. Ancient Christians did more than use smells: they used olfactory experience as a primary mode of religious epistemology, making claims about divine being and nature, human nature and existence, and human-divine interaction and order. Examining smell as a category of religious experience highlights crucial aspects of religion that we have not adequately taken into account.
A18-65
Ecclesiological Investigations Group
Theme: The Nature and Mission of the Church: Ecclesial Reality and Ecumenical Horizons for the Twenty-First Century
A panel where speakers attempt to discern the significance of the 2006 document from the World Council of Churches document, offering doctrinal, theological and hermeneutical perspectives upon its formation and content and to attempt to discern its potential ecumenical ramifications. After an introduction from Fr. K. M. George, who took part in the WCC meetings to discuss this document at Porte Alegre this year, the following speakers will engage with the document as well as also addressing futures for ecumenical dialogue and the development of an ecumenical ecclesiology in general.
The Nature and Mission of the Church Communion: God, Creation, and Church
Paul Collins, University of Chichester
This offers a critique of koinonia in The Nature and Mission of the Church and proposes further clarification. It asks how the designation of Church as koinonia is constructed; and what is the correlation of meaning of koinonia in relation to the Godhead, creation, redemption and Church. Despite apparent ambiguity I suggest that there is a congruity of meaning to be found in the text, and there is an iterative use being made of the notion of koinonia. The first stage in the process of clarifying the use of koinonia would be in relation to the Holy Trinity. I appeal to Zizioulas’ understanding of the Godhead as ‘an event of communion’ (Being as Communion) which I argue situates the discussion in the realm, which Caputo calls ‘Radical Hermeneutics’, and of deconstruction of ‘community’ made by Derrida. Church as ‘communion’ relates to enabling participation in divine life for humanity/cosmos.
How to Express the Link between the Church and the Holy Trinity in a Common Ecumenical Discourse? An Analysis of Recent Ecumenical Documents on the Nature of the Church
Peter De Mey, Catholic University of Leuven
I will discuss three accounts on the nature of the Church which are the result of recent ecumenical dialogues: the Reformed-Catholic document Towards a Common Understanding of the Church (1990), the Lutheran-Catholic document Church and Justification (1993) and the ongoing dialogue on The Nature and Mission of the Church (1998, 2006) which is taking place within Faith & Order. What the three documents have in common is that one has tried to develop a common discourse on the nature of the Church which has successfully integrated images which hitherto were used in either the Protestant or the Catholic reflection on the Church. Thus, in the ecumenical dialogue there is a remarkably broad reception of notions of the Church like ‘creation of the Word’ and ‘sacrament of God’s grace’. When will the participating churches learn to use images that have been developed in other Christian churches in their own ecclesiology?
Called to be the One Church? The Unity Statements of the WCC and Their Reception in the Document "The Nature and Mission of the Church"
Risto Saarinen, University of Helsinki
The Porto Alegre assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC, February 2006) received an important unity statement, titled Called to be the One Church. It can be regarded as the fourth unity statement in a series begun in New Delhi 1961 and continued in Nairobi 1975 and Canberra 1991. The Porto Alegre unity statement is accompanied with a study document: The Nature and Mission of the Church (NMC). In this paper, NMC will be analyzed with the help of earlier unity statements and some other important WCC texts. The aim of the paper is twofold: it will introduce the NMC in the context of longer history, but it will also make some critical questions and comments regarding its theological weight and ecumenical usefulness.
Pentecostal Perspectives on The Nature and Mission of the Church
Wolfgang Vondey, Regent University
The WCC document, The Nature and Mission of the Church, is the first major ecumenical consensus statement with consistent contributions from the Pentecostal community. Pentecostal ecumenical commitment is characterized by a maturing ecumenical ecclesiology. Convergence is found largely on the basis of an ecclesiology that portrays the Church as koinonia or trinitarian communion, although the basis for this concept is perceived less as an abstract and speculative concept than an experiential, doxological reality. The potential ramifications of the WCC document are seen as strongest in the area of ecclesiology proper and weakest in the actualization of Christian unity in the culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse churches of global Christianity. Pentecostals suggest that there exists a plurality of ecclesial self-understandings and nuances that are theologically complementary and desirable since they are often born from and determined by a community’s experience and praxis of faith rather than a division of doctrine.
Is There a Future for the Catholic-Protestant Ecclesiological Dialogue? The Non-reception and a Challenge for Ecumenical Dialogue
Korinna Zamfir, Babes-Bolyai University
The analysis of the Catholic-Protestant dialogue concerning ecclesiology reveals a very differentiated understanding of the old controversial questions. However, notwithstanding countless ecumenical documents, during the last decades the confessional borders were re-enforced. The results of the dialogue have found hardly any reception. The non-reception questions the very logic of the discussions and the future of the ecumenical dialogue. The issue of the non-reception is related to the level of the official Church statements, of the theologians not involved in dialogue, of the local churches, and of the forums of the ecumenical dialogue. The existing convergence should have led Churches to take steps towards some degree of mutual recognition. Yet they receded from a decisive step towards fellowship by reason of fear of losing identity, independence or prerogatives. The psychological and church-policy factors are major obstacles in the way to church fellowship. Non-reception has to be addressed by a clear strategy.
Are Councils and Synods Decision Making? A Roman Catholic Conundrum in Ecumenical Perspective
Bradford E. Hinze, Fordham University
The Roman Catholic conundrum is this: do consultative-only practices of parish pastoral councils, diocesan pastoral councils and diocesan synods, and synods of bishops, as stipulated by the 1983 code of canon law, fulfill the advances of the Second Vatican Council for shared responsiblity in the church, or should these bodies with their leaders be allowed to exercise collective decision-making authority? How do the World Council of Churches documents Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry and The Nature and Mission of the Church illuminate these issues and contribute to the further development of Catholic ecclesiology?
A18-66
Indigenous Religious Traditions Group
Theme: Indigenous Religion and Modernity
The panel examines the encounters between indigenous religions’ world views and practice and modernity. It will examine the assumptions that not only have indigenous religions domesticated many world religions, especially Islam and Christianity, but their encounters with Western modernity have also produced various forms of new religious traditions. Presenters will examine specific case studies of indigenous religions’ responses to modernity, drawing theoretical and conceptual analysis from the various case studies. The session will advance our knowledge of the state of indigenous religions and their relationship to local and global processes and modernization projects in several parts of the world.
“I Hope We Can Civilize Them before They Hurt Themselves”: Assessing the Legacy of Vine Deloria, Jr.
Michael Zogry, University of Kansas, Lawrence
Vine Deloria, Jr.’s scholarship continues to be relevant in terms of recently debated issues in religious studies. Additionally, his clever use of humor to disarm and inform, as evidenced in print and in person, is germane both methodologically and pedagogically. The first section of this paper will engage Deloria’s scholarship in the contemporary discussion regarding the concept of secrecy. It will argue that a useful distinction can be made between secrecy and privacy, particularly with regard to interpretation of specific First Nations’ strategies of interaction with non-community members, historically and at present. The second section of the paper will consider his possible methodological influences upon scholars and their students, with illustrations culled from ethnographic fieldwork as well as the satirical essay that provided the title for this paper. From these vantage points it is clear that Deloria’s scholarship and methodology are and will continue to be pertinent.
Ancient Traditions, Modern Constructions: Innovation, Continuity, and Spirituality on the Pow Wow Trail
Dennis Kelley, University of Missouri, Columbia
We are, as scholars of American Indian religious culture, prone to discount the “religious” nature of the pow wow phenomenon. However, in contemporary Indian Country, the majority of people who identify as “Indian” fall into the “urban” category: away from traditional lands and communities, in cities and towns wherein the opportunities to live one’s identity as Native can be restricted, and even more so for American Indian religious practice and activity. This paper will explore a possible theoretical model for discussing the religious nature of urban Indians, using aspects of the contemporary pow wow as exemplary, and suggest ways in which the discourse on Native American religious practices can inform the larger discussion of religion in general by implying a comparative direction between urban Indians and other religious actors in American secular society.
Old Photos, New Connections: Mirroring Western and African Religion
Inez van der Spek, Dominican Centre for Theology and Society, Nijmegen
In this paper childhood snapshots from a Nigerian friend, the novels of British-Nigerian authors Ben Okri and Helen Oyeyemi, and the Dutch wax tableaux of Yinka Shonibare are involved to reflect on religion in the age of postcolonialism and globalization. In Nigeria both Islam and Christianity have many believers. Many of them have a pluralistic approach to religion, freely mixing traditional religious and ritual elements with Christian and Islamic beliefs. This is not to suggest that religious hybridity in an African country would offer a model for a Western secularized country. And yet, it is worthwhile wondering how interest in Africa's religiosity can be more than just exotism. It is suggested that it may function as a mirror, reflecting questions on the meaning of hybridity and humor (jokes, parody, mockery) in religion, so painfully absent in traditional Christian religions.
A18-67
Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group
Theme: Kierkegaard and the Spiritual Life
Is Hope Located in Future Possibility or in Dying to the Self? Towards a Kierkegaardian Conception of Spiritual Therapy
Paul Carron, Baylor University
Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death can be useful in pastoral counseling and spiritual formation. However, some of the ways in which it has been used are problematic. It is not primarily a book of typologies of the self or a psychological roadmap for becoming a self, nor is it suggesting that we find our hope in future possibilities. Rather it is a guide to becoming a true self, which means to die to the self and to the world. If this notion is taken seriously in pastoral counseling, then we must pursue methods of spiritual therapy that will help us towards this end. Fortunately, Kierkegaard gives us several suggestions in his Christian Discourses of how we might die to the self. Two of these suggestions are explored as ways to implement this aspect of The Sickness Unto Death in pastoral counseling and spiritual therapy.
The Beatitude of Defeat: Anfechtung, Humility, and Prayer in Four Upbuilding Discourses (1844)
Joseph Ballan, Syracuse University
Rarely do treatments of Kierkegaard’s “upbuilding discourses” take into account the textual units in which they were originally published. This paper offers an interpretation of Four Upbuilding Discourses (1844) as a coherent whole, explicating the thought that traverses the individual discourses: a thought of Christian humility as something passionate and audacious, not passive and quietistic. The paper sets these discourses within the context of 17th-century Lutheran spiritualities and edifying literatures, particularly those of Johann Arndt and Jakob Böhme. Attention is given to revisions and developments of Martin Luther’s concept of Anfechtung in these writers and in Kierkegaard. Jean-Louis Chrétien’s recent phenomenological work, as well as his interpretation of Kierkegaard, is used to develop themes of struggling with God and the beatitude and fecundity of being wounded in this struggle. The paper concludes by relating the theorization of humility in Four Upbuilding Discourses to pertinent concepts in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works.
Education's Pious Fraud: Kierkegaard's Pedagogy
Stephen N. Dunning, University of Pennsylvania
Much scholarly attention has been paid to the element of deception in Kierkegaard's works, but little to his theory of the necessary deception involved in all education. This paper will argue that what Kierkegaard calls 'education's pious fraud' provides a key to understanding a wide range of phenomena. After a brief analysis of the theory as Kierkegaard presents it, I will explore its implications for: (1) Kierkegaard's use of 'indirect communication' in the pseudonymous authorship; (2) the nature of religious education; and (3) the classroom techniques that we use in teaching about religion in secular institutions (using as examples our putative neutrality on the value of religion(s) and also one way we may deceive by departing from neutrality when teaching about Islam). The primary text for this exercise is in Works of Love (1847), using the Hongs' 1962 translation (p. 236, corresponding to p. 252 in their 1995 translation).
A18-68
Men's Studies in Religion Group
Theme: Issues in Men's Studies in Religion
This session will address issues of the interaction of masculinity and religion in the areas of media, politics, and pop culture.
Theology for Non Elite Males
Greg Ellis, Moravian Theological Seminary
Non elite men find themselves in an apparent power paradox. By most definitions of power, men are more powerful than women, but are less likely to meet their fundamental needs of life, health, safety and shelter. Men need to articulate a theology of exercising power over others while recognizing this power comes at a high cost to us. Feminist theological methods, especially those of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, provide an excellent starting point for articulating this theology. Fiorenza’s fourfold hermeneutical framework modified to address non elite male interpretation of biblical texts to liberate them from an elitist theological interpretation. This modified framework is then applied to the Samson saga and the story of Joseph, the man who helped raise Jesus to see how non elites can exercise what power they have in a theologically appropriate manner to benefit their community instead of themselves.
Men As Peacemakers: Courage and the Practice of Nonviolence
Ellen M. Ross, Swarthmore College
The myth of redemptive violence pervades North American public life. This paper explores the narratives of Quaker men who refused to engage in public acts of violence during the 17th -20th c. in North America. It analyzes the history of men for whom confidence in the power of love to transform the heart of the self and the enemy was believed to far outweigh the effects of force or violence in changing the world. Historical and contemporary Quakers like George Fox, Jacob Ritter, John Woolman, and Bayard Rustin have walked a road of personal and social transformation as prophets committed to peace and non-violence. The narrative of the transforming power of love that emerges in their stories offers a visionary alternative to the monomyth of redemptive violence that increasingly defines masculinity in our culture.
Ungraceful God: Masculinity and the Images of God in Popular Culture in Brazil
Andre Musskopf, Sao Leopoldo, Brazil
This paper proposes to analyze the masculine images of God in popular Brazilian songs using gender, gay and lesbian, and queer studies, making explicit the relationship between those images and the cultural understandings of masculinity. It will also present a summary of the current stage of the studies relating masculinity and religion in Brazil, proposing other ways of relating those issues.
A18-69
Mysticism Group
Theme: Mystical Asceticism and Extreme Experience
“The Body Gains Its Share": The Asceticism of Mechthild of Magdeburg
Michelle Voss Roberts, Rhodes College
Through an analysis of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead, this paper discerns Mechthild's views on the role of asceticism in the processes of divinization. Mechthild does not portray the body as needing punishment, but rather seeks its purification through an ascesis of desire. I suggest that Mechthild develops a single set of physico-spiritual senses - the sort of 'sensorium' that Bernard McGinn finds in other medieval mystical authors. For her, ascetical practices purify the whole person: body, soul, and senses. The paper specifically examines the “three kinds of sorrow” in V.1 alongside their function in the whole of the work.
Shiva's Pain Protocol in Basava's Vacana Poetry
Lise Vail, Montclair State University
This paper explores the complex nuances of pain in the poetry of Basava, a 12th-century poet-saint from Karnataka, India. He claims that Lord Shiva’s sport involves using pain to test us, to purify, punish bad behavior (karma), and thus prod us onto the right path. “[He] plays tricks with you until your bones stick out (#210). Only an imperturbable Shiva’s hero—a ‘Vira-shaiva’—deserves liberation, since Shiva's path is grueling, and pain guaranteed: “Bhakti cuts through like a saw, coming and going, and bites like a snake” (#212). Basava even begs God to protect his virtue by cursing, humiliation, or making him crippled and sightless (#s 253, 58). Is Shiva a cruel trickster? What pains does the poet actually experience? Basava’s penal-system lexicon—noses cut off, being scalded, the rack—leaves readers wondering if he perhaps experienced prison. Detractors were infuriated when he renounced the Vaishnava Brahmin sacrificer’s lifestyle to lead the Virashaiva movement.
Astonishing Pain: Mystical Suffering in Christina Mirabilis
Charlotte Radler, Loyola Marymount University
This paper focuses on Christina the Astonishing’s apostolate, as depicted in a hagiography by the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré. I integrate three facets of her suffering—suffering as imitation of Christ, suffering as enactment of purgatory on earth, and substitionary suffering that redeems those in purgatory. I argue that these three features of suffering are deeply interrelated in that they constitute important mechanisms within Christina’s public ministry. I also investigate the public and communal dimensions of meaning to her extraordinary pain. In confronting the agony of Christina’s body, the reader encounters a multi-lateral and multi-layered inner- and inter-textuality. A complex hermeneutical pyramid emerges: within the text, the community struggles to make sense of Christina’s violent self-affliction; Thomas of Cantimpré constructs and interprets her anguish in his Vita; and the contemporary reader strives to make intelligible the interconnected web of factors that determine the roles and relationship between body, pain, and gender.
Pain and Pleasure: Body Modification and Spiritual Experience
Megan Summers, University of Georgia
Using Reverend Jason Cusick’s rubric for experiencing voluntary physical pain I will argue that body modification in general and tattooing specifically is an appropriate venue for harnessing the power of this experience of pain for spiritual growth. I will show how getting a tattoo applies to all of his categories including pain as rite of passage and pain as means of transcendence. I will support the argument with both cognitive theory and scholarly research from Mary Douglas and Kevin Shilbrack. Tattooing, viewed with this lens, is a modern mystical experience, one that is growing in popularity and accessibility.
A18-70
Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought Group
Theme: Methodological and Theoretical Issues
Eight Is Not Enough: A Pragmatic Response to Daniel Pals' Theories
Alva Anderson, Wofford College
With its clarity, organization, and balanced and thorough handling of its material, Daniel Pals’ Seven Theories of Religion emerged in the past ten years as a leading text for introducing major methods in the study of religion. Due to the book’s success, Pals has released an expanded second edition, his Eight Theories of Religion, in which he adds Weber to his list of key theorists whose impact make their work too crucial to ignore. This paper will make the case that in order for Pals to succeed in presenting a complete picture of the “classical” methods in the field, he needs to include a ninth theory in his work, namely the pragmatic approach of William James. The essay will proceed first by articulating the precise nature of James’ pragmatic “theory” of religion, and then by presenting its contributions to the ongoing conversation regarding approaches to the study of religion.
Religious Experience after the Phenomenology of Religion: The Semantics of Religious Experience Reports
Stephen Bush, Princeton University
Religious experience has been one of the principal objects of investigation in the study of religion since the discipline’s inception. Today, however, the category of experience is contested as never before, with calls from some quarters to eliminate it from religious studies altogether. This is no doubt related to the fact that many have rejected the methodology of the formerly prominent phenomenology of religion approach, and they see religious experience, which stood at the center of the phenomenology project, as guilty by association. In an influential essay, Robert H. Sharf argues that since experiences are absolutely private, and since only that which is public has semantic content, reports of religious experiences are devoid of meaning. However, the semantic theories of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom show that the meanings of the terms used in experience reports are accessible to scholars even if the referents of the terms are not.
Re-reading Foucault on Power: Fraser, Brandom, and Rorty on the Politics of Self-creation
Jason Springs, Princeton University
This paper intervenes in a recent debate among pragmatist thinkers about the capacity of “social practice” explanations of agency and freedom to critique and resist systemic forms of power. By reading Michel Foucault’s later account of power as a productive feature of social practices against Robert Brandom’s account of “expressive freedom,” I highlight the weaknesses of their respective projects, and then explore the possibility of modifying each project by the other’s best insights.
A18-71
Signifying (on) Scriptures Group
Theme: Scriptures and Race, Roundtable Discussion 1
Setting the Agenda: Vincent L. Wimbush, Claremont Graduate University
A18-72
Theology and Continental Philosophy Group
Theme: New Directions in Theology and Continental Philosophy
A Certeauvian Analysis of African American Religion
Torin Alexander, Rice University
This paper employs a Certeauvian analysis of African American religion. In so doing, I argue that Certeau’s theory of practice, particularly with respect to the concepts of space and tactics, reveal the oppositional nature of African American religion and religious experience. By oppositional, I mean that which resistances, circumvents, evades, or opposes oppressive dimensions of power, particular in relation to the construction of society. Further, I assert that Certeau’s writings have great explanatory power for those attempting to understand the centrality of religious belief in general, and “Christian” belief in particular within the African American community.
Belief and Practice in Talal Asad’s “De-privatization” of Religion
Christopher C. Brittain, Atlantic School of Theology
This paper critically examines the “genealogy” of religion and secularism as developed by Talal Asad. It explores Asad’s critique of various attempts to establish an essence of “religion,” and his emphasis on the role of practices and tradition-guided reasoning in the study of religion, as opposed to a focus on belief. Of particular concern will be his interest in challenging the secularization thesis and the privatization of religious practice in modern society. The argument will proceed through a close internal-critique of Asad’s argument, with some reference to the work of José Casanova, William Connelly, and Jeffrey Stout. The examination of Asad’s theory of religion, along with his presentation of the religious (Islamic) subject, will focus on his suggestion that one aspect of the secularization thesis – the principle of structural differentiation – “no longer holds.”
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Lineage of Spinoza
Matthew Hagele, Florida State University
In this essay, I reconstruct Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of freedom and argue that it can be located in the lineage of Benedict de Spinoza. That this is the case is not a radical claim. Indeed, Nancy himself hints at the “proximity” between his thought and that of Spinoza. However, the nature of this proximity is left rather vague in Nancy’s work as the author simply recognizes the need for further study. Therefore, this essay, while acknowledging the innovation of Nancy’s overall project in The Experience of Freedom, focuses its attention on the brief, undeveloped textual appropriations of Spinoza—specifically those dealing with Spinoza’s conception of God as verb, and his argument for the harmonious coexistence of Infinite Necessity and human freedom—as suggesting that the latter represents a prior movement in a particular narrative of thought that culminates in Nancy’s work on freedom.
A18-73
Wesleyan Studies Group
Theme: Challenges to the Church
Fanatical Women: The Struggle toward Public Ministry in the Early Free Methodist Church
Douglas Cullum, Roberts Wesleyan College
Nineteenth-century Free Methodist women were the victims of conflicting messages. On the one hand, numerous religious and cultural factors provided fertile ground in support of women’s involvement in the early Free Methodist Church. On the other hand, the young denomination’s biblical and ecclesiastical conservatism made it hesitant to move toward the full enfranchisement of women in ministry. This inner tension in the early Free Methodist Church is displayed in this paper through two primary foci. First, the experiences of two Free Methodist women offer insight into the struggles encountered by those who felt called to enter into areas of ministry traditionally held by men. Then, early Free Methodist diversity of opinion on the matter of women in ministry is illustrated by probing personal interchanges between persons who serve as representatives of the much broader ideological and theological ferment that troubled the young denomination throughout its founding era.
A Conference in Cultural Captivity: White Mississippi Methodists and the 1963 "Born of Conviction" Statement
Joseph T. Reiff, Emory and Henry College
The 1963 “Born of Conviction” statement published in the Mississippi Methodist Advocate aggravated an existing tension between Methodists of the white Mississippi Conference and the national Methodist Church. The statement, signed by 28 ministers, sought to fill a vacuum: Conference leaders had made no public response to the Ole Miss riot or to insistence on rigid maintenance of segregation, thus implying the Church’s collusion in Mississippi’s “Closed Society.” The statement called for freedom of the pulpit and quoted the Discipline’s claim that Jesus’ teachings prohibited racial discrimination. The intensely negative response from most of the Conference and the lack of support from Conference clergy leaders resulted from the Conference’s cultural captivity, which prevented many from seeing the tensions between the “Southern way of life” and the “expressed witness” of the national Methodist Church. The paper is based on three years' research, including oral history interviews with signers of the statement.
“We, the People...”: The US Cultural Commitments of the United Methodist Social Principles as a Challenge to Global Connection
Darryl Stephens, Emory University
The connectional challenge offered by recent liberal/conservative debates about social issues in The United Methodist Church have drawn attention away from another significant challenge to unity in the connection: U.S.-centrism. This paper proceeds by identifying some of the U.S. cultural commitments in the Social Principles, discussing some of the challenges to global connection posed by these commitments, and examining ways in which European and African conferences have responded to these challenges. This study contributes to the UMC’s self-understanding as a church and to addressing ecclesiological challenges confronted by a global connection dedicated to social witness and action. The paper concludes with a constructive proposal, suggesting that unanimity of opinion on social issues is not a prerequisite for maintaining connectional unity.
A18-75
Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation
Theme: Pagan Communities: Innovations, Internal Negotiations, and Growth
Alchemical Rhythm: Sacred Dynamic Fire and the Politics of Drumming
Jason Winslade, DePaul University
Although drumming has long been associated with countercultural events and contemporary Pagan festivals, thriving communities of drummers and dancers have emerged as a formidable presence at these events. Alchemical rhythm refers to the adaptation of classic magical principles to activities centered around a sacred fire circle. Drumming practitioners, many of whom eschew conventional categories of Paganism, work their particular alchemical magic nightly at festivals, where they continually negotiate between individual intentions and communal values. This paper primarily explores drumming as a performative practice that both challenges traditional notions of ritual and liturgy and encompasses conflicts experienced by the broader Pagan community. Particularly, these practitioners confront issues surrounding leadership and egalitarianism, ethical behavior and etiquette, and individual and community identity. Through interviews and participant observation, I examine the roles that drumming and sacred fire work play in contemporary Paganism and whether their influence offers possibilities for social and political change.
The Fourfold Goddess and the Undying God: Anatomies of Minnesotan Bootstrap Witchcraft Traditions
Murph Pizza, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
“Paganistan” – the Minnesota Twin Cities NeoPagan community – emerged from being “Pagan flyover country” in the 1970s to become a flourishing community with a regionally unique, innovative, and evolving alliance of traditions. Self-started by impatient Midwestern occultists mining books, rather than awaiting transmission from a lineage holder, the process of Paganistan creating itself included cultivating an environment where critical engagement, creativity, and innovation are commonplace and accepted within the community. This project examines the Fourfold/Twyern Witchcraft traditions to demonstrate how religious innovations are negotiated within the community, and how their creation has contributed to the religious and cultural character of Paganistan.
Children of Converts: Generational Retention in the Neo-Pagan New Religious Movement
Laura Wildman-Hanlon, Cherry Hill Seminary
When a new religion develops, its growth is not only reliant upon attracting and converting new adherents but also retaining them as well as the succeeding generations. Many scholars have noted that the retention of its second and third generations is a vital marker to the success of a New Religious Movement, but there is currently little research. The Pagan Census, which gathered data in the early 1990s, found that '41.3 percent of all participants stated that they have children.' (Berger et al.nd 2003). Has the socialization directed to the children within the Neo-Pagan movement been successful in helping them develop strong enough ties to their community to cause the new generations to want to remain active within it after they have grown to adulthood? This presentation is of a qualitative exploration, using a small sampling to provide a broad overview of generational retention in the Neo-Pagan New Religious Movement.
The Pagan Explosion
James Roger Lewis, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
An important though neglected source of information bearing on the question of numbers of adherents to alternative religions is national census data. In 2001, the censuses of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia collected information on religious self-identification. There was also a religion survey conducted in the United States in the same year. Comparing the numbers of self-identified Pagans in 2001 with earlier years reveals a startling pattern of explosive growth in all four of these countries. This paper proposes to survey this census and survey data for the light it sheds on increasing participation rates in Paganism. The latter part of the presentation will also discuss two of the factors fueling this rapid expansion, the internet and the recent phenomenon of adolescent ('Teen Witch') Paganism.
A18-76
Coptic Christianity Consultation
Theme: Coptic Monasticism through the Ages
A new consultation on Coptic Christianity extends a warm invitation for paper proposals on the subject of Coptic monasticism. Submission on the early, medieval, and modern periods are encouraged, with special attention given to monastic literature, theology, material culture, and the role male and female monks have played in society. The field of Coptic studies intersects with a variety of academic areas, and the organizers want to cultivate interdisciplinary contributions by both graduate students and established scholars.
"A Man Holy and Perfect": The Holy Man as Didaskalos (Teacher) and Mathetes (Disciple and Pupil) in the Life of Paisios/Bishoy, Attributed to John Kolobos
Tim Vivian, California State University, Bakersfield
Most study of the holy man/person in Late Antiquity focuses on the saint as patron, thaumaturge, mediator and teacher, and intercessor. While all of these roles occur in the Life of Paisios/Bishoy attributed to John Kolobos, there is one further role: that of didaskalos (teacher) and mathetes (disciple and pupil). In the hagiographical Life of Paisios, Paisios serves as both teacher and pupil, thus modeling both roles for his monastic audience. In this paper I will look at both what Paisios teaches and what he learns. What does this monastic pedagogy tell us about early monastic hagiography? What did monastic authors and readers hope to learn from such edifying tales as that of Paisios? This paper plans to address such issues and place the Life within the larger context of Egyptian monasticism in Late Antiquity.
Encounters with Monks: Coptic Monastic Hospitality Networks
Chrysi Kotsifou, American University, Cairo
This paper demonstrates and illustrates the existence and workings of the Egyptian monastic hospitality network. Monastic rules stipulated that travellers who were in need should be received and taken care of in monasteries. Egyptian monasteries had the resources and the manpower to provide for travellers and especially for pilgrims who came to them for help and guidance. As soon as pilgrims entered Egypt, they were helped in their journeys by monks and clerics. Monasteries were mainly founded by the Nile and in close proximity to each other, thus enabling the execution of often uneventful itineraries. On the practical level, the Church and monasteries provided pilgrims with food and accommodation and the means of transportation required to reach their destination. At certain times, educated monks were required to work as guides and interpreters for their visitors. These guides and interpreters also carried the necessary letters of reference for the pilgrims.
"The Soul Is Like a Ship": Sailing Imagery in Early Egyptian Monastic Literature
Bernadette McNary-Zak, Rhodes College
Early Egyptian monastic spirituality was inextricably tied to its environmental and topographical contexts. As a result, its literature is replete with examples of the ways in which ammas and abbas incorporated water imagery into their sayings and teachings. This paper looks at the relationship between context and text by examining sailing analogies attributed to three monks of the fourth and fifth centuries: Paul of Tamma, Amma Syncletica, and Abba Ammonas. It argues that these analogies contributed to a discourse about spiritual progress in the monastic life by providing a practical and metaphorical way to explain the reception and cultivation of extraordinary spiritual gifts.
Then Am I Not Obliged: Shenoute of Atripe Writes to a Women's Monastery to Persuade and Discipline
Janet A. Timbie, Catholic University of America
Shenoute of Atripe (d. 465) communicated with the women's community in the White Monastery Federation in a work known as Then Am I Not Obliged. After first reviewing its place in the entire Shenoutean corpus, then its treatment (very brief) in previous scholarship, I will examine the evidence provided by the text for 1) the type of control exerted by Shenoute over the women's group and 2) the means by which women attempted to maintain a degree of independence. Due to the dramatic style of Shenoute, the letter offers an unusual view of one episode of gender conflict in an Egyptian ascetic community. The text both illustrates and enlivens modern theory of gender and status in Late Antiquity.
Beyond Their Gender: Coptic Female Monasticism in the Twentieth Century
Lois Farag, Luther Seminary
The purpose of this paper is to document the history of Coptic female monasticism in the twentieth century.This paper will investigate female monastic renewal in the Coptic Church. This renewal began with the beginning of the twentieth century and accelerated during the second half of the same century. The paper will follow this historical development, and the main figures that launched and shaped this renewal. The paper will discuss some aspects of this renewal such as the changed face of monastic recruits, their work, intellectual activity, and the establishment of new priories. The spiritual renewal within the monasteries extended beyond the confines of the monastic walls and is shaping Coptic women spirituality, whether married or single. The modern female Coptic monastics are continuing the conversation that began with the early church “ammas” and are extending it to the twenty-first century.
Patriarchs Kyrillos VI and Shenouda III: Architects of Contemporary Coptic Monasticism
Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, Valparaiso University
At the onset of the twenty-first century, Coptic monasticism is more vibrant and active than ever. Monks and nuns have restored and re-inhabited ancient monasteries where the core symbols of Coptic Christianity are being preserved, re-invented and formed. Monks work inside and outside the monasteries, serving the Coptic community in places as far away as in Australia and the U.S.A. Nuns are developing and performing new vocations for women that not that long ago were unheard off in the Coptic Church. This presentation will provide an analysis of the methods and strategies used by Patriarch Kyrillos VI (1959—1971) and the current patriarch, Shenouda III (1971 - ) to initiate, develop and continue the revival of the Coptic Orthodox monastic movement.
A18-77
Cultural History of the Study of Religion Consultation and Queer Theory and LGBT Studies in Religion Consultation
Theme: Body Parts: Sexed Bodies, Secular Bodies
Following Foucault, many scholars have taken for granted that the process of secularization occasioned the birth of the modern sexual subject. As clinics and courtrooms emerged over the long nineteenth century as privileged sites from which to identify and name deviance, social scientific ways of knowing came to eclipse older theological forms. So the story goes. This eclipse has never been total, however. Nor were these processes of uneven secularization an exclusively nineteenth-century affair. This interdisciplinary roundtable discussion explores the conjoined histories—and futures—of secularism, sexuality, and embodied subjectivity. We proceed “piecemeal,” with each panelist focusing on an individual body part as a way not only to disaggregate what Foucault called the “artificial unity” held together by “sex,” but also to disrupt the fantasy of a universal body that coheres across time and space. Panelists discuss: “foot,” “breast,” “fat,” “hymen,” “penis,” “DNA,” "conscience," and “throat.”
A18-78
Religion, Public Policy, and Political Change Consultation
Theme: The Politics of Religion and Public Policy
Progressive Religion in the Public Sphere: A Critical Case Study about Health Care Access in Massachusetts
Ann B. McClenahan, Harvard University
In recent decades, sociologists and political scientists in the United States have focused on the activities and commitments of the Religious Right as it built significant footholds in local, regional, and national politics. Less examined have been the attempts by progressive religious organizations to engage in legislative and electoral politics. This paper presents a case study and critical analysis of one such engagement: the campaign by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization to leverage a statewide ballot initiative into a significant expansion of health care access in Massachusetts. The case offers insight into the strategies and tactics employed in both legislative and electoral politics.
Not Slaves to Men: The Success of Faith-based Politics in Human Trafficking Activism
Yvonne Zimmerman, University of Denver
This paper examines how the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives has transformed federal initiatives to combat human trafficking as codified in The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (H.R. 3244) into a special mandate for faith-based organizations, and showcases how this transformation has been accomplished. Since the establishment of the ‘Faith-Based Initiative’ office, it has become the Bush administration’s preferred rhetorical frame to position human trafficking as a problem with religious dimensions. This rhetoric, moreover, has been backed with money. Current trends indicate that rather than being awarded to organizations with prior experience in the issues pertaining to human trafficking, a disproportionate chunk of federal monies are awarded to organizations who make ‘faith’ the basis of their anti-trafficking efforts.
Interfaith Open Communities: Faith-based Affordable Housing Advocacy in Metropolitan Chicago
Joe Pettit, Morgan State University
This paper presents a political analysis of Interfaith Open Communities (IOC), an affordable housing education and advocacy program in metropolitan Chicago. The program, now in its sixth year, is co-sponsored by Protestants for the Common Good, the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. The paper will first consider the religious rational presented by the co-sponsors for pursuing education and advocacy related to affordable housing. The largest section of the paper will consider both the successes and failures of the effort, with a focus on identifying important lessons learned. The final section of the paper will present IOC as a new model for faith-based advocacy, one that departs significantly from the model of community based organizing in the tradition of Saul Alinsky.
A18-79
Rethinking the Field Consultation
Theme: Part I: The Future of "Religion and Ecology" and "Ecotheology"; Part II: The Role of Liberal Theology in the Discipline
In considering "ecotheology" and "religion and ecology," some question the value in the creation of a new field, arguing that scholars should focus more on "greening" extant fields of study. Furthermore, there seems to be a growing gap between the methodology of "religion and ecology" and "ecotheology." Finally, as pioneering theologians begin to retire, their positions are not being filled with scholars in either area. Given these challenges, this panel will focus on the future of "religion and ecology" and "ecotheology" as fields of inquiry within the study of religion.
Panel: Part II: The Role of Liberal Theology in the Discipline
Liberal theology has been chastised for its refusal to embrace traditional doctrine, its reliance on experiential inquiry, and its supposed tendency towards relativism. A battle for authenticity and recognition continues, and this panel will address the concerns of those considering work in the field.
A18-100
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Representing Religion in Public: What Can Your Department Do and Why It Should
Sponsored by the Academic Relations Committee and the Religion in the Schools Task Force.
Department chairs and members of religious studies and theology departments get requests from various non-scholarly publics to address their questions about religion and theology. Some of those publics include religious communities, educational communities (high schools, etc.), health care communities and professionals, community associations, and even local media. Representing scholarship on religion to such publics is a worthwhile effort and can strengthen the department and the institution while it enhances these publics’ understanding of religion. The difficulty is that many departments are not sure of what to do and how to go about it. A distinguished group of panelists, all of whom have extensive experience in representing scholarship on religion to various publics, will share ideas and facilitate dialogue on how best to meet this pressing need.
A18-101
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Student Liaison Group Decennial Celebration
Sponsored by the Graduate Student Committee and Student Liaison Group
In the 1970s, the Board of Directors created the position of Student Director, a voting member of the Board. In 1996, the Student Liaison Group was established, directly linking the AAR with the doctoral programs of individual institutions in religion. In 2006, the Board established the Graduate Student Committee as a Standing Committee. These measures formalizing student members’ roles in the Academy recognize the need for prominent student voices and the benefit of an institutional memory in serving the graduate students who comprise 30 percent of all AAR members and who are our hope for the Academy’s future. This session explores the history of AAR student involvement and its continuing progress. It will be followed immediately by a reception celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Student Liaison Group and the newly established Graduate Student Committee. Former Student Directors and past and current Student Liaisons are especially encouraged to attend.
A18-102
Special Topics Forum
Theme: The Other Within: The Study of Religion and Diversifying Our Knowledge Production
Sponsored by the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee
Through four presentations and a respondent, this forum provides opportunities to discuss theoretical and methodological innovations drawn from the work of racial, ethnic, and minority scholars, involving both critique (deconstruction) of current methods of knowledge formation and construction of alternate approaches.
A reception hosted by the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee directly follows.
A18-103
Arts, Literature, and Religion Section
Theme: The Practice of Art and the Study of Religion
Does the practice of art have a role to play in the study of religion? If so, what? This session offers a solo dance performance followed by a panel in which four scholars who study and/or practice art as integral to their scholarship will draw on their own experience to address questions such as the following: does the process of studying religious phenomena require that we engage in disciplinary practices that educate our senses differently than acts of scholarly reading and writing? Are there forms of experience and knowledge that can only be accessed through training in (a particular) art? Can the practice of art provide new perspectives not only on material and bodily dimensions of religious life, but on intellectual and philosophical dimensions as well? This panel will invite participation in setting an agenda for this line of inquiry.
A18-104
Buddhism Section and Religions, Social Conflict, and Peace Group
Theme: Buddhism and Violence
The majority of recent works on religion and violence have focused on Abrahamic traditions. There has been a neglect of the role of violence in Buddhism. Buddhist Studies itself has contributed to this neglect of examining Buddhism's 'darker side.' This panel explores various dimensions of Buddhism and violence, such as Buddhist rhetoric, Buddhist monasticism and violence, and Buddhist war. This exploration will provide the tools to assess whether there is a 'Buddhist violence' and, if so, what that entails. Furthermore, by focusing on the worldliness of Buddhism, this panel hopes to problematize the Orientalist view that has often accompanied Buddhist Studies in its western history.
Making Merit through Warfare: The Bodhisattva-gocara-upāyavişaya-vikurvāņa-nirdeśa Sūtra
Stephen Jenkins, Humboldt State University
Buddhist Kings had sophisticated, practical, and prominent scriptural resources to support their use of deadly force in warfare and harsh punitive violence in maintaining social order. This sutra shows practical concern for military defense, control of vassals, and maintenance of social order. It advocates a combination of harshness and benevolence, juxtaposing warnings against excessive compassion with the prohibition of the destruction of infrastructure and the natural environment. Assuring the king that no moral fault is entailed for killing if he maintains proper intentions, strives to avoid conflict, and limits modes of waging war averts the Kşatriya’s classic fear of karmic retribution. Further, the cause of the violence is identified as the force of the victim's own karma. Under these conditions, the king actually strongly increases his merit through warfare.
The Rhetoric of War in Tibet: Towards a Buddhist Just War Theory
Derek Maher, East Carolina University
While the earliest Buddhist traditions placed great emphasis on teachings advocating non-violence (ahimsa), Buddhism eventually came to accommodate various aggressive ideologies, including martial arts, the samurai ethic, and warfare in general. My paper will explore the rhetoric that has been used in Tibet to justify warfare. I will argue that various parties in early seventeenth century Tibet worked to articulate criteria of just war theory within a Buddhist context. I will focus on biographies and histories that discuss the 1642 war in Tibet. I will investigate Geluk and complementary Kagyu accounts of these events. Through these inquiries I hope to discover general patterns that will reveal what counted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as suitable justifications for armed conflict. My primary focus will be jus ad bellum, that dimension of just war theory that relates to just causes, legitimate authority, and last resort for warfare.
Buddhism and Violence in Mongolia During the Theocratic Period
Vesna Acimovic Wallace, University of California, Santa Barbara
This paper discusses the brutal penal system that was introduced in Mongolia during the autonomous, theocratic period (1911-1921) under the auspices of the Eighth Jebtsundamba Khutugtu, the religious and secular leader of the state. It examines the forms of corporeal punishments of Buddhist ecclesiastics and laypeople in light of the socio-political and economic conditions in Mongolia of that period. It also brings into discussion the consequences of the harsh penal system in terms of the social and political events and changes in the country and their affect on the state of Buddhist establishments in Mongolia.
Onward Buddhist Soldiers: Sermons to Soldiers in the Sri Lankan Army
Daniel Kent, University of Virginia
This paper investigates Buddhist sermons (bana) to Sri Lankan military personnel as performative speech. Drawing upon transcripts of ba?a and formal interviews with monks, I show that the main purpose of these sermons is not to convey Buddhist doctrinal pronouncements on war, but rather to preach 'according to the occasion' in order to illicit particular emotional or mental states (hita) in the audience. By taking the thoughts and feelings of monks and lay people into consideration, this analysis of the structure of Buddhist sermons complicates the conceptual tension between Buddhism and war.
Buddhism and Violence in Thailand: The Objectification of the Sacred
Michael Jerryson, University of California, Santa Barbara
This proposed paper will analyze the relationship between Buddhist symbolism and violence in Southern Thailand. Since January 2004, Southern Thai monks (bhikkhus) have been living under martial law and constant physical danger. As the primary holder and disseminator of the dhamma, the bhikkhus serve a dual function of being both subject and object within their religion. While they are agents of change and sustainability, Buddhist adherents also objectify them as a symbol of the religion’s sustainability and, through this, posit the bhikkhus as symbols of their religious tradition. Through symbolizing the teaching of Buddhism, attacks on the bhikkhus represent an attack on the sacred. It is here that we find that importance between religion and violence falls not on textual evidence, but rather on performance and representation.
A18-105
Comparative Studies in Religion Section and Comparative Religious Ethics Group and Comparative Theology Group
Theme: The State of Comparative Enterprise in the Study of Religions
This panel brings together three comparative program units of the AAR for fruitful conversations across boundaries on the nature of comparative work as qualified by “religions,” “theology,” and “ethics,” and to discuss the “state” and status of comparison and “the comparative study of religion” in the academy. The panelists who are co-chairs or representatives of these program units will highlight the distinctiveness of their respective units and possible modes and models of future collaboration between these three units of the AAR. Given the growing number of “comparative” units in the AAR, the proposed panel is timely and necessary.
A18-106
History of Christianity Section and Death, Dying, and Beyond Consultation
Theme: The Christian Afterlife
The Rose That Grew through the Crack in the Wall: Images of Death and Afterlife in Twentieth-Century Mainline Protestantism
Lucy Bregman, Temple University
This paper examines images for death and afterlife found in early to mid-twentieth century anthologies of Protestant funeral sermons. Death as nonviolent natural transition was the primary imagery for Protestant Christian preaching about death. Sermons addressed those present as 'future dead,' intensely concerned about their own souls, God and afterlife. Images of Heaven as home, of sea voyages and natural growth stress peace and hope. The underlying idea was that 'natural immortality' receives proof and confirmation from Christian revelation. Poetry bolstered these themes, making doctrine emotionally vivid. These images, now frequently attacked as 'denial' and 'non-biblical' or even 'New Age' faded by the 1950s and vanish from Protestant sermons after the 1970s.
The Reformation of Hell: Pierre Viret's Polemic against Catholic Theology of the Afterlife
Michael Bruening, Concordia University, Irvine
The Calvinist reformer Pierre Viret devoted several of his early works to criticizing Catholic funeral practices and visions of the afterlife. He was influenced, first, by his debates with the former Sorbonne doctor, Pierre Caroli, over the efficacy of prayers for the dead and, second, by the continuation of Catholic familial funeral practices among the people of the Pays de Vaud, who had Protestantism thrust upon them from above by the city of Bern. Because of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the Reformed faith required a complete redrawing of the traditional map of the afterlife, and Viret does so, arguing that most of the Catholic church's doctrine and practice stemmed its false teaching about justification combined with its adoption of Greek and Roman pagan funerary practice and visions of the afterlife.
Bernard of Clairvaux on the Christian Afterlife: A Medieval Curiosity or Cause of War?
James G. Kroemer, Marquette University
The twelfth century Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux, offered a fascinating theory concerning the Christian afterlife that reflected both his monastic ideals of community and his spiritual desire for union with God. Bernard taught that the souls of the sanctified Christians did not enter the full glory of heaven upon death, but were consigned to wait together patiently for the Last Day. It was only when the soul was reunited with the body at the general resurrection of the dead that one could finally experience the joy of union with God. Bernard's theory on the Christian afterlife, which was rejected by the Church in the fourteenth century, is more than a medieval curiosity. The paper argues that Bernard's position was the impetus for his involvement in the Second Crusade, demonstrating that one's position on the afterlife may serve as justification for war.
Nefarious Necromancy: Christian Critiques of Nineteenth-Century American Spiritualism
Roddy Knowles, Boston University
This paper depicts and assesses the critiques of American Spiritualism put forth by both Protestants and Catholics during the half century following the 1848 “rappings” in Hydesville, New York. A consideration of anti-Spiritualist rhetoric reveals that many Christian thinkers addressed the reality of communication with the deceased by putting forth their own speculations about the post-mortem fate of the body and soul. By looking at the variety of stances taken on the bodily resurrection at judgment alongside the nature and existence of the miraculous, this paper charts not only the dynamic between Christianity and Spiritualism, but also among Christian thinkers, in an attempt to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the contested terrain of the afterlife in nineteenth-century America.
Christ’s Descent to the Dead in the Early Latin Church: The Eternal Fate of Those Who Died before Christ
Joshua Papsdorf, Fordham University
Much like the epistle of I Peter on which it is based, the doctrine of Christ’s descent to the dead, or the “Harrowing of Hell,” has had a tumultuous reception and been the subject of numerous controversies. This paper outlines the history of the doctrine as it developed in the Latin West from the second to sixth centuries. The fluctuations in the doctrine’s estimation are shown to be intimately connected to major changes in early Latin soteriology. The move from a mythological conception of salvation to a juridical or metaphysical model resulted in the gradual neglect and practical obsolescence of the doctrine. This position is illustrated and supported by citations from a range of early Latin works, with a particular emphasis on the works of Philastrius of Brescia, Rufinus of Aquileia, and Augustine.
Joseph Smith's Conquest of Death: Sacerdotal Genealogy and the Chain of Being
Samuel Brown, Harvard University
Nineteenth-century America witnessed substantial changes in death practice and culture. Joseph Smith's solutions to the problems of death and heaven, which arose in that period, have proved both complex and durable. Adapting, perhaps unconsciously, the Neoplatonic Chain of Being, Smith defeated death by creating a hierarchical genealogy of the afterlife that is not comprehended by the theocentric vs. domestic dialectic of his peers. Nor is it captured by simple genealogical immortality. Appropriating and recapitulating the translation of Elijah and Enoch, Smith created a reflex of heaven through temple rites of anointing, sealing, endowment, and adoption, which allowed his followers to conquer death as their fabled prophets had done. By defining heaven as an ecclesiastically framed family tree, Smith established heaven on earth, permanently vouchsafing his followers' immortality. Smith's system also domesticated human history into “dispensations” that reestablished genealogical continuity and provided Smith's followers immediate access to Adam and Eden.
A18-107
North American Religions Section
Theme: Migration, Missionaries, and the Manifestation of Catholicism: Transnational Religions in the United States
Saving an Unsalvageable City: Catholic Missionaries in Antebellum New Orleans
Michael Pasquier, Florida State University
The reputation of New Orleans as the “Great Southern Babylon” and the “Sodom of the South” stands alongside its reputation as a Roman Catholic island within a Protestant region. This doubly exceptional caricature of the Crescent City as both irreligious and Catholic carries with it a long history of people attempting to save what they considered to be an unsalvageable city. During the antebellum period, Catholic missionaries equated the state of Catholicism in New Orleans with the apparently immoral nature of its inhabitants. A study of Catholic missionaries in New Orleans demonstrates the anxieties of those who wished to transform a place that appeared beyond transformation. It also brings to mind the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the apparent tension between rebuilding a city as it was—strange, morally questionable, and creole—or as it should be—mainstream, morally upright, and American.
What Would Jesus Do in India? How American Missionaries between the World Wars Re-fashioned Jesus Abroad
Gretchen Boger, Princeton University
American foreign missionaries in the 1920s and ’30s engaged in a public debate re-evaluating the purpose and methods of missions. World War I had left them self-conscious about proclaiming the superiority of Christianity, sensitive to observations that it had failed to prevent devastating total war in the West. Their best bet, they thought, was to strip Christianity of non-essential accretions and present Jesus alone as the heart of the faith. That choice was in keeping with a history of American attempts to extract a purified Jesus from Christian dogma. But the missionaries had the benefit of East Asian perspectives unavailable to previous generations. Their encounters with non-Christian interpreters of Jesus affected the missionaries’ own understanding of the figure they revered. Their hybrid portrayal made its way back to America in their letters and articles and eventually complicated Protestant images of Jesus in a period that scholars have considered Christologically unsophisticated.
Más Allá de Azusa: The Early Construction of Transnational Pentecostalism
Daniel Ramirez, Duke University
This study traces the evolution of Pentecostalism in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through the first decades of growth after the Azusa Street Revival. It supplements recent studies of early Latino Pentecostalism by 1) focusing on heterodox (non-trinitarian) actors and movements; 2) tracing transborder or transnational circuits; and 3) highlighting cultural elements of the history. The period exemplifies many patterns of migration and mobility—of people and symbolic goods—patterns that prefigure later instances of the intersection between migration and religious culture. The life histories and robust agency of repatriated evangelists and their religious progeny in the face of macro events (the Depression and consequent Repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s and the Bracero guestworker program of the 1940s through 60s) open up a long-ignored window through which to study comparatively and in an earlier time period the contemporary phenomenon noted by scholars of transnational religions.
Social Capital as a Reason for Transnational Growth of Pentecostalism: How Colombian Migrants in South Florida Build Social Capital in an Unlikely Context
Kathryn Moles, Florida International University
This paper presents research on the rapid expansion of transnational Pentecostalism indigenous to Latin America as it relates to social capital, using branches of La Iglesia de Dios de Jesucristo International in South Florida as a qualitative case study. Data analyzed from five different data collection instruments, supported the hypothesis that Colombians who join the church would show an increase in social capital. If a group with low levels of positive social capital in a state with some of the lowest levels in the nation, can generate significantly higher levels of social capital in the milieu of the Pentecostal church, then this supports its significance as a factor in the spread of Pentecostalism. This has hitherto not been studied in-depth, and compliments other identified growth factors. The results also provide evidence for religion and spirituality as productive producers of positive social capital even in an unlikely context.
A18-108
Religion and the Social Sciences Section
Theme: Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Religion
To Be Spiritual Is to Stop: Inner Lives in an Economy of Uprooting
Brian Palmer, Uppsala University
This paper examines spiritual sensibilities under conditions of individualization and economic uprooting. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents of a Swedish town, I ask: What styles of inner life are fostered when the reassurance of a welfare state diminishes and individuals are left to seek socioeconomic security on their own? I find that my hosts cherish “individualized observances” sequestered in space and time from the pressures imposed by other people. In an era of neoliberal individualization, to be spiritual is to stop.
Paging God? Constructions of Religion and Spirituality amongst Staff in Hospital Intensive Care Units
Wendy Cadge, Harvard University
This paper brings “lived religion” approaches to bear on questions about religion, health and healing in the contemporary United States. Specifically, I examine how religion and spirituality are present and constructed in an infant and adult medical intensive care unit at a large secular hospital in the United States. As settings of birth and death, these units present ideal contexts through which to examine ethnographically how patients, their families, and health care providers construct and draw on religious and spiritual themes in making sense of suffering, illness, and the ethical decisions often made in difficult medical situations. I analyze the multiple religions and spiritualities present in these units, visibly and invisibly, and address the theoretical and practical issues in studying religion ethnographically outside of explicitly religious organizations.
The Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Kyrgyzstan: How Learning Influences Practice, or Accounting for the Difference between Hizb ut-Tahrir and Ancestral Worshipers
David Montgomery, Boston University
Drawing upon ethnographic field research and survey data on religious and cultural practices in Kyrgyzstan, this paper describes the implications of how learning influences practice. Utilizing an anthropology of knowledge framework which implies that all forms of knowledge contain a body of information that is socially organized and presented through a medium appropriate to the audience, I argue that what accounts for differences between orthopraxic Muslims and those who are more syncretic in their religious practice is the environment in which they come to understand their religious obligations - the habitat of the everyday and the potentiality of practice.
A18-109
Theology and Religious Reflection Section
Theme: The Cross and Empire
Christian Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Subalternity: Rethinking Kenosis, Conversion, and Agency
Peter Jones, Southern Methodist University
This paper explores constructively a particular intersection between theology, psychoanalysis, and subaltern studies. Theologically, the focus is on conversion and agency, with a particular interest in kenosis as a graciously enabled human act. Regarding psychoanalysis, the focus is on the major Lacanian concepts concerning identity formation and human interaction. Regarding subaltern studies, the focus is on the agency of cultural discourse itself. After concisely describing the relevant concepts involved and their intersecting and informative relations across the boundaries of their parent fields it is possible to reflect on some of the theologically constructive implications. This reveals a fuller picture of the emergence and development of the human person as a subject-agent within language and socio-cultural discourses characterized by imbalances of power. Theologically, this has implications for how we think about the Incarnation, conversion, agency, and the struggle for some measure of freedom, justice, and peace prior to the eschaton.
The Nicean Christ: Imperial Hegemony and Christian Dissent
Rita Nakashima Brock, Faith Voices for the Common Good
Standard art histories read post-Constantinian images of the enthroned Christ in terms of the hegemonic iconography of the emperor. We contend that these images convey tension with the hegemony of empire rather than the co-optation of Christianity by empire, a tension also found in the Nicean christology, which subordinates the emperor’s divinity to that of the eternally begotten son. This paper will explore this theological tension between the empire and Christ in relation to the current conservative, apocalyptic political rhetoric that elevates Nation above law and that misreads Christian skepticism about empire. The Nicean solution critiques empire and creates a fructile tension between state protection and coercive government. Early ideas of paradise offer a mediating zone of creative interaction, where questions of empire and Christ are in constant struggle and where the ancient concept of the divinity of humanity, theosis, both undermines imperial hegemony and patriarchal structures of gender.
Confessing in the Land of the Hunchback God: Suffering, Hope, and Forgiveness in Northern Uganda
Todd D. Whitmore, University of Notre Dame
For twenty years, the conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan military has caused enormous suffering in northern Uganda. The LRA has abducted over 20,000 youths and carried out systematic programs of rape, mutilation, and massacre. The military has also committed abuses. I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda to assess the two main strategies for the Acholi to give religious articulation to their suffering and their hope for reconciliation. Many of their sons and daughters, brother and sisters have returned home from the LRA, but not until after having committed atrocities against their own people, villages, and families. Reconciliation is a concrete requirement of ongoing life. Okot p'Bitek has called for a recovery of traditional religion. George Piwang-Jalobo points to the witness of Acholi martyr Janani Luwum against Amin's regime to argue for a re-inculturated Christianity. I use ethnographic methods to assess the two strategies.
Going Native: An Interstitial and Intercultural Wisdom Christology
Laura Taylor, Vanderbilt University
While the motives for Columbus’ 1492 voyage are often described in terms of the quest for a shorter sea route, his journey was funded by Ferdinand and Isabella as part of an anti-Islamic crusade that would forever divide the world between the West and the rest. This metaphorical division is particularly evident in the early colonial discourse in which Christian identity is constructed in opposition to its savage “other” and the evangelization of the New World is thought to be predestined in the name of the Empire. Locating my work at the intersection of feminist Christology and cultural, critical race, and postcolonial studies, I explore the way in which the colonial Christ has uncritically offered a monocultural approach to religious discourse. Then, drawing on Elsa Tamez’s work with indigenous religions and lived examples of hybrid Christologies, I lay the preliminary groundwork for the theological re-visioning of an intercultural Wisdom Christology.
The Cross against Empire: Toward a Counterhegemonic Theology of the Cross
Matthew MacKellar, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
Contemporary social and theological analysis reveals the violence operative in the hegemonic and colonizing relations between the privileged and the marginalized within and between societies. Often, the cross serves as a legitimating symbol of the triumphalism of the powerful in the colonization process or as a panacea to the suppressed guilt of oppressors. This paper argues that, in light of the epistemic rupture arising from the perspective of the “poor,” the oppressor—instead of delighting in or glorifying the sufferings of Jesus upon the cross—ought to react in horror to Jesus’ cruciform torture and connect it to the suffering of other people, seeing it as a confrontation of those complicit in the ongoing crucifixion of the poor. The proper “spirituality of the cross” is thus the situating of oneself in given historical situations so as to side with those who are being crucified by the forces of oppression and injustice.
A18-110
African Religions Group
Theme: African Indigenous Religions in the Twenty-First Century
"Osa Eleiye" (The Witches’ Verse!): Yoruba Orature, the Babalawo, and Female Power
Bolaji Bateye, Obafemi Awolowo University
Yoruba Orature and its diviner, the babalawo, literally ‘father of secrets’ are significant factors in Yoruba religion. The 'feminine mystique' is an ambivalent phenomenon in Yoruba religious traditions. It is essential to most sacrificial rites as the power that sanctions most of the rituals. Nevertheless women unlike the babalawo are barred from active participation in many Yoruba cults. How can we resolve this incongruity? What are those ritual powers Yoruba women are believed to posses? Why does a menstruating woman believed to be capable of neutralizing the potency of powerful herbal preparations? What is that alluring and yet repelling power that characterized African womanhood? This paper addresses the foregoing questions. It also brings to the fore the Ifa verse, ‘Osa Eleiye’ that speaks of the institution of the ‘witches’ or ‘iya mi’ (literally the mothers). It reveals the association of this verse in the empowerment of women.
African Indigenous Religions and Pentecostalism: A Study of Ijo Orunmila Adulawo in Lagos
Danoye Oguntola Laguda, Lagos State University
Ijo Orumila Adulawo is Pentecostal religious group that is based on the traditional religion of the Yoruba people. It is a theistic group that holds Olodumare (God) in supreme esteem while demonstrating a belief in other divinities, especially Orunmila. This paper seeks to examine the liturgies and doctrines of the group with the aim of identifying the shift from a traditional belief to a neo-Pentecostal group. Preliminary study has shown that the group’s re –organization is a product of the Pentecostal trends that now permeate the practice of religions on the African continent. Therefore the tenets, doctrines and liturgies of African Indigenous religions are still intact and fundamental to its adherents. The paper seeks to raise questions on the methodologies adopted by the group's pursuance of Pentecostalism as a replacement for traditionalism.
Mafuta Pole Dini Ya Africa: A Resurgence of African Religion
Samuel K. Elolia, Emmanuel School of Religion
Mafuta pole Dini ya Roho ya Africa represents the revival of African Religion. It was founded in West Pokot, Kenya by Lukas P'kech who was a follower of the outlawed Dini ya Msambwa. The British Colonial police at Koloa killed P'kech in 1950 along with 40 of his followers. The remaining of the followers went underground until its recent resurgence in East and West Pokot Districts. Unlike the earlier group, which did not worship in structured buildings, the newer group seems to operate like a church. As in the past it claims to reactivate the African Religions of the ancestors in an appealing way in order to compete with other contemporary religions that are thriving in modern Kenya. My field research will attempt to identify its characteristics with regard to beliefs, practices, and distinctions from Christianity.
Beyond Totem and Taboo: Indigenous African Religions and the Quest for a Global Ethic: The Gikuyu Case
Teresia Mbari Hinga, Santa Clara University
Focusing on the Gikuyu belief and ethical systems, I will explore selected ethical themes including inter alia: The quest for peace, good governance, ecological and economic justice. I intend to offer a preliminary analysis of Gikuyu perspectives and possible contribution to selected dimensions of the global ethical quest. This exploration will be a contribution however preliminary to the emerging discourse on the Global Ethic as a theoretical (though admittedly contested) academic enterprise. The paper will be a contribution, however Lilliputian to the nascent efforts to reconstruct and reclaim indigenous African knowledge, values and cultural resources, and to bring these to bear in Africa’s struggles towards healing of her multiple wounds. Such a reclamation of indigenous value systems, many increasingly recognize, is also a vital contribution to the world struggling towards a humane future in a shrinking and an increasingly intimate “global village.”
A18-111
Bible, Theology, and Postmodernity Group
Theme: John D. Caputo's The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana University Press, 2006)
A panel discussion of John Caputo's new book The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event.
A18-112
Bioethics and Religion Group
Theme: Bioethics, Religion, and Public Policy: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives
Paul Braune Resists the National Socialists' "Euthanasia" Program: July 1940
LeRoy Walters, Georgetown University
In July 1940 Paul Braune, Protestant pastor and administrator of several institutions for the mentally disabled, compiled an eleven-page memorandum summarizing what he knew of the Nazi 'euthanasia' program. He then sent his memorandum directly to Hitler's Chancellery. This presentation will summarize what we now know about the so-called T4 program -- a centralized effort to kill institutionalized mentally-handicapped people, especially people who were incapable of working. I will use Braune's own regional outline -- Württemberg, Saxony, Brandenburg, and Pomerania -- as a framework and will analyze the extent to which Braune's factual information was correct or incorrect. In conclusion, I will seek to evaluate Braune's approach to protesting what clearly constituted a crime against humanity. Was quiet diplomacy sufficient, or should Braune have gone public with his protest? When private and public protests fail to slow or stop serious injustice, what kinds of additional actions should be contemplated?
Is Medical Experimentation on Prisoners Ethical?
Christopher Rodkey, Drew University
Is medical experimentation on prisoners ethical? This essay will address the history and ethics of this complex issue. In doing so, I will pose Cornel West’s influential argument, which frames this issue between the ideas of bribery and coercion, against Mary Daly’s meta-ethical theory. Arguing for Daly’s position, I will conclude that prisoner experimentation can only be genuinely conceived as an expression of genocide.
Catholic Health Care Mission, Community Benefit, and the Public Good
David Craig, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
This paper presents my research from a qualitative interview project on religious health care nonprofits and the public good. Currently in the United States, we lack the moral vision and political will to manage the economics of health care fairly and efficiently. There are also increasing calls from some politicians for religious nonprofits to take the lead in serving the underserved and inspiring the care required in other people. This paper explores, first, the ways that Catholic health care organizations can help redefine health care as a public good and, second, these organizations' current practices in meeting the “community benefit” standard that regulates their tax-exempt status. I argue that appeals to justice in some organizational mission statements signal a changing conception of health care and the common good. This change can contribute new moral arguments and best practices for broader reform initiatives involving these organizations and the government.
Christian Bioethics and Public Policy: A Comparison of Engelhardt, Hauerwas, and McCormick on the Issues of Euthanasia and Universal Health Care
Andrew William Getz, Duquesne University
“What is the proper role of Christian ethics in the bioethics of a religiously pluralistic society?” Within contemporary American society (with its increasing insistence on an overwhelmingly strict separation between church and state), there are many questions regarding how this integration of religiously informed ethical judgments and public policy is to be realized. What must be examined is how one’s understanding of the role of faith in reaching bioethical judgments impacts one’s understanding of how those faith in-formed ethical judgments function in a political society of diverse faith commitments. This paper will examine the treatment of euthanasia and universal health care by three Christian ethicists H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Stanley Hauerwas, and Richard A. McCormick. This will be done so as to illustrate how their different understandings of the role of Christian faith in bioethics impact the way that they understand those Christian bioethics functioning in the socio-political moral discourse.
A18-113
Christian Spirituality Group
Theme: Spiritual Formation for Social Commitment
"The Bells of Nagasaki Still Echo in My Ears": Exploring the Christian Social Spirituality in the Writings and Edited Works of Takashi Nagai
Joseph W. Caldwell, Fuller Seminary
In the opening chapter of "We of Nagasaki", Takashi Nagai, a survivor of the atomic bomb drop on Nagasaki, asks the question: “What would the world be like in an atomic war of extended duration?” He answers his question not with a physical account of death and dying but with a nod toward the destruction of the soul. With the collapse of the Soviet threat and the seeming amnesia society has developed about the possibilities of nuclear war, Nagai as a topic may seem somewhat dated. But Nagai’s accounts, actions and his own spiritualization of his circumstances reach beyond mere political consideration about nuclear proliferation. Nagai contextually develops a program of social action that draws directly from his own lay Catholic spirituality and that transcends his own historical situation. This presentation will examine Nagai's contribution to an understanding of survival spirituality.
Nonviolence as a Christian Spiritual Path: Factors That Shape and Sustain Nonviolent Commitment
Janet W. Parachin, Phillips Theological Seminary
When considering that some Christians have chosen nonviolence as their way of life and spiritual path, certain questions arise: What factors shape one’s decision to choose nonviolence as a way of life? In light of the lack of widespread support for nonviolent perspective, what factors help one maintain this perspective once it has been chosen? Those persons and institutions who provide spiritual formation for social commitment may also ask, what educational models and methods may be useful in fostering commitment to nonviolence? These questions are explored using a narrative methodology to engage the perspectives and practices of three groups of nonviolent social activists—black civil rights activists of the 1960s, Roman Catholic peace activists of the twentieth century, and nonviolent social activists in a local community in the early twenty-first century.
The Tortured Body: A Liturgy of the Eucharist
Rebecca Gordon, Graduate Theological Union
How ought Christians in this country who follow sacramental traditions respond to our nation's use of torture in a post-9/11 world? This essay is a meditation on the Eucharist, arranged in the order of that great liturgy itself. In it I make the claim that, as William Cavanaugh suggests in "Torture and Eucharist", the church’s practice of Eucharist cannot rightly be separated from the state’s practice of torture. In Eucharist we regularly remember and retell the story of One who was tortured to death for political reasons. Throughout this meditation I argue that the practice of torture is precisely the anti-Eucharist, the unmaking of individual human bodies and thereby of social bodies. In Eucharist, we seek by feeding individual bodies to re-member and remake that community we call the Body of Christ. Many Christians will therefore find their -- deeply practical -- response to torture in the practice of Eucharist.
Transfiguration Spirituality: Encountering God's Presence in the Margins
John Nelson, Bethel Seminary
The relationship between beauty and social justice has often been tenuous within Christian spirituality. While beauty’s evocative and excessive characteristics may draw us toward God, they may also result in idolatry, elitism, and oppression. Through creative first person accounts, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the “mystical” and “prophetic” streams of Christian spirituality are united in an encounter with God’s presence in the margins. These encounters are both iconoclastic, shattering our images of humanity and God, and iconic, mediating the divine presence. I propose this “transfiguration spirituality” does not result in idolatry, oppression, or escape, but rather calls us to perceive and participate within the Spirit of God’s redemptive, beautifying, and reconciling action in the margins—the place where a desire for beauty and concern for social justice are joined.
A18-114
Gay Men's Issues in Religion Group
Theme: Mystical Erotica: Gay Living as Spiritual/Religious Practice
Towards a Latin American Gay Liberation Theology
Mário Ribas, University of Cape Town
Although the Brazilian population is often stereotyped as sensual, the normal attitude towards sex and sexuality is really shame and guilt. In spite of the apparent sexual liberty of the semi-naked bodies on the beaches and Carnival, the rules prescribed by the hetero-patriarchal paradigms about the body and sensuality prevail. During colonisation, the European heterosexual structure was prescribed and imposed, and later reinforced through the military dictatorship. Liberation Theology that questioned those realities of oppression did not necessarily go far enough to include in the quest for liberation those who were out of the heteronormative system. The purpose of this paper is to explore shame and guilty and liberation, experienced by those who subvert that order, particularly Brazilian gay men. This is intended to be a reflection towards a gay Latin American liberation theology, drawing theology from the gay male reality of economical oppression and social alienation.
Gay/Queer Men as Virtuosi of the Holy Art of Bricolage and as Tricksters of the Sacred
Peter Savastano, Seton Hall University
Organized around the concept of the “bricoleur” and based on ethnographic research, this paper postulates that: 1) by virtue of their exclusion from most of the world’s religious traditions, gay/queer men find themselves in a kind of spiritual “Diaspora”; 2) gay/queer men have been forced by circumstance to forge a diverse array of spiritual practices, re-interpret or invent alternative sacred myths, produce their own mystical writings, and form diverse intentional spiritual communities; 3) in becoming masters of bricolage, gay/queer men unwittingly function in the role of the trickster for each other and for the wider heteronormative culture in which they are embedded; 4) for many gay/queer men the role of sex is sacramental and consciousness altering/expanding, as is often reflected in their mystical writings, spiritual journals and memoirs; 5) sex is one of the central axis around which their spiritual practices and sacred narratives are organized.
Intimations of Mystical Consciousness in Alternative Poetry
John E. Allard, Providence College
This paper explores gay poetry as a source for a study of mystical consciousness among gay men. The work of Whitman, Rimbaud, and selected contemporary gay poets will be examined in light of Ricoeur's theory of metaphor and genre, and of R. C. Zaehner's typology of mystical experience.
Walt Whitman's Mystical Camraderie
Juan A. Herrero Brasas, California State University, Northridge
The original meaning of Whitman's poetry was religious and mystical. During his lifetime, Whitman was seen as a messiah and a mystic. In fact, a Church of Whitman came into existence after the poet's death which lasted for several decades. Whitman's religious and mystical enterprise was rooted in the poet's experience as a gay man. Far from being a forerunner of the modern gay liberation movement, he tried to prevent the emergence of a separate, stigmatized minority.
A18-115
Hinduism Group
Theme: Invoking the Veda in the Worship of Siva and Visnu
The most dramatic change in the Brahmanical tradition was from the Vedic fire-based ritual system to one centered on pūjā-type offerings presented before an image. Corresponding to this change was a shift in orientation from the Vedic deities to worship of Vişņu and Śiva (and their divine retinues). This shift was reflected in the formation of a variety of religious systems that to various degrees extended, redirected, and superseded elements of the Vedic tradition. This panel examines early Smārta ritual, which presents itself as continuous with the Veda, as well as two contrasting Āgamic traditions, the Vaikhanasa, which seeks Vedic authority for its Āgamic doctrines and practices, and the Saiva Siddhanta, which generally does not, but in which certain conceptual and ritual structures were carried over from Vedism, or have been maintained alongside the Āgamic system. These illustrate some of the rhetorical strategies available to new religious movements in India.
Image and Temple in the Late Vedic Ritual Codes
Timothy Lubin, Washington and Lee University
It is well known that rites of image-worship and temple-based pūjā service eventually supplanted the Vedic fire-cult as the standard mode of Brahmanical ritualism. These rites are described at length in the epics, in the Purāņas, and later in the Āgamas and Tantras. However, it is rare that such practices are introduced directly into the Vedic ritual codes (Sūtras). This paper will review the stages by which this introduction took place, beginning with the assimilation of such offerings to the old model of the bali and the Traiyambaka offering to Rudra. Attention will then turn to the rubrication of image- pūjā in Baudhāyanagŗhyaśeşasūtra, focusing on the formulation of a common ritual format, the choice of mantras deemed to be appropriate for each deity, and the nature of the connection with similar prescriptions in the Purāņas.
The Veda in the Āgama
Ute Huesken, University of Heidelberg
The paper gives an example of the appropriation of “the Veda” in Āgama texts. The case study deals with the Vaikhānasa tradition, based on the explanations and interpretations of the 15th-century (?) Vaikhānasa scholar Srīnivāsa Dīkşita in his text Daśavidhahetunirūpaņa. In his text Srīnivāsa Dīkşita refers to the Vaikhānasasmaŗtāsūtra, to a -- now lost -- Vaikhānasagrhyapaŗiśişţasūtra, and to other sutra traditions such as the Baudhāyanagŗhyasūtra. It is demonstrated how he establishes a direct connection of the Vedic Vaikhānasa-śākhā and the South Indian Vaikhānasas as distinct tradition of Vişņuite temple priests.
Śaiva Siddhānta and the Vedic Tradition
Ginette Ishimatsu, University of Denver
This paper investigates the complex relationship between Śaiva Siddhānta and Vedic ritual traditions. Śaiva Siddhānta, a school of Siva worship persisting in Tamilnadu, is based in part on the Sanskrit Āgamas. While denying the ultimacy of the Vedas, these medieval texts are clearly indebted to them in certain ways. For instance, Vedic models are obvious in Āgamic practices such as initiation (dīksā), fire rituals (agnikārya), and balidāna. Moreover, in contemporary practice, temple priests (gurukkals) may supplement Āgamic worship with Vedic mantras or recite Āgamic mantras “in a Vedic style.” The relationship between the two systems cannot be separated from the relationship between the Āgamic gurukkals and the smārta brahmans, who follow Vedic authority. While the gurukkals see themselves as the smārtas’ equals, the latter do not recognize them as authentic brahmans. The inferior status of the gurukkals may partly account for the “Vedicization” of temple pūjā.
A18-116
Islamic Mysticism Group
Theme: Raising the Discourse to Another Level: Diverse Appropriations and Adaptations of Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension
This panel examines the discourse on Muhammad's night journey (isra') and ascension (mi'raj) as articulated outside of mainstream Jama'i-Sunni Islamic spheres. Each of the four papers illustrates diverse ways that particular Shi'i and/or Jewish scholars appropriate and adapt the themes of Muhammad's heavenly journey in order to advance their intellectual projects and to promote the interests of their communities. The four papers offer new and critical approaches to the study of Islamic ascension literature, tracing the broad development of key ideas in this literature while simultaneously grounding the analysis in terms of specific texts, practices, and locations.
Prophetic Ascent and Initiatory Ascent in Qadi al-Nu'man's Asas al-Ta'wil
Elizabeth R. Alexandrin, University of Manitoba
Qadi al-Nu'man's 10th-century Fatimid Ismaili work, Asas al-Ta'wil, forms an early example of the medieval Islamic employment of the Prophet Muhammad's ascent as a model for individual mystical, or more specifically, initiatory experience. This paper will underscore the importance of the Asas al-Ta'wil for the history of Islamic mysticism. In addition, the Asas al-Ta'wil is a work that reflects the methods of 10th-century Fatimid Ismaili Qur'anic interpretation and the centrality of the 'stories of the prophets' (qisas al-anbiya') to medieval Ismaili thought. The Fatimid Ismaili tradition of the 'allegorical interpretation' (ta'wil) of the Qur'anic passages concerning prophetic ascent merit further elaboration in what follows in this paper. Significantly, and as this paper aims to show, particular intellectual trends within medieval Ismaili thought focused on the concept of prophetic ascent in order to distinguish between the prophet's superior revelatory experiences and the individual's initiatory experience.
Early Imami Shi'i Narratives and the Construction of the Story of Muhammad's Ascension
Frederick S. Colby, Miami University of Ohio
This paper examines the use of the narrative of Muhammad's ascent by proto-Imami scholars from Qumm at the turn of the tenth century CE. By comparing key tropes in these Imami texts to similar tropes in Jama'i-Sunni texts of the same period, the paper illustrates how the ascension discourse provides a site for Muslim sectarian polemics. The paper considers the thesis that these Imami ascension narratives, drawn primarily from 'Ali Qummi's Tafsir and Saffar Qummi's Basa'ir al-Darajat, were also in dialogue with Jewish narratives. This paper suggests that the ascension discourse as defined by early Imami scholars played a foundational role in helping to shape how numerous Muslims subsequently tell the tale of Muhammad's night journey and ascension.
Heavenly Journey as Contested Symbol: Echoes of the Mi'raj in Medieval Hebrew Literature
Aaron W. Hughes, University of Calgary
This presentation will focus on the mi'raj as a site of socio-rhetorical self-definition in medieval al-Andalus. Rather than examine the actual contents of the mi'raj, my interest is in its adoption and adaptation by Jewish intellectuals for various ideological reasons. The mi'raj, in other words, was a contested symbol, one that Muslims could use to demonstrate the superiority of Muhammad's prophetic career and thus Islam; but also one that non-Muslims could use to subvert such claims. In using the motif of a heavenly journey, Jewish thinkers attempted to appropriate the mi'raj by showing how it originated not in the Qur'an, but in the Bible and early rabbinic literature. In so doing, they sought to imply that the trope of the mi'raj was not Muslim or Arabic, but Jewish and Hebrew. This ideological struggle of the ownership of the mi'raj is thus intimately connected to both cultural poetics and religio-cultural nationalism.
"When Muhammad Went on the Mi'raj He Saw a Lion on the Road": The Mi'raj in the Alevi-Bektashi Tradition
Vernon James Schubel, Kenyon College
'It is reported that when Muhammad went on the mi'raj he saw a lion on the road.' This is beginning of the Alevi-Bektashi text, Buyruk. The accompanying narrative describes how the Prophet meets Imam Ali in the form of a lion and places his ring in his mouth. On returning to earth he joins the circle of the Forty (kirklar) who reveal that when one is cut, they all bleed. The story establishes the origin of the primary Alevi ritual, the ayn-i cem, and provides a symbolic blueprint for their batini world view which affirms the essential unity of the Prophet, the Imams and the pirs. Based on fieldwork among the Alevi community this paper will examine several versions of this narrative, exploring their connection with Alevi theology and ritual practice.
A18-117
Japanese Religions Group
Theme: Japanese Religion and Politics
Internal and international politics are the foci for exploring various dynamics of Japanese religious experience, expression, and influence. The power wielded in defining and enacting religious activity and ritual is examined in a number of contexts and from multiple perspectives in the modern period. As Japanese interact with those from other cultures, fundamental questions about human religiosity and power--especially how and who defines it--are raised. Meiji politicians, Colonial Koreans, Okinawan anti-base protestors, current governmental leaders, and media reporters all enter the conversation.
Taming Demons: The Anti-superstition Campaign and the Invention of Religion in Meiji Japan
Jason Josephson, Stanford University and École Française d'Extrême-Orient
In the pre-Meiji period there was no indigenous word that referred to something as broad as “religion,” nor was there a systematic way to distinguish between “religions” as members of some larger generic category. There were, however, well-recognized terms for “evil cult” and “dangerous teachings;” and it was these categories that shaped early Meiji government policy toward Christianity, popular sects, and to some degree Buddhism. By looking at law codes, textbooks, and governmentally distributed pamphlets, this paper examines the government’s attempt to restrict these “evil cults” and purge “dangerous” and “backward” ideas. It is from among these banned beliefs that the legal category “religion” (shūkyō) emerged as a paradoxical group of beliefs distinguished from “superstition” (meishin) explicitly by being designated as a matter of personal choice. Ultimately, this process of differentiation led to the invention of “religion” in Japan with far reaching consequences.
Beyond Resistance or Collaboration: The Strategic Merger of the Korean Wŏnjong and Japanese Sōtōshū in Colonial Korea
Hwansoo Kim, Harvard University
Japanese and Korean scholarship on Korean colonial Buddhism has been confined to binary interpretations. The two Buddhisms are cast in terms of imperialism versus anti-imperialism, or of collaboration versus nationalism, with few alternative identities. Yet, primary sources reveal that colonial Buddhism in Korea is greatly complex. One case, the attempt to merge the Japanese Sōtōshū with the Korean Wǒnjong in 1910, evinces the complex triangle of Korean Buddhists, Japanese Buddhist missionaries, and colonial authorities. This case shows that Korean Buddhist monks cannot be classified as simply anti- or pro-Japanese, nor can their responses to occupation be characterized only in terms of resistance or collaboration. The case also reveals that Japanese Buddhist missionaries did not follow state ideology blindly: they protested, collaborated, and compromised with the colonial government. In reevaluating this period, we see that the interaction between the two Buddhisms consciously and unconsciously reinforced both shared and contested cultural identities.
Relationship of Religion to the Okinawan Anti-base Protest Movement
William W. Hunt, Nashville, TN
American military bases occupy a substantial portion of the island of Okinawa. Okinawa has a history distinct from that of the remainder of Japan. It has developed a distinctive indigenous religion and a fervent pacifism. For a quarter of a century, Okinawans have vigorously opposed the presence of military bases on their island. Largely from personal interviews, this paper examines the religious beliefs of two of the protest leaders, Itokazu Keiko and Takazato Suzuyo and determines that religion plays an important role in their political activism. This paper concludes that religion is a principal ingredient in the Okinawan anti-base protests.
“Yasukuni Problem” Re-considered: The Tasks for Religious Studies
Yuki Shimada, Princeton Theological Seminary
Since Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi started annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, debate over the "Yasukuni Problem” has become fierce once again. It has provoked protests by peoples and governments of neighboring Asian countries and aroused heated pros and cons of the visits among politicians and populace in Japan. The protests stem from conflicts of consensus around three problems: the understanding of history, the impact for diplomacy, and the relationship between the state and “religion.” Although all three overlap, this paper focuses on the last problem, examining a brief overview of discourses of advocates for Yasukuni visits/worship, the inherent problems of understanding “religion” in relation to the public sphere, and the ramifications of Japan's supreme court ruling defining the “authentically” accepted public view of “religion.” Finally, the paper suggests what academic tasks await scholars of religious studies in confronting the “Yasukuni Problem.”
Discourses of the Re-appearing: The Re-enactment and Aftermath of the Rite of Nuno-hashi Kanjô-e at Mt. Tateyama
Irit Averbuch, Tel-Aviv University
This paper focuses on an intriguing case of a recent revival, after 130 years, of an old Buddhist ritual for a prefectural “culture festival” (bunkasai): The rite of Nuno-hashi kanjô-e (“Consecration Rite of the Cloth Bridge”), performed at the foot of Mt. Tateyama (Toyama prefecture) on September 29, 1996, and on September 18, 2005. The rite was originally aimed to provide women, who were banned from climbing Mt. Tateyama, with a means for salvation and a promise of rebirth in Amida’s Western Paradise. Though conducted today in a secular context of “cultural festival” or “ibento”, the rite had stirred deep religious experiences in most of it participants, on the one hand, and raised a variety of local-political problems on the other. The paper discusses this variety of interconnected and complex issues of the manipulation of religious rituals for economic and political gains in today’s Japan, and their ramifications.
A18-118
Lesbian-Feminist Issues and Religion Group
Theme: The Challenge of Lesbian Voice/Presence to Religious Traditions
I. B. Horner and the Writing of Women Under Primitive Buddhism (1930)
Grace G. Burford, Prescott College
This paper tells the story of how a young, British, Cambridge-educated woman named Isaline B. Horner came (in the 1920s) to write western scholarship's first--and for several decades its only--book on women in Buddhism. A key player in this story, Caroline Rhys Davids (feminist activist and wife of Thomas Rhys Davids, founder of the Pali Text Society), suggested the topic of women in Buddhism to Horner after Horner returned to Cambridge from a two-year stay in South Asia. This is a story of the early decades of women's higher education, the terrible impact of the Great War, British colonialism in South Asia, the beginnings of western scholarship on Buddhism, and the launch of Horner's long life of studious interpretation of Buddhist texts and--simultaneously, in the private, personal background--the beginnings of Horner's relationship with another Cambridge scholar, Elsie Butler, that would last until Butler's death in 1959.
Abnormal Women and the "Third Sex" in the Pali Buddhist Canon
Carol S. Anderson, Kalamazoo College
One of the central issues in South Asian religions scholarship is the variety of terms found in early Indian texts that refer to sexually non-normative individuals, both female and male. The Vinayapitaka of the Pali Canon contains an interesting list of terms that monks should not use when referring to women, and in this list is a term that has been translated as 'women without balls,' or a 'female' human who enjoys some type of intercourse with members of the same sex (the actual term is 'itthipandaka'). Following this term throughout the Pali Canon as well as the array of contemporary scholarship displays a remarkable lack of attention to women, in general, and a parallel lack of attention to the kinds of sexually deviant individuals considered possible in the early centuries of first millennium South Asian religious worlds.
Sor Juana: Academic Freedom, the Necessity for Fiction, and the Resurrection of Queer Lineage
Marie Cartier, Claremont Graduate University
This paper explores the primary sources of Sor Juana and how they have been historically decided not by the poetry itself, but by the secondary sources’ interpretations. The secondary sources impact upon the original primary sources has remained fixed until scholars skilled in both academia and art employed art to impact upon not necessarily the primary work, but also on the secondary sources interpretations of the primary sources. In other words, I will explore the radical notion that what Sor Juana wrote is what Sor Juana meant.
Sisterhood or Polarity?: Controversies over the “Guardian Priestess” Path in Dianic Witchcraft
Kerry Noonan, University of California, Los Angeles and California State University, Northridge
Since the early 1970s, separatist Dianic Witchcraft has emphasized the totality of women’s experiences, the power of women working together in ritual, and rejected other modern Witchcraft traditions’ insistence on heterosexual gender polarity in divinity and among practitioners for effective ritual. “Sisters doin’ it on their own” has been the watchword for this radical feminist spiritual tradition. Recently, movement leaders Ruth Barrett and Falcon River have developed a new ritual role called “guardian priestess.” This has generated much controversy, as they have been denounced by founder Z Budapest, who claims they have introduced polarity and a butch/femme model into Dianic Witchcraft, whereas they maintain women working together in magical partnership is at the heart of the tradition. In this paper, I situate Barrett’s and River’s concept of “guardians” in Neopaganism, feminist spirituality, and contemporary Lesbian culture, as well as examining the evolving situation in light of schisms in other religions.
A18-119
Native Traditions in the Americas Group
Theme: Law, Religion, and Native American Traditions
This session examines a range of contested intersections of U.S. law, Native American traditions, and the category of "religion." Papers examine the protection of "sacred" lands, repatriation of "sacred" objects and cultural patrimony, free exercise in prisons, and contested understandings of marriage.
Territory, Wilderness, Property, and Reservation: Land and Religion in Native American Supreme Court Cases
Kathleen M. Sands, University of Massachusetts, Boston
This paper describes the links between land and religion in the Marshall cases of 1823-32 and the Free Exercise cases of 1986-1990. The Marshall cases placed First Nations simultaneously under the constitution as “domestic dependent nations” and outside the constitution as non-citizens, hence not entitled to Free Exercise or other constitutional rights. The Free Exercise cases are explicated in relation to three metaphors: 1) private property (2) the garden, wilderness, and wall and (3) the reservation. While the first two metaphors explain the failure of the religion clauses for both native and non-native Americans, the metaphor of reservation is more promising. For Native religions it suggests legislative remedies related to treaties; for Native and non-Native citizens, it returns attention to reserved rights.
Sweatlodge Practices in Prison: Another Clash of Cultures
Emily Brault, Oregon City, Oregon
I propose to draw out some of the tensions between Native American ceremonies and the rehabilitative and constitutive ideals of American prisons. These tensions began historically when the governments of European settlers imprisoned Native people for practicing their traditions. They are evidenced again in the necessity of legislative acts that try and protect Native American religious freedom and practice both within and outside of prison. And they continue today as Native people in prison try to negotiate traditional practices and spaces within institutions generated and fostered by different values, beliefs, and perceptions of reality. My goal here is to raise some broad and general issues that offer entrance into more specific conversations at a later date.
Ho`oponopono: Traditional Dispute Resolution in a Repatriation Conflict
Greg Johnson, University of Colorado, Boulder
Fraught with implications concerning the constitutionality of repatriation law, the status of Native Hawaiians under federal Indian law, and problems inherent to weighing competing religious claims, the Kawaihae dispute is currently pushing the envelope of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), generating myriad and conflicting opinions in courts, the media, and on the street as to the meaning of Hawaiian tradition in the present. This dispute is provocative for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it pits fifteen Native Hawaiian organizations against one another on religious grounds. Recognizing that existing repatriation laws are ill equipped to address such predicaments, a federal judge has directed the Hawaiian groups to engage in traditional dispute resolution, which they began in January of 2006. This paper explores traditional Native Hawaiian dispute resolution practices—ho`oponopono—as engaged in this dispute.
NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) and the Return of the Repressed
Jace Weaver, University of Georgia
This paper looks at recent developments in public perceptions about the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It focuses on the relation of repatriation to Native land claims and persistence upon the land. In particular, deliberate misinformation campaigns, designed to play upon fears about Native cultures and religious traditions, will be examined.
A18-120
Religion and Disability Studies Group and Biblical Scholarship and Disabilities Consultation
Theme: Writing for Publication in Religion, Bible, and Disability Studies
While “publish-or-perish” can impact scholars at almost any institution today, writing and publishing are also the means by which we communicate and dialogue within the academy across space and time. No scholar committed to the concerns of faith and disability can afford to ignore the demands of publishing any longer. This session is devoted to how to write and publish in the field of religion, Bible, and disability studies. The panel will include publishers, series, journal, and book editors, and authors who work within these fields of study. Topics to be addressed include: an overview of publishing in the field, what to expect in the publishing process, what areas of inquiry are open, how to turn a dissertation into journal articles and/or a book, book proposal writing, editing a volume of essays, finding the right publisher, dealing with the peer review process, and related topics.
A18-121
Religion and Popular Culture Group
Theme: Religion, Text, and Sex: Contemporary Religious Sex Manuals
In this session the panelists take up the “problem” of human sexuality and the solutions various religious groups have offered for managing it, from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The tension between prescription and practice unites the papers thematically. Each panelist highlights the efforts of religious authorities to define appropriate sexual behavior by contrasting it to “immoral” or “unnatural” behavior. These papers additionally describe a particular fascination with--or anxiety about--how individuals plot a course between spiritual instruction and erotic enjoyment. Through sexuality, religion becomes embodied, both within the physical, sexual bodies of practitioners, and in the body’s symbolic representation of morality and sin. The human body can mediate religious faith, but it can also exemplify transgression and excess. Together, these papers offer sociological, theological, and historical interpretations of the ways in which various religious groups have engaged these tensions between religious beliefs and sexual practices.
Making Total Women: Sexual Bodies and Sexual Identity in Evangelical Marital Advice Guides, 1963-1980
Rebecca L. Davis, Yale University
“Making Total Women” examines how evangelical marital and sexual advice manuals of the 1960s and 1970s fit within the long-standing debate among social and cultural historians about the discrepancies between prescriptive literature and social behavior. This paper will examine how Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman (1973), and other books like it, employ self-conscious camp and parody in ways that destabilize distinctions between what was recommended and what was “real.” These books make contradictory demands upon their readers to express sincere faith while imitating an idealized feminine domesticity. They represent the wife’s body as a bridge over this divide. As a symbol of heterosexual marriage and reproduction, the wife’s body functions in these books as normalizing force of gender stability. The books suggest that women can use their bodies as both literal and figurative intermediaries between the secular world and their sacralized home.
'Born Again Is a Sexual Term": Demons, STDs, and God's Healing Sperm
Amy DeRogatis, Michigan State University
This paper discusses sex manuals written for a small but growing group of Protestant evangelicals who believe that demons are transmitted through sinful sexual unions. Unlike other evangelical marriage manuals published in the past fifty years, these texts are concerned with the spiritual side of sexuality and the specific dangers that accompany illicit sex; specifically, the partners could end up as fragmented spiritual beings and expose themselves to demonic infestation. This is the true meaning of S.T.D.s: sexually transmitted demons. Similarly, the definition of “born again” differs from typical evangelical literature. “Born Again,” the authors explain, “is a sexual term.” To receive God’s cleansing spirit, the petitioner must become like a female and open themselves up to God’s healing sperm. This paper examines sex manuals written in the theological context of contemporary charismatic deliverance literature that presents the sexual body as an arena for the battle between demons and God.
How Should a Nice Jewish Orthodox Israeli Couple Do It?
Evyatar Marienberg, Tel Aviv University
This paper examines several Jewish-Orthodox marital manuals published in Israel in the last twenty years (1985-2005), all of which include significant discussions on sexual relations. Often written for a specific audience (men, women, couples, ultra-orthodox, modern-orthodox, sephardim, ashkenazim, etc), these manuals present a wide view of the way sex is prescribed in today’s Israeli Jewish Orthodox world. In his paper, “How Should a Nice Jewish Orthodox Israeli Couple Do It?”, Marienberg will concentrate on a few recent marital guides which became best sellers (and common wedding or engagement gifts). Among other questions, he will try to understand what made these specific works so popular, and what changed in the style and content of these manuals over the last two decades.
Catholics Do It Infallibly
Cristina L. H. Traina, Northwestern University
This paper traces transitions in 20th-century American Roman Catholic marriage and sexuality manuals to the Catholic embrace of psychology as an authoritative moral truth. In the late 19th and early 20th century the body—unstable and vulnerable to impurity— was primarily described as a liability to the soul, by mid-century the challenge became developmental integration of a good body’s natural impulses and tendencies, channeling and training them into acceptable, chaste forms. In the late 20th century sex was so highly celebrated in both official and popular accounts that sex was seen not just as a helpful metaphor for divine-human love but in some cases as the quintessential human experience of it. Throughout this transition period, manuals emphasize—and caution—that only marital sex open to pregnancy is truly and fully holy, exciting, and passionate. In these manuals the “methods” that make sex more fulfilling are not sexual techniques but spiritual and relational ones.
A18-122
Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
Theme: Horror, Heroes, and the Supernatural in Film
"Do I Look Like Someone Who Cares What God Thinks?": Rethinking the Relationship between Religion and Cinema Horror
Douglas E. Cowan, University of Waterloo
While it is often dismissed by cultural critics for its emphasis on violence, poor production values, and fairly predictable plot lines, B-grade horror cinema reflects in substantial ways the religious discourses of late modern society. Most particularly, in what appears at first as an action-driven absence or inversion of religious sensibilities, many of these films actually instantiate very traditional religious discourses and themes, and instantiate culturally specific 'fear factors' on which filmmakers depend for the success of their stories. Taking the religious elements in horror cinema seriously, and locating them within the analytic domain of 'sociophobics,' this paper examines horror films from the perspective that what we fear, how we express those fears, and how those fears are ultimately resolved are socially and culturally conditioned. In terms of cinema horror, the salient question is: Why is religion so often used to tell a scary story?
American Identity in Recent Marvel Comics Superhero Films
Anthony Mills, Fuller Seminary
The mythology of the superhero in American culture has always been tied to American identity itself. It has evolved almost in tandem with American history, and superheroes themselves have been either personifications of or foils for the American values and desires contemporaneous with them. At the same time, changes in American culture have brought with them changes in how superheroes are conceived. There is currently a gradual evolution of the American superhero mythology from traditional to postmodern. The differences can be articulated according to five key areas, including relation to others, sexuality, psychology, moral decision, and the nature of evil. In the medium of graphic novels, this turn originated with Marvel Comics and Stan Lee. Filmic adaptations of Marvel heroes are numerous and more are in development. I want to discuss how these films exhibit the postmodern hero mythology, and what impact this has or should have on American identity.
Channeling, Trance, and Religion in What the Bleep Do We Know!?
Emily Merriman, Boston University
What the Bleep Do We Know!? combines interviews and animations with a plotline of individual spiritual transformation. Intermingling scientific theories with Neoplatonic and New Age commonplaces, it makes a number of claims about the nature of reality, propounding both an ambivalent neo-Gnostic view about the necessity of divine knowledge and a vision of mystical unity. It seeks to induce in its viewers a trance-like state in which critical discernment is suspended. The film's condemnation of Christianity is expressed in theological terms, personal terms, mystical terms, and also conveyed in subtle ways by the cinematography, which actually draws power from the images and ethos of Catholicism. Engineered for maximum rhetorical effect, the film's motley patchwork of science, addiction recovery, narrative and New Age ideas, has a specific message, based on the teachings of Ramtha, a channeled teacher and warrior.
George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead: Consumerism and the Specter of Undeath
Kim Paffenroth, Iona College
Like Dante's Inferno, George Romero’s classic horror film Dawn of the Dead is ghastly, funny, shocking, but also humane and humanizing. Both works unmask human beings for the selfish, greedy, self-destructive creatures that they are, but thereby, these works seek to shock us out of our sins, especially out of our violence and materialism. As Fran and Peter flee the mall at the end of the movie, we rejoice just as we do at the end of the Inferno when Dante climbs up out of hell. It is, at the very least, a sobering and realistic ending, one that demands that its viewers reject the earth-bound, hell-bound kingdom of the mall, in which life has been utterly and eternally eclipsed by the dawn of the dead, and instead strive for a higher Kingdom, in whatever secular or religious terms one conceives of it.
Heaven Can Wait: The Emergence of American Purgatory
Diana Walsh-Pasulka, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Several American popular films and television series feature the representation of a middle state of the afterlife, characterized as existing between heaven and hell. This state is regularly referenced as purgatory, although the designation is not technically correct. This proposal situates the emergence of this American version of purgatory within an historical context. By comparing late nineteenth century American appropriations of the Catholic dogma with contemporary examples in popular culture, I will reveal a unique version of the middle state between heaven and hell, where deceased spirits enjoy a proverbial second chance as well as the opportunity to attend to unfinished business with those they have left behind. The precedent for this version of purgatory is to be found in transformations of the popular practice of prayer for dead, associated with the Catholic dogma, but which in reality exceeded the bounds of its doctrinal definitions.
A18-124
Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture Group
Theme: Postmodernism and Tillich
Although Paul Tillich has sometimes been taken to be an archetypal modern figure, this session shows otherwise. Three papers explore an array of resonances between Tillichian ideas and themes prominent in Jean-Luc Marion, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek (and in the interpretation of St. Paul advanced by several of these thinkers) while the session's leadoff paper hazards the argument that, from 1919 forward, Tillich assumed, announced, and inhabited a cultural-historical situation beyond the modern, and that Tillich's own theology was a correlation of the message of one concrete religion with just such a situation.
Paul Tillich: Prophet and Partial Practitioner of the Postmodern
Robison B. James, University of Richmond and Baptist Theological Seminary, Richmond
Although Tillich is sometimes considered a representative modern, I argue that in 1919 he announced, defined, and thereafter partly inhabited a cultural-historical situation that some now call “postmodern,” and that Tillich’s entire theological project was “half-Nietzschean” in the sense implied when he says his approach is “oriented towards Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘creative’ on the soil of Hegel’s ‘objective-historical spirit’.” Thus, rather than promoting a totalizing discourse, Tillich is emphatic that from out of each concrete cultural-historical standpoint normative disciplines will be elaborated (cf. his doctrine of theological and philosophical circles), including a normative theory of religion or theology (thus far Tillich’s non-Nietzschean side), and that the alternative “right or wrong” does not apply to the contrasting results, except for persons existentially participating in the standpoint (here Tillich’s Nietzschean side). I conclude that, when less cautious postmoderns concede more than Tillich to “the Nietzschean,” they are self-trivializing if not self-refuting.
Gift as Icon and Gestalt in Tillich and Jean-Luc Marion
William F. Stevens, University of Edinburgh
The notion of "gift" described as "saturated phenomenon" in the parlance of Jean-Luc Marion, has analogical parallels with Paul Tillich's Gestalt of grace. Are these notions of gift pure unconditionality or are they enmeshed in the malaise of the "impossibility of justice" as posited by Derrida? This essay seeks to compare Tillich's notion of Gestalt as that "which embraces itself and the protest against itself" as a proper criterion to evaluate the iconic character of the gift. The question then is this: Can the concept of gift stand as the form of the Unconditional, as pure icon, or is the ideological freight of value and exchange too much for this Gestalt to bear? This essay will assert that Tillich's theonomic principle in conjunction will Marion's iconic gift is still valid for the current debate.
The Aporia of Law, Justice, and Gift/Grace: Dimensions of Forgiveness in Paul, Derrida, and Tillich
Jonathan Rothchild, Loyola Marymount University
This paper addresses the interrelationship between law, justice, and grace/gift within three interlocutors: the Apostle Paul, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Tillich. Each thinker understands the relationship between law, justice, and grace as an aporia. My thesis, first, holds that any properly conceived ethics must address the relationship between law, justice, and gift/grace in order to circumvent a radical relativism and an empty absolutism. Second, my thesis contends that the aporia between these three is resolved—not eliminated, but rather transformed—through the practice of forgiveness which acknowledges law, enjoins justice, and focuses on the particular other through love. There are three primary sections of the paper: 1) a conversation between Paul and Derrida on the relationship between law, justice, and gift; 2) an analysis of Tillich’s reflections on that same relationship; and 3) a constructive and critical analysis of Tillich’s contributions to Pauline and Derridean informed ethics, with particular emphasis on forgiveness.
“Dark Depths of Madness!”: Tillichian Anxiety Meets Kristevan Abjection
Sigridur Gudmarsdottir, Drew University
Tillich’s concept of “the ground and abyss of being,” disrupts the theistic God-concept and affirms the complexity and balance of the individual self. This important concept of the Tillichian systematics have been identified by Ann Belford Ulanov as closely linked to femininity and the maternal. The paper reads Tillich´s imagery of the abyss through Kristeva´s poststructuralist lens of the material maternal. Does the abyss of God become too abysmal if it is linked to the physical eros of the maternal? How does Kristeva´s theories of maternal abjection and anguish affect Tillich’s distinction between ontological anxiety and pathological anxiety? The paper argues that Kristeva´s theories of maternal anguish can be used for “shaking the foundations” of the Tillichian distinctions between pathological and ontological anxiety. It reveals some of the sexed traits of the maddening depth which Tillich called the ground and abyss of being.
A18-125
Western Esotericism Group
Theme: Western Esotericism
The Western Esotericism group seeks to reflect and further stimulate the current process (reflected in the recent creation of new chairs and teaching programs, international associations, journals, monograph series, and reference works) of professionalization and scholarly recognition of Western esotericism as a new area of research in the study of religion. For more information on the field, see notably the websites of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE: www.esswe.org), the Association for the Study of Esotericism (ASE: www.esoteric.msu.edu) and the center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam (GHF: www.amsterdamhermetica.com).
Northern Humanists, Heretics, and Cabbala: Responses in Northern Art, Theology, and the Witch Hunt to the Theurgical Study and Ritual Practice of Jewish Mysticism in the Sixteenth Century
Yvonne Owens, University College, London
Northern humanists, including Reuchlin and Agrippa, studied Cabbala, applying it to their theurgical aspirations of spiritual, intellectual and moral elevation. But anti-Semitic and misogynistic streams within both Neo-Platonism and Scholasticism firmly associated both Jewishness and feminine physiology with the heresy of witchcraft. The images of Cabbalistic vessels and women as witches became fused in artistic and literary tropes and iconography, visible in the works of Durer, Hans Baldung, and Altdorfer, their conflation evident in the popular belief that Jewish men menstruated. This image of physiological, feminine 'pollution' was intricately connected with the idea of the 'contamination' of heresy, and both Reuchlin and Agrippa were constrained to publicly defend their theories and approaches. Reuchlin continued to defend Jewish scholarship and Cabbala, and Agrippa continued to defend the inherent moral worth of women, even while their reputations, their fortunes and their works suffered the irreversible derelictions of moral taint and infamy.
Types of Greek Numerology
Joel Kalvesmaki, Dumbarton Oaks
Around the second century CE a new method of prognostication emerged in the Greek-speaking world. Names and terms were converted to their numerical values (via psephic calculations, better known as gematria) and then analyzed to predict the future. There are scores of Greek manuscripts that attest to the variety of techniques and the popularity of numerological prognostication throughout the Byzantine and modern-Greek eras. The few numerological techniques that have been published are not well known. I present here six major types of Greek numerology, as well as a few of the many variations. I also suggest ways in which ancient and medieval readers might have used these texts.
Early Homeopathy and the Medical Establishment in Germany
Roelie van Kreijl, University of Amsterdam
The topic of the paper is the early debate (1810-1840) between homeopathy and the medical establishment in what is now Germany. It discusses the question why homeopathy did not succeed in its efforts to get its doctrines accepted as part of the standard academic medical curriculum. I order to answer this question the paper will focus on the social and discursive processes that constitute the polemic, using discourse analysis and insights from the sociology of science. The paper will argue that, although this is a matter of opposition between a medical doctrine based on occult causalities against one based on instrumental causalities, it is power and not substantive argumentation, that is of decisive influence in establishing and protecting bodies of knowledge.
Yoga as a Corrective to Misguided Rationalism: Science in the Esoteric Thought of Gustav Meyrink
Amanda Boyd, Sam Houston State University
The self-proclaimed esotericist and early twentieth-century German author Gustav Meyrink devoted much of his fiction and philosophical treatises to the role of yoga in a rapidly industrializing world. A life-long practitioner of yoga, Meyrink felt that this occultist praxis helped one perceive and counteract the division of the self into the spiritual and the corporeal. On the basis of several of his short stories and essays, this paper shows that Meyrink wished to draw attention to the dangers of a world preoccupied with a scientific rationalism that emphasized the material to the detriment of the spiritual. If yoga could make the individual whole, Meyrink’s writings show that he believed that a reoriented science aimed at holistic restoration could have a similar affect on a societal level. For Meyrink, yoga initiates are critical facilitators in the recognition of rationalism’s divisional tendencies and the reversal thereof.
Gnosis of the Flesh II: "Prophetic Exegesis" and Temporal Alchemy in J.J. Hurtak’s Pistis Sophia
Carol Matthews, US Naval Academy
This paper is an examination of the theoretical, experiential, and methodological processes by which Dr. J.J. Hurtak recasts the ancient Gnostic text, Pistis Sophia, into a modern, esoteric “ultraterrestrial” manual for spiritual ascension. My analysis will commence with a brief historical outline of the progression of Hurtak’s thought and method over the 30 years since his original revelation as published in The Book of Knowledge. Concomitantly, I will use Hurtak’s commentary on the Pistis Sophia to demonstrate his syncretic use of many antecedent sources. I will conclude with the issues attendant on any occultist who attempts to update an ancient text for contemporary usage and with a description of a historical-critical method providing contextual analysis to the revelatory production of modern and post-modern text-prophets, operating in UFO contact, occult, New Age, and theosophical frameworks.
A18-126
Zen Buddhism Seminar
Theme: Zen in the Contemporary World
This panel examines the status of Zen Buddhism and Zen Buddhist scholarship in the last 30 years. In particular, the papers to be presented in this session will focus on two topics, namely, new methodological trends in Zen Studies and the transformation American forms of Zen Buddhism underwent with regard to ritual, ideology, and institutional structure in the past thirty years. Thus, the papers will contribute to a critical understanding of Zen theory and practice today.
The Zen Master in America: Dressing the Donkey with Bells and Scarves
Stuart Lachs, New York, New York
Zen’s self-definition was largely formulated in early China. It imputed superhuman qualities to the Zen master/roshi and is the foundation for both today’s Zen master in America and for his students. We will examine how these imputed qualities, constructed in early China, appear in the modern American context by looking at five modern Zen masters and their students during the last thirty–five years in America. With modern means of reporting, journaling, notating, and testifying, we have access to more detail, not just hagiography, about these Zen masters. Suddenly, we begin to see real people, acting in real life with all their foibles. Nonetheless, these masters are still considered, both institutionally and by their disciples, to have attained the idealized roles proscribed for them. This distortion, an unconscious collusion between the institution, the master and the students, results in a system that impacts good faith, authority, relationships and self-understanding.
Transforming the Menacing Fetus: Abortion and Other Pregnancy Loss Rituals in American Zen Centers
Jeff Wilson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In Japan, mizuko kuyō; is a rite of apology to the angry spirits of aborted fetuses. It involves the intercession of savior bodhisattvas to liberate the ghosts and deliver them to the Pure Land. This widespread practice is often depicted by scholars and critics as anti-modern and misogynistic. But as the practice has arrived in America over the past three decades, it has been largely reformulated by new Zen practitioners. In part the adaptations made in the ritual by convert Zen Buddhists reflect an underlying liberal American religious ethos linked to Protestant frames of religious practice, feminism, left-wing politics, and modern psychology that informs many of the practices carried out by these new Zen communities. At the same time, however, American mizuko kuyō; reveals a trend towards greater ritualization, engagement with savior figures, and re-valuation of emotional needs within a rather subdued and controlled upper middle class religious culture.
New Trends in Dōgen Studies in Japan
Kiyozumi Ishii, Komazawa University
The modern study of Zen Master Dôgen (1200-53), called Sôtô Shûgaku or Sôtô Theology, began with the adoption of modern academic methods, with the publication of foundational works by Eto Sokuô (1888-1958) and Kurebayashi Kôdô (1893-1987) in 1944 and 1970, respectively. The subsequent generation of scholars assumed that Dôgen’s ideas and historical identity should be defined on the basis of the historical development of Chinese Chan/Zen thought. Based on the contributions of Kagamishima Genryû (1912-2001), and later with modifications by Ishii Shûdô (b. 1943), the analysis of Dôgen’s style of the citation of Chinese works soon became the mainstream of Sôtô school studies. The approach to Chinese Chan studies pioneered by Iriya Yoshitaka (1910–1998) and Yanagida Seizan (b. 1922) has also led to important innovations in Sôtô Theology, as have the responses to Critical Buddhism (hihan Bukkyô) and the attention to works by Dôgen other than his Shôbôgenzô.
The Current State of Chán Studies in Japan
John R. McRae, Tokyo, Japan
The Japanese study of Chinese Chán Buddhism has undergone a generational succession, with the emergence of a new group of scholars now in the prime of their careers. The foundation of contemporary Chán studies was established by Iriya Yoshitaka (1910–98) and Yanagida Seizan (b. 1922), who collaborated closely for almost four decades, but now the baton has been passed to a younger generation including Ibuki Atsushi (Tōyō University), Ishii Kōsei (Komazawa), Ishii Shūdō; (Komazawa), Kinugawa Kenji (Hanazono University), and Ogawa Takashi (Komazawa University). The issues to be covered in this presentation include the emphasis on reading Chinese text as Chinese (and not merely as transposed, often artificially, into Japanese grammar); recent in-print debates on the scholarly interpretation of Chán texts; attitudes toward Chán studies in China and elsewhere; interpretive work on early, classical, and Sòng-dynasty Chán; and the attitudes of Japanese scholars to their own field.
A18-127
Animals and Religion Consultation
Theme: Intertwining Animals: The Real, the Sacred, the Immanent, the Symbolic
This session investigates "real" animals (the ivory billed woodpecker, African elephants) and "symbolic" animals in the sacred cosmology of the Akan peoples of West Africa. It also provides a glimpse into the recently released The Communion of Subjects - a global look at animals and religion. Animals play myriad complex roles in religion, and at times it is almost impossible to separate the real animal from the symbolic animal, if that is possible at all. Animal imagery in Akan ritual cannot be disconnected from the real animals represented, just as the rediscovery of an animal thought to be extinct brought about a "religious" response. The papers address different religious and cultural settings as well as different perspectives on humans and animals.
Golden Proverbs: Animals and Ethical Cosmology of the Akan Peoples of West Africa
M. Christian Green, Harvard University
Over the last few years, a remarkable exhibition has been making its way around art museums in the United States. The exhibition is titled West African Gold: Akan Regalia from the Glassell Collection. Inhabiting Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the Akan peoples associate gold with wealth, power, and prestige. One of the most striking features of the golden regalia in this exhibition is the prominence of animal imagery. Because Akan cultures convey ancestral wisdom verbally, the motifs in their works, such as the backward-looking sankofa bird that is one of the centerpieces of the collection, often allude to proverbs. These proverbs suggest a rich repository of wisdom that can be seen to underlie Akan social, political, and economic ethics, as well as a relationship to the animal world based on fondness and the communication of a wisdom at once earthly and divine.
Lost and Found: The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Extinction, and Immanence
Jennifer Rycenga, San Jose State University
The rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas in April 2005, provides an excellent case-study of nature-based immanence in contemporary American spirituality. This talk will analyze salient examples of reactions to the rediscovery, from birdwatchers, biologists and conservation experts, focusing on interrelations between human beings and the woodpecker. The ethical and experiential parameters of animals' immanence will be discussed in relation to radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly's invocation of the lost-and-found dimensions of extinction in her most recent book, Amazon Grace (2005). Daly suggests that our encounters with 'extinct' animals demonstrate the existence of a biophilic world despite the daily onslaught of openly necrophilic worldviews dismissive of any significance given to animals. Finding the Ivory-billed Woodpecker created a moment in which the coexistence of immanent faith and imminent despair took material form, and the survival of one animal became a beacon of hope for many.
Sacred Whispers in the World: Animal Presence
Lee Bailey, Ithaca College
The cultivation of ecological spirituality calls us to broaden our range of experiences to include many natural phenomena, such as the worlds of animals. Seeing our selves in nature rather than above it means opening ourselves to the presence of animals, as in their perceptual worlds (smell, sounds), and communications, as in non-verbal languages (body languages). The problem of anthropomorphizing animal worlds is important, since it is inevitable and ubuquitous, but introduces dangers to be avoided. The problem of dominion is rooted in religious and instinctual patterns, and must be re-thought on the continuum between deep ecology egalitarianism and some kind of hierarchy. The issue of theodicy is also important, since humans in the dominion paradigm so fiercely attempts to control nature to avoid our suffering, but thus causes immense suffering for other species. Video and audio clips will illustrate points.
The Ideal of A Communion of Subjects: A Challenge to Classical Liberalism
Gary Steiner, Bucknell University
The volume A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics examines the task of affirming the place of humanity within the larger cosmic scheme of things. But the ideal of cosmic holism seems to stand in an irreducible contradition with the ideal of the autonomous individual that is the cornerstone of classical liberal political theory. If Heidegger is right that we cannot simply adopt a non-Western standpoint in the endeavor to find our lost place in the cosmos, but must instead find a path of thinking from our current self-understanding to a sense of belonging to the cosmos, then the seeming contradiction between cosmic holism and liberal individualism must be confronted. Hegel’s conception of the individual as the mediating term between selfish desire and abstract personhood holds the key to sublating this contradiction.
A18-128
Daoist Studies Consultation
Theme: The Baby or the Bath Water: Reconstructing the Contexts of the Laozi and Applying Its Ideas to the Postmodern World
Religious Origin of the Terms Dao and De and Their Signification in the Laozi
Jia Jinhua, Harvard University
This paper applies a synthetic methodology of etymological, religious, and philosophical studies to explore the original meaning of the terms dao and de, two primary concepts in Chinese intellectual history. Many early texts identify Dao with the Great One/Spirit of the Pole Star/High God. This identification is now supported by the newly unearthed text, “The Great One Gives Birth to Water.” Through an etymological analysis of the characters dao and de and supported by received and discovered texts and materials, I further verify that Dao indeed originally represents the spirit of the Pole Star/High God and the movement of Heaven, and De originally symbolizes the action of impartiality or the virtue and power able to act justly. In terms of this new interpretation, I further discuss the signification of dao and de in the Laozi to uncover the mystic aspect of the text.
Are There Ritual Formulas in the Daodejing?
Ronnie Littlejohn, Belmont University
In this paper, I argue that the sources of the oral logia of the Daodejing were lineages of daoshi who were masters in the techniques of the dao. I uncover the identity and work of these daoshi in Qin and pre-Han China. They were dedicated themselves to astrology, magic, medicine, divination and geomancy, as well as to achieving longevity and ecstatic wandering. They were close to what later became known as the School of Yin-Yang and the Five Phases. The Zhuangzi, Neiye, Huainanzi and Daodejing represent different types of visible and tangible traces of these lineages. I argue that the Daodejing's structure and materials are such that the it shows many affinities with what we know about such works containing wisdom and ritual lyric and formula. I conclude the paper by offering a commentary on a number of Daodejing logia supporting my reading of the text.
The One Gave Birth to the Two: Martin Buber's Dialogical Transformation of the Daodejing
Jonathan Herman, Georgia State University
Although the identification of Daoism as a 'mystical' tradition is deeply ingrained in both scholarly and popular circles, the debates raging in the contemporary academic study of mysticism have scarcely made a dent in the Sinological discourse. In particular, the conversation on crosscultural appropriation of mystical resources, those contextually ambiguous or multi-faceted historical instances, is embryonic. The subject of this paper is one such morsel of largely forgotten religious history, Martin Buber's unpublished commentary on the Daodejing. This manuscript, produced more than a decade after Buber's German volume on Zhuangzi but barely a year after the publication of I and Thou, represents a pivotal stage in Buber's intellectual development and in the Western consciousness of Chinese philosophy. This paper examines how this document problematizes several key issues in the study of mysticism, including the role of context, the primacy of experience, and tensions between otherworldly and intrawordly forms of mysticism.
Confronting the Problem of Conceptual (Mis)Appropriation: The Daoism Example
Amy Weigand, Temple University
Daoism is a privileged site for the construction of 'alternative' perspectives on human relations with the natural environment. This paper deploys the methodology of close reading of texts proposing features of a 'Daoist environmental ethic' to explore the following questions: 1) What reasons do the authors offer to justify turning to Daoism for insight into ameliorating Western environmental degradation?; 2) What assumptions are operative in the attempt to frame a “Daoist” ecological consciousness in contrast to “Western” models of domination and plunder?; and 3) What are the conditions prevailing in the discursive fields of the academic study of Daoism and of environmental theory that require or reward the presentation of an ecological ethic in line with Daoist values? The final section offers reasons for continued engagement of Western thinkers with Daoist traditions, but with critical awareness of the desires, needs, and assumptions that often precipitate and condition such engagements.
A18-129
Religion and Colonialism Consultation
Theme: Colonialisms of Modernization
Religion and Colonialism: Religion as a Primary Category of Analysis
Caleb Elfenbein, University of California, Santa Barbara
Many scholars in our field recognize that the discipline’s organizing concept is tied to the expansion of European power. Armed with data from the field, and at times operating at the frontiers of conquest, European scholars began to theorize more generally about the category of “religion,” which in turn effected how European societies conceptualized their own traditions and the place of those traditions in the production of knowledge and in ordering human life. The nascent category of religion also had a profound place in nineteenth century colonialisms, guiding policies to reconfigure traditions as a means of modernizing subject populations more generally, often with unintended effects. The Religion and Colonialism Consultation seeks to investigate these effects by analyzing how different actors and institutions delimit, construct and deploy the authority of "religion" in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Martyrdom through "Parang Sabil": A Response to Colonialism in the Philippines
Vivienne S.M. Angeles, La Salle University
During the colonial periods (1521-1898; 1898-1946), policies like the imposition of Christianity by Spanish authorities and the head tax by American administrators generated opposition and prompted a number of Muslims in southern Philippines to launch individual attacks against Spanish and American military forces. Believing that this was a last recourse and a form of struggle in the path of God (jihad fi sabillalah), the 'sabil' went through religious rituals with the assistance of the imam as part of his preparations for immediate entry to paradise upon death. This paper argues that martyrdom through 'parang sabil' was a form of resistance to the Spanish and American colonial administrations in the Philippines. This practice, which was legitimized by appeal to religious teachings, raised issues on interpretation of scripture and tradition and at the same time contributed to Muslim-Christian tensions in colonial and post-colonial Philippines.
“The Christian Character of the North-West Provinces”: Roman Transliteration and the Linguistic Reformation of Colonial India
Robert A. Yelle, University of Illinois
In response to the theme of “colonialisms of modernization,” my paper investigates the religious dimensions of nineteenth-century British colonial proposals for the adoption of the Roman alphabet and of European typographic conventions in the printing of South Asian languages. Like some other colonial projects for linguistic reform, Roman transliteration reflected the idea of a perfect language, in which one word stood for one thing, and one letter for one sound. A careful perusal of these proposals, and of their relation to earlier, seventeenth-century proposals for a universal language or written character, shows that these were more than simply utilitarian reforms to facilitate literacy and commerce. The ideal of an univocal language, and of an universal standard of printing, represented nothing less than the assertion of Christian monotheism against Hindu polytheism.
Civil Subjectivity and the Perfect Brahmachari: Cultivating Modernity in the Arya Samaj
Cassie Adcock, University of Chicago
Discussions of the place of religion in the modernizing project of the colonial state in India have focused largely on an “identitarian politics” directed to the constitution of new identities and the demarcation of new communities. The shuddhi conversion campaign initiated by the Arya Samaj in U.P. in the 1920s has been described in these terms as a project to unify and consolidate the Hindu community and to increase its numerical strength. Side by side with this “identitarian politics” of community, I argue, there is a strand of discourse within the Arya Samaj which articulates a “moral politics” directed to securing the subjectivities on which modern forms of government could be based. In the moral politics of shuddhi, conversion was represented as a means to universalize Vedic practices of somatic self-cultivation – brahmacharya (celibacy) and diet – deemed necessary for the formation of rational, moral, and therefore politically responsible subjects.
A18-130
Religion in Europe Consultation
Theme: The Christian and Muslim Crossroads of European Identity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
The controversy surrounding the Danish Jylland-Posten’s cartoons of Mohammed is the entry-point for this session’s exploration of the religious dimensions of European identity. In approaching this subject, participants will address a variety of related questions. In light of the gradual secularization of European identity, are the caricatures an instance of religious hatred or merely one of insensitive “humanism?” Do the varieties of Muslim experience in Southeastern Europe (majority status in Albania, co-existence with Christians in Bosnia, secularization under communism, nationalization and transnationalization in the postcommunist era) offer new models for interpreting European identity? Does the caricature crisis confirm the “clash of civilizations” thesis, or does it speak more to the challenges of European integration? Finally, what may Christian responses to the caricature crisis tell us about the evolving understandings of the role of Christianity in shaping European identity?
Christianity, Islam, and European Identity: From the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 to the Jylland Posten Cartoons of 2005
Gustavo Benavides, Villanova University
Four decades after the Muslim invasion of Spain, the term “European” was employed in the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 to refer to the soldiers who defeated the “Arabs” in 732. What is significant in terms of a “European” identity is the fact that the Chronicle was written in territories that had been under Muslim domination for less than half a century. What the Chronicle shows is that “Europe” and “European” are to be understood in the context of a system of oppositions: “Christian” vs. “Muslim,” “European” vs. “Arab.” Twelve centuries later, the publication of twelve cartoons by a Danish newspaper has led to a renewed debate about the meaning of the term “Europe” and “European.” These developments require us to rethink the debates concerning modernity/secularization as well as to consider whether they may lead to a post-Christian Europe or, rather, to the resurgence of a religiously-based understanding of European identity.
Muslim Identities in Southeast Europe between Nationalism and Transnationalism
Ina Merdjanova, Sofia University
The collapse of communism and the consequent armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia led to the radical redefinition and reshaping of the relations between the Muslim communities and the post-communist nation-states in the region, on the one hand, and to Islamic transnational identifications and commitments, on the other. This paper will seek to analyze the various ways in which renewed Muslim identities have shaped social and political attitudes and have expressed themselves in the public sphere, particularly with regard to the post-communist processes of nationalization and transnationalization. A particular attention will be paid to the recent further complication of these developments by attempts at rendering the Balkan brand of Islam as “the genuine European Islam.”
What to Be or Not to Be: Islam, Satire, and Identity in the European Union
Martyn A. Oliver, Boston University
This paper will explore how religion—particularly Christianity and Islam—contribute to evolving notions of identity, reshaping concepts of nationalism, religious affiliation, and secular identity in terms of the development of the European Union and its effects on individuals. I will argue that conflicts such as the Danish cartoon controversy are indicative of Europe’s collective difficulty in reconciling these competing elements. While the EU functions as a political entity, it has not provided the tools for creating a new collective European identity. Rather than a clash of civilizations, the new tension for the so-called West will be conflicts of internal self-definition.
A18-131
Yoga in Theory and Practice Consultation
Theme: Construction and Transcendence in Modern Yoga
This panel will examine the emerging body of scholarship that addresses the multifaceted process behind the emergence of yoga as a profoundly influential cultural and religious force in the 20th and 21st centuries. Of particular interest are the processes whereby yoga became a pan-Indian and transnational phenomenon of significance on a number of different levels, including as a spirituality, a physical culture, and a mode of physical therapy. The secondary goal of the panel will be to explore the dialectical tension between yoga as a “constructed” entity versus the more “essentialist” conception of yoga as a methodology that transcends cultural, temporal, and spatial boundaries while retaining a core meaning and purpose. This will lead to further questions regarding the “authenticity” of modern yoga, the limits of the cultural analysis of claims to transcendence, and the potential implications of participant-observation methods in understanding this phenomenon.
A18-132
Friends of the Academy Reception
Individuals whose generosity allows us to continue many of our special programs are invited to a reception hosted by the AAR Board of Directors.
A18-133
AAR Racial and Ethnic Minority Members' Reception
The Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee invites interested persons to a reception celebrating the contributions of racial and ethnic minority scholars in the Academy.
A18-134
Plenary Address
Theme: Presidential Plenary and Awards Ceremony--Diana Eck: Prospects for Pluralism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion
Diana Eck is interested in the challenges of religious pluralism in a multi-religious society. Her work on India includes the book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India; she is currently working on a book entitled India: Myth on Earth. Since 1991, she has headed the Pluralism Project which includes a network of some 60 affiliates exploring the religious dimensions of America’s new immigration. Her book A New Religious America investigates the growth of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim communities in the US and the issues of religious pluralism in American civil society. In 1998, Eck received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her plenary will address how national and local debates over religious difference and cultural identity have opened an area of critical study for scholars. What is pluralism from a civic perspective? A theological perspective? How does pluralism take shape “on the ground” in countless local contexts and connections?
A18-136
Arts Series/Films: Crash
Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
In a voice over during the opening credits of Paul Haggis’ Oscar-winning film Crash, Don Cheadle tells his partner, “In LA nobody touches you. We are always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” In the film, a number of characters collide over two days in Los Angeles. Hence, through collision comes our invitation to feel, to care, and to think about race and responsibility in the twenty-first century.
Directed by Paul Haggis, 2004, 113 minutes, R rated (color, USA)
A18-137
Arts Series/Films: Guelwaar
Sponsored by the African Religions Group
The funeral of an outspoken Senegalese political activist and subsequent disappearance of his corpse provides the backdrop for Sembène’s incisive feature. This bold film tackles the conflict between Muslims and Christians, dependence on foreign aid, and the elusive nature of independence itself.
Directed by Ousmane Sembìne, 1992, 115 minutes, unrated (color, France and Senegal, subtitled)
A18-138
Women's Reception
Sponsored by the Status of Women in the Profession Committee and the Women's Caucus.
The Women's Caucus invites all friends to join us in honoring those women who have been presidents of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature.
A18-140
AAR and Pluralism Project Celebration in Honor of Diana Eck
Sponsored by AAR and the Pluralism Project
The AAR and the Pluralism Project are hosting this celebration of Diana Eck, 2006 AAR president. We welcome affiliates, advisors, friends, and colleagues to join us for light refreshments, networking, conversation, and informal updates on research projects. Your RSVP to staff@pluralism.org is appreciated.
A18-135
AAR Members' Reception
AAR members are invited to join one another at the AAR Members’ Reception for jazz music and collegiality. Don’t forget the free drink ticket mailed with your name badge!
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Student Members' Reception
AAR and SBL student members are invited to drop by for conversation with fellow students. Snacks will be provided. Don’t forget your free drink ticket!
A19-2
AAR New Members' Continental Breakfast
New (first-time) AAR members in 2006 are cordially invited to a continental breakfast with members of the Board of Directors.
A19-3
Religion and Disabilities Task Force Meeting
The Religion and Disability Task Force wraps up its work with this final meeting. We would like to invite any interested members to attend and participate in defining a vision for the future of disability in the AAR, religious studies, and the academy.
A19-6
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Christian Theology's Engagement with Religious Pluralism: Biblical Texts and Themes
Sponsored by the Program Committee
In this forum, scholars of religion and theology discuss the challenges religious pluralism poses to Christian theological thinking with a specific focus on difficult biblical texts and themes. How have traditional biblical ideas such as the dualisms between light and darkness, the divine and the demonic, heaven and hell, and the exclusive claims regarding Jesus Christ shaped Christian thinking about religions? How are Christians in the twenty-first century wrestling with these biblical texts and motifs in their efforts to articulate a theology of religions today?
A19-7
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Women Speaking to Religion and Leadership: Honoring the Work of Mercy Oduyoye
Sponsored by the Status of Women in the Profession Committee
All are invited to this special panel sponsored by the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group and AAR’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession honoring the work of Mercy Amba Oduyoye. Oduyoye is a native of Ghana and is a founder of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. Oduyoye was contributor to Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective and serves her church as a Methodist lay woman. Her books include: Hearing and Knowing; The Will to Arise: Daughters of Anowa; and Introducing African Women’s Theology. Panelists in this session include Mercy Oduyoye, Katie Cannon, Musa Dube, Sarojini Nadar, and Letty Russell.
A19-8
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Teaching the Introductory Course in Theology and Religion
Sponsored by the Teaching and Learning Committee
Barbara Walvoord, the principal investigator, and some of the participants will report on and discuss the results of a study of 70 highly effective teachers of introductory courses in theology and religion. Discussion will focus on how faculty members define their discipline (e.g. “theology” or “religious studies”) and establish and communicate their goals for student learning and development and how the goals articulated by faculty compare with students’ expressions of their own goals in taking introductory courses.
A19-9
Arts, Literature, and Religion Section
Theme: Blake and Religious Vision
The Revolutionary Vision of William Blake
Thomas Altizer, Mt. Pocono, PA
This paper is an attempt to state clearly and briefly the imaginative revolution of William Blake, to identity it in terms of its ultimate heterodoxy and apocalypticism, but to call forth it actual theological power, which can most concretely occur by way of exploring Blake's vision of Satan. Blake's is our most revolutionary vision of Satan, but here Satan is only finally called forth by way of 'The Self-Annihilation of God' a self-annihilation that is absolute apocalypse or Jerusalem.
A Final Vision: Blake's Dante Illustrations
Andrea J. Dickens, United Theological Seminary
I propose a reading of William Blake’s Dante Illustrations (1824-1827) with attention to three themes in his theology: the nature of God as love, forgiveness as the basis of a Christian religion of love, and the human as an image of the God she worships. This work is of interest for Blake’s theology and a provocative work to study because Dante was an object of Blake’s derision at various points; in these illustrations, Blake blends in his own theology while illustrating the Italian’s visionary masterpiece. Although Blake’s theology usually is explicated through his writings, especially through the Illuminated Books, with little attention to his engravings, I believe that it is possible to find further evidence of it here, and that these traces form an important commentary on the poem of Dante as well as give us a sense of Blake’s religions beliefs at the end of his life.
"I Walk Weeping in Pangs of a Mother's Torment for Her Children": Women's Laments in the Poetry and Prophecies of William Blake
Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College
This paper focuses on female laments in the poetry of William Blake, and how they relate, in their elaborate, structured, deeply contextual verbal performances, to a long history of women’s ritual lament traditions in various parts of the world. A close look at Blake’s female lamenters gives us a most compelling lens into what might be termed, with some nuance, Blake’s “proto-feminism.” Blake’s lamenting women loudly question injustice of a fallen world; they witness the ruins of experience, but also to “apocalyptic reversal." But when the laments are finished and the weeping women seem to suddenly evaporate, we are confronted with Blake’s deep ambivalence toward women and sexual difference, his sense of gender division as mirroring a “fallen” world. But true to the depth and power of this poetry, female laments in Blake speak the truth to power, even in texts that otherwise display ambivalence toward the female “other.”
“I Mean Great Poets”: William Blake and Geoffrey Hill
Emily Merriman, Boston University
Often acclaimed the most important contemporary British religious poet, Geoffrey Hill has been influenced by William Blake throughout his long career. Through the prism of a recent poem, “On Reading Blake: Prophet Against Empire” (2005), this paper explores the nature of Hill's insights into Blake's methods and meanings and demonstrates what those insights reveal about Hill's own vision of the poetic enterprise. It argues that Hill--studying, interpreting, and relating to Blake as a significant influence--identifies how writing forcefully, even angrily, against the dominant ideologies of an age can have challenging, sometimes damaging, consequences for both the poet and his poetry. Hill's interpretation of Blake, in this poem and elsewhere, reveals how a poet with a prophet's understanding of the inextricable relations of the artistic, the religious and the political undertakes the task of writing only at great risk, because of the forces he must “contradict” both within and outside himself.
A19-10
Buddhism Section
Theme: New Perspectives on Buddhist Hagiography in East Asia
This panel offers novel approaches to the study of hagiographic literature in East Asian Buddhism. While past scholarship has either read hagiography as a record of historical lives or has interpreted it as mythical biography, these papers approach hagiographic literature in the contexts of its production. Instead of reading through the texts to a supposed historical reality, these papers look closely at the literary form of the texts themselves as well as the historical and discursive contexts in which they were produced and received. Leaving aside the question of the historicity of the figures depicted in these texts, the papers in this panel trace the representations of Buddhist figures across cultures, genres, traditions and discourses.
Indian Patriarchs in a Chinese Looking Glass: The Earliest Hagiographies of Nāgārjuna and Aśvaghoşa
Stuart Young, Princeton University
The fifth- and sixth-century Chinese hagiographies of Nāgārjuna and Aśvaghoşa have long been used by modern scholars to reconstruct the careers of these great Buddhist patriarchs in ancient India. This project reflects the time-honored Buddhological methodology of viewing ancient Indian history through the unacknowledged lens of medieval Chinese literature. By contrast, this paper analyzes the earliest hagiographies of Nāgārjuna and Aśvaghoşa as they were understood by their medieval Chinese architects. By looking at these works in the contexts of their creation rather than through them to an imagined original reality, we can learn a great deal about the concerns underlying their formation. The Chinese hagiographies of the ancient Indian patriarchs were formulated and understood differently than were the hagiographical collections written by, for and about Chinese “saints.” My paper examines this unique form of Chinese hagiography that consciously spanned the spatiotemporal and cultural chasms separating ancient India from medieval China.
The Immortalization of Bodhidharma: The Chan Patriarch in Buddhist Sources and Beyond
Joshua Capitanio, University of Pennsylvania
The sixth-century monk Bodhidharma rose from relative obscurity during his own lifetime to become one of the most emblematic and larger-than-life figures of Chinese Buddhism. This paper traces the development of Bodhidharma’s hagiography in Buddhist sources, from the earliest stories of his arrival in China to late Tang sources describing his apparent death and resurrection in a manner similar to Daoist “corpse-deliverance” (shijie). Following is an examination of the impact of this portrayal of Bodhidharma outside of Buddhist circles as revealed in a number of late Tang and Song texts, currently preserved in the Daoist canon, linking him with certain practices aimed at the achievement of physical immortality.
Reading with Form and Genre, Contesting Paradigms and Memory: Kakunyo’s Godenshō
Chris Callahan, Harvard University
This paper focuses on a text known in the Shin Buddhist community as the Godenshō (Notes on Transmission), which is narrative account of Shinran written by his great-grandson Kakunyo. In contrast to earlier approaches that have either read the text as a flawed historical document or a “sacred biography,” I propose to return the text to the moment of its production and read the text in light of the genre concerns and expectations of the time. Paying close attention to the literary form and structure of the Godenshō, I demonstrate how the text draws on and contests earlier paradigms from both the Buddhist tradition and court literature. Lastly, I expose the text’s ideological functioning by examining its rhetorical strategies and read it as a site of contested memory by summoning the narratives and voices that it excludes.
From Realm to Realm: Nichizō, the Genre-Crossing Holy Man
Heather Blair, Harvard University
Nichizō, dubbed both a holy man and an immortal, is famous for having traveled through mountain caves to visit Tuşita Heaven and the iron mountains of hell. When he returned to life in this world, he brought instructions from bodhisattvas and gods, as well as news of deceased sovereigns, officials, and clerics. Even as his persona exceeded sectarian identities, stories of his exploits overflowed standard biographical media into paintings, musical treatises, poetry, and encyclopedia. This paper emphasizes the intertextual qualities of hagiographical production, and argues that Nichizō’s cross-genre trail, as integral to his stories as his journeys through other realms, can guide us into new approaches to hagiography.
A19-11
History of Christianity Section
Theme: Piety, Practice, Performance: Action and Embodiment in American Christianity
This panel was inspired by a collaborative research initiative on the history of American Christian practice funded by the Lilly Endowment. Participants will reflect upon the utility of the term “practice” alongside two related terms (“piety” and “performance”) for the study of North American Christianity in general, as well as for the examination of particular subjects in the history of American Protestantism. Following Kathryn Lofton’s theoretical overview of these three terms within religious studies, Anthea Butler, Heather Curtis and Tisa Wenger will assess the value of each term for their respective research projects on sanctification in the Church of God in Christ, divine healing among late-nineteenth-century evangelicals, and liberal Protestant experiments with liturgical dance in the 1920s. Ann Taves will conclude the conversation with an appraisal of the advantages and limitations of approaching the study of American religion through the rubrics of piety, practice, and performance.
A19-12
Philosophy of Religion Section
Theme: Philosophy and Method in the Study of Religion
Philosophy of Religion and the Analytic/Continental Divide
Myron A. Penner, Trinity Western University
Perhaps in no area of philosophy are the differences between analytic and continental approaches to philosophy in greater contrast than in philosophy of religion. This may be because philosophy of religion is one of the few clearly identifiable sub-areas in which both analytics and continentals do work. My view is that this phenomenon provides a great opportunity for meaningful dialogue across schools. More specifically, I attempt to show that in virtue of their commitment to analytic philosophy, analytics should heed their continental counterparts, at least in some respects. Similarly, I argue that in virtue of their commitment to continental emphases, continental philosophers should heed their analytic counterparts, at least in some respects. I demonstrate this by analyzing two case studies: (a) the use of Bayesian reasoning in analytic philosophy of religion, and (b) the Heideggerian critique of onto-theology.
Paul Ricoeur's Reconciliation of Explanation with Interpretation
Robert A. Segal, University of Aberdeen
Paul Ricoeur sought to reconcile opposing philosophical camps. One dispute that occupied him was the opposition between explanation and interpretation, or that between causes and meanings, or that between a scientific and a hermeneutical approach to culture, including religion. I want to present the main positions on the dispute that have been taken by others. I then want to show how Ricoeur’s attempt to reconcile the approaches fails because Ricoeur actually redefines explanation as other than an account of human behavior. What he really offers is a merely interpretive approach to culture.
What Lies beyond the Failure of “Religion”? Philosophy of Religion and Methodological Reflections on the History of Religious Studies
Ludger Viefhues, Yale University
With the help of pragmatic realism this paper evaluates the methodological debate on “religion” from the perspective of the philosophy of religion. I will argue constructively, that philosophy of religion is epistemologically required to take into account the historical and theoretical context of the concept of “religion.” Critically, this paper claims that a nuanced account of the parochial origins and lasting global implications of the concept of “religion” does not lead to abandoning the concept. Rather, “religion” can serve as an analytic concept detailing complex intercultural interactions of power and language in describing and shaping our world.
Exposures and Acknowledgements: Rethinking the Philosophy of Religion
Tyler T. Roberts, Grinnell College
In the past decade or so, a number of philosophers, psychoanalysts, and political thinkers have challenged and refigured the boundaries between religious and secular discourse. Doing so, they have produced a series of “hybrid discourses” that reflect on and enact what I describe as an “exposure” of secular, humanistic thinking to religious thought and practice. Focusing on Eric Sannter and Stanley Cavell, I argue that the concept of exposure helps us to reshape our understanding of the contributions philosophical thought makes to the study of religion. First, I analyze the way Santner opens psychoanalysis and philosophy to theological conceptions of the “grace-event.” Second, I employ Stanley Cavell’s concept of “acknowledgment” to analyze the relation between the “religious” and the “secular” in Santner’s discourse. I argue that “acknowledgment” offers a richer and more exacting basic orientation to religious phenomena than either “naturalism” or “methodological atheism.”
A19-13
Religion and the Social Sciences Section
Theme: Narrating the Local: Methodological Reflections on Ethnographies of Religious Practice
This panel brings together a collection of ethnographers studying a range of religious practices in a variety of geographic locations. The goal of the panel is to give presenters an opportunity to collectively reflect on the methods and theories they have used to narrate the local. Taking a particular field study as its own example, each paper will address the ethnographic relationship between the field and the archive, sometimes in tension, sometimes in harmony. Presenters will discuss how they write history into their descriptions of the present and in turn how they use their observations in the field to shed light on the past.
(Paper) Trails: An Expanded Theory of Archive in Ethnographic Practice
Jill DeTemple, Southern Methodist University
While many anthropologists utilize archives as sources of historical context, and some have interrogated the colonialist impulses or privileging that this practice seems to extend, very few have questioned the ontological status of the archive itself. What constitutes an archive, and how do the ways we define archives reflect the way we connect the present with the past, especially in the case of illiterate or semi-literate populations? This paper argues that effective ethnographic practice requires a willingness to identify, interact with and reproduce local archives, many of which may not be in paper form. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, the paper demonstrates that for one community in central Ecuador, history and its relationship to present day religion and development cannot be examined exclusively in paper trails left in churches and houses of government, but must also be understood in the more concrete context of local roads.
Who Could Marry at a Time Like This?: Debating the Mehndi Ki Majlis in Hyderabad, India
Karen G. Ruffle, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Networks of trade, scholarship, and pilgrimage have traditionally connected Muslims transregionally, yet these very networks draw into dramatic relief the significance of the local in defining Shi‘i religious practices and worldviews. The Shi‘a community in the South Indian city Hyderabad has strongly resisted campaigns launched by the religious elite of Iran and Iraq to homogenize Muharram ritual-devotional practices. I examine the contested nature of the mehndi ceremony of Qasem, who was married and martyred at the battle of Karbala in 680 CE. The mehndi ceremony (majlis) is steadfastly observed on 7 Muharram by Hyderabadi Shi‘as in defiance of pressures from the ‘ulema in Iran and Iraq to eliminate practices deemed to be inauthentic and un-Islamic. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic data, I argue that the participation in the mehndi ki majlis narrates a worldview connecting Hyderabad’s Shi‘as to Karbala through the ecology, aesthetics and values of the local Deccani culture.
Santería and the "Branding" of Cuba: Effects upon Local Afro-Cuban Religious Practices
Jalane D. Schmidt, University of Florida, Gainesville
The Afro-Cuban religion of Regla de Ocha (aka, “Santería”) is deemed a privileged marker of Cuba’s African past for the religion’s practitioners, their detractors, the tourism industry, and researchers. But researchers should interrogate how archival sources, authoritative texts, and other media about “African diaspora religions” can homogenize and reify a regional account, which then circulates and influences researchers’ (and our funders’ and publishers’) expectations of what is deemed a research-worthy topic, what we should seek in the field, and how to “represent” our investigation ethnographically. My field research over eight years’ time in eastern Cuba has revealed that some seemingly long-standing “traditions” of certain Afro-Cuban religions appear to be local religious practitioners’ contemporary responses to and adaptations of earlier ethnographic accounts of Santería, the influence of which has been amplified by the increased recent attention of Cuban government-affiliated folklore institutes, the tourism industry, the mass media, and researchers’ inquiries.
Layering the Local: Lived History and the Ritual Production of Place in a Nuevo New South Town
Chad Seales, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In this paper, I describe how the arrival of a public Catholic ritual, Good Friday processions, from Mexico to Siler City, North Carolina in the 1990s, elicited a specific ritual response from long-time white Protestant residents, the renewal of Fourth of July parades the year following the first public procession. I argue that Latina/o Catholics and white Protestants in Siler City have ritually produced competing conceptions of place; these ritual productions enact “lived histories,” fractured memories and narratives that extend beyond the local, spanning time and space; and the multiple layers of history, ritual, and place that coexist in a specific geographic location demand a cross-disciplinary research approach that continually moves between the field and the archive. Reflecting on three years of archival research and fieldwork in Siler City, I synthesize specific ethnographic and historical methods and propose that scholars of the particular should continually “layer the local.”
A19-14
Religion in South Asia Section
Theme: Literary Characters across Early South Asian Narrative Traditions
Our panel will examine various important literary characters that appear in early South Asian narratives. By focusing on particular characters in their literary contexts, we aim to shed new light upon early South Asian texts in a way that crosses traditional boundaries between religious traditions. Although in some ways related to recent studies on hagiography, we have chosen literary characters because we are focusing on figures who are developed through their appearances in a number of short or fragmented narrative scenes and whose full or more detailed life-story is never really told (or if it is, not until much later). As we will demonstrate, literary characters embody or flesh out particular teachings of the texts, anchoring abstract claims in the reality of particular individuals. Rather than explain away miraculous or supernatural details in the stories, the papers on this panel treat literary characters as integrated artistic constructions.
Who Was Shaunaka? A Literary Assessment
Laurie Louise Patton, Emory University
This paper will take up the question, ”Who is Shaunaka, both as a proponent of a method of Vedic interpretation, as well as a mythological sage?” First, I will examine the references to Shaunaka in the Vedic literature, and characterize the distinction of his approach. Shaunaka's emphasis on the role of the deity, and the giving of names (namadheya) in ritual activities is distinct from other sages, such as Katyayana. Second, I will argue that the later legends that treat the progenitor of this school, the sage Shunaka, as well as his descendant, Saunaka, focus in some way on the power of the deity within ritual action. In his penchant for theological commentary (especially through etymological means), Shaunaka stands for a theological literary style, even in the later texts in which he appears as a mythological figure.
Ambattha and Shvetaketu: Literary Connections between the Upanishads and Early Buddhist Narratives
Brian Black, London University
The focus of this paper will be on similarities between the Upanishadic stories that feature Shvetaketu and the Ambattha Sutta. I will suggest that they are in fact different presentations of the same story. Both Shvetaketu and Ambattha are depicted as brahmin students who are young and arrogant as they approach the domain of a non-brahmin. In the case of Shvetaketu, he is rude in his encounter with the king; whereas Ambattha is disrespectful to the Buddha. In both cases the young brahmin leaves the non-brahmin after being defeated in debate, without having learned from him an important teaching. Finally, both brahmins are replaced by their teachers, who in contrast are more refined and humble. As I will suggest, these shared literary features shed new light on the relationship between the Brahmanical and Buddhist narrative traditions.
Reading the Buddha as a Compassionate Trickster in Early Buddhist Narrative Traditions
Sara L. McClintock, Emory University
Who is the Buddha of the early Buddhist narrative traditions? Phrased as such, this question requires not an historical but a literary response. In this paper, I read the Buddha as a compassionate trickster who, as an instantiation of nirvana, operates outside the usual boundaries of space, time, and social conventions. As a figure who has “done what needs to be done,” the Buddha does not change, yet he interacts with beings in such a way that they are foundationally transformed. Frequently, this transformation is effected through the Buddha’s verbal trickiness, shape-shifting, conjuring, ironic humor, and general bending of social, moral, temporal, and spatial norms. Through a close reading of episodes in which the Buddha uses such tricks, this paper will show how the Buddha may be read as compassionate trickster who catches people up short, surprising or even shocking them into a realization of the true nature of reality.
Krishna and Jarasandha/Shishupala in the Hindu and Jain Traditions
Jonathan Geen, McMaster University
Primarily relying upon depictions of Krishna in Hemacandra’s Shvetambara Jain Trishashtishalakapurushacharitra and the (Hindu) Mahabharata, this investigation examines Krishna as a literary character, contrasting his portrayals in the Hindu and Jain narrative traditions. Focusing upon the slayings of Jarasandha and Shishupala, I argue that in the Hindu tradition Krishna’s strong association with, and subordination to, the heroic Pandavas in the Mahabharata contributed to the rather unheroic depictions of Krishna’s post-Vraj adult life. In the Jain tradition, however, his loose association with, and predominance over, the Pandavas made possible a more glorious and heroic adult career. That Jarasandha was killed by Krishna in the Jain accounts, but by the Pandava Bhima in the Mahabharata, may reflect the strong influence of a Pandava-centric Hindu tradition on the evolution of Krishna mythology.
Creating a Rshi: The Later Literary Life of Yajnavalkya
Steven Lindquist, Concordia University, Montreal
The figure of Yajnavalkya from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (ch. 3-4) is well known in the Hindu tradition and in scholarship. What is less known, however, is that Yajnavalkya’s literary life does not end with the Brihadaranyaka story. This paper analyzes the stories about Yajnavalkya found in the historically later Mahabharata and various Puranas, utilizing his earlier portrayals as a backdrop in understanding how this figure develops across time and across literary genres. Specifically, this paper is concerned with how this figure develops into an ancient rshi who is said to be the founder of the White Yajurvedic tradition, a teacher of yoga, and iconic of Vedic India. I argue that by analyzing these recompositions of the figure of Yajnavalkya, we can see how different literary traditions understood this figure while in the midst of recasting him for their own social, political, and theological ends.
A19-15
Study of Islam Section
Theme: “Islamic Fundamentalism”: Homogeny Identified or Diversity Homogenized?
Scholarly and journalistic interest in fundamentalism has not abated, and the model has continued to evolve. Innumerable books published since 1995 adopt or update it in explicating contemporary trends in diverse traditions. The pertinence of the proposed session is twofold. First, the subject is highly relevant to our understanding of modern Islam – the model’s influence is beyond question. We submit that any meaningful discussion of Islamic modernity entails some form of engagement with the idea of religious fundamentalism, and taking a stance on which Islamic trends and movements, if any, may meaningfully be labeled “fundamentalist.” Secondly, notwithstanding the model’s near ubiquity, its utility remains an open question and has certainly not been established definitively.
Fundamentalism and Modern Shiism
Lynda Clarke, Concordia University, Montreal
Can the term 'fundamentalist' be appropriately used to characterise modern Shiite movements? The paper argues that Shiism does not conform to many of the features of fundamentalism as defined in the Fundamentalism Project. Shiite movements may be regarded (with some regional variation) as culturally fundamentalist, since they posit religion as the basis for identity and seek to shore up that identity against the outside world. There is also some evidence of political fundamentalism. Shiism is not, however, fundamentalist in theology, law, or hermeneutics. In addition, many Shiites do not see themselves as conservative or fundamentalist; they view themselves, in fact, as the progressive wing of Islam. Recognition that a religion may behave 'fundamentally' in some spheres and not others avoids totalisation, while still allowing us to draw on a most useful concept and body of literature.
Hassan al-Hudaybi and the Muslim Brotherhood: Can Islamic Fundamentalism Eschew the Islamic State?
David L. Johnston, Yale University
Beginning with an examination of the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood’s second General Guide, Hasan al-Hudaibi (from 1951 to 1973), this paper questions the general assumption that Islamic “fundamentalism,” or Islamism, is necessarily a “political Islam” that seeks to overthrow existing political entities in order to install an “Islamic state.” Hudaibi personally denounced any violent means to promote the Brotherhood’s cause and in his writings defined the Islamic state as a state in which the moral injunctions of the sacred texts are promoted—a program on which in Egypt Muslims and Christians can easily agree. The paper concludes that the key difference between Islamic activists who seek to overthrow existing structures and those who only seek a moral revitalization of society is to be found in their theological approach—both their hermeneutic and the classical authorities they consult.
Contesting Fundamentalism: The Case of Islamic Education
Florian Pohl, Emory University
The term “fundamentalism” has attained widespread popularity for the comparative study of religious revival. The presentation addresses the difficulties of this term for the sober analysis of contemporary religious phenomena, specifically when applied to Islam. The stereotyping of Islamic education as “fundamentalist” furnishes a case study. Drawing on examples of Islamic education from different geographical contexts, the presentation evaluates the limitations and dangers of “fundamentalism” as a comparative category. Exposing the conceptual shortcomings of this term for the analysis of Islamic education contains the potential for opening up a new and more imaginative discourse on the nature and role of religion in contemporary societies by looking beyond categories such as “fundamentalism” to explore the various ways in which religion’s role in contemporary educational, social, political, and civil life as a whole is conceived.
The Category “Islamic Fundamentalism”: Good for Polemics, Bad for Scholarship?
David Harrington Watt, Temple University
In this paper, I will advance eight distinct arguments concerning the category 'Islamic fundamentalism.' These arguments are based a careful reading of texts concerning 'fundamentalism' that were published in England and the United States in the years between July 1, 1920 and the present. It seems quite likely, then the category 'Islamic fundamentalism' is so flexible, so vague, and so polemical, that it is no longer of much use to scholars. It is nothing more than a dead metaphor.
Rethinking the “Fundamentals” of Fundamentalism: Dualism, Literalism, Golden Age-ism
Simon Wood, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
This paper examines the prevailing model of religious fundamentalism, which dates from the 1970s, finds paradigmatic expression in the Fundamentalism Project (1991-95), and is adopted in innumerable recent books on modern Islam. The paper suggests that the thought of prominent “fundamentalist” thinkers frequently fails to conform to the model, and critiques various efforts to uphold the model in spite of such incongruities. It also suggests that the model imposes a monolith on diversity, and that therefore a variety of terms might be more useful than the homogenizing “fundamentalist.”
A19-16
Study of Judaism Section
Theme: Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary Kabbalah
In These Empty Fools One May Find Bells of Gold: Wise Fools and Revelation in Spanish Kabbalah
Yechiel Shalom Goldberg, California State University, Long Beach
Proceeding from the premise that thirteenth century Spanish Kabbalah is, at least in part, a medieval extension of the biblical wisdom tradition, this paper will explore the identity of the kabbalist as a wise fool in two kabbalistic sources, the writings of Azriel of Gerona and the Zohar. Azriel’s portrayal of the psychological conditions for acquiring wisdom and the process by which a person becomes wise will be analyzed. The relationship between this portrayal of the personality of the wise person and the Zohar’s dramatic portrayal of the relationship between hidden wise people and fools will be examined. These portrayals of the kabbalist as wise fool will be compared to contemporary Christian models of the wise fool as well as models found in the philosophical tradition. This comparison will shed light on this form of Jewish esotericism by illuminating the personality of the person who possesses and transmits wisdom.
The Popularization of Kabbalah in the Early Modern Period and Today: The Case of Women
Chava Weissler, Lehigh University
This paper compares the popularization of Kabbalah in the early modern period and today. In both eras, difficult Hebrew and Aramaic Kabbalistic texts and concepts were adapted and simplified in vernacular materials: Yiddish in the 17th and 18th centuries, and English in the 20th and 21st. Further, in both periods, women, normally excluded from mystical study, became involved in the process of vernacularization, de-canonization, and reshaping of these materials. Rather than asking whether vernacular texts and practices are “valid” Kabbalah by the standards of elite texts, this paper asks what the term “Kabbalah” signifies to the readers of this literature. Further, it interrogates the impact of women’s participation in the mystical tradition for those inside and outside of kabbalistic renewal movements: for some, women’s participation automatically brands a movement as “heretical,” while others see a renewal of Judaism via the incorporation of the feminine.
New Age and Old Judaism in Kabbalah Centre Teachings
Jody Myers, California State University, Northridge
I will examine the selective use of New Age religious concepts in the Kabbalah Centre movement. I am going to focus on three that can be attributed to the founder, Philip Berg: the identity of the present as the Age of Aquarius, his use of New Age 'science,' and his version of universal wisdom. My research is based on an examination of Kabbalah Centre literary sources and participant-observer experience. Berg’s strategic use of New Age concepts, I maintain, is designed to attract different cohorts of spiritual seekers into an acceptance of what is actually a particularistic and conservative ideology. Simultaneously, Berg pioneers a radical new definition of Jewishness. While the Kabbalah Centre’s concept of “Israelite” involves the rejection of an ethnic understanding of Jewishness in favor of universalism, it does not mean the end of hierarchy within the community or within humanity; it simply draws new boundaries.
Spheres of Influence: The Portrayal and Functions of Kabbalistic Cosmogony, Cosmology, and Magic in Contemporary Speculative Fiction and Sequential Art
Andrea Lobel, McGill University
Jewish mystical and supernatural themes have long been an integral part of mainstream Jewish literature. Given their emphases on futuristic or fantastic worlds, the genres of speculative fiction and the medium of sequential art (or, Bande Dessinée) have also come to incorporate Jewish mysticism, including Kabbalah. In this presentation, I discuss several representative fictional works, including Dante’s Equation, by Jane Jensen, The Red Magician, by Lisa Goldstein, The Tribe, by Bari Wood, Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat, Tauf Aleph, by Phyllis Gottlieb, and Promethea, by Alan Moore. My contention is that, within these post-Holocaust stories, there is a progressive move away from an association of Jewishness with victimization and otherness, or outsider status, toward the birth of the image of the Jew as a powerful kabbalist trained in mystical self-defense, and finally, toward the emergence of a positive, balanced representation of Jewishness and its power, as symbolized by kabbalistic imagery.
A19-17
African Religions Group and Religions, Medicines, and Healing Group
Theme: African Religions, Healing, and HIV/AIDS
This session will address challenges facing African communities in relation to rethinking traditional religious values and practices in relation to HIV/AIDS, and to health delivery systems in relation to traditional practitioners and African Indigenous Religions. Gendered dimensions will be explored through the case illustration of female spiritual healers.
Conflict in Religio-Cultural Values and Practices in African and Western Communities in the Age of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic
Tapiwa Mucherera, Asbury Theological Seminary
In this paper, I argue that there is need for the African community to re-assess some of the borrowed western ethical values and practices being enforced today, as well as re-assess some of the African traditional values and practices in the face of HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Healing and the East African Patient: Promises and Challenges of Religious Faith-Medical Treatment Collaboration
Jame Schaefer, Marquette University
Interest in the effects on patients when their religious faith is factored into the treatment process has grown recently in medical and nursing schools throughout the United States. Researchers have investigated various aspects of the religious faith-medical treatment relationship, identifying positive and negative religious coping strategies that patients have used, encouraging the development of religion-medicine courses in health care training programs, and discerning appropriate types of spiritual or religious histories to take when patients need prolonged care or face terminal diseases. This presentation will provide an overview of research on the medical treatment-religious faith and spirituality relationship in relation to East Africans patients, their religious approaches to healing, health care providers, and caregivers. I will address challenges to bringing about collaboration, and outline a research agenda in which scholars of religions practiced in East Africa can engage, to facilitate positive religious coping during the treatment process and facing terminal illnesses.
Women of the Spirit: Prophetesses and Healing in Contemporary Harare
Anna Chitando, Zimbabwe Open University
As Zimbabwe's healing delivery system began to struggle in the mid 1990s, there was a notable increase in faith healing. This paper explores the importance of female spiritual healers in Harare. It uses gender analysis to capture their contribution to healing. The paper argues that prophetesses appear to be more sensitive to feminine issues. The paper also pursues the question of how the economic situation has expanded the healing sphere. Prophetesses bless passports, foreign currency dealers and cross-border traders. It concludes with an analysis of the meaning of health in a context characterised by hyper inflation and uncertainty.
An Ancient Faith Meets a Contemporary Challenge: African Indigenous Religions and HIV and AIDS
Ezra Chitando, University of Zimbabwe
The religions of Africa should play a key role in addressing HIV and AIDS. While the efforts of the churches have been documented, African Indigenous Religions (AIRs) have only received blame and condemnation. African Christian theologians, Western donors and other actors often accuse AIRs of promoting harmful cultural practices that aid the spread of HIV. This study seeks to offer a more balanced perspective by highlighting positive aspects of AIRs in the wake of HIV and AIDS. The first section provides an overview of the "religion and AIDS" discourse. The section outlines critiques of AIRs in the era of HIV and AIDS. The third section describes positive ideas and practices that are relevant to the struggle against HIV and AIDS. A concluding section brings the study to a close.
A19-18
Anthropology of Religion Group and Ritual Studies Group
Theme: That Can't Be Religion—They're Having Fun! Sex, Laughter, Leisure, and Games in Religious Practice
Liminal Transgressions at the New Year's Festival in Zanzibar
Magnus Echtler, University of Bayreuth
Obscene songs are a new form of liminal transgression within the New Year’s festival in Makunduchi, Zanzibar. The women and men who sing these songs are criticized for their inventions, but they continue to enjoy the creative freedom provided by the liminal context of the festival. The singing of obscene songs is both conservative and innovative. It reproduces the structural division of the town into opposing moieties. But it also introduced a new theme: gender relations. This innovation is responsible for the success of the festival on the regional level. The songs form part of the ongoing reconstruction of Zanzibar national identity in the discursive tensions between urban and rural, modern and traditional, reformist and local Islam.
Playing at Syncretism: New Rituals in a Brazilian Catholic Women’s Group
Steven Engler, Mount Royal College and Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
Drawing on recent fieldwork, this paper describes the rituals of a women's prayer group in Brazil. At two levels, the play/non-play boundary helps maintain the social space of this 'Catholic' group that practices 'a little of everything.' (1) The diocese accepts this syncretistic lay group as Catholic because its unorthodox elements are seen as playing at religion: false doctrine and infantile spirituality, but good practice. (2) Moments of laughter and fun diffuse potential tensions arising from the group's diversity. I define syncretism in terms of meaning making and intelligibility, where social/religious boundaries offer leverage for relations of power (Benavides). In this context, Droogers argues that the 'as-if' of play allows religious actors to combine disparate domains of meaning. I extend this by arguing that negotiations over the play/non-play distinction itself are fundamental to the 'like but unlike' of syncretism, and in religion’s work at boundaries more generally (Tweed).
Being “Saved” — Being Children: Symbolic Prescriptions and Ritual Proscriptions of Pleasure and Play in a Storefront Pentecostal Church
Deidre H. Crumbley, North Carolina State University
There are many forms of Pentecostalism, but they share a central belief in indwelling spirit, manifested through speaking in tongues and in a life of piety and perfection. Boundaries between the sacred and profane are associated with prescribed and proscribed behavior codes with which not only adults but also their offspring are expected to comply. This paper explores both the “shall nots” and the “shalls” that circumscribe and validate leisure time, especially as they apply to children. This paper first explores how notions of “indwelling spirit” and of “being chosen” sacralize leisure and play; then it examines ways sacred spaces serves as arenas of pleasurable performance and embodied joy. The case study is a female-founded storefront “sanctified” church in Philadelphia where most members had immigrated as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and II.
Ritualizing Religious Reward: The Dark Side of Play
Nikki Bado-Fralick, Iowa State University
Although the manufacture of religious games and toys is a burgeoning industry, with sales doubling yearly and new titles and lines being added all the time, the significance of religious games and toys has been little studied. This is a peculiar oversight, considering the number and types of issues that are potentially raised: among them the uneasy intersections of fun and family entertainment with competition and commercialism, and the oversimplification and reduction of complex religious beliefs and embodied practices to easily memorized scriptural sound bytes and ritualized, but restricted, forms of play. The authors of this paper attempt to address this oversight by exploring aspects of the “dark side of play”—what happens when religious reward is ritualized through competitive play—by using works by Grimes, Myerhoff, Turner, and Schechner to explore the connections between aspects of ritual, play, and performance.
Ritualizing Religious Reward: The Dark Side of Play
Rebecca Sachs Norris, Merrimack College
co-presenter with Nikki Bado-Fralick
A19-19
Bible in Racial, Ethnic, and Indigenous Communities Group
Theme: Biblical Scholarship and/as Public Criticism
We believe that the meeting of the AAR in Washington, DC offers an important opportunity to reflect on the issue of biblical criticism and/as public criticism. How has biblical interpretation influenced public policy affecting racial, ethnic minority and indigenous communities? How have racial, ethnic minority and indigenous biblical scholars functioned as public intellectuals? How has biblical criticism become a form of public discourse impacting our communities? These and many other questions will be addressed in 10 minutes position statements by each of the panel’s presenters.
A19-20
Buddhist Philosophy Group
Theme: Re-Thinking Reason, Re-Viewing Buddhist Views
For Buddhist philosophers, what is "reason," and how do they employ it? And once reason is in place, what view of reality does it lead Buddhist thinkers to defend? Finally, how do we distinguish those view such that Buddhist thinkers fall into one "school" or another? This session addresses these closely allied questions, ranging from foundational figures in India to great adepts in Tibet.
On What Do We Rely When We Rely on Reasoning?
Richard Nance, Ann Arbor, MI
In Buddhist texts authored in Indian and Tibetan traditions of scholasticism, one is regularly directed to check one's understanding against 'scripture and reasoning.' To date, however, comparatively little attention has been given to the usage of the latter term of this pair (Skt. yukti, Tib. rigs pa) in Indian Buddhist texts. Building on the work of Scherrer-Schaub, Kapstein and others, this paper discusses divergent glosses of the term yukti as found in texts such as the the Vyākhyāyukti, the Tattvasamgraha(pañjikā), the Samdhinirmocana, the Yogācārabhūmi, and the Abhidharmasamuccaya(bhāşya). By highlighting continuities and discontinuities in these accounts, I hope to stimulate reflection on the ways in which our assumptions regarding reasoning--and, by extension, what is to count as 'Buddhist philosophy'--are represented in, and perhaps contested by, thematizations offered within the tradition.
A Rose by Any Other Name? Doxographical Classification in Indian Texts
of the "Later Period" of Indian Buddhism
David Vincent Fiordalis, University of Michigan
This paper examines doxographical categories in some Indian and Indian Buddhist texts of the "later period" and compares them with categories found in early Tibetan texts. Paying particular attention to the basic fourfold classification of Buddhist philosophical schools into Vaibhāşika, Sautrāntika, Madhyamaka and Yogācāra, it seeks to address the question of whether or not Indian and Tibetan sources of this period constitute a common tradition of interpretation and draw upon a common vocabulary. Arguing that there are some significant commonalities among them, it proceeds to raise some questions about using these doxographical categories for understanding the development of Indian Buddhism and what it might mean to talk in terms of Buddhist "schools of thought."
Slicing the Pie Alternatively: Śakya mchog ldan on Divisions of the Mahayānā Tenet Systems
Yaroslav Komarovski, University of Virginia
Śākya mchog ldan argues that the views of Yogācarā Madhyamaka and Nihsvabhavavāda Madhyamaka are different, and this is why he accepts them as subdivisions of Madhyamaka. Nevertheless, that distinction is not drawn at the level of an Arya's experience in meditation on the ultimate; instead, the distinction pertains to the way one sees the world after arising out of meditation. Indeed, for Śākya mchog ldan, the Yogācarā and Nihsvabhavavāda Aryas realize the same view during meditation. Therefore, the fundamental difference between the two is indeed very subtle: it lies not in the experience of the meditative equipoise, but in the way that experience is described after the arya leaves that meditative state. By using this tool — stating difference on the level of conceptual description and oneness on the level of direct realization — Śākya mchog ldan claims that the views of the different systems are both different and compatible.
Heterodox Doxography? The Philosophical Stance of Kun Mkhyen kLong Chen Rab ’Byams Pa
Albion Butters, Columbia University
This paper will explore the largely unrecognized scholastic contributions of one of Tibet’s greatest thinkers, kLong chen rab ’byams pa (1308-1363), through the lens of his doxographic overview of Buddhist tenet-systems (the Precious Treasury of Spiritual Systems, or Grub mtha’ mdzod). Specific focus on the third chapter of this work will expose particularities involved with kLong chen pa’s interpretation of Buddhism’s two-reality theory in relation to the Svātantrika and Prāsangika schools of Madhyamaka philosophy, such as his assertion that ultimate truth withstands analysis. It will also investigate kLong chen pa’s move to identify the Third Turning of the Wheel as definitive while simultaneously presenting the view of Prāsangika-Madhyamaka as the apotheosis of the various dialectical vehicles.
A19-21
Chinese Religions Group
Theme: Violence and the Body in Late Imperial China
This panel explores a spectrum of body practices through the lens of self-inflicted violence as a constitutive element in late imperial Chinese religions. It posits that violent body practices perpetuate the forceful discourses of filiality, piety, loyalty, and sanctity, but also give expression to various civilizing and demonizing processes that are fundamental to mainstream culture. These practices are patterned in a way that is analogous to the patterning of the social body. Each presenter theorizes the implications of these practices for a broader understanding and deeper appreciation of the role of violence in Chinese history.
Letters from an Immortal: Religion, Gender, and Body Practices in Sixteenth-Century China
Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota
This paper focuses on the practices of fasting and seclusion of Tanyangzi, a woman who was a religious teacher, visionary, and saint in sixteenth-century Suzhou. It attends specifically to issues of gender and bodily religious practice. It also contrasts attitudes toward gender and bodily practices in two different kinds of material about Tanyangzi. One is a set of published sources (a biography and letters by her disciples) on Tanyangzi. The other is a series of unpublished letters which purport to be by Tanyangzi herself together with a frontispiece painting of Tanyangzi by You Qiu, now held in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The paper will conclude with some general observations about fasting and seclusion as religious practice.
Piety, Passion, and Blood Writing in the Late Ming
Jimmy Yu, Princeton University
This paper contextualizes blood writing (xieshu), the practice of copying or writing texts with one’s own blood, in the mainstream culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. Examining the privately published anthologies and Buddhist canonical works on blood memorials and blood scriptures by scholar-officials and Buddhist clerics, the author argues that blood writing was a practice that synthesized and transcended the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Blood writing cannot be reduced to either an ascetic act or an externalization of some internal ideal. On the one hand, it was a concrete practice that involved the physical maiming of one’s body. On the other hand, it also conveyed some of the implications of mainstream Confucian values, such as piety, filiality, and loyalty, albeit in extreme form. Blood writing was both shaped by late imperial cultural values and it contributed to the shaping of such values.
Violated Bodies: How Guanyin Became a Domesticated Demon
Mark Meulenbeld, Princeton University
This paper provides an alternative view of Guanyin's Chinese 'domestication,' which typically argues that the originally Buddhist, male deity became Confucianized and feminized. The author argues instead that the historical changes in Guanyin's portrayal can also be understood as an apotheosis resembling the containment and canonization of threatening demonic gods (ligui). The argument offers a structural interpretation of Princess Miaoshan's practice of self-maiming, her premature death, and her ambiguous status as an orphan soul (guhun). The paper sheds light on other issues as well, including the mechanisms for dealing with unnatural, violent deaths and the process of deification, how tales of self-sacrifice were produced, and the significance of self-inflicted violence and the violation of the physical boundaries of the body.
A19-22
Comparative Theology Group
Theme: The Body, Its Meanings, and New Light on the Problems and Possibilities of Comparative Theology
Comparative Theology can be explored with attention to method; see our sessions on the Comparative Religious Ideas Project, and with the Comparative Study of Religion Section and Comparative Ethics on the nature and finality of comparative projects. But comparative theology necessarily flourishes in specifics, experimental analyses, and conversations bringing specific bodies of learning together in conversation. This session boldly brings together four diverse kinds of reflection on materiality and body: 1. the body of Krsna as avatara compared with the incarnation of Christ; 2. Maximos the Confessor and Tibetan reformer Tsong kha pa regarding divine embodiment; 3. the temporal durability and materiality of Jesus as Son of God and of the holy Qur’an as actualizing the transcendent in a sacred specific “textual body;" 4. metaphors of fluidity and the body in Mechthild of Magdeburg and Lalla of Kashmir, for both of whom all reality participates in a cosmic flow.
Krsna and Christ: A Comparative Study Concerning the Body-Soul-Divine Relation in the Manusi Tanu (Human Form) of Bhagavadgita 9.11
Steven Tsoukalas, Centre College
This paper compares the doctrines of the body-divine relation in the person of Krsnavatara (Krsna in his avatara state) in the thought of Sankara and Ramanuja with the incarnation of Christ as represented by traditional christological formulations. Comparison is also made between Sankara and Ramanuja. The study also draws out comparative theological and soteriological implications. The paper first examines the ontologies of Sankara and Ramanuja so that, second, an accurate comparison of body-divine relation in avatara and incarnation might be accomplished. A result of this paper is a demonstration that some popularly-held similarities between avatara and incarnation are at best superficial, and that therefore careful consideration of ontologies provides the necessary foundation from which to launch comparison of the body-divine relation in the persons of Krsna and Christ.
The Cosmic Christ and the Dharmakāya: Embodied Manifestations of the Cosmic Order in Maximos the Confessor and Tsong Kha Pa
Thomas Cattoi, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
The purpose of this paper is to lay the foundations for a comparative theology of divine embodiment, using insights from the Greek Father Maximos the Confessor and the Tibetan thinker and monastic reformer Tsong
kha pa. Despite their radically different cultural and theological backgrounds, these two authors developed a surprisingly similar theology of divine embodiment, if this term is used to indicate the Christian mystery of the incarnation as well as the Mahāyāna doctrine of the Buddha bodies. In the course of this paper, I will discuss a number of excerpts from Maximos’ Ambigua and Tsong kha pa’s Lam rin chen mo, highlighting the points of contact and the differences between two approaches. I will conclude offering a few constructive considerations as to the shape of a possible contextual Christology, which would articulate the Christian teaching of the incarnation using resources from Tibetan philosophy and culture.
Recitation of the Qur’an and the Incarnation of Christ: Possibilities for Global Society
Peter deVries, University of Pittsburgh
Societies based on human institutions are inherently inequitable. The manifestation of transcendence offers the possibility for an egalitarian global society. But these manifestations are inherently temporal, unable to provide a stable foundation for a non-subordinating society. However, Islam and Christianity each claim events that are temporally durable. The incarnation of Christ is the primary event of manifestation for Christians. The eventfulness of the incarnation continues if the incarnational body has not been destroyed and continues to present itself, in any of several possible ways. For Muslims, the Qur’an actualizes the transcendent in a text. Recitation of the Qur’an allows the event of revelation to continue if we accept a theory of unified reading. Both the incarnation of Christ and the recitation of the Qur’an offer the possibility of a continuing actualization of the transcendent, although each presents difficulties.
Flowing and Crossing: The Fluid Theologies of Mechthild and Lalla
Michelle Voss Roberts, Rhodes College
Metaphors of fluidity are pervasive in the theologies of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Lalla of Kashmir. This paper highlights the various ways in which body can flow with and into the divine. For both thinkers, the universe and individuals proceed from a cosmic or divine flow and return to it by means of practices that participate in that flow. Their water metaphors diverge when the individual soul returns to the divine: Mechthild retains images of water, while Lalla converts to those of breath. This shift of imagery, I suggest, marks a difference of theological position on suffering as obstacle or means of participation in the divine flow.
A19-23
Hinduism Group
Theme: Engaged/ Progressive/ Liberation Hinduism and Hindus
This panel aims to see how our understanding of Hinduism might shift, in terms of both contemporary and historical movements, if we intentionally adopt the interpretive lens of social justice. This project is explicit that the ways we shape our initial questions shape subsequent findings, and that such research can shape the understandings of Hinduism by Hindus and others. We borrow our model from three areas: (1) liberation theology (in all its forms); (2) engaged Buddhism; and (3) the Progressive Muslims project. The papers in this panel address movements, institutions, and people working from a more or less explicitly Hindu perspective on issues of social justice. Our hope is that this panel can help initiate a new direction in scholarship on Hinduism, and religions in and of South Asia more generally.
Progressive Hindus and the California Textbook Controversy
Vijaya Nagarajan, University of San Francisco
This paper explores the current controversy on the Hindu textbook issue in California. First, it reviews the current representation of Hinduism in California textbooks and the political repercussions of the Education Commission in California responding to certain Hindu community groups. What were the changes that some Hindu groups in America were demanding? What were these changes based on? On what kinds of histories and knowledges are the members of the Hindu community basing their suggestions for changes? What are the range of groups and associations who “represent” Hinduism in the United States and India? This paper also has some ethnographic fieldwork within Hindu communities in the west coast, especially in Northern California, where the issue of the Hindu textbook is particularly charged and contested. This paper explores and outlines what may be necessary for a “progressive” Hinduism to emerge in California, especially at the rhetorical level.
Hinduism as Spiritual Humanism: The Pluralistic Vision of the Ramakrishna Mission
Jeffery D. Long, Elizabethtown College
This paper explores the vision for Hinduism implicit in the religious pluralism of the Ramakrishna Mission. The main emphasis of this paper is upon the Ramakrishna tradition’s potential to act as a counterweight to Hindutva through its teaching of religious pluralism, a teaching traceable to Ramakrishna’s teaching that all religions are paths to the same goal. This is a doctrine that has rarely been articulated in a systematic or philosophically consistent manner and has evoked much criticism both from the Hindu right and from non-Hindus. The central aim of this paper is to suggest ways in which the Ramakrishna tradition’s pluralism can be re-articulated in such a way as to avoid the kind of criticism to which it has been subject and enable the tradition to more fully realize its progressive alternative vision for Hinduism.
Devotion, Sadhana, and Social Action
Ramdas Lamb, University of Hawaii, Manoa
The interaction of religious beliefs and social engagement has long been a part of the Hindu tradition, although seldom perceived or discussed in the West. Part of the reason is our use of Western academic and religious paradigms, based on the Abrahamic traditions, to understand religious social involvement. These attitudes cloud our ability to perceive the prevalence of social action in Hinduism, especially in the devotional schools. Although such activism has often been a part of a larger fundamentalist push at proselytization and conversion, other forces promoting social activism within these traditions have included a questioning and critique the orthodoxy of the traditions themselves, and this reality ameliorates the overall way in which they are perceived. My paper discusses how the role of social engagement in Hinduism both as it has played out in the past as well as examples of it in contemporary times in India and the West.
Marxism and Feminism Meet Hindu Ritual: Liberation Theology Revisited and Revisioned
Corinne Dempsey, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
The Rush temple in upstate New York does not run soup kitchens or outreach programs for the poor and disenfranchised. Quite the opposite, its offerings to the goddess are most often expensive and ostentatious; its excessive showiness makes some visitors uncomfortable. Yet, as this paper argues, the Sri Lankan guru/priest who leads the temple has created a hotbed for social justice -- both in theory and practice. This proclivity for equal rights becomes most apparent when practitioners--regardless of gender, caste, and ethnic backgrounds--regularly and publicly perform elaborate pujas and homam rituals at the temple. This paper discusses theories and rationales behind these practices, many of which are informed by remnants of the guru's early affinity for Marxism (that, as he understands it, was exchanged for religious conviction in his early twenties) and by the Shaiva-Shakta tantric tradition to which he belongs.
A19-24
Law, Religion, and Culture Group and Biblical Law Section
Theme: Law and Cultural Narratives
Alfred the Great and the Law of Exodus: The Afterlife of Biblical Law in Early Medieval England
F. Rachel Magdalene, Augustana College
This paper will explore the afterlife of the laws of Exodus in early medieval English law. In particular, it will study the intersection of the Decalogue and Covenant Code with the law code of Alfred the Great who ruled the southern Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex from about 871 C.E. to 899 C.E. Alfred used prior Anglo-Saxon law codes, the Decalogue, and the certain provisions of the Covenant Code to write what is considered by many to be the first law code of England. This paper will compare and contrast the legal provisions of the Decalogue and the Covenant Code with Alfred’s legal provisions and then offer an analysis of Alfred’s interpretations of these important biblical texts. The methods used will be drawn from biblical narrative criticism, biblical cultural criticism, and legal history.
Members Only: The Crushed, Cut, and Tolerated in Deuteronomy 23:1-8
Jione Havea, Southern Methodist University
This paper focuses on Deut 23:1–8, a text that determines who can join YHWH’s assembly according to the state of his testicles, penis, parentage, and racial background, and reads it alongside cultural narratives involving eunuchs (e.g., the book of Esther, following Randall Bailey’s reading), bastards (a term, according to Driver, referring to both offspring born out of wedlock and offspring of an incestuous [or prohibited] union as in the stories of the Ammonites and Moabites), and outcasts who may be tolerated (e.g., the stories of people in the so-called mission field who are now being embraced). From a postcolonial perspective, the contention is that, in the Pacific Island context, people who were once rejected are now embraced, as the Edomites and Egyptians are tolerated in Deut 23:7–18, but they are troubled by what may be waiting beyond the initial moments of their being tolerated.
Biblical Law, American Law: A Typology of Tactics for the “Restoration” of Conservative Christian Normativity in the United States
Ipsita Chatterjea, Vanderbilt University
Within conservative Christianity in the United States today, the understanding of the rightful relationship between civic and criminal law and biblical normativity manifests itself in a variety of ways. This paper will examine contemporary rhetoric regarding the relationship between biblical law and “American law” (American criminal, civil, and constitutional law). The following questions will be asked: how are biblical and American law spoken of in relation to one another; and what are the strategies and legal tactics utilized and how do they vary in response to events? The underlying thesis is that, while there is a great heterogeneity of positions within conservative Christianity on the relationship between biblical law and American law, one objective remains the same, that is, a restoration (that presumes loss) of something akin to Christian biblical normativity as law.
The Biblical Defense of Slavery
Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School
This paper will explore the use of biblical law to defend slavery in the antebellum American South. At a time when a literal reading of the Bible was prevalent in Protestant denominations, debates concerning the issue of slavery raised crucial questions about the relevance of the Bible and biblical law to the circumstances of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, questions were raised about the relationship between theology and biblical interpretation and the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. This paper will trace the manner in which slavery was defended as biblically-based and the theological and cultural tensions that resulted.
A19-25
Lesbian-Feminist Issues and Religion Group
Theme: Survival and Liberation: Religious Lesbian Womanists/Feminists Challenge Faith Communities
I, Too, Sing Songs of Freedom
Dorinda G. Henry, National Center for Human Rights Education
This paper gives voice to the hopes and fears for the Black Church and its same-and-both-gender-loving members. There is (1) hope of reconnecting as a community of faith, a community of distinct sociopolitical and historical suffering-and-rejection and oppression; (2) hope of healing, growth and reconciliation; and (3) hope for personal, cultural and theological emancipation for both the Black Church and its same-and-both-gender-loving members. This paper attempts to “break bread” with the Black Church, so that we may, together, care for and mend our personal and spiritual wounds as well as our wounded Church, that it might once again be that institution of liberation from all forms of oppression. The three sections of the argument are: (1) Slavery and Oppression, (2) Pride and Prejudice, and (3) Reconciliation, Transformation and Emancipation. The scholars whose works inform these arguments include Paul Tillich, James Cone, Jon Sobrino, Cornel West, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, and Harold Fowler.
Living Fully into Who We Are Called to Be, or, Why Our Silence(s) Still Do Not Protect Us
Frances E. Wood, Emory University
Within African American women’s history the late 19th – early 20th century ‘culture of dissemblance’ played a critical role in Black women’s survival. One of the aspects that characterized such an approach was the promulgation of an implicitly monolithic representation of respectability that foreclosed examination and discussion of the significant differences among the lives of Black women. This paper examines a residue of dissemblance in the lives of twenty-first century African American women, placing monolithic constructions in contestation with the significant differences that inhere intra-communally. These similarities and differences will be examined within the framework of the intersectionality, and the implications that silences surrounding difference have for the survival and liberation of Black women in the U. S.
A19-26
New Religious Movements Group
Theme: Coming of Age: Adaptation and Change in New Religions
New religions are, almost by definition, adaptive organizations, however well or poorly that works out in the history and development of particular groups. This session will consider the question of adaptation from a number of different perspectives: generational, diasporic, legal, and philosophical.
Youth Then and Now: A Comparison between Converts to NRMs in the 1970s and Their Now-Adult Children, Socialised in the Movement
Eileen Vartan Barker, London School of Economics
Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, and taking the Unification Church as a primary (though not exclusive) example, this paper compares the youth who converted in the 1970s with their children who were brought up in their movement, some of whom have now left, some of whom are now committed missionaries, and some of whom vacillate between the movement and the ‘outside.’ Issues addressed include the difference it makes whether one is converting into or out of an NRM, and the changes in methods that NRMs have adopted between, initially, attracting youth into their movement and, subsequently, keeping them in it.
“I Conjure You Up by The Powers Of India. Appear Before My Eyes!": Constructing Images of India and Producing Hindu Spiritual Power in Popular Ghanaian Religious Discourse
Albert K. Wuaku, Florida International University
This paper demonstrates the agency of Ghanaian people in appropriating Hinduism. I show how popular Ghanaian interpretations of three genres of narratives inform the meanings attached to Hindu symbols that flow into Ghana as part of a global circulation, and produce a wonder-working religious power image of India and Hinduism. This image of India and Hinduism is inspiring a wave of indigenous Ghanaian Hinduism. The paper contributes to the discourse on African agency in the appropriation of the emerging global culture. Far from being passive victims to the dislocations of globalization Ghanaians exercise their agency in selectively and creatively appropriating globally circulating symbols, [in this case Hinduism] and investing these with indigenous meanings of power, in order to regain control over their lives.
The 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act: Rediscovering Key Events in Pagan Historiography
Helen Cornish, Goldsmiths College, University of London
In 2001 Pagans in Britain gathered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Fraudulent Mediums Act; this Act had repealed the 1736 Witchcraft Act and removed the concept of witchcraft from the British Statutes. For many Witches and Wiccans, 1951 was identified as a historical marker for state recognition of Witchcraft and regularly referred to the 1951 Act as the ‘legalisation of witchcraft’. Others were wary of mythologizing the impact of legislation that had Spiritualist concerns at its heart, but appreciated the value of a symbolic community event that raised the profile of British Paganism for political and ideological purposes. The ways this key event was commemorated illustrates how events are selectively reshaped in order to establish shared histories for new communities. This paper examines these crucial issues in the context of Pagan historiographies, and considers broader concerns regarding the public profile and recognition of Paganism in Britain in 2001.
Alexander Dugin’s Apocalyptic Traditionalism
Mark J. Sedgwick, American University, Cairo
Alexander Dugin, a former Soviet dissident, is now the leading Russian exponent of Traditionalism, a religious philosophy established by René Guénon. The paper sketches Dugin’s activities–which include a religio-philosophical academy, a youth movement, and followers undergoing paramilitary training–and then explores the relationship between them and the religious aspects of Dugin’s traditionalism. Three elements are identified as being particularly important. One is the understanding of modernity in terms of the kali yuga, the Hindu final age. Another is the existential commitment to political action for the sake of its spiritual value that Dugin derives from Guénon, Nietzsche, and Evola. Finally comes Dugin’s conviction that apocalyptic conflict between the United States and the Eurasian world (centered on Russia) is inevitable and even desirable. This gives a certain edge to his political activities, and helps match his views with those of his admirers in the Kremlin, where anti-Americanism is increasingly acute.
A19-27
Platonism and Neoplatonism Group
Theme: Hierarchy in Neoplatonism
The Social Context of Jewish Middle-platonic Discourse about Hierarchy
Naomi Janowitz, University of California, Davis
Philo’s concept of his audience included notions of hierarchy; some of his readers were worthy of his deep insights and some not. E.R. Goodenough argued that some of Philo’s comments were meant to be restricted to Jews, though Philo does not state this directly. This model implies that Jews represent a higher level in the human hierarchy than non-Jews. While Goodenough’s argument has not been widely accepted, the fact remains that Philo makes elitist claims that presuppose both a human and divine hierarchy. It should be possible to re-examine Philo’s writings and develop a new conceptualization of Philo’s unique way of correlating the hierarchy of knowledge with the more general human, and even divine hierarchy. This will give us important information about the interconnection between philosophical claims to special elitist traditions and how they are and are not evidence of the world of social competition.
Sacred Races: Iamblichus and Porphyry on Ethnic Hierarchy
Philippa Townsend, Princeton University
In De Mysteriis, Iamblichus assumes the persona of Abamon, an Egyptian priest, as he responds to the inquiries of his former teacher, Porphyry. In this paper, I suggest that Iamblichus's identification with Abamon goes beyond the traditional Greek veneration of "barbarian wisdom." In his text, Iamblichus actually inverts the established hierarchy of Greek over barbarian, by challenging Porphyry's assumption of the universality of Hellenic culture and asserting instead the universal value of particular ethnic traditions. This is not to deny Iamblichus's dependence on Greek philosophy, but rather to make a claim about his self-conscious stance towards Hellenism. This paper, then, places the philosophers' differences with respect to the role of the "sacred races" within the context of both their philosophical and cultural perspectives.
The Interpretation of Neoplatonic Hierarchy by Renaissance and Baroque Artists
Naoko Frances Hioki, Graduate Theological Union
The subject of this presentation is the interpretation of hierarchy in western art. It tries to show that the artists did not always present the hierarchy as "elitist," but often they presented it as an "inclusive" vision of a unified cosmos. There are especially interesting examples of "inclusive" hierarchy from Renaissance and Baroque art, where the heavenly and the earthly are united as one dynamic whole. Among them, the presentation will focus on Cathedra Petri (completed in 1666) by Bernini in St. Peter's, Rome and will demonstrate that this artwork represents the unfolding of hierarchy in the form on concentric circles. Bernini was familiar with the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and through his famous "glory of angels" in Cathedra Petri, he visualized the imparting of the Godhead, the overflowing of love into the cosmos and the return of all beings to the divine unity in glory.
Running and Returning: Habad Hasidism on Bodily Divestment and the Subsequent Implementation of Divinity in the Lower World
Israel M. Sandman, University of Chicago
In HaBaD (alt. “Chabad”) Hasidism, divine absoluteness and unity are cognized, contemplated, and internalized. This entails a dialectical process in which the individuated self, the body, and matter are first negated and transcended, because they obscure their divine source, and then transformed and redeemed as means of implementing the divine source even in the lower world. This transformation is a daily process, beginning with an incremental “running,” i.e. step-by-step divestment from the individuated self, body, and matter, towards the higher, divine world of unity. This takes place by means of mystical contemplation during the daily prayer rites prescribed by Jewish law. At the apex of the “running” comes a self-transformational mystical union. With the transformative power of union, the “return” to the lower world of individuated selves, bodies, and matter can begin, all entities can be redeemed as expressions
A19-28
Practical Theology Group
Theme: Reviewing Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination, Charles R. Foster, Lisa E. Dahill, Lawrence A. Golemon, and Barbara Wang Tolentino (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
Educating Clergy is the first book in a series of comparative studies by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that examines how members of different professions are educated. "It has never been more evident," asserts William Sullivan of Carnegie, "that public as well as private life in America is powerfully shaped by traditions of faith commitments and religious observance. This study was born out of the conviction that the organized clergy plays a central, though unofficial, role in many aspects of national life." Based on extensive literary and field research in Roman Catholic, mainline and evangelical Protestant, and Reform and Conservative Jewish seminaries, Educating Clergy explores the influence of historic traditions and academic settings in contemporary classroom and communal pedagogies. The book describes elements in classroom pedagogies that distinctively integrate the cognitive, practical, and normative apprenticeships to be found in all forms of professional education.
A19-29
Religion and Ecology Group
Theme: Religion from the Ground Up: Religious Reflections on Place
Eternal Foundations or Contested Grounds? The (Ab)Use of Nature and God in Political Discourse Surrounding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Whitney Bauman, Graduate Theological Union
‘God’ and ‘Nature’ can serve as “god tricks” in political discourse (Haraway). They can serve as epistemological foundations beyond which questions cannot be asked. They set up confrontational methods for approaching ethical issues and knowledge debates. I argue that neither foundationalism nor relativism is helpful in political discourse surrounding environmental issues because these approaches avoid their eco-context. In this way, ethical commands or epistemological claims can be asserted regardless of the specific context of a given situation. In order to give this methodology for dialogue some texture, I analyze the debates surrounding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Politicians and activists on all sides of the issue make foundational claims based on ‘God’ or ‘Nature’. Through looking at these ways in which foundational values clash yet never gain traction in any context, I also offer a constructive method whereby a many-sided argument can take place on this contested territory.
Rural Redemption: The Family Farm as Sacred Place in the American Catholic Agrarian Tradition
Tovis Page, Harvard University
In their introduction to American Sacred Space (1995), David Chidester and Edward Linenthal write that “sacred space anchors a worldview in the world,” but that it “anchors more than merely myth or emotion. It anchors relations of meaning and power that are at stake in the formation of a larger social reality” (17). Presenting ‘the family farm’ as a kind of ‘sacred place’ in American Catholic agrarianism, I will show how it anchors the worldview of Catholic agrarianism in the world. This worldview has assumptions about appropriate human social relations (particularly in regard to sex and gender) as well as human relations to the divine and to the natural world. On both real and ideal levels, the sacred place of ‘the family farm’ in the American Catholic agrarian tradition entails multiple norms and practices through which social, ecological, and religious worlds are variously constructed, challenged, and maintained.
Sacred Place and Spiritual Journey in Ursula Le Guin's Fiction
David L. Barnhill, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
In many of her science fiction novels, Ursula Le Guin has presented different worlds with a rich sensitivity to the relationship between culture and nature and to political questions of equality, gender, community, and freedom. This paper analyzes the notions of place and journey in three of her novels: The Dispossessed (1974), The Eye of the Hero (1978), and Always Coming Home (1985). Throughout these novels, the notions of place and journey are developed in subtle ways that transcend conventional notions of one’s familiar home and a pilgrimage to a sacred site. In addition, the novels exhibit an increasing significance of ecofeminist spirituality and bioregional sensitivity. The books also are what scholars call critical utopias, in which an ideal society is presented as a compelling critique of conventional society but at the same time is flawed and fluid.
Practicing Place: Comparative Reflections on Urban Intersections of Spirituality, Identity, and Nature
Barbara A.B. Patterson, Emory University
A two year old charter school, serving fifty percent local and fifty percent refugee and immigrant children establishes a community garden as their pedagogical and spiritual commitment. A large research university in the same city develops a foot-path system through its woodlands to encourage learning and sense of belonging and spirituality related to campus and beyond. Local food growers and providers in this same area envision a local food system focused on increased availabillity and awareness of the ethical and spiritual dimensions of eco-justice. Though dramatically diverse, these three communities share an urban ecological system and in each case, thriving involves performances of place. Through preliminary ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examinates how concepts of urban place become performed spiritual and ethical practices. It explores why and how these communities turn to nature as site for such practices, including their power for making meaning of identity and community and supporting agency for change.
A19-30
Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
Theme: Identity, Ritual, and the Sacred in Film
Sacred DNA: Religion and Genetics in Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca
Ronald Green and Aine Donovan, Dartmouth College
Gattaca, Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film depicting life in a genetic dystopia, is widely used in courses dealing with ethics or genetics to raise fundamental questions about the uses of genetic information. Less obvious to the naïve viewer, and to scholars who have written on the film, are its pervasive religious themes. In this paper, against a background of the work of Mary Douglas and others, we develop the many symbolic and structural elements of the film that have religious significance and we consider why it is important to understand the ways in which genetics lends itself to an alliance with religious ideas.
Teaching Crash
Emily Askew, Carroll College
Opening Paul Haggis’ masterpiece Crash, Don Cheadle reflects, “In L.A. nobody touches you...are always behind cement and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just to feel something.” Through collision comes our invitation to feel, care and think about race and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Cheadle’s claim speaks to the state of insulation with which my beginning religious studies students approach studying religion. It speaks to what it takes to get beyond the cement and glass of emotional and intellectually lethargy (animosity) toward other religions/other ways of thinking about religion. Because Crash works so well to destabilize assumptions, it as the first conversation my religious studies students have with ideas of truth, morality and certainty. The film has led to a pedagogy I term “Crash teaching.” In this presentation I explain both ways in which I “teach Crash.”
The Spectator, Gender Performance, and Gnosis in Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Christine Kraemer, Boston University
The Hedwig film presents a transgender character in full gender-malleable glory: as a little boy, an androgynous young man, a transsexual woman, an over-the-top drag queen, and lastly as a gender-ambiguous – but, it is implied – finally authentic self. Using Judith Halberstam’s concept of the “transgender look” and Judith Butler’s notion of drag, this paper will consider how Hedwig confronts the spectator with the reality and universality of gender performance. Special attention will be given to the film’s utopian vision of total gender transcendence, which uses both the Gospel of Philip’s retelling of the Garden of Eden narrative and the “Origin of Love” story from Plato’s Symposium to suggest a solution to those human beings who feel doomed to search the earth for their “other halves.”
Visual Imageries of Ritual Possession and Colonial Mockery: Les Maîtres Fous and the Problem of Reflexive Mimesis in the Filmic Representation of the Hauka Movement
Jens Kreinath, University of Heidelberg
Les Maîtres Fous is a documentary film that is produced by the prominent French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch in 1956 on the possession ritual of the Hauka movement, which was practiced by Songhay migrants from Niger in Accra, Ghana, during the time of French colonialism. The aim of this paper is to address methodological questions about the visual representation of ritual possession practices through filmic narratives and to interpret them in light of the problem of the reflexive mimesis as derived from this film and its technique. By way of using the concept of the ‘indexes of agency’ as introduced by Alfred Gell, the attempt will be made to analyze the visual imageries of ritual possession and colonial mockery as presented in Les Maîtres Fous and to explore the semiotic implications that these imaginaries can have for the perception and conception of the Hauka movement.
What Hath Vienna to Do with Jerusalem? The Value of Psychoanalytic Film Theory for Religion and Film Scholarship
Kent Brintnall, Emory University
Two recent studies of methodology in religion and film – John Lyden’s Film as Religion and Clive Marsh’s Cinema and Sentiment – reject theoretical approaches informed by psychoanalytic theory and spectatorship studies in favor of ethnographic approaches. This paper will use Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as a case study for demonstrating the value – perhaps even the necessity – of psychoanalytically informed spectatorship theory to the discipline of religion and film. The paper will, hopefully, provide an opportunity for a conversation about the usefulness of particular methodologies in religion and film scholarship.
A19-31
Religion, Politics, and the State Group
Theme: Progressive Politics and Religion: Has the Left “Gotten It”?
Although progressive movements have historically relied on deep moral and religious roots, exit polls in the last presidential election showed a linear positive correlation between frequency of religious attendance and support for Republican President George Bush, a finding the media dubbed “the God gap.” Recently progressives have become so awkward on religion that journalist Amy Sullivan could write in 2004 that “religion is the third rail of Democratic Party politics.” Many progressive organizations, however, have quietly committed signficant resources and staff to strengthening the interface between progressive politics and religion. This panel will highlight this work, showcasing major initiatives among leading advocacy groups. The timing of this panel—two years after the 2004 elections and immediately after the mid-term 2006 elections—also provides an especially fruitful opportunity for evaluating the successes and ongoing challenges of these efforts and for providing a forum for dialogue between activists and academics.
A19-32
Schleiermacher Group
Theme: Ecclesiology, Pneumatology, Trinity: The Third in a Four-Year Reinvestigation of Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith
The Schleiermacher Group continues its four-year reexamination of the Glaubenslehre with a focus this year on the second half of part II (propositions 113-172). Next year we turn to the contested Introduction.
Reconsidering Schleiermacher’s Protestant-Catholic Antithesis and Its Significance for His Ecclesiology
Laura Thelander, Princeton Theological Seminary
This paper examines Schleiermacher’s antithesis contrasting Protestantism and Catholicism and how it informs his ecclesiology. Countering those interpreters who suggest that Schleiermacher’s ecclesiology contradicted this antithesis by placing such theological weight upon the church for the ongoing mediation of redemption, this paper seeks to present a more nuanced interpretation. By analyzing key Christocentric and pneumatological elements that constitute his ecclesiology, Schleiermacher’s robust ecclesiology emerges without undercutting Christ’s exclusive dignity as the Redeemer. A concluding comparison with Tillich’s ecclesiological dialectic of the Protestant principle and Catholic substance suggests possible ways of interpreting Schleiermacher’s ecclesiology in light of this antithesis.
Schleiermacher on Holy Spirit and the (Disappointing) Church: A Contemplative Reading
Cathie Kelsey, Iliff School of Theology
Schleiermacher's claim that the Holy Spirit is the common spirit of the Christian church is difficult to reconcile with the actual human history of the church as well as with our individual experiences of congregations in the 21st Century. Yet this claim is the organizing principle for his pneumatology. Using the contemporary classic Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology in its analysis of part two of Schleiermacher's Christian Faith, this paper argues that Schleiermacher's knowledge of the Spirit's presence in the community of faith is grounded in a form of contemplative awareness that is not provable but is demonstrated in living and is received as a gift that may be integrated into individual and shared life. The conclusion suggests why such a contemplative grounding of doctrine is useful for our own time.
Schleiermacher’s Trinity: Redemption as Divine Presence
Paul DeHart, Vanderbilt University
This presentation will show how the idea of God’s union with human nature is the mediating conceptuality needed to understand Schleiermacher’s claim that the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity coincides with the essence of his characteristic understanding of redemption. First his notion of the only possible way to understand “divine presence in a creature” will be sketched. Then this notion will be used to clarify the basic moves of his discussion of the trinity: its soteriological orientation, its modalist critique of the “ecclesiastical doctrine”, and its stern refusal of any speculative grounding for that traditional doctrine’s reconstruction.
From Divine Love to Economic Trinity in Friedrich Luecke's Interpretation of Schleiermacher's Theology
Gregory Walter, St. Olaf College
Contemporary Trinitarian theological speculation can be illuminated by the tradition of interpretation of Schleiermacher's doctrines of divine love and the Trinity. In exchanges with speculative theologians, Friedrich Luecke argued that divine love can satisfy the demand that God is as God reveals without introducing Trinitarian self-distinction into God's very being. His proposal raised questions of pantheism among other students of Schleiermacher but his rejection of the speculative employment of the concepts of divine love or personhood was shared by his critics. Luecke's use of Schleiermacher's theology will be assessed as well as the significance of both theologian's work for contemporary concerns about the relationship between the immanent life of God and God's economic activity will be proposed.
A19-33
Scriptural Reasoning Group
Theme: Land, Messianism, and the Other
Scriptural reasoning is a valuable tool in addressing contemporary points of theo-political significance. Currently, there are few issues more outstanding in importance than that of the relation between religion, land and the relation to others. This panel hosts representatives of Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the effort to excavate a conversation around the topic from out of the sources of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Qu'ran and the New Testament. Emphasis will be on prior paper exchanges and close textual study within the session.
A19-34
Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture Group
Theme: Encountering the Divine in a Pluralistic World
Negotiating the Nature of Mystical Experience, Guided by Tillich and James
David H. Nikkel, University of North Carolina, Pembroke
The nature of mystical experience has been hotly debated. Essentialists divide into two camps: 1) unmediated identity beyond any subject-object structure 2) a mystical object maintaining some distinctness at the point of contact. Paul Tillich’s mystical a priori has affinities with the former, while William James’ model of religious experience coheres only with the latter. Constructivists oppose the essentialists. Other scholars attempt a tertium quid between essentialism and constructivism, but fail to address what is mediated. After noting some ironies of the constructivist position, this paper argues that the human body perforce mediates mystical experience, which consists of a distinctive sense of bodily harmony conjoined with openness to the potentialities of an integrated environment, involving distinctive neurological processes. While Tillich and James’ Romantic assumption of a direct connection with the divine cannot be sustained, they may stimulate us to imagine more bodily connections to the divine for a postmodern age.
Breakthrough of the Unconditional: Tillich's Concept of Revelation as an Answer to the Crisis of Historicism
Christian Danz, University of Vienna
Since the 1920s the concept of revelation has stood in the center of Paul Tillich’s theology. This paper investigates the structure of this concept and its constitutent elements, both with respect to a systematic perspective and to the way Tillich worked it out. I explain and defend the thesis that revelation, as Tillich understands it, is the contingent event in which spirit grasps itself in its inner reflectivity, and in its historical nature – this in relation to determinate contents of knowledge. Thus revelation is spirit’s becoming transparent to itself in the dimension having to do with knowing. In revelation thus understood two things are constituted at once, history and the consciousness of history. Tillich grounds theology in a theology of revelation that understands faith to be the “becoming reflective” of the consciousness of history. He intends this to be an original answer to the “crisis of historicism” (Ernst Troeltsch).
The "Jewish Dimension" of Tillich's Thought
Bryan Wagoner, Harvard University
This presentation will explore some of the lesser known aspects and influences of Tillich’s personal relationships with Jews and Judaism, primarily during his final years in Germany, in the 1920s and 30s. It will also argue for, and seek to articulate the contours of a distinctively Jewish dimension of Tillich’s philosophy and theology in this period. In particular, it will explore the transformation Tillich experienced vis-à-vis Judaism following the First World War with respect to the Messianic, utopic and prophetic dimensions of Judaism and their influence on Tillich's theology. This will entail accounting for his interactions and relationships with two Jewish members of the Kairos Circle, Heimann and Löwe, and his professional and personal interactions with members of the Frankfurt School, themselves all (secular) Jews.
Tillich and Bakhtin: Dialectical or Dialogical Comparative Theology?
C. Peter Slater, University of Toronto
Both Tillich and Bakhtin stressed concrete encounters with others as our touchstone of reality. From within the theological circle, Tillich’s system was more overtly christocentric. His dialectical/correlationl method led to a somewhat synthesizing approach to other religions that may be construed as inclusivist. By contrast, Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy of language and Orthodox background led him to a perspectival pluralism that gave more ontological weight to the otherness of others. This paper concludes that comparative theology, as currently understood, would benefit more from Bakhtin’s dialogism than Tillich’s dialectics, while developing a position on other religions in tune with the spirit of Tillich’s theology of culture.
A19-35
Open and Relational Theologies Consultation
Theme: What God Does, Might, or Cannot Know about the Future
Open and relational theologies are distinguished by their claim that God does not foreordain or foreknow all things that will occur in the future. The future is genuinely open. This belief affects how one might think about eschatology, prayer, ecological responsibility, etc. Given particular beliefs about God’s power, nature, and relation to time, however, perhaps God may know some things about the future. And given beliefs about God’s promises, purposes, and love, perhaps God knows other things about the future. In this session, we hear papers that use resources from scriptures, theological traditions, science, and philosophy to explore what God does, might, or cannot know about the future.
The Hope of God versus the Knowledge of God
Karen Winslow, Azusa Pacific University
Using passages from each division of the Hebrew Bible, I demonstrate that they represent a world view that assumes God does not know the future, but hopes for certain outcomes. Gen 22, Exod 32-34, 1 Samuel 15.10-34, 1 Kings 21.20-29, and Jeremiah 18.1-12 and 26.1-6, 12-13 are characteristic of this predominant scriptural perspective. These texts show that, as determined as God was to produce outcome X under contingency A, God did not know X would occur, because the future was dependent upon human response to God’s command and/or prophetic warning. Divine freedom is exhibited not only in the passages in which God altered the judgment that he had planned, but also in prophetic oracles by which God explains that he will indeed alter any plans in response to human obedience or disobedience. Scripture represents the hope of God in the people of God rather than God’s knowledge of the future.
Surprising God: Prayer, Partnership, and the Divine Adventure
Bruce G. Epperly, Lancaster Theological Seminary
Do our prayers make a difference to God? Do they add anything to the universe and to God’s experience of the universe that is new and creative? Do they play any role in the well-being of others and God’s responsiveness that might not have occurred apart from our prayers? Can be God be faithful, in life and death, if God neither foreknows nor foreordains what is to occur in the next second or century? Questions such as these emerge the moment we begin to challenge classical understandings of divine knowledge and power.
An Adventurous Sovereignty: Risk Taking and the Infinite Intelligence of God
Gregory A. Boyd, St. Paul, Minnesota
The biblical narrative presents a paradoxical picture of God as sovereign and adventuresome. Unfortunately, classical theology emphasized the former but minimized the latter. If we think through the logic of omniscience and the infinite intelligence of God, we arrive at a model that holds God’s sovereignty and adventuresome nature together, and this has positive consequence for theology and Christian living.
"I Know Who Holds the Future" but Not the Future
John E. Culp, Azusa Pacific University
The criticism that a God who does not know the future is a limited God involves both a historical/theological/linguistic issue and a practical/existential issue. Christian theology has accepted logical limitations on God. Logical limitations require metaphysical grounds. Metaphysically it is not possible to know what does not exist as though it existed. This principle does not limit God’s power but describes who God is and how God acts. Metaphysical principles describe the ontological conditions that make possible logical limitations. Understanding God as not knowing the future responds to the existential/practical need for security. The person seeking security finds security in the reliable nature of God rather than in some knowledge that describes what will happen. Basing faith upon God’s nature and actions acknowledges the crucial role of God in the world without attempting to determine what God’s role will be in the future.
A19-36
Tantric Studies Consultation
Theme: New Approaches to Tantric Studies: Cognitive Science and Contemporary Metaphor Theory
Less Than Meets the Eye: What Cognitive Science Adds to Tantric Studies
Kelly Bulkeley, Graduate Theological Union
Cognitive science has been applied to a large and growing number of religious phenomena. It has not, however, taken any particular interest in the multiplicity of practices encompassed by tantric studies. In a way, this is an old story: A prominent method in religious studies neglects and/or misconstrues the various spiritual techniques known collectively as tantra. Trying to turn that old story in a new direciton, I will argue the following. First, the phenomena of tantra represent the conceptual limit of the cognitive science of religion in its current mainstream form. Second, a critically revised cognitive science may still provide resources for the study of tantra, particularly regarding vision, gender, and sexuality. Third, research on sleep and dreaming holds special promise for bridging efforts between tantric studies and cognitive science. Such efforts lead to a view of dreaming as a natural, cognitively grounded, spiritually liberating opportunity to cultivate tantric experience.
Blended Worlds and Emergent Beings: Metaphors, Cognitive Science, and the Study of Tantra
Glen Alexander Hayes, Bloomfield College
In this paper I will discuss recent developments in the cognitive sciences and linguistics and apply some of these new approaches to Tantric Studies. I will show how the methods developed by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and others can help us in understanding the cosmophysiology and sadhanas expressed in major 17th-century Vaişņava Sahajiyā texts attributed to Mukunda-deva, such as the Amŗtaratnāvali and the Amŗtarasāvali. In this paper I will extend the methodology using more recent developments in the field of metaphor studies and cognitive linguistics, and I will also consider a wider range of Tantric texts, including additional Sahajiyā texts like the Ānanda-bhairava of Prema-dāsa, and selected tantric texts from the Śaiva and Śākta traditions. Methodologically, I will also draw upon the recent (2002) work by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner on “conceptual blending,” The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities.
The Way Abhinavagupta Thinks: Bodily Metaphors, the Vitality of Language, and the Poetics of Intertwining
Kerry Martin Skora, Hiram College
I think with the Kashmiri Hindu Tantric sage Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025 C.E.) and contemporary theorists of body, metaphor, and imagination, in order to unveil some of the “hidden complexities” of Abhinavagupta’s creative body-mind network. I show that Abhinavagupta’s use of bodily metaphors reveal the nondual intertwining of Body and Consciousness; that his blending of verbal and bodily domains suggest that the Supreme Word is experienced as embodied Other; and that both poetic discourse and tantric ritual are efficacious and transformative, revealing new realities and new ways of being-in-the-world. My work is inspired by both conceptual blending theory (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner), and radical empiricism and anthropology of the body and senses (Michael Jackson, Thomas Csordas, and David Howes). I conclude that Abhinavagupta’s creative metaphors and blends reveal that the imagination is grounded in the body, which finds itself in dialogical relationship to other bodies, other consciousnesses, and other worlds.
Fluids, Metaphor, and Self-realization: Reading Tantra through the Lens of Rasa
Sthaneshwar Timalsina, San Diego State University
This paper explores current Western metaphor theories applied to interpret otherwise obscure Tantric texts and traditions in light of classical Indian metaphor and rasa theories. Application of ‘conceptual blending’ provides a new framework to read complex Tantric texts with merged traditional metaphors in a shifting cultural paradigm. Examination of metaphor and rasa reveal that the classical strategy subordinates the concept of metaphor while elevating the doctrine of dhvani. This theory comes into crisis, however, when ‘rasa’ itself becomes a metaphor. Tantric texts on ritual and philosophy apply rasa as a source language to explain the esoteric experience, considered to be inexplicable in ordinary language. This analysis strives to complement the application of contemporary Western theories as applied to Tantric literature, examining parallel classical Indian thought.
Blood for the Goddess: Impurity, Kingship, and Power in Assamese Tantra
Hugh Urban, Ohio State University, Columbus
This paper examines the mythology and worship of the Mother Goddess Kamakhya, focusing specifically on the central role of blood as both a dominant metaphor and a physical substance. Using texts like the Kalika Purana, Yogini Tantra, and Kaulajnananirnaya, I look primarily at the worship of Kamakhya in pre-colonial Assam, from roughly the 10th to the 18th centuries. Blood, I suggest, is both the symbolic and literal embodiment of the Kamakhya's power (sakti), which circulates in a kind of capillary network between the Goddess, her priests, her tantrik devotees, and, up until the colonial period, the kings who patronized her worship. Power flows from the Goddess, who menstruates for three days each year, through the blood of animal victims offered to her in sacrifice, through the bodily fluids consumed in Tantric ritual, to the king who patronizes her sacrifices and conquers enemy kings in the 'sacrifice of battle.'
A19-42
Wildcard Session
Theme: Critical Reflections on Cornel West's Democracy Matters
In the sequel to his groundbreaking work Race Matters, Cornel West makes a bold and critical analysis of the state of democracy in our times. The panel brings together philosopher of religion and religious ethicist Jeffrey Stout, political theorist Romand Coles, and the scholar of Islam, gender, and race Amina Wadud to discuss West's text and his call for a renewed commitment to projects of radical democracy.
A19-43
Study of Islam Section
Theme: Comprehending the Qur'ān: Critical Issues Raised by the Publication of E. J. Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān
Completed this year, Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān (EQ) is the first comprehensive reference work on the Qur'ān to appear in a Western language. As the general editor, Jane McAuliffe "deliberately embraced a plurality of method and perspective within the pages of the EQ, conscious of the fact that not all scholars, whether non-Muslim or Muslim, agree with this approach." The impact of the EQ therefore extends well beyond the boundaries of Qur'ānic Studies. Through this diversity of approach, and through lengthy articles on such subjects as "Art and Architecture," "Exegesis" and "Literature," the EQ challenges the ways we study sacred texts. Panel members will review the history of the project and address the difficulties of incorporating such a variety of perspectives. The respondent will broaden the discussion to deal with issues common to all who study and teach religious texts.
A19-37
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Tour
Sponsored by the Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Group and the Center for Holocaust Studies
The museum’s permanent exhibition The Holocaust includes over 900 artifacts, 70 video monitors, and four theaters with historic film footage and eyewitness testimonies. The museum also features temporary exhibitions highlighting the history of the Holocaust. Tour attendees will receive timed tickets for the 11:00 am entry to the permanent exhibition. Victoria Barnett, Director of Church Relations for the Center of Holocaust Studies, will offer a brief introduction to the museum and then attendees will be allowed to visit the permanent exhibition at their own pace. Please allow at least two hours for the visit.
Visitors may also use the library and archives. The library is open to the public daily from 10 am to 5 pm. No appointment is necessary. The archives are open weekdays from 10 am to 5 pm. Arrangements can be made in advance for archival materials to be set aside for weekend use; contact archives@ushmm.org or 1-202-488-6113.
A19-40
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Wabash Student-Teacher Luncheon
Sponsored by the Graduate Student Committee and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning
The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning and AAR Graduate Student Committee cordially invite AAR and SBL doctoral student members to this lunch gathering with experienced faculty mentors to share conversation about teaching. This luncheon is aimed at doctoral students nearing the end of their studies who have some experience in teaching. It is an opportunity to meet with mentor-teachers to discuss teaching experiences. If you are a student member with some experience in teaching and have not attended this luncheon in the past, please RSVP online at www.aarweb.org/annualmeet/2006/RSVP/Wabash/ by noon on Wednesday, November 15 to attend. Do not RSVP unless you are planning to attend, as space is limited to the first 75 doctoral students who register.
A19-49
Religion and Cities Consultation Planning Session
This session is devoted to the development of a new AAR Religions and Cities Consultation. The consultation will structure and foster a conversation between research on cities and research on religious organizations, practices, and beliefs. What difference do urban contexts make in the formation of religious thought and practice? What difference do religious organizations make in the formation and transformation of cities? The committee proposing the consultation seeks the ideas and participation of AAR members in all disciplines who have a scholarly interest in these questions and in related methodologies (religious research) and pedagogies (seminary and collegiate education).
A19-50
Special Topics Forum
Theme: The Marty Forum: Andrew M. Greeley
Sponsored by the Public Understanding of Religion Committee
The recipient of the 2006 Martin Marty Award for contributions to the public understanding of religion is best-selling author, priest, journalist, and sociologist Andrew M. Greeley. Greeley is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and a Research Associate at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Greeley is the author of two autobiographies, more than 50 best-selling novels, over 100 works of non-fiction, including most recently The Making of the Pope 2005 (2005), The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins, and the Second Vatican Council (2004), and Priests: A Calling in Crisis (2004).
The Marty Forum provides an informal setting in which Greeley will talk about his work with Robert A. Orsi, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University, and will engage in discussion with the audience.
A19-51
Wildcard Session
Theme: A Korean Shamanic Ritual for Healing the Comfort Women
In order to fully present the significance of A Korean Shamanic Ritual for Healing the Comfort Women, by the Association for Preservation of Hwanghado Shamanic Ritual of South Korea, and to deeply engage with spiritual activism for social justice and spiritual liberation, and to explore the healing power further that lies in the vast realm of shamanism, the presenters have formed a panel. Our panel offers a unique opportunity for those who are interested in the healing power of shamanic rituals for individual and for communal healing as well. Our panel presentation is made up of five parts, including actual ritual.
A19-52
Wildcard Session
Theme: Publishing with a Denominational (Church-Owned) Press: Possibilities and Realities
Nearly every sub-discipline of theological inquiry shares interests with a denomination (church-owned) press, yet many academic authors do not take advantage of this extensive network. This session will explore the possibilities and realities of publishing for these church-owned publishers. A panel of veteran editors and marketing specialists share the trade secrets that will make authors reconsider their choice of other academic and popular options. Some denominational publishers, for example, can distribute content to hundreds of thousands of readers. This session will explain what type of royalties one can expect; the boundaries (or freedom) of mission-based publishing, marketing strategies, international trade, the editorial process, and many other things that authors need to know about the great potential of denominational publishers.
A19-53
Wildcard Session
Theme: Three Western Perspectives on the Re-valuation of Sacred Space: Wyoming, Kansas, and Colorado
These papers study contemporary Western re-imaginings of sacred relationships between humans and their bio-regions. The first contrasts the land art of indigenous people from Wyoming to the pie-charts of the current energy boom, arguing that American souls, as described by W. E. B. Du Bois, can be critically discussed through such contrasts. The second paper studies the ecological philosophy of the Land Institute of Kansas and brings Pure Land Buddhism to bear as a related philosophy, arguing that the goals of diverse and sustainable grasslands suggest land as numinous space, linking agricultural and spiritual topography. The final paper studies a pastoral letter from a group of Catholic bishops to their bioregion and the work of the Colorado Food and Agriculture Policy Council to illustrate an alternative estimation of sacred space is emerging that addresses the reclamation of blighted landscapes and the resacralization of agricultural lands that serve urban populations.
The Souls of Wyoming
Mary Keller, University of Wyoming
“The Souls of Wyoming,” raises the epistemological and ontological significance of mapmaking, drawing from contemporary theory in the history of cartography (J.B. Harley), geography (Yi-Fu Tuan) and the history or religions. Based on Charles Long’s argument that religion is best understood as an orientation that gives meaning to the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world, the paper compares Native American rock art and the Medicine Wheel to contemporary maps of coalbed methane production. Each cultural "map" is read following W. E. B. Du Bois's phenomenological exploration of the American soul. The paper argues that the term soul can be employed as a rubric (complete with its resonances regarding the red buttes of Wyoming, the "red" skin of Native Americans, and the blood shed in the conquest of Native Americans) for comparing the significance of the human in relation to the land as found in these maps. That is, maps give evidence of the mapmaker’s valuation of their relationship to the land, their ultimate significance with respect to the land. Thus, “The Souls of Wyoming” reads humans as religious in their needs and desires to orient themselves and figure out their ultimate significance through the representational schemes of maps, read broadly from Medicine Wheels and rock art to contemporary pie charts of state economic production.
Pure Land/Good Earth: Buddhism, the Land Institute, and Care of Spiritual Space
Philip Meckley, Kansas Wesleyan University
“Pure Land/Good Earth: Buddhism, the Land Institute, and Care of Spiritual Space,” will look at the ecological philosophy of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas with reference to Pure Land Buddhism. The stated purpose of the Land Institute is to develop and promote an agricultural system to maintain the ecological stability of the prairie, and to produce a sustainable crop yield through the use of perennial grains and legumes. Hence, the Land Institute develops agronomic technologies to wean farmers from reliance upon fossil fuel intensive agricultural methods. Pure Land Buddhism, for its part, makes the claim that bodhisattvas established celestial paradises for those seeking nirvana. Human flourishing in an enduring future is possible, according to this branch of Buddhism, only in a situation of sustained meditation characterized by purity. This view of human topography rests upon the bases of enlightenment, renewal, and continuity with the past. It is the contention of this paper that the philosophical underpinnings of the Land Institute bear much in common with traditional Buddhist ecological ethics. Even more, this paper argues that the ecological philosophy underlying the Institute’s stated aims is fundamentally based upon an idea of the land as numinous space, and draws a close connection between geographical and spiritual topography. In this regard, “Pure Land/Good Earth” illuminates some of the basic features of Pure Land Buddhism, in order to demonstrate the similarities of Buddhist views with the aims of the Land Institute. In particular, this paper aligns the functional spaces of both Pure Land Buddhism and the Land Institute through the conjunction of geography and human spirituality.
"Living Waters" and "Forest Cathedrals": Practices to Re-sacralize "Ordinary" Land
Celeste J. Rossmiller, Regis University, Denver
“’Living Waters’ and ‘Forest Cathedrals:’ Practices to Re-Sacralize ‘Ordinary’ Land,” posits that in many instances, the notion of “sacred space” is associated with settings such as the National Cathedral or the Lincoln Memorial. Indeed, British theologian John Inge’s A Christian Theology of Place focuses on the great cathedrals of England as pilgrimage sites that anchor and invite experience of the divine. Other categories of sacred spaces, it could be argued, are our so-called “wilderness” areas and national parks. These places fulfill Mircea Eliade’s definition of “sacred” as that which is set apart by societies for the purpose of human renewal and sustenance. Millions and more make pilgrimages annually to these “shrines” of nature—to the point of overburdening their ecosystems. However, an alternative estimation of sacred space and place is emerging both around blighted landscapes that call out for reclamation and agricultural lands that serve urban populations. These latter sacred places are evoked in a bioregional pastoral letter by a local group of U.S. Catholic bishops and in the workings of the incipient Colorado Food and Agriculture Policy Council (CoFAPC)—a coalition of secular organizations gathered to promote local food practices that are healthy for both land and all its denizens. This paper traverses a pastoral document from one religious community as a prime example of combining religious and theological categories with praxes for the purpose of re-sacralizing and rejuvenating the land and its multiple communities. It then points out lacunae in the pastoral’s theological thinking, and supplies the alternative theological image of perichoresis to replace a more transcendent interpretation of divine and humans with one full of mutuality, diversity, and community. Next, “Living Waters and Forest Cathedrals” outlines a “Eucharistic lifestyle” emerging from a perichoretic worldview to enrich the transformational praxis sought by the bishops. That is, based on a religious “table practice” characterized by the free gift of life, now shared communally, Christian communities come to adopt lifestyles based on serving the diversity of life in their human and land-based communities. Thus, in conclusion, the paper applies this thinking to local church involvement in the workings of CoFAPC.
A19-54
Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section
Theme: Walk, Talk, Teach, and Learn: A Street Fair of Posters, Exhibits, and Interactive Displays That Will Educate and Excite about a Breakthrough Moment in the Classroom or a Great Course
"Quilting" as Metaphor and Practice in the Teaching of Feminist Theology
Millicent Feske, Saint Joseph's University
“Quilting” is one of a series of domestic and communal images that function as metaphors in the development of feminist thought and theology in the last three decades. This presentation will display and discuss two simple “quilts” that were created in group projects by students in undergraduate feminist theology courses to demonstrate how the idea of quilting as used in contemporary Christian feminist theologies served both to engender a model for classroom teaching and learning for feminist pedagogy and to serve as a theme and organizing principal for the content of such a course. It will describe the specifics of the assignment, its place in the larger course as organized around the theme of quilting, and discuss the ways in which quilting served as both methodological metaphor and pedagogical practice for both instructor and students.
The Religion Project: Engaging the Non-Religious Studies Major
Donald J Monnin, Villa Maria College
This paper will provide one example of how to engage the non-religious studies major in an Introduction to Religious Studies or World Religions course. The Religion Project that I assign is not one, but fifteen different options from which students may choose. A number of these options are program-related to their majors. I have created options for students in education, graphic design, interior design, liberal arts, music, and photography programs. I will display beautifully-done, professional-looking examples of work from students in graphic design, interior design, and photgraphy. Copies of the Religion Project, with detailed descriptions of all fifteen options will be provided. I believe that instructors will find these displays exciting and impressive, and that they will inspire them to create religion projects and assignments that can be related to other academic programs at their own institutions.
Taste and See: Contemplative Practice as an Invitation to Animate the Study of Religion
John D. Copenhaver, Jr., Shenandoah University
For the most part, I employ the phenomenological method in teaching religion. But many of my classes also include an experiential component because I want students to taste, however momentarily, religious experience from inside. Experiential exercises have the capacity to breathe life into the study of a religion and expose the beating heart of faith.
Drawing on spiritual exercises I learned during graduate studies at the Shalem Institute in Washington, D. C., I have found ways to incorporate short sabbaths into the classroom that refresh and enrich the learning experience. The exercises are most prominent in my courses on Religion and Ecology, Asian Religions, and Christian Spirituality. The exercises vary according to the course, but are always carefully related to readings. In my presentation, I will discuss the specific practices I use and invite the audience to participate in one animating contemplative exercise.
The Six Gatis and Their Enactment on the Lawn of Vassar College
E. H. Jarow, Vassar College
This paper discusses the theory and praxis around ritual/theatrical productions of the Six Gatis (“realms of existence” as described in seminal texts of Tibetan Buddhism) by students in a 'Death and Dying 'course at Vassar College. As part of an ongoing project to “re-embody” the learning process, it points to further possibilities for both viscerally participatory and collaborative education.
The paper discusses efforts to integrate body and mind, feeling and thought, individual and community, and engagement and critical awareness in the study of religion. The contention is that collaborative and embodied learning can help situate the humanities, and the field of religious studies, in the center of an effort to ground the pursuit of knowledge in embodied communities as well as in theoretical speculations.
Making Them Read; Making Them Engage: The Use of Process Notes in Daily Assignments
Merrill M. Hawkins, Carson-Newman College
This presentation discusses process notes to promote student engagement with the content and process of learning. The process note is a standard practice in Clinical Pastoral Education. Conceieved by Anton Boisen, the process note calls on the student to describe how she/he feels, as well as what she/he thinks. The use of process notes promotes active and engaged reading and learning about content and process. Many of my students either do not read at all or do not comprehend the idea of critical reading. This limited background in critcial reading hinders the student from discussing texts. The process note provides a bridge that leads to critical reading and engagement. In addition to promoting cognitive learning, the process note promotes affective learning. This learning from cognitive and affective dimensions of both content and process creates a student who can be more engaged with the class.
Strategic Teaching, Strategic Learning: Using Religious Studies to Teach Study Skills
Stephen Murphy, University of Virginia
The advent of technologies like Internet searching, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Instant Messenger has radically changed collegiate research, presentation, and communication. Unfortunately, for many college students such technologies serve not as learning aids but as shortcuts; not as tools, but as distractions. As a result, many incoming college students lack the skills in studying and organization that will be expected of them throughout college and beyond. After three years of teaching dedicated study skills courses to freshman students and tutoring these same students in Religious Studies, I have found that the variety of lectures, readings, and assignments found in Religious Studies courses offer an excellent opportunity to introduce students to a wide range of study skills and analytical thinking. This streetfair session will discuss ways to use Religious Studies courses as a vehicle for teaching students various ways of learning, studying, and preparing assignments.
Teaching through the Oral Tradition
Yolanda Yvette Smith, Yale University
The oral tradition was once a critical component of education for African Americans. Although many African American churches have abandoned aspects of the oral tradition in favor of formal education and printed resources, the oral tradition can still be a legitimate system of teaching and learning. This system of teaching and learning, grounded in African tradition, was not only creative and fun, but it was an important vehicle for transmitting communal wisdom along with vital information. A strategy for teaching through the oral tradition can assist the church in drawing upon resources that emerge from African American traditions as viable modes of education. It can further inspire African American churches to reclaim indigenous cultural expressions throughout the educational process.
Creative Cosmology: Drawing Genesis 1
Paul Thomas, University of Missouri, Kansas City
This poster presentation explores the results of a drawing exercise in which students were asked to draw the activity described in Genesis 1 and 'The Babylonian Creation Epic.' The pedagological issues explored in this poster include the value of visual learning and hands-on learning activites, how such exercises can teach students to cull information from a text that is not evident based upon a superficial reading, the effects familiarity has upon reading practices, as well as teaching students how to identify anachronism and how modern cosmologies are not translatable to ancient cultures.
A19-55
Ethics Section
Theme: From Africa to New Orleans: Healing Racial and Urban Divides
"If I Could Become Death, I Would Fall on the White Man": Ugandan Hope and Hatred Towards the United States
Todd D. Whitmore, University of Notre Dame
I argue that the best way for religious ethicists to ascertain African attitudes towards the United States is through incorporating ethnography into their discipline. I draw from my fieldwork in conflict-ridden northern Uganda, including time in Internally Displaced Persons camps, to make the case that a prime interpretive lens for African attitudes towards the United States is the category of whiteness.
The prominence of the category of whiteness is evident in the conflicted attitudes of northern Ugandans towards the United States. On the one hand, I have been told several times during my research that my mere presence in northern Uganda is a sign of hope that the world has not forgotten the victims of the twenty-year conflict. On the other hand, there is deep resentment towards whites, as evidenced in Omal Lakana's poetry when he writes, 'If I could become Death, I would fall on the white man.'
"Rebuilding Better" the City of God: Compassion as Justice after Katrina
Maureen O'Connell, Fordham University
This paper proposes compassion as an immediate and long-term response to the unjust suffering of concentrated poverty brought to the American consciousness by Hurrican Katrina. I retrieve elements of compassion from the theological and philosophical tradition, particularly political theology and Catholic social thought, to suggest that compassion can be rightly understood as an interruptive, self-critical and communal means of perceiving, interpreting and transforming the causes of concentrated poverty that surfaced in the American consciousness after Katrina. I propose that compassion is essential for “rebuilding better” urban communities because it interrupts prevailing notions of suffering, flourishing and models of justice with the memories, narratives, and urgent demands for empowerment and participation of those most directly affected by the disaster and urban poverty. I illustrate that compassion redirects responses to social suffering from charitable amelioration to a just eradication of suffering through empowerment and participation in the common good.
From NOLA to Springfield: Ethics, Race, and Urban Reconstruction in a Post-Katrina World
Robert R. N. Ross and Deanne E. B. Ross, University of Massachusetts, Boston and City of Springfield, MA
Part I analyses the demographic conjunction of racial patterns and urban reconstruction efforts in New Orleans and Springfield (MA), including impact on voting power, misuse of funds for levee maintenance, and the racial/ethnic models cities seek to emulate. Part II outlines legal/ethical principles drawn upon by federal and state legislation to effect (or thwart) racial balance in light of urban economic/reconstruction needs. Part III identifies inconsistencies in these principles in terms of ethical concepts and concrete cases. The conclusion outlines a model for urban renewal based on recent theories of human engineering and the concept of Participatory Design in the work of Enid Mumford. Participatory Design argues that people impacted by the introduction of any new technology – whether technological innovation or wholesale reorganization of social structures, including urban renewal – must be active participants in the process of problem analysis and solution decision-making.
A19-56
History of Christianity Section
Theme: Who Do You Say That I Am? The Construction and Use of Mormon and Anti-Mormon Identities
This panel examines how individual identities shaped and were shaped by Mormonism. The identities--Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet; a nineteenth-century African American Mormon convert; John Alexander Dowie, the Oral Roberts of the late 19th century and an acknowledged precursor of early Pentecostalism; and contemporary Ex-Mormons intent on proselytizing former Mormon missionaries--are worthy of study in their own right. But this panel goes a step further by examining the process of identity formation, including both the ways identities are formed in relation to religion and the various ways identities, in turn, are a constitutive element of religion generally. Two of the panel papers address the interesting ways Mormonism constructed, or was appropriated by, “non-Mormon” identities, while the other two papers focus on the construction and use of identities from within Mormonism. All four papers shed light on the way individuals negotiate their identity vis-à-vis Mormonism.
Joseph Smith and the Rhetoric of Economics and Prophecy
David Gore, University of Minnesota, Duluth
While prophetic rhetoric can best be characterized as poetic, if not frenzied, but always inspirational in tone, the rhetoric of economics is best characterized as prosaic, staid, or uninspiring. Though prophets, ancient and modern, have always felt free to comment on economic matters, the case of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, is unique. It is unique because historians have generously traced Smith’s economic behavior, and because his statements about economics came in the context of a better-developed sense of economic theory than existed, say, during the time of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. As a consequence, this paper will examine Smith’s discourse on economics in an attempt to state clearly his theory of political economy, and to expand understanding of how prophetic rhetoric and economic rhetoric might share common ground.
Seeing Jane: Jane Elizabeth Manning James’ Posthumous Career as an LDS Symbol
Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
ane Elizabeth Manning James, a free black woman, converted to Mormonism in the winter of 1841–‘42. During the last decades of her life, James repeatedly petitioned LDS Church officials for her endowments and sealings, rituals that would enable her to reach the highest levels of glory after her death. Because of her race, officials consistently denied James’ requests. However, the documentary record that James' requests left allowed her to become a symbol in the LDS Church beginning in the late twentieth century-—a symbol that Saints have used to advance multiple, sometimes opposing, agendas. In this paper I analyze the uses to which James has been put. I argue that Saints have selectively appropriated, and often simplified, the stories James told about her own life in order to create a usable past and imagine a brighter future for the LDS Church and the world.
Elijah III: The Influence of Mormonism on John Alexander Dowie
D. William Faupel, Wesley Theological Seminary
John Alexander Dowie began his ministry as a Congregational clergyman in Australia in 1872. Reaching the top of his denomination’s ecclesial ladder, he embarked on an independent healing ministry. Coming to the United States in 1888, he spent time among the Mormons, adopting much of their organizational structure, evangelistic strategy and worldview. Establishing his headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, he founded the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, and established Zion, Illinois, a utopian community. By the time of his death in 1907 he had a world following of 250,000. Weakened by a stroke in 1905, his second tier leaders forced him to resign, fearing his rapid expansion was leading to bankruptcy. Dowie died while in a struggle to regain control. Emerging Pentecostalism inherited the bulk of his legacy.
"A PO Box and a Desire to Witness for Jesus": Calling and Mission in the Ex-Mormons for Jesus
Sara Patterson, Loyola Marymount University
In October 1975, Bob Witte founded the Ex-Mormons for Jesus (EMFJ). Since that time, EMFJ has created a unique identity for itself as the group who missions to the Mormon missionaries. In this paper I will argue that 'Ex' is in part too simplistic a designation for this group; rather, they have created a complicated mixture of both Mormon and evangelical Christian systems. Through combining models of evangelical Christianity, popular psychology, the structure and rhetoric of addiction programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and the cult theories of the 1970s and 1980s, the EMFJ have come to create a unique view of their identity as ex-Mormons. Merging their present with their past identities, the EMFJ maintain what is for them a productive tension.
A19-57
Philosophy of Religion Section
Theme: Africana Phenomenology and the Study of Religion
Africana Phenomenology is a first order form of philosophical practice that organizes the history of Africana subjects and identifies the cultural practices by which such subjects come to critically reflect on existential and cosmic meaning. This panel will outline some of the strategies of Africana Phenomenology, identify its relationship to the category of “religion,” assess its significance to past and future formations of religious thought and method, and respond to the following questions: What are the distinctive features of the phenomenological history of the Africana subject? In what ways can this history capture the generalities and specificities of men’s and women’s experiences in religion? To what extent can the practice of ethnography be used to order this history? What are the similarities and differences between the phenomenological histories, techniques of suspending consciousness, and metaphysical orderings for African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean cultures? To what should we attribute those differences and similarities?
Signs of Recuperation, Recuperating Significations: Charles Long and Africana Phenomenology
James Bryant, College of the Holy Cross
The emergence of Africana Phenomenology in the discursive milieu of Africana Studies brings with it a thoughtful reconsideration of phenomenological practices in Western philosophy. It has, as Paget Henry argues in Caliban’s Reason, sought to narrate the history of “Africana subjectivity,” or the structure of consciousness interiorized by people of African descent. This paper will explore the practice of phenomenology in the work of Charles Long and its contributions to Africana Phenomenology. Considering Long’s style of phenomenology within Henry’s vision of Africana Phenomenology will yield the following motifs: the politics of silence that mute articulations of rationality in Africana cultures; the wider practice of phenomenology in knowledge production at all levels of culture; the arbitrary configurations of object and subject in formalized research, or put differently, the tension between empirical data and the intelligence necessary to interpret data; and, the embedded rhythm of metaphysics in Africana styles of knowing.
What Is This “Black” in Black Theology? Towards a (Re)Construction of Black Theology
Corey David Bazemore Walker, University of Virginia
Since the publication of James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power and A Black Theology of Liberation, the project of black theology has been challenged to articulate what exactly constitutes the “black” in black theological discourse. To this end, this project announces a critical rapprochement between Dominique Janicaud’s “minimalist” phenomenology and a (re)constructed black theology that does not just offer a new semiotics trapped within the logocentric political economy of the modern world, but rather articulates a robust Africana phenomenology that gestures towards new horizons for black theological thinking in wrestling with the absurd bodies of meanings of those who were/are at the ends of the new beginning(s) of the (post)modern world.
African Religion and Africana Phenomenology
Paget Henry, Brown University
Africana phenomenology is an emerging area within the larger discursive field of Africana philosophy. The primary goal that Africana phenomenology has set for itself is the writing of a phenomenological history of the Africana subject. In this paper, I will offer a phenomenological analysis of the ethnographic data on the religious life of the Akan and the Yoruba. This analysis will thematize processes of self-construction and the conception of the self that emerges from these self-constructive practices. In particular, I will focus on concepts of destiny and self-fulfillment that are basic to both groups. These I will argue were important meaning-constituting categories that are vital for our understanding these two African subjects. By taking up these issues from a self-reflective perspective, this paper will hopefully make some significant contributions to the first period in this phenomenological history of the Africana subject.
A19-58
Study of Judaism Section
Theme: Messianism and Law in Twentieth-Century Jewish Thought
In this session we will examine the tensions or accomodations between the messianic and the legal, between the presentness of religious experience and its futureness. The first paper will discuss the contrasting ways Rabbis Kook (the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel and the great theologian of religious Zionism) and Heschel negotiated the idea of a prophetic Halakhah within the different contexts of Zionism and what could be called the American eschatology of the civil rights movement. The second paper will examine the status of the law and the universalization of the messianic idea in the contemporary American movement known as Jewish Renewal. The final paper will analyze the ways that different scholarly approaches to messianism in Rabbinic literature (Neusner and Urbach) or to the interpretation of Rabbinic literature itself (Halivni) are themselves embedded in different conceptions of the relation between law and messianism.
Must Prophetic Halakhah Be Messianic? Abraham Isaac Kook and/or Abraham Joshua Heschel
Yehudah Mirsky, Harvard University
This paper explores whether within the structure of halakhah as the legal embodiment of prophetic revelation, a prophetically charged legal order is only possible under the aegis of a broader Messianic orientation that relaxes the structural anxiety (which halakhah shares with legal systems generally) over the potentially antinomian, anti-structural thrust of prophetic revelation. We will do so by comparing the views of Abraham Isaac Kook, jurist, mystic and the leading theologian of Religious Zionism (1865-1935) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), Hasidic existentialist, the leading theologian of American Jewry and an active participant in the civil rights movement. Both actively sought to reinvigorate prophecy in their times, saw politics as central to that project and were nonetheless committed to traditional halakhah, albeit one reinvigorated by prophetic critique and awareness.
The Academy, the Law, and Messianic Expectations
Aryeh Cohen, University of Judaism
I want to claim in this paper that two of the most prominent scholarly projects of the twentieth century (both of which continue into the twenty first century) are embedded in two different messianic ideologies—in which the study of law leads to messianic goals. I will claim that this messianic performance has guided many of the goals of what may be called the Neusnerian project from translation, to the importance of establishing an authorship to Nuesner’s capitalist model of literary production. At the same time, David Weiss-Halivni’s project of Talmud commentary Mekorot u-Mesorot, follows his own messianic vision of renewing the “maculate Torah”. Using George Steiner’s My Homeland the Text and Halivni’s memoir The Book and the Sword as a frame and a filter highlights the themes of overcoming the exile of the maculate text in order to redeem that text as “homeland”.
A19-59
Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Group
Theme: Intersection of Religious and Spiritual Practices in Hawaii
Shinto in the Hawaiian Diaspora: Economics Masquerading as Nationalism at a Pre-Pacific War Hawaiian Shrine
Wilburn Hansen, Stanford University
The Shinto shrine currently called Daijingu Temple of Hawaii survived in a foreign environment owing to its amazing ability to adapt, innovate and persevere. An interesting product of the shrine’s survival technique included the simultaneous worship of King Kamehameha, George Washington and Admiral Togo, three great historical figures from three different cultures continually in conflict. Since the Togo worship occurred in the years prior to the Pacific War, the easy explanation for it is Japanese nationalism. This paper seeks to qualify the nationalist model by an alternative explanation of Togo worship in Hawaii as an example of the shrine following a popular trend in order to meet religious consumer demand. That is, Daijingu’s Togo worship served a temporary Japanese “tourist” market, and was not simply as an affirmation of Japanese nationalism lurking in the immigrant Japanese populace.
Colonial Conquest(s), Especially Hawaiian or Native American in Focus
Regina Pfeiffer, Chaminade University of Honolulu
When Queen Ka'ahumanu, in conjunction with Kamehameha II, challenged the prevailing Kapu system of Hawaii, she prompted a void in the Hawaiian religious life. Into this void, the earliest missionaries arrived a few months later. While missionary women played an important role in promulgating both the Christian faith and education of the indigenous peoples, the ali'i women of Hawaii embraced Christianity with fervor. As Christian women, they shaped much of the future that remains today, instituting hospitals, writing music and prayer, and establishing educational schools for the children. This paper will highlight the work of these extraordinary women of faith.
Hawaiian Kapa: Sewing Spirituality
Jenny Patten-Gargiulo, Graduate Theological Union
The art of quilting was introduced to the Hawaiian people by missionaries in the early 1820s. The Hawaiian quilt, or Kapa, was born out of a synthesis of patchwork quilting and snowflake cutting, two crafts introduced to the Hawaiian women by the wives of missionaries. These innovative quilts were replete with meaning and had elements that represented ideas such as the flora and fauna of their beloved islands, leis as symbols of love, as well as the piko, or belly button as a place of origin. It didn’t take long before Christian symbols were included in the patterns, including the Christian cross and three-fold motifs representing the trinity. Several examples of Kapa will be presented, including a brief description of the quilts’ iconographies, information on the quilters and other aspects illustrating the continuum of this spiritual art in within the community of Hawaiian women from its origin to contemporary day.
A19-60
Buddhist Philosophy Group
Theme: New Approaches to Candrakīrti
Candrakīrti’s body of work formed a major research focus for some of the pioneers of Buddhist Studies, including Louis de la Vallée Poussin, Sylvain Lévy, and J.W. de Jong. Several recent and forthcoming books attest to Candrakīrti’s enduring vitality and suggest fruitful new avenues for exploring his importance in the Buddhist world, historical and contemporary. The papers in this panel embody a variety of these approaches: philosophical, comparative, literary, and historical.
Candrakīrti and the Metaphysics of Ordinary Language
Daniel A. Arnold, University of Chicago
The logically elusive character of Mādhyamika arguments has long made it a matter of dispute just what kinds of arguments are on offer. Thus, although Madhyamaka is perhaps most often characterized by modern interpreters as a Buddhist version of skepticism, there is also a strong argument to be made for the constitutively metaphysical character of this school’s arguments. The distinctive style of Madhyamaka’s arguments is perhaps best appreciated in contrast to arguments in a specifically epistemological key. Accordingly, this paper considers Candrakīrti’s response, in the first chapter of the Prasannapadā, to the kinds of objections to the Mādhyamika position that might emerge from the perspective of Buddhist epistemologists following Dignāga. The argument is that Candrakīrti's arguments have affinities with modern “ordinary language philosophy,” and that they support a finally metaphysical conclusion.
The Recalcitrant Candrakīrti
John D. Dunne, Emory University
Not long after the translation of Candrakīrti’s works into Tibetan, his approach to Mādhyamika philosophy grabbed the attention of Tibetan interpreters. By the sixteenth century, Candrakīrti’s works have become incontrovertible for traditions as disparate as the Karma Kargyü (bka’ brgyud) and the Gélûg (dge lugs). Nevertheless, as represented by typical sixteenth century authors such as Karma Mikyö Dorjé and Paņchen Sönam Drakpa, Kargyü and the Gélûg thinkers attribute positions to Candrakīirti that cannot be justified by his writings. In view of this anomaly, this paper explores the hypothesis that, while Candrakīrti’s works provided justifications for Tibetan innovations, his notion of what it means to know ultimate reality was incompatible with the dominant styles of contemplative practice in Tibet. That is, Candrakīrti’s thought contravenes key features of the style of Mādhyamika that first reaches Tibet, and those features lie at the heart of Karma Kargyü and the Gélûg practices.
Candrakīrti’s Prescription for Treating the Three Poisons
Karen C. Lang, University of Virginia
The metaphor of illness and treatment occurs in both Buddhist sūtras and in Buddhist philosophical śāstras. Buddhist philosophy understood along medical lines deals with both false beliefs (mithyadrsti) and emotions (kleśa) that are inextricably bound up with suffering (duhkha). Buddhist philosophers consequently do not simply analyze these afflictive emotions; they also advocate their eradication from the life of a serious practitioner. In Candrakīrti’s Madhyamaka philosophy, reasoning and argument are necessary to diagnose and to restrain the afflictions of desire, anger, and delusion (moha) because they poison the mind and impede a bodhisattva’s progress along the path to Buddhahood. In his commentary on Aryadeva’s Catuhśataka, reason and argument are supplemented by narrative and example. This paper will explore the arguments and narratives that Candrakīrti employs to explain these afflictions’ origins, the methods for their eradication, and the central role their eradication plays in the bodhisattva’s path.
What's Wrong with Inference, Again
Kevin Vose, College of William and Mary
A wealth of scholarship has examined Candrakīrti’s critique of formal inference and his singular endorsement of reductio-ad-absurdum reasoning. Debate centers round Candrakīrti’s precise rationale for inference’s futility. Some later Tibetan authors claim that Candrakīrti abandons certain forms of inference due to his denial of a “commonly appearing [inferential] subject” (chos can mthun snang). This paper will show that Candrakīrti’s earliest commentator, Jayanānda (12th century), similarly sees Candrakīrti as denying “common appearance.” Jayanānda pits Candrakīrti’s critique squarely against the Buddhist epistemological movement and ties this critique to Candrakīrti’s (and his own) presentation of the rarified states of enlightened perception, in which the ignorance responsible for perceiving ordinary phenomena has vanished. While his arguments stem from his commentary to Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra, Jayanānda quotes at length the locus classicus for this issue, the Prasannapadā’s first chapter “refutation” of formal inference. Jayanānda’s comments, then, amount to a rare Indic gloss on this important passage.
A19-61
Christian Spirituality Group
Theme: Spirituality: Its Uses and Misuses
Participants will reflect on how spirituality, as a discourse and a method, is evolving in current scholarly work in the field of religion. In what ways is the study of spirituality contributing to the broader study of religion, through its distinctive methods, approaches, and questions? In what ways does the language of spirituality (perhaps through careless use of the terminology or because of assumptions implicit in the discourse of spirituality) obscure or hinder work in the study of religion? Do notions of spirituality abroad in the culture intersect with the academic study of spirituality, and, if so, to what effect?
A19-62
Comparative Studies in Hinduisms and Judaisms Group
Theme: Issues in Poetry Translation: From the Bhagavad Gita to Poetry in the Ancient Synagogue
Translation provides both obstacles and opportunities for scholars of religion, and the translation of poetry presents particularly difficult challenges. In this session Laurie Patton will discuss the process she used in developing her forthcoming translation of the Bhagavad Gita for the Penguin Press Classics series. In addition, Michael D. Swartz will examine issues of translation and comprehensibility in the poetry of the ancient synagogue. Time will be available at the end of this comparative panel for a moderated conversation with audience members.
Translation and the Comprehensibility of the Poetry of the Ancient Synagogue
Michael D. Swartz, Ohio State University, Columbus
Piyyut, the liturgical poetry of the synagogue in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, has endured a reputation as a particularly recondite form of Hebrew literature. This genre is known for its learned allusions, its creative use of Hebrew grammar, and its practice of weaving Midrashic motifs into its narrative and rhetoric. In this paper the question of the comprehensibility of the genre as well as its alienness to modern ears is examined through observations on the challenges faced by the scholar who hopes to translate early piyyut.
A19-63
Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group
Theme: Gift, Class, Agency: Rethinking Concepts and Cases
The three papers in this session interrogate concepts that play foundational, often implicit, theoretical roles in the explanation and interpretation of religious phenomena: gift, class and agency. Each uses a specific case (organ transplantation, the role of the IWW in the U.S. labor movement, and parish vigils in a New England diocese) to engage the formulation and use of these ideas in the study of religion.
"It Felt Like a Gift": Attending to Religion in Organ Exchange
Arlene Macdonald, University of Toronto
This paper examines the transplanting of human organs and the tremendous contest, scholarly, political, and popular, to ascribe the terms of that exchange. Based on ethnographic research into the religious dimensions of receiving an organ, the paper attempts to show how a religious lens helps us "rethink" static categories of gift and commodity and circumscribed understandings of exchange. Attention to the religious significance of receiving an organ challenges the Maussian framework commonly deployed by transplant scholars. Social ties are shown to be based on shared religious understandings and not limited to the parties in the exchange. Distinctions between gift and commodity are blurred. Traditional understandings of the relationship between body, person and material continuity are rewritten in new theological language.
Religion as Street Fight: Religion, Performance, and the Industrial Workers of the World
Richard J. Callahan, University of Missouri, Columbia
Exploring religious expressions and activities related to work and the working class outside of organized churches, this paper examines three moments in the history of the Industrial Workers of the World and argues that in the cases considered, "religion" emerges transgressively as a contested, conflicted site of power. Against this background, religion appears publicly as a dynamic process that cannot be separated from contexts and associations related to the occupation of space, distinctions of social power, and claims of human value. These, in turn, are intimately connected to the production and maintenance of class hierarchies. Therefore, in the case of the IWW, religion appeared again and again as a street fight: literally, and often violently, in confrontations in the streets of American cities as union members dramatically tried to claim space and proclaim an alternative perspective on human labor and its relation to social power.
Resistance and Belonging in Parish Vigils in the Boston Archdiocese
John Seitz, Harvard University
Religious resistance has frequently been linked in theoretical applications to the concept of agency. This study draws on fieldwork among Boston Catholics who are resisting the closure of their parishes to suggest that studies of resistance might profitably turn their attention to the religious and cultural manifestations of belonging. The paper moves from an exploration of the ways a desire for belonging drives the particular resistors in Boston toward a theorization of resistance in general as diagnostic not just of power, but also of belonging. Interpretations of belonging are different from those of 'power' because they balance the political elements of oppression and intimate domination with the elements of generational continuity, willful embrace, and signs of existential comfort in religious worlds. This effort takes up anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s mediation of Foucault and Geertz while also avoiding the vagueness and potential romantic obscurity of the epistemological concept of agency.
A19-64
Evangelical Theology Group
Theme: Evangelical Theology and Science
Evangelicals, Theological Method, and God’s Two Books
Josh Reeves, Boston University
The idea that God has revealed himself in two books, meaning Scripture and nature, has a long history in Christian thought. Yet, this phrase took on special connotations following the Reformation and scientific revolution. Because the “texts” of both Scripture and nature were seen as public, and with careful observations, self-evident theologians (especially evangelicals) and scientists embraced Baconian induction as the best method for ascertaining truth. But induction has been widely rejected by philosophers of science in the 20th century as an adequate characterization of scientific method, partly because it would be overly permissive in allowing theories to be considered scientific. I will discuss the implications of this for theological method and will suggest a better way for evaluating the truth of theological claims.
Evangelical Theology and the Empirical Stance: An Engagement with Bas van Fraassen
Kevin Hector, Princeton Theological Seminary
Evangelicalism and empiricism have long been suspicious of each other: evangelicalism tends to see empiricism as anti-supernatural and so anti-theistic, whereas empiricism sees evangelicalism as superstitious and so irrational. We can complicate this picture, however, by recognizing that there are in fact important similarities between evangelicalism and empiricism. This, at least, is what I shall argue. The argument proceeds by (a) defending the version of empiricism proposed by Bas van Fraassen (in The Empirical Stance); (b) suggesting the parallels between van Fraassen’s empiricism and evangelicalism; and (c) hinting at an evangelical understanding of empiricism, and an empiricist understanding of evangelicalism.
A19-65
Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Group
Theme: Women's Agency/Desire in Cross Cultural Perspectives
Feminist Agency and the Construction of Sexual Desire: Querying Mahmoud's Politics of Piety and Female Pentecostals in Latin America
Christine E. Gudorf, Florida International University
Saba Mahmoud’s Politics of Piety account of the Cairene women’s mosque movement is compared to the activism of Latin American women within the Pentecostal (evangelico) movement, specifically on how male and female sexual desire are constructed. As in Mahmoud’s account, the focus is on the agency of women, and what conditions and types of agency and subjectivity are compatible with the feminist project.
Drinking from Their Own Wells: An Inter-Cultural Analysis of the Treatment of Widows
C.L. Nash, University of Edinburgh
Old Testament widows faced similar gender-based oppression to contemporary Kenyan widows. Practices such as rituals of cleansing or being forced to marry her deceased husband’s brother, barely address her impoverishment. I apply two readings to this situation: feminist and postmodern theory. From a feminist perspective, the well being of the woman in community interrogates practices which work to oppress any woman. A postmodern reading is most helped by Michel Foucault whose analysis of theoretical functionality demonstrates the way social power is reproduced as its power structure creates gender normativity and authority. My thesis is that Old Testament widows were suppressed through economic, theological and anthropological belief systems, which precluded their ability to drink from their own wells. I interrogate the religious treatment of widows by addressing: 1) the contemporary widow in developing nations; 2) past and present regulations regarding widows; 3) paradigms for change.
Silly Little Women and Sober, Silent Virgins: The Agency of Women in the Fourth-Century Trinitarian Debates
Kate Wilkinson, Emory University
Saba Mahmoud's questions concerning the definition of agency apply well to the study of women in ancient cultures, specifically late Roman Christianity. Examining works by Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius, I challenge two narratives: 1) emerging ascetic models suppress women, while ‘heretical’ groups give women a chance at self-expression 2) women resist within circumscribed boundaries. Both rely on an understanding of ‘agency’ as political and moral autonomy. I argue that analyzing the role of women in light of an ‘indigenous’ teleology rather than an implicit feminist, progressive teleology reveals unique modes of women’s agency within the early church. I review the categories of silence, modesty and rationality, and show how discourses of heresy and orthodoxy in relation to women might have been both persuasive to their female audience and provided opportunities for the exercise of a uniquely early Christian, feminine agency in the church.
A19-66
Nineteenth-Century Theology Group and Schleiermacher Group
Theme: The Uses and Abuses of Schleiermacher in the Nineteenth Century
Thinking about the Infinite: The Role of the Religious in the Early Works of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach
Dustin Feddon, Florida State University
This paper explores religious consciousness in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ludwig Feuerbach. Their works have served as seminal texts in the study of religion. This paper will focus on how both authors see religious experience as essential for understanding the activities of human consciousness and what it discloses about the nature of subjectivity. Karl Barth is helpful in teasing out the relation between these two thinkers. Barth famously highlighted the relation in his introductory essay to The Essence of Christianity. He saw both Feuerbach and Schleiermacher as members of a lineage that prioritized human experience over theological reflection within the domain of religious thought. As a consequence to this prioritization, Barth argued that Schleiermacher helped pave the way for Feuerbach to make the daunting claim that God is nothing more than a human projection. I, however, will argue that this is an oversimplification on the part of Barth.
Placing Theology in the University: Schleiermacher’s Brief Outline and Hofmann’s Encyclopedia of Theology
Matthew L. Becker, Valparaiso University
This paper compares Johannes von Hofmann’s (1810-1877) taxonomy of theology with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s. Hofmann had studied under Schleiermacher and later served as a professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. Like his teacher, Hofmann understood Christian theology to be the scholarly investigation of the relationship of God and humanity given in Jesus and mediated through the community he founded. Hofmann also divided theology into three complementary tasks: systematic theology articulates a normative understanding of the essence of Christian faith; historical theology investigates the scriptural texts which shape that essence; and practical theology cultivates skills in church administration. Hofmann, however, subordinated the practical aspects of theology to its concern for truth. As a university discipline, theology has a unique object, a unique mode of knowing that object, and a unique method by which that object is investigated.
A Nineteenth-Century Case of Post-Liberalism? The Reception of Schleiermacher in the Ecclesial, Social Theology of Albrecht Ritschl
Clive Marsh, University of Nottingham
This paper examines the mixture of respect towards and critique of Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion and theology offered by Albrecht Ritschl. Drawing on discussion of Schleiermacher throughout Justification and Reconciliation, but especially his 1874 study of the Speeches, the paper considers Ritschl’s responses to Schleiermacher’s emphasis on universality, subjectivity and aesthetics in religion. It then examines the impact of discussion of those themes upon the respective interpretations by Schleiermacher and Ritschl of the communal dimension of Christian faith. The paper argues that Ritschl’s critique functions as an example of critical discussion of the complex interplay between the religious practices and theological traditions of Pietism, Romanticism and Liberalism. The interaction between Schleiermacher’s and Ritschl’s work offers insights for contemporary discussions about ‘global spirituality’ and about the perennial tensions in church and society between the individual and the communal. It thereby illuminates current discussion between liberals and post-liberals in Christian theology.
A19-67
Person, Culture, and Religion Group
Theme: Embodied Religious Practices in Psychological Perspective, Part II
The Return of the Body in Eucharistic Practice: Psychoanalysis and the Disruption of Ritual
Dirk G. Lange, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
In the midst of continued tensions between ecclesial bodies concerning eucharistic practice and theology, this paper proposes a reading of post-traumatic stress theory juxtaposed to eucharistic ritual that breaks open the older categories of eucharistic theology. How does the body “return” in Christian eucharistic rituals? This question, arising out of post-traumatic stress theory and its interpretation by Cathy Caruth, offers a powerful resistance and an equally compelling re-writing of the classical two-sided disembodiment of eucharistic practice and ritual. This paper explores how texts of psychoanalysis can interact with theological texts (particularly Martin Luther) in order to retrieve the body as an integral part of eucharistic ritual and practice. A psychoanalytical reading of eucharistic ritual disrupts representational forms of memorial and repetition and opens the possibility of understanding eucharistic ritual as embodied practice without capturing or strangely, mastering/ritualizing the body. This embodied practice curiously opens the possibility of an anti-ritual.
This Is My Body: The Interplay of Personal Symptom and Public Symbol in Eucharistic Practice
Kathleen Bishop, Long Branch, NJ
This paper will use Kleinian psychoanalysis to examine Eucharistic practice in Anglican liturgy. Just as Buddhist meditation practice has been compared to psychoanalytic practice, Christian liturgy can also be examined as a set of practices that constitute “a path out of suffering.”As a theoretical prelude to a larger piece of ethnographic research, this paper will interpret the images, gestures, postures, movement and “moments” in the liturgy from a psychodynamic perspective. This paper will chart a middle course between those who pathologize liturgical practices (Freud) and Christian apologists who merely valorize such practices. The goal of this inquiry will be the formulation of an interview protocol for qualitative research. The interest here is in how individuals use public symbols, such as the bread and wine of the sacrament, to address private symptoms arising from personal emotional conflicts.
Food as Ritual, Mouth as a Deity: The Place of Feast in Yoruba Concept of Vitality
Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin, Obafemi Awolowo University
This paper examines the triangular relationship among the spiritual, the human, and nature and their interaction on the vitality of the cosmos. It examines the place of feasting as a sacred phenomenon among the Yoruba people of Africa. The interaction between the spiritual, human and nature expresses the inseparability of the spiritual and the material. It further shows the close interlinks between physical bodily parts and the metaphysical bodily parts for example, physical ori (Outer head) is seen by the indigenous people as being controlled by the metaphysical ori (Inner head). The paper then concludes that the mouth deserves such treatment as a deity that receives reference, sacrifice, and worship as a gateway to human vitality.
A19-68
Religion and Ecology Group
Theme: Religious and Theological Reflections on Environmental Issues in Africa
Contemporary Global Culture, the Theologies of Prosperity, and Ecological Restoration in Africa: An Ecotheologian's Perspective
Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Whilst contemporary global culture has not been all that healthy for natural ecosystems - both human and nonhuman, including those of Africa the problematic view on prosperity and the theologies of prosperity as grasped and taught in most African churches today, especially the newly emerging ones - the Charismatic/Pentecostalist churches- and which are seeding into the mission-related churches as well, have the tendency of serving as a wind agaisnt the sail of efforts at ecological restoration in Africa. However, the churches in Africa stand in a unique position, with and without the theology of prosperity, to contribute meanigfully to ecological restoration in Africa.
Land Crisis: Indigenous Religion in Zimbabwe
Tabona Shoko, University of Zimbabwe
The land crisis, nurtured by the Government’s Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe is a contentious issue dominating in non academic circles, politics, economy etc. Politics in particular has taken centre stage on the debates about the land. Previous writings have concentrated on social and political issues like democracy, rule of law, human rights, justice, power, gender and feminism. The religious dimension is not clearly articulate. The churches appear inactive on the matter. Virtually not much has been produced from a religious point of view yet indigenous religion has played a significant role during the liberation struggle and after independence. This research seeks to explore the indigenous religious dimension of the land crisis in Zimbabwe. As product of empirical field research it is based on the contention that the land crisis is multi-dimensional, with intertwined aspects and above all religious factors.
The Khanya Programme and African Christian Theologies of Nature
Eric Trozzo, Drew University
Kwesi Dickson and John Pobee sketch out elements of an African theology of nature. In particular, they highlight community in various ways, including the role of the land in forming community, seeing the universe as a living entity, and the human communal bond with the more-than-human world. This poster examines the Khanya Program in South Africa to see to what extent Dickson’s and Pobee’s theological visions are manifested in an actual Christian ecological movement.
A19-69
Religion, Politics, and the State Group
Theme: Global Perspectives: Political Theology at the Crossroads
Political Theology at the Extremes: Gandhi and Bin Laden
James L. Rowell, Lafayette College
The Political Theologies of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Osama Bin Laden are situated at extreme ends of the spectrum of religion and politics, yet both men in their respective times have exerted a tremendous influence in the world. The central question here is, have the Islamist tactics of violence eclipsed those of non-violence, at least in the short term? Specifically, how could a non-violent advocate such as King or Gandhi respond to Bin Laden today, and what political climates foster the respective political theologies? At stake is the theoretical and real concern that non-violent strategies are still a viable alternative to the path of violence.
Political Religion in the Era of Globalization: Toward a Postnational Christian Theology
Kevin York-Simmons, Vanderbilt University
This paper examines the political role of religion in the era of globalization. I locate the challenges for political religion in the context of the demise of the nation-state occasioned by globalization. I then examine possible options for Christian theology that look beyond the nation-state as the primary political context for religion. Following an analysis and critique of the fundamentalist option, I argue for a vision of religious political participation rooted in the democratic tradition that moves beyond the nation-state.
Wall of Separation or Barrier to Justice? Valuing an Islamic Approach to "Church-State" Separation
Robert F. Shedinger, Luther College
It is common today for people to ask the question “Is Islam compatible with democracy?” Since this question is not asked about other religious traditions, there is a clear recognition that Islam has historically had a qualitatively different relationship with the political order than any other religious tradition. When this question is asked about Islam it is often taken for granted that such compatibility is possible only to the extent that Muslims can accept such concepts as separation of politics and religion, individual rights, and religious pluralism. The conservative Islamist desire to recreate the Islamic empire of the past is viewed as regressive and untenable. While there are indeed serious problems with the Islamist position, this paper will argue that the Islamist critique of Church-State separation nevertheless has some validity and deserves to be engaged. Fundamental issues of justice may be at stake.
A19-70
Roman Catholic Studies Group and Christianity and Academia Consultation
Theme: Issues and Controversies in Catholic Higher Education
Renewing the Identity of Catholic Colleges: Implementing Lonergan's Method for Education
Alison Benders, Ursuline College
The value of this presentation is quite concrete in addressing a vital issue for Catholic universities and colleges. The issue is how these institutions can enrich their educational mission with the resources of the Catholic tradition while addressing people who are formed by and live within modern culture, which holds overwhelmingly to a secular worldview. The paper offers, as a starting point for conversation, an educational strategy and practical curriculum improvements, both grounded in Bernard Lonergan’s extensive and influential work on human intellectual, ethical and religious development.
Controversial Conversations on a Catholic Campus: A Report on Research
Daniel McKanan and Kari-Shane Davis, Saint John's University
How do students and faculty at Catholic colleges talk about such issues as women’s ordination, gay marriage, and contraception? This presentation will report findings from a foundation-sponsored study of “controversial conversations” on a Midwestern Catholic campus. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has sought to identify the factors—institutional, pedagogical, and interpersonal—that contribute to good conversations on difficult issues. A good conversation, we believe, is characterized by both “civility” and “courage.” That is, participants must respect the personhood of one another by listening carefully, and they must respect their own personhood by articulating viewpoints that may generate disagreement. Our strategy for identifying these factors has been to conduct both a campus-wide survey and to use a variety of classes and events as “laboratories,” and in this paper we will share the initial fruits of our research, and identify some of its theological implications.
Searching for the Wellspring of American Catholic Intellectual Life: The Catholic University of America, University Extension, and the Catholic Summer School Movement
Raymond A. Patterson, Saint Michael's College
The Catholic University of America provided University extension work through the Catholic Summer School movement, especially its fifty year relationship with the Catholic Summer School of America in Cliff Haven, NY. Catholic University would provide many lecturers for the Summer School, whose stated mission was “to give from the most authoritative sources among our Catholic writers and thinkers the Catholic point of view on all the issues of the day.” The University also had an opportunity to promote itself before the leaders of Catholic society in the East. The long relationship between the Catholic University of America and the Catholic Summer School provides an excellent case study for the University’s attempt to establish itself as a center for Catholic intellectual activity in the United States.
A19-71
Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group
Theme: In Search of Well-Watered Gardens: Theo-Ethical Resources in the Work of Alice Walker
Members of this panel contend that a slow and methodical engagement of Alice Walker's nonfictional work is required in order for us to fully grasp Walker’s resources for moral agency. That is, by using womanist intuitive reasoning, a systematic approach to textual interpretation that probes the depths of written work through an interrogatory engagement, we can assess the usable truth in selected essays by Walker.
Stated another way, each panelist uses womanist intuitive reasoning to critique Walker’s essays so that liberationists can identify those ‘well watered places in the garden of the Lord’ that contribute to self authenticity. Thus, this panel examines the transformative significance of four ethical sources—1) the invisible transcript of scripture, 2) counter realities within tradition, 3) reason as embodied engagement, and 4) the experience of self-naming in Alice Walker’s non-fictional corpus.
A19-72
World Christianity Group and Coptic Christianity Consultation
Theme: A Vision for Coptic Studies: “Coptic Christianity” from Late Antique Egypt to the “Coptic Diaspora”
A Vision for Coptic Studies: “Coptic Christianity” from Late Antique Egypt to the “Coptic Diaspora”
Stephen Emmel, Universität Göttingen
"Coptology" as an academic discipline grew out of a Renaissance interest in the Coptic language, partly as a hoped-for key for deciphering ancient Egyptian, and partly as a tool for missionizing one of the "Oriental Churches." The discovery of massive quantities of Greek papyri in Egypt during the past century has made "Coptic Egypt" too an important ancillary subject for ancient history, Byzantine history, and especially Church history. Coptic Egypt’s fundamental contribution to Christian monastic spirituality has long been recognized, and recently unique Coptic Gnostic sources have given "Coptic studies" renewed impetus and energy. But what has become of Coptology, or Coptic studies, as a discipline today? And how does this discipline define "Coptic Christianity" in a way that distinguishs it from other varieties of Christianity, both in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, as well as in contemporary Egypt and the "Coptic Diaspora" in Europe, North America, and Australia?
A19-74
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Five Years of Building Bridges
Sponsored by the Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Chaired by Andrew Rippin, University of Victoria, this panel brings together an international mix of scholars to discuss a wide range of topics which concern both Christians and Muslims in current academic and public thinking. Hugh Goddard, University of Nottingham, will deliver a critical examination of various international initiatives which focus on issues common to both faith groups; Miroslav Volf, Yale University, will explore the theme of Christianity and liberal democracy; Mona Siddiqui, University of Glasgow, will look at themes and tensions within Qur’anic pluralism; and Jane Little, BBC World Service, will offer her reflections on current thinking in religious broadcasting at the BBC.
A19-75
Special Topics Forum
Theme: How to Propose a New AAR Program Unit
Sponsored by the Program Committee
Join the chair of the Program Committee and the AAR Annual Meeting Program Director for an informal chat about upcoming Annual Meeting initiatives as well as the guidelines and policies for proposing a new Annual Meeting program unit.
A19-76
Wildcard Session
Theme: Religion and Abuse: Proclamation, Disclosure, and "Hearing to Speech"
This panel will discuss three dimensions of breaking the silence surrounding experiences of physical and sexual violence. Surveys tell us that one in three girls and one in seven boys will experience sexual abuse by the time they are eighteen years of age. We also know that the cycle of abuse relies heavily on the victims silence. Breaking silence about one's experience of abuse is a daunting task shrouded in fear and shame. The panel will discuss the roles of proclamation from the lectern and pulpit regarding abuses of power, disclosure of abuse from survivors of abuse, and the ability and responsibility of the religious community to "hear into speech."
A19-77
Wildcard Session
Theme: Educational Strategies to Develop Clergy Leadership of Congregations for Justice Engagement in the Public Square
A panel of seminary executives, faculty and resource persons will lead a discussion of a draft gramt proposal to invite seminaries to develop pilot projects in the arts of leadership in public engagement and the focused, intentional formation of congregations with a character and passion for doing justice in effective ways. Participants may request the proposal in advance of the session.
A19-79
Wildcard Session
Theme: Epistemic Violence in the Study of Religion
Religious studies is increasingly a field that aims to address concerns of oppression, include voices of those who have been silenced, and embrace difference. As part of this development, questions arise concerning how the practice of religious studies is embedded in the perpetration of patriarchal and colonial violence. The panel addresses this issue of epistemic violence in the study of religion from the perspectives of methodology, systematic feminist theology, and Christian ethics. How can the conceptual language of religious studies acknowledge the field’s origin in colonial violence? How is feminist theology situated between rejecting and continuing the epistemic violence of a patriarchal discipline? And how can traditional claims to Christian nonviolence be negotiated given the realities of structural violence? Constructively, the panel will open new ways for the study of religion to proceed responsibly in the face of the entrenched realities of patriarchal and colonial violence.
“Modern Religion” as Negotiation of Violence: Accounting for and Subverting the Epistemic Violence of the Category of Religion
Ludger Viefhues, Yale University
Critically examining recent scholarship on epistemic violence and the modern category of “religion” (Fitzgerald, Masuzawa), I propose understanding the discursive formation of “modern religion as a field of negotiation of metropolitan and anti-metropolitan violence. The paper thus theorizes epistemic violence and religion in a way that avoids the fruitless alternative of either resisting or embracing “modern religion.” I will argue secondly that these negotiations of violence through and in modern religion are characterized by a dialectic between “authentic” and “universal” claims of identity. In academic and other contexts where these strategies of identity are subverted or challenged, we find consequently the emergence of alternate modulations of modern religion and in them alternate negotiations of epistemic violence.
Feminist Systematic Theology as Epistemic Violence, or, In Praise of Girlfights
Shannon Craigo-Snell, Yale University
This presentation combines Spivak’s description of “epistemic violence” with Irigaray’s feminist critique of Western epistemology. While Spivak implicates intellectuals in the silencing of the subaltern, Irigaray charts the processes by which education silences women and erases otherness. This raises questions: Are feminist systematic theologians committing epistemic violence against the women whose experiences they draw upon? Have their ways of knowing been so formed that they can neither hear women nor speak as women?
I argue that feminist systematic theology commits epistemic violence in two ways. First, against women, by interpreting the experiences of women through lenses formed in the traditions of men. Second, against the oppressive traditions they inhabit. Two specific, related forms of this epistemic violence of resistance are concrete practices of inclusion and arguments among women. In such arguments, women embody a communal performance of multiple knowing and enact an alternative epistemology, speaking both as and to women.
Multiple Violences and the Possiblity of a Peaceful Self
Cynthia Hess, St. Mary's College of Maryland
This paper argues that academic discussions about systemic and epistemic violence challenge traditional Christian understandings of nonviolence by exposing the complex ways in which human beings are embedded in the world’s violence. First, accounts of systemic and epistemic violence reveal that it is extremely difficult to disentangle oneself from the various social structures that enact economic, cultural, military, and political violence. Second, they indicate that because we are socially constructed in a violent world, violence has become integral to our selves, forming us as sites as well as agents of violence. Finally, some scholars argue that social justice itself can be a form of epistemic violence as it attempts to deconstruct oppressive structures and ways of perceiving the world. In light of all this, the paper calls for a reconsideration of traditional Christian claims about nonviolence and more nuanced discourse on ethical forms of violence.
A19-80
Wildcard Session
Theme: Pedagogy and Theology: Crossing the Multifaith Divide Toward Access and Inclusion
In what ways can clergy be supported pedagogically and theologically in enacting access, equity, and inclusion within? This panel presentation will discuss how Auburn Theological Seminary, Teachers College at Columbia University, and City University of New York came together to enact shared values of social justice, equity, care, community, and education using the question of disability and faith. Our challenge was how to communicate and collaborate across pedagogical and theological lines. The issues considered include: spaces/places for engagement, the process enactment, implications for practice, and relevance for the lives of marginalized constituents. As the initiative continues we will explore how we can create a pedagogy and theology of access and inclusion and thereby aid our communities in serving all members with dignity and respect.
A19-81
Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section and Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group
Theme: Kierkegaard and Pedagogy
This panel will look at Kierkegaard's views on pedagogy, as well as the specific challenges posed by teaching Kierkegaard, or religion more generally, in different contexts to different sorts of students.
A19-82
Buddhism Section
Theme: Twenty-Five Years and Looking Forward: Former Co-Chairs' Roundtable
The 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Buddhism Group/Section. Major issues for the future of the Buddhism Section will include: the section's relationship with other Buddhism-related units, the section's relationship with non-Buddhism-related units; types of panels in the section at the annual meeting; ways to utilize the resources of the various host cities for the annual meetings; potential expansions of the Buddhism section unit; the creation of a section webpage and discussion board; developing outreach activities; and finding creative methods to accommodate Buddhism's globalization. This roundtable discussion by past Co-Chairs of the Buddhism Section seeks to encourage the ongoing consideration of changes in the AAR as they are pertinent to this section.
A19-83
Comparative Studies in Religion Section
Theme: Legal Categories in the Study of Religion: Comparative Issues
The study of law and religion has tended to focus on a single culture or a single religion. Such studies rarely (and perhaps with legitimate reasons), think through the comparative implications of their materials. The AAR is the kind of place where such implications should be thought out. The purpose of the Panel Session is to take one such recent work on law and religion in America and work through its comparative implications. Winnifred Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) deals with the municipal ruling of the city of Boca Raton to standardize its grave sites at a particular city graveyard. Our first panelist will discuss the writing, publication, and reception of the book, focusing particularly on comparative implications. Our second panelist will respond to Sullivan’s work. He will assess the comparative implications of her work from a non-American perspective, particularly from Europe and non-Western religions.
A19-84
Religion and the Social Sciences Section
Theme: Religion, International Collaboration, and Social Change in Africa
In an era of globalization, African nations and their citizens face severe challenges related to HIV/AIDS, high levels of hunger and poverty, human rights violations, and foreign debt. Scholars, policymakers, religious leaders, and citizens debate the appropriate roles of religious organizations and networks—local, national, regional, and international—to respond to these challenges. The papers in this session critically examine recent and ongoing religiously based and religiously influenced networks that have engaged in work of human rights, poverty alleviation, and response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. What have been their successes and failures? What pitfalls must be addressed? What are the prospects?
Learning to Stand with Africa: Religious Networks, Human Rights, and HIV/AIDS
Matthew Bersagel Braley, Emory University
The paper employs content and network analysis of several religiously based responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in East Africa to highlight characteristics that distinguish church-based human rights work. Yet the analysis also suggests that church-based projects cannot extricate themselves from the pressures generated by the internal and external dynamics of a weak state. How religiously based responses both reflect and resist isomorphic tendencies (e.g., in their adoption and transformation of human rights language; their cooperation with and critique of the state; etc.) reveals how meso-level institutions act as interchanges for both top-down and bottom-up processes linked to the globalization of human rights. Religious networks, then, legitimate moral identities in ways that are not bound exclusively by geographic, political, economic, or cultural boundaries. Moreover, as communities of communities they appropriate rights-language into existing narratives, traditions, and social ecologies, thus transforming abstract principles into shared, living practices.
The Politics of Evangelicals (2000-2005): On The Issues of Debt, AIDS, and Poverty in Africa
Jennifer Eaton Dyer, Vanderbilt University
In 2002, President Bush announced his historic initiatives to fight the pandemic of AIDS in Africa in the State of the Union Address. What role did Evangelicals play in supporting this effort? And, how have they maintained a voice on the systemic problems of poverty and AIDS in Africa? In this paper, I will examine the politics of Evangelicals during the Bush administration and trace the history of events culminating in their broad reaching action and awareness on these issues. Sociologically, I will discuss the role of the prophetic voice in the evangelical community and the paradigm shift that is ensuing. And psychologically, I will discuss the assumed cognitive thinking of evangelicals, how that is changing, and what impact that change will have in the evangelical communities. Finally, I will argue that the current politics of Evangelicals is changing the face of Evangelicalism in America today.
African Poverty and the ONE Campaign: An Analysis of Moral Imagination and Motivation
Douglas A. Hicks, University of Richmond
The ONE Campaign, which invites U.S. citizens to work “to make poverty history,” brings together celebrities and a network of religiously grounded and other national and international nongovernmental organizations. This paper critically analyzes the efforts to mobilize disparate religious communities to support the ONE Campaign and related anti-poverty efforts, especially in Africa. Focusing particular attention on the ways in which the ONE Campaign has drawn upon religious imagery and religious activism, this paper examines the successes of the recent anti-poverty movement while also delineating the limitations and future challenges of a celebrity-driven, NGO-coordinated effort.
A19-85
Study of Islam Section
Theme: Cartoons of Muhammad and Muslim Responses
The publication of a series of cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005 provoked a strong response in the Muslim world. Scholars of Islam had to deal with the issues raised by this controversy. This panel will address some of those issues. Among the topics to be discussed are the media “event” of the cartoons, the intersections of ethics and political rhetoric, reactions to the cartoons in various parts of the Muslim world, differences between Sunni and Shi’i responses, comparisons with the reactions to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, web sites created and used to teach about the controversy, issues of the limits of freedom of speech and “liberalism”, and Islamic legal rulings on freedom of speech.
A19-86
Theology and Religious Reflection Section and Lesbian-Feminist Issues and Religion Group
Theme: Washington Sunday: God, Sex, and Politics
Using the format of "Washington Week," this roundtable discussion will feature lively and witty conversations on the intersection of God, sex, and politics. Panelists are veteran scholars and activists, well-known in the studies of race, gender, queer theory, and sexual theology.
A19-87
Women and Religion Section
Theme: African Religion and Women's Agency
Surviving the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: African Women Living and Dying, Shielding and Sheltering, Theorizing and Being Theorized
Beverley Haddad, University of KwaZulu-Natal
HIV and AIDS in the African context has reconfigured both how African women live and how they theorize and are theorized. What compounds the effect of HIV and AIDS on women is the collusion between the Bible and African patriarchy. In this paper, I will outline issues raised by group discussions held with leaders of church women’s organizations on their role in curbing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These issues will highlight the way in which their survival theologies sometimes foster silence. By creating safe, sequestered sites, it is argued, taboo subjects such as sexuality and the transformation of patriarchal culture can be given expression. Drawing on lessons learnt through conducting an HIV/AIDS training programme that includes contextual Bible study work, suggestions will be offered as to how to strengthen the religious resources of these women. In so doing, these resources become an asset in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
Women and the Politics of Leadership in Africa
Oyeronke Olajubu, University of Ilorin, Nigeria
A church is a group of people united in the purpose of communing with God, but also a political organization with specified agendas and administrative structures. Invariably, politics of identity for people who occupy positions of leadership is a reality in the church. Over the years, this power imbalance in church leadership has spurred women to challenge, oppose and negotiate with official power holders in the church in various ways. Oftentimes these attempts had been attenuated by the women’s lack of access to Western education and biblical exposition. However, these efforts are not impacting the hegemonic structures significantly because the understanding that the church in addition to being an ecclesiastical body is also an organization imbued with political inclination is lacking and this needs to be corrected. This paper would analyze and elucidate possible ways to effect this crucial correction in African women’s orientation in the church.
Evil, Suffering, and Women's Agency in Africa
Damaris M'mworia, Drew University
In his book African Religions and Philosophy, John S. Mbiti argues that, for African peoples, there is no evil that is an accident. According to Mbiti,witchcraft, curses or breaking of taboos are some of the causes of suffering. Because of the patriachal nature of most of the African societies taboos and explanations of evil and suffering are based on men's perception of reality. Those who try to expand cultural boundaries often find themselves breaking a taboo and consequently being blamed for the suffering in their families or society. For example, a woman who refuses to participate in an oppressive ritual might be blamed for any misfortunes in her family. Drawing examples from female intitiation rituals in Kenya,this paper discusses the intersection of power, religion and women's agency. I maintain that religious beliefs and teachings on suffering and evil are mechanisms of social control.
A19-88
Afro-American Religious History Group
Theme: Celebrating the 100th Year of a "Black Revival": A Discussion on The Azusa Street Mission and Revival by Cecil M. Robeck
This session will discuss the 100 anniversary of the Azusa Street revival, which started with a group of African Americans in Los Angeles, California. A new book, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival, by Cecil. M. Robeck is a history of the first few years of the mission and the revival. The rapid spread of the revival, its leadership under the auspices of a racial mixed and gender inclusive board, and ithe mission's leadership by an African American pastor, William J. Seymour, continues to be a bone of contention in Pentecostal Historiography. How does this new comprehensive history of Azusa Street reframe the the trajectories of African American Religious Historiography? This panel will discuss the implications of this book for revamping past and future studies on the Black Pentecostalism.
A19-89
Anthropology of Religion Group
Theme: Familiar yet Strange: Jewish Ethnographers in Evangelical Communities
Many Jews who study evangelical Protestantism grapple with the traditional insider/outsider dilemma in ethnography, but with a twist. Although Jews and evangelicals share Biblical texts and evangelicals do 'know' about Judaism, nevertheless evangelicals know very little about contemporary Jewish praxis. Consequently they have a framework within which to place/and or conceptualize the Jewish ethnographer, but that framework has little in common with the ethnographer's self-understanding. Some evangelicals support right-wing Israeli nationalist causes and many give special priority to converting Jews, who play a critical role in dispensationalist premillennialist theology; conversely, some Jewish fieldworkers have concerns about being proselytized in ways that they would not encounter in other research settings. In addition to evangelical concerns about self-representation and competing value systems, the field encounter often generates conflicts over interpretive frameworks -- ethnographic analysis vs. conversion narrative -- that inevitably color the substantive research findings and the fieldworker's understanding of religious identity.
A19-90
Eastern Orthodox Studies Group
Theme: The Theology of Sergii Bulgakov
Graced Creatureliness: Ontological Tension in the Uncreated/Created Distinction in the Sophiologies of Bulgakov, Solov’ev, and Milbank
Brandon Gallaher, University of Oxford
The recent work of John Milbank on the need for a primordial principle of mediation between the uncreated and the created is witness to a renewed interest in Russian sophiology, particularly, Solov’ev and Bulgakov. In the engagement of the work of the aforementioned thinkers, it is argued that, in order to avoid Gnosticism, pantheism and divine monism, sophiology must ground the mediation of Sophia within the distinction between the created and the uncreated exemplified in the divine-human unity of Christ. Applied to anthropology such a distinction would neither collapse the uncreated into the created nor ontologically juxtapose them but would see humanity, as it bears the imago dei=Sophia/love, involving a basic ontological tension between what creation is immanently (its capacity to love God in self-surrender) and the transcendent-immanent uncreated being in which it is eternally called to participate in Christ (God’s divine-human vocation for it in the love of Christ).
From Antinomy to Sophiology: Bulgakov's Post-Kantian Idealist System
Jonathan Seiling, Conrad Grebel University College
The recent surge of scholarship on the origins of German idealism has provided key insights into similar developments in Russian religious philosophy. Although the into similar developments in Russian religious philosophy. Although the current interest in the writings of Sergi Bulgakov centers largely around his later, dogmatic works, I will argue that his pre-Revolutionary work contains a basic system that responds to philosophical issues debated by the German idealists. His concept of Sophia as an all-unifying being, who was both divine and creaturely, establishes a framework from which he builds in his later dogmatic writings. The influence of Pavel Florenskii is pivotal for understanding how Bulgakov critically appropriates both the Sophia motif from Solov’ev and Schelling’s system of 'Naturphilosophie'.
A19-91
Mysticism Group and Daoist Studies Consultation
Theme: Daoist Mystical Experiences: Embodied and Disembodied
Daoist Mysticism: Embodiment, Eudaimonia, and Flow
Laura Weed, College of Saint Rose
'Daoist Mysticism: Embodiment, Eudaimonia and Flow' will explore the philosophical and psychological ramifications of Daoist conceptions of self-cultivation through maximizing the natural expression of de, perfecting embodied energy as qi, and co-relating health in body to proper function in society, nature, and Tian. This exploration will show that a practical form of embodied mysticism lies at the center of the Daoist understanding of a person and his or her place in the world. The paper will use this exploration to describe a middle ground between the traditional interpretations of Daoism as either a non-religious philosophical system or a shamanistic magical religious system. The paper will then argue, using this conception of embodied mysticism, that the philosophical and religious interpretations of Daoism are not as opposed as some authors have held them to be. This interpretation highlights the value of ordinary Daoist practice for bringing transcendence to one's life.
Out-of-Body Experience in Tang Daoist Meditation: A Few Non-Neidan Examples Found in the Yunji Qian
Stephen Eskildsen, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
This paper will examine a few different varieties of self-induced out-of-body experience described in Taoist meditation texts that are most likely datable to the Tang period. In each of the texts the specific content and nature of the out-of-body experience is different, as is its perceived purpose and significance, and the technique of inducing it. Thus the data examined will attest to the considerable prevalence of out-of-body experience among Daoist practitioners that cut across diverse factions, methods and theories.
The Daoist Mystical Body
Louis Komjathy, Pacific Lutheran University
This paper examines what I refer to as the “mystical body” in the Daoist religious tradition, specifically in early and late medieval Daoist communities. I discuss the ingestion of astral effulgences and the visualization of multi-colored orbs and body gods in Shangqing (Highest Clarity) Daoism, as well as the encounter with non-spatial cranial locations and the activation (or creation) of a subtle, energetic body in Song-dynasty internal alchemy (neidan) lineages. It is noteworthy that these practices simultaneously recognize the importance of “material” bodily constituents (organs, fluids, etc.) and “energetic” or “divine” dimensions. I argue that the importance of the body in certain forms of Daoist religious praxis may represent a previously unacknowledged form of mysticism, namely, “body mysticism” or “somatic mysticism.” Here the “sacred” is experienced in/as/through one’s own body. Daoist views of the body, and embodied practice, problematize the assumed dualism between “sacred” and “profane.”
A19-92
Native Traditions in the Americas Group
Theme: Cultural Sovereignty in the Representation of Native Traditions
This session will explore how museums, especially the Smithsonian, and a number of universities recently have begun to collaborate in new ways with Native American communities. The results have begun a new chapter to the history of representation of Native American traditions and histories, but have also brought unforeseen new vitality to the institutions.
Honoring the Patwin People: A Campus/Community Collaboration at the University of California, Davis
Ines Hernandez-Avila and Juan Avila, University of California, Davis
This paper tells the story of how the UC Davis Native community has engaged in a project to honor the original people of the land where UC Davis today sits. It began with concerns about the several times that human remains had been disinterred on the campus. While the university complied with the letter of the law, the Native community on the campus felt that something should be done to formally acknowledge that the university was built on Patwin ancestral lands. Supported by local Native communities, the project has hired a design team for a multi-faceted articulation of the Patwin cultural heritage embedded in the land and that continues in the contemporary Patwin community. The project will be the first time that a university campus pays homage to the original peoples of the land, through historic, cultural, linguistic, and artistic expression.
Collaborative Issues in Onondaga Nation Territory
Philip P. Arnold, Syracuse University
This presentation explores the Indigenous Sustainibility Studies Project, a collaboration between Syracuse University's Dept. of Religion, SUNY - Environmental Sciences and Forestry, and the Onondaga Nation. These three centers representing distinctive 'ways of knowing' are collaborating to promote sustainable balance between human culture and the material world globally, and specifically, the clean up of Onondaga Lake, a sacred lake in the heart of Syracuse which is the site of the founding of the 'Great Law of Peace' and the Haudenosaunee 'Iroquois' confederacy, but also tragically ranks among the most polluted lakes in the United States.
Creating Native Space at the National Museum of the American Indian: Integrating Indigenous Philosophical Stances in the Contemporary Life Gallery
Gabrielle Tayac, National Museum of the American Indian
The opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in September 2004 heralded a fundamental shift in the ways that a wide public would engage Native peoples. On an unprecedented scale, derived from decades-long efforts to assume new levels of intellectual sovereignty, Native peoples grasped authority of their own experience in an institutional setting. Three thematic inaugural galleries created the core visitor experience at the museum were based on hundreds of consultations with indigenous communities and individuals about how they should be represented. The outcome of these consultations developed into the three interlocking themes: cosmovision (Our Universes), history (Our Peoples), and identity (Our Lives). In this paper, the author, a co-curator of the Our Lives exhibition, will uncover how Ines Talamantez’s integrated approach to Native American religious traditions permeated the exhibition process. The visual techniques and narrative examples employed will be shown in a virtual tour of the gallery.
A19-93
New Religious Movements Group and Yoga in Theory and Practice Consultation
Theme: Embodiment, Empowerment, and Commodification in Contemporary Yoga and Tantra
The papers in this session examine issues related to the significance of yoga and tantra as modes of practice in the context of contemporary religion, spirituality, and physical culture. Special attention is paid to the sectarian, bodily, and economic implications of the adaptation of Indian models of religious practice to the demands and needs of a cosmopolitan and international audience.
The Practice of Yoga in the US: Bridging the Mind and Body and Religion and the Market
Shreena Gandhi, University of Florida
In the last 15 years there has been an exponential growth in the practice of yoga and in the material commodities surrounding yoga. According to Karl Marx, and later Georg Lukacs, the increase in a commodities market creates not only a radical alienation from the products of ones labour, but also from one’s physical body. In this light, then, the market of yoga and its material culture, should contribute to this alienation. My fieldwork, however, has shown that people who practice yoga are less alienated from their bodies. Thus, it seems, we have a paradox. Using the scholarship of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this paper will discuss this paradox and try to suggest a new framework for understanding the relationship between religion and capitalism by focusing on the practice of yoga.
Empowerment and Embodiment in Modern Yoga: Styles and Modes of Postural Practice in Ashtanga Vinyasa Training
Klas Nevrin, Stockholm University
Stockholm University
The aim of this paper is to develop a theoretical model that distinguishes between styles and modes of action; and to apply this model to empirical data collected from Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga. The proposed theoretical framework will contribute to an understanding of the import of postural practice (asana) in Modern Yoga by making visible bhakti-oriented modes of postural practice; by conveying the multiple ways in which yoga practices are meant and experienced in individual instances; and by providing for a level of analysis which reveals subtle links between culture and phenomenology. Finally, in discussing the results of the analysis, it is argued that the notion of empowerment is essential to an understanding of the popularity of postural practice.
Yoga: Its Transmission and Commodification in the United States
Michelle Demeter, University of South Florida
Yoga is an increasingly visible and versatile commodity in the United States health market. Its origins stretch to pre-Vedic India, and it has been argued that yoga has undergone much change since its transmission to Western culture. As yoga’s popularity has grown, so have questions about its influence on Western culture. In its popular, widespread incarnation in the United States, yoga is now practiced at exercise centers and gyms. Perhaps more interestingly, yoga is also found in the form of marketable products that create a multibillion-dollar industry. However, before its influence can be adequately measured, it must be determined whether yoga is considered to be religious in the United States. In other words, it is important to determine whether yoga has been secularized, and if it has, to what extent. This paper will explore the questions surrounding yoga’s apparent transformation in Western culture, as well as the issue of secularization.
Whose Tantra? Reimagining Bazari Tantra as a Significant Category of Discourse in the Study of Tantrism
Madhu Khanna, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
My presentation explores several case studies of the 'living' of bazari Tantra. It will examine its locus in mainstream and esoteric traditions of Tantra. The all-pervasive presence of bazari Tantra raises some crucial questions regarding the social role of Tantrism in the public sphere and its identity in terms of the canonized tradition of Tantra. I propose to examine the following questions: 1. Is bazari or popular Tantrism a sub-set of the literary canonized tradition? 2. Can we use the parameters that are applied to study Tantric literature such as the indigenous classificatory systems (e.g. Vedic, tantric, Desi, Vama, Dakshina, etc.) to locate bazari Tantra? 3. Do the linguistic formations of the term 'Tantra' that changed dramatically over the course of history provide contexts for accommodating the bazari forms of Tantra? 4. How do popular forms of bazari Tantra compare with transnational attempts to integrate Tantra in the ‘global market’?
A19-94
Reformed Theology and History Group
Theme: Book Review Session of Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics
This session will be devoted to an analysis and assessment of the recent work, Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics, edited by Amy Plantinga Pauw and Serene Jones (Westminster-John Knox, 2006)
A19-95
Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Group
Theme: Religion, Justice, and Genocide in Africa
This session reflects on the concept of justice as a way to defuse violence in the volatile genocidal and post-genocidal contexts of Rwanda and Sudan. The presenters utilize the resources of religious traditions in order to disrupt the spirals of violence of war and retribution.
Voices of Victims of Genocide in Darfur: Heard but Not Heeded?
Eric Markusen, Danish Institute for International Studies
The author of this paper participated in the collection and analysis of testimony by victims of the conflict in Darfur. While the State Department declared that the violence in Darfur merited the designation of genocide, little, the paper argues, has been done concretely to relieve victims' suffering and save their lives.
A Post-Genocidal Justice of Blessing as an Alternative to a Justice of Violence: The Case of Rwanda
Vern Neufeld Redekop, Saint Paul University
Using the concepts of mimetic structures of violence and mimetic structures of blessing as a meta-framework, along with insights from the evolution of restorative justice, I will work out a set of criteria for the kind of justice that will lead to mutually empowering relationships. A justice of violence is seen as an attempt to seek balance in a situation of victimization by forcing perpetrators to suffer in some way. Achieving balance in this way becomes the telos of the action. A justice of blessing is teleologically oriented toward the establishment of mutually empowering relationships; that is, the development of mimetic structures of blessing.
A19-96
Religions, Medicines, and Healing Group
Theme: Teaching Religion and Healing
The focus of this session will be the book Teaching Religion and Healing (Oxford 2006). Presenters, who have also authored chapters in the book, will speak about their experiences in developing and teaching courses about religion and healing from different disciplinary and traditions perspectives. Conceptual, methodological, and logistical challenges will be illustrated.
A19-97
Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture Group and Cultural History of the Study of Religion Consultation
Theme: Is Paul Tillich “the Unacknowledged Theoretician of the AAR’s Entire Enterprise” (Jonathan Z. Smith)?
The statement quoted in the theme for this co-sponsored session is from Smith’s Opening Address to the AAR’s 1989 Annual Meeting (JAAR 58/1:6). For that earlier occasion, Smith was to address the question, “Is there anything unifying . . . governing our activities as an academy?” (ibid 1). In the present session, Smith will revisit and comment upon his 17-year-old statement. His presentation will be followed by prepared responses from Prof. Tomoko Masuzawa of the University of Michigan and Prof. John J. Thatamanil of Vanderbilt Divinity School, after which there will be a general discussion, with questions from the floor.
A19-98
World Christianity Group
Theme: World Christianity
World Christianity is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand Christian faith and practice on six continents, informed by the multitude of world historical and cultural experiences, and expressed through diverse local religious traditions. This panel will feature presentations on the status of the field and the challenges of academic enquiry.
A Demographic Overview of World Christianity
Todd M. Johnson, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
The presentation (and handout) will include statistics on the denominational and ethnolinguistic composition of world Christianity along with an update on the major languages of scripture and Christian broadcasting. The status of world Christianity will be set in the context of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Unity and Diversity in the Christian Movement
Lamin Sanneh, Yale University
The paper proposes to examine the wide diversity of the societies and cultures involved in the Christian movement and point to underlying issues of challenge and unity. For example: Has the post-Western resurgence increased Christian fragmentation and splintering? Has it introduced new splits and divisions or has it increased co-operation and collaboration among Christians? Has Christian renewal affected mainline denominations? Has pluralism helped or hindered conversion and expansion? Has the interreligious frontier expanded because of the resurgence?
Doing Theology in the Context of World Christianity
Peter C. Phan, Georgetown University
If Christian theology is faith seeking to mediate faith to cultures, then the emergence of Christianity as a world religion in a culturally and religiously pluralistic context will have significant implications for the way theology should be done. The paper examines some of the challenges Christianity as a world religion poses to the theological task and presents the ways in which Asian Roman Catholicism has attempted to respond to them, especially in terms of liberation, inculturation, and interfaith dialogue.
World Christianity as an Epistemological Problem
Patrick Provost-Smith, Harvard University
In many disciplines the problem understanding the spectacular growth of Christianity – long thought to be an essentially European religion inextricably linked to European cultural hegemony – in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has shattered previously held assumptions about the nature of religion, cross-cultural transmission, and local agency. New questions have emerged, and new modes of interpretation are now necessary. On the one hand, the predominant forms of mission studies that have shaped the study of World Christianity have seen non-Western Christianities primarily through the lens of cross-cultural reception, transmission, and translation – yet often with little or insufficient engagement with theoretical currents in anthropology or postcolonial theory that have made such modes of interpretation difficult to sustain. Secondly, the concept of "tradition" has undergone intense scrutiny in philosophical circles. Those debates must be taken into account in exploring the intellectual challenges presented to contemporary World Christian studies.
A19-99
Liberal Theologies Consultation
Theme: Are Liberal Theologies Liberation Theologies?
Radical Liberalism: A Liberatory Mandate
Peter C. Hodgson, Vanderbilt University
Beyond postliberalism, and opposed to radical orthodoxy, stands radical liberalism. Radical liberalism does not shun the tradition of liberal theology and the concept of liberality; rather it deepens them, drives them to their roots, the radix. The ultimate radix of theology is God, who is freedom and sets free. God sets creation free from nonbeing and decay, and humanity from subjection to sin and oppressive powers. God’s radical freedom is the end of all creatures. Thus a liberatory mandate lies at the heart of liberal theology. This mandate plays out theologically and ethically. Theologically, the task of a radically liberal theology is to engage central themes of Christian faith and rethink their root meanings in relation to contemporary conceptualities and issues. Ethically, the task is to bring freedom to bear on oppressed peoples, marginalized cultures/religions, and degraded nature, and to critique the political-economic structures that produce oppression, marginalization, and degradation.
The Material Promise of Karl Rahner's Theological Anthropology for A Feminist-Liberationist Soteriology
Millicent Feske, Saint Joseph's University
This paper argues that the liberal anthropological theology of Karl Rahner anticipates a materialist formal method holding significant promise for furthering contemporary feminist-liberationist soteriologies that reject suffering as a necessary component of salvation. While Rahner's theological method has been a resource for early liberation theologians, beyond this, there has been little exploitation of the materialist soteriology nascent in Rahner's work. This paper demonstrates that through his transcendental anthropology, Rahner suggests the retrieval of materiality, the rehabilitation of desire, the possibility of novelty and fluidity in historical meaning -- all things sacrificed by the modern theological project and assigned to woman. While rejecting Rahner’s own christological soteriological conclusions as over-determined by modernity's concerns for absolute knowledge, this paper shows the possibility of drawing upon the promising aspects of his formal method as avenues to the further development of a materialist, liberationist Christian understanding of salvation from a feminist perspective.
Time for Liberal Theology? Time Zones, Tempo, and Territorial Politics
Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, Grinnell College
In a 1959 essay, Paul Tillich argued that time and space should be treated as antithetical forces. Where space predominates, he wrote, human existence is tragic. The prophetic message that history is progressing towards a goal is the "turning-point" in the struggle between space and time. Tragedy associated with the polytheistic gods of space is averted by the coming victory of the one God of time. I argue that this conception of time as progressive, universal and triumphant over territorial politics underwrites the liberal myth of liberation. Drawing on the recent work of American political theorist William E. Connolly in Neuropolitics (2002) and Pluralism (2005), I urge constructive theological engagement with "time zones", "tempos", and "speed". The aim is to enrich our appreciation of time as a dimension of the ethos of generosity required to meet territorial politics without tragedy.
A19-100
AAR Sterling Circle Reception
All members who have been with the AAR continuously for at least 25 years are part of our Sterling Circle. In honor of your long-term support, John R. Fitzmier, executive director, and Diana L. Eck, AAR president, invite you to celebrate at an open house.
A19-101
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Jewish Religious and Communal Responses to Genocides in Africa
Sponsored by the Program Committee
Ever since the Holocaust, scholars and activists in the American Jewish community have sought to raise awareness about genocide and to combat it when it occurs. At the 1993 opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel used his remarks to draw attention to the genocide in the former Yugoslavia. In 2004, the USHMM and the American Jewish World Service launched the multifaith Save Darfur Coalition. In this session, leading thinker and activist Rabbi David Saperstein will discuss contemporary Jewish religious responses to genocide and assess the role of Jewish communal organizations in stopping the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. In addition to providing an analysis of the history and current state of humanitarian and religious intervention and relief in the region, Saperstein will evaluate the successes and failures in Jewish responses to genocide over the past decade.
A19-102
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Disability and the Local Faith Community: Concerns for Ministry and Theological Education
Sponsored by the Religion and Disabilities Task Force
People with physical, sensory, psychiatric, and intellectual disabilities have enormous gifts and talents to share with their faith communities, but they do not always feel welcome. This interactive session will discuss how to identify and remove barriers which prevent children and adults with disabilities from accessing a full life of faith including worship, study, service, and leadership. These can be barriers of architecture, communications, and attitude. Are we preparing our students to minister to people with disabilities? The session will be led by Ginny Thornburgh and Lorraine Thal from the Religion and Disability Program of the National Organization on Disability located in Washington, DC. The program publishes guides (including the award-winning publication That All May Worship), coordinates religion and disability conferences, facilitates the Accessible Congregations Campaign, and promotes the goals of the Seminary Project. Come prepared to share your experiences of inclusive worship.
A19-103
Special Topics Forum
Theme: AAR Excellence in Teaching Forum: A Conversation about Teaching with Patricia O'Connell Killen, 2006 Excellence in Teaching Award Winner
Sponsored by the Teaching and Learning Committee
Join us for a conversation about teaching with Patricia O’Connell Killen, winner of the 2006 AAR Excellence in Teaching Award. Killen will post some of her teaching materials at www.aarweb.org/awards/teaching/default.asp a few weeks before the Annual Meeting and will also be available for on-line exchanges during the time leading up to the Annual Meeting and for two weeks after the meeting.
A19-104
Wildcard Session
Theme: Economic Dimensions of Religion and Religious Dimensions of Economics: A Dialogue
Rational choice modeling of religious behavior and religious institutions has made a substantial impact in recent years in economics, and been controversial among sociologists of religion. Rational choice analyses have covered religious participation, religious competition and market structure, incentives within religious institutions, and spiritual capital; even traditional theological topics as religious knowledge, free will and analysis of divine–human salvation contracts. Despite an obvious intersection with the interests of religion scholars, there has been little contact between scholars in the different disciplines. The aims of the session are to encourage dialogue and constructive critique between economists and religion scholars, to benefit scholars in both disciplines, and to explore the possibility of a new AAR group.
A19-105
Wildcard Session
Theme: The Role of Secular Viewpoints in Scriptural Studies: Past, Present, and Future
Secular Criticism, the AAR, and the SBL
Jacques Berlinerblau, Georgetown University
I make two assumptions. First, that the two major scholarly organizations devoted to the study of Scripture and Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion have excluded non-theist perspectives in their scholarly discourses and practices. Second, that this exclusion has had fairly catastrophic effects for the academic study of religion, and by extension these societies themselves. Starting with a definition of “secular criticism,' I examine how a-religious and irreligious forms of criticism can find no institutional place within scholarly societies that imagine themselves to be, ironically, bastions of secular reason. I then discuss the marginalization of religious studies within the larger university framework of the humanities and the social sciences. This marginalization, it is argued, is partly attributable to the misgivings that the mainstream (and stridently ³secular²) Academy has about their pious colleagues in the fields that study religion.
What Difference Does Q Make? or Excavating Q Studies
A. J. Droge, University of Toronto
The hypothetical document 'Q' has come to play an increasingly central role in the (re)construction of Christian origins. The advocates of a traditional description of Christian origins - the synoptic gospels, Paul's letters, and Acts - are now waging a counter-offensive against a (re)description that runs along the non- (or semi-) canonical trajectory of Q, the Gospel of Thomas, the Didache, the Gospel of Matthew, and James. 'Q studies' reveal the ideological investments of scholars on both sides of the fight. The paper will try to identify what the stakes are in this disciplinary crisis. What might appear at first sight to be a While “Q” might seem to be a critical/secular alternative, it is still very much in thrall to the theological/religionist perspectives of its more conservative adversaries. What might a rigorously 'secular' perspective on 'Christian origins' be?
Translation as Manipulation: A Secular Perspective
Hector Avalos, Iowa State University
Translation theory has increasingly emphasized the use of translation as a tool of power. This paper explores the ways in which translations are used to maintain the value and relevance of biblical texts in modern contexts. The paper contends that the relevance of biblical texts is particularly maintained by attempting to hide or to mitigate the thought and culture of biblical authors because modern sensibilities would find such thoughts and culture objectionable. In particular, we explore how translation is used to mitigate anti-Judaism in the Christian scriptures, and misogyny and violence throughout the Jewish and Christian canons. Publishers of biblical translations function to maintain or enhance the market share, particularly in religious communities, for their translations rather than to educate or expose the culture of biblical authors.
What Is Secular Criticism?
James Crossley, University of Sheffield
The paper will begin with an overview of how secular perspectives have been excluded in the history of Christian origins and New Testament studies of the discipline and how this has not only led to the dominance of Christian perspectives (and therefore Christian results) but has also led to the neglect or exclusion of certain supposedly atheistic academic trends which were part of the mainstream in the humanities. I argue that there needs to be an increase in secular minded scholars within the discipline. Three areas are highlighted: 1. Historiography and the importance of asking the big “why” questions rather than what this or that person really said and meant or what this or that community looked like; 2. Theology and secular views of Christological development; 3. Politics. Questioning the validity of the relevance of New Testament texts by emphasizing the effectively alien to most scholars’ faith commitments.
A19-106
Evils in Religious Traditions Consultation Planning Session
Evils in Religious Traditions Consultation Planning Session seeks scholarly interests regarding the study and understanding of how religious traditions experienced, experience, and will experience human constructions of evil. The session seeks members for a new core group that will interact with other AAR program units. The session will build a base of interested scholars to promote new exchanges, particularly in relation to living religious traditions via the respective ethical dimensions bound to the concepts of evils in human understandings and conceptualizations of the world(s) in which they live. The session coordinators wish to establish a myriad of scholarly possibilities for seasoned and younger scholars of religions. Whether a scholar is interested in a structural analysis of evil, gendered manifestations of evil, or evil on the silver screen, Evils in Religious Traditions Consultation endeavors to support a new AAR consultation devoted to analytical and reflective studies to openly discuss evil.
A19-107
Christian Systematic Theology Section
Theme: God's African Households
The "Matter" of the Eucharist in Bénézet Bujo’s African Catholic Ecclesiology: The Sacrament as a Means of Inculturation and Liberation
Joshua Ralston, Emory University
African Theolgoy has generally divided between accounts of inculturation and liberation. This paper examines how Bénézet Bujo integrates the twin concerns of African Theology into his ecclesiology. This paper shows how Bujo offers both the African and the Western churches a robust Eucharistic vision that successfully establishes the political importance of the Eucharist, while being cognizant of the need to inculturate the central Christian sacrament into the African context. I argue that Bujo’s ecclesiology emerges from his synthesis of Christianity and African values of life and the ancestor cult. From this I explore the relationship between inculturation and liberation in Bujo’s ecclesiology, by examining the economic impact of using local products in the Eucharistic celebration. I conclude that Bujo’s sacramental ecclesiology includes a prophetic sacramental politics that responds to the negative consequences of globalization. In my view, it presents an important corrective to Cavanaugh’s recent proposal of a “theopolitical imagination.”
African Apophatic Theology
Michael Battle, Virginia Theological Seminary
How African Christians understand themselves to be the church is not primarily through the individual’s cognitive function but through particular communal ways of knowing. African churches offer a dynamic construction of individual and community in which both identities create each other. This notion of mutual construction can be seen through how African ecclesiology is defined through a wide range of relatives, neighbors and villagers and ancestors who share responsibility for the formation and discipline of individuals baptized in Christ’s community. In essence, African ecclesiology looks more like hospitality rather than a place or time; whereas, western notions of the church inevitably lead to the church as building or a setting for Sunday morning. Therefore, African ecclesiology begins not with cognitive function but with communal sensibilities of devotion and mystery from which an individual mind could never fathom alone.
The Whole Household of God (Oikos) in an African Ecclesiological Perspective
Ernst M. Conradie, University of the Western Cape
In ecumenical discourse the “whole household of God” has emerged as a new theological root metaphor. This metaphor integrates three ecumenical themes (based on the Greek root “oikos”), namely the quests for economic justice, ecological sustainability and ecumenical fellowship. The metaphor may be used to refer to the fellowship of churches, but also to a “wider ecumenicity” (the unity of humankind) and to the earth as God’s house within which we live. This begs the question how the metaphor may be employed in an ecclesiological context. If the church is not itself the household of God, what is its place and mission within this household? This paper will address this question in critical dialogue with contributions to an indigenous African ecclesiology where references to the family of God are common and where the boundaries between the church and civil society are often blurred.
A19-108
Ethics Section
Theme: Violence against Women Rooted in Religion: A Comparative Study
Various world religions are examined to discover how violence against women is deeply rooted in those religious traditions. It would be nice to think that various public actors when acting abusively toward women misuse religion. But that is not the case; world religions are deeply flawed, not "innocent" by-standers misused by mistaken adherents. We intend to expose not just violent practices in contemporary religions but also expose the violence in the sacred texts upon which those religions are established. Having done that, we then examine resources in those same religions for self-criticism and resistance and active change as regards violence against women. In each of the religions we examine, there are positive possibilities for gender justice. And given the power of religion in today's various cultures, progressives need to do battle for the future of these religious traditions. Religions examined include Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Chinese Religions, and Hinduism.
A19-109
Religion in South Asia Section
Theme: Identity, Poetry, and Desire
"Hinduism" in a "Non-Hindu" Context: A Study of Brahma-Worship in Thailand
Nathan McGovern, University of California, Santa Barbara
In order to deconstruct our too-easy categories of “Hinduism” and “Buddhism,” I examine an element of Thai religiosity that problematizes these categories, the worship of Brahma. In spite of the fact that Thailand is officially Buddhist, nearly every hotel, hospital, and large business in the country, as well as many government buildings, have erected a Brahma-shrine, usually in a highly visible spot in front of the building, and make offerings to the god every day. I argue that the worship of Brahma in Thailand puts the lie to the linear, meta-historical theories of religious history that our simplistic categories of “Hinduism” and “Buddhism” tend to foster, and demonstrates in vivid fashion how religious movements can spontaneously arise, appealing to an often vague and distant religious past, while simultaneously showing signs of their deep embeddedness within and contingency upon their local contexts.
Reifying Religion While Lost in Translation: Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d.1781) on the Hindus
SherAli Tareen, Duke University
In this paper, I highlight the rhetorical mechanisms through which medieval Indian Muslim thinkers engaged in the problematic of translation while conducting comparative studies in religion. More specifically, I reconsider Mirza Mazhar Jan-i-Janan’s (d.1781) ideas on Hinduism in an attempt to identify ways in which he ‘reifies’ religion in the process of making sense of a religious tradition containing symbols and categories that were drastically foreign and alien to him. After delineating the major aspects of Jan-i Janan’s ideas on Hindu thought and practice, I argue that although his reading of Hinduism is highly sympathetic, he nonetheless fails to account for the modalities under which Hindu religious categories must be approached and understood. Therefore, Jan-i Janan’s reading of Hinduism represents an excellent demonstration of how an ill-engagement with the problematic of translation produces cross-religious representations that are as the pun goes: ‘lost in translation’.
Monism, Mantra, and Poet-Mystics: Religious Readings of Courtly Epic Poetry in South Asia
Deven Patel, Seton Hall University
Reading Sanskrit literary texts 'religiously' has a well-developed history in South Asia. The hermeneutic practice of reading religious significance into the overall structure of superficially non-religious poetry has been actively pursued by generations of commentators on pre-modern Indian literature. One genre that has hitherto been understudied in terms of the nexus of art and religion has been the Sanskrit courtly epic (mahakavya). In light of this fact, this paper aims to explore and discuss three aspects of the celebrated Naisadhiyacarita’s receptive history from this point of view: its being read as an allegory of Advaita Vedanta (monism), as an unfolding of a potent Tantrik mantra, and the construction of its author as a spiritual adept and mystic. The larger aim is to open up the scholarly discourse of religion in South Asia to new perspectives on genres and sets of texts not previously explored for such themes.
Disaporic Desires: Exploring the Discourse of Desire among Hindus in the United States
Shana Lisa Sippy, Columbia University
This paper explores the discourse of desire among Hindus living in the United States. Based on fieldwork conducted in California over the past five years, I examine contexts and strategies of desire and argue that cultivation of desire is a centerpiece of making Hindu identity in the diaspora. I consider not only longing for the homeland, which most diasporic communities have cultivated, but also the ways Hindu parents and pundits are engaged in the development of other types of desires, the “sanctioned” romantic, the gastronomic, the material, and the spiritual. I suggest that many contemporary practices of Hindus in the diaspora—education, consumption, and ritual— actually revolve around the inculcation and fulfillment of desires, for both children and adults. This paper investigates the nature of such desires and the discourse and strategies employed by parents and pundits alike as Hindu subjectivities and communities are created through the cultivation of shared desires.
A19-110
Study of Islam Section
Theme: Islam and Authority in a Public Space
From 12 to 124,000 Venerable Models: Externally Dissimilar Manifestations of Shi`i Islam in Iranian Ritual Spaces
David Simonowitz, Otis College of Art and Design
This presentation compares two major mosques completed in Tehran, Iran after the Islamic Revolution and illustrates that, contrary to accepted wisdom, Ithna`ashari Shi`i ritual spaces may be designed and used in manners that distinguish them from comparable Sunni spaces. Not only are the buildings conceived to articulate quintessential Shi`i Islamic doctrinal principles, but they reify contemporary Shi`i politico-religious theories. Nevertheless, these two Shi`i mosques are formally and conceptually different from one another, as well. The presentation partly attributes this to the different periods of the nascent Islamic Republic in which the two mosques were built; however, the locations of the two buildings in socially and economically different areas of northern Tehran are yet more significant determinants in the structural designs and epigraphic programs. Finally, in highlighting the distinctly Shi`i aspects of these spaces, the presentation illustrates the instructiveness of examining ritual space in comparative Shi`i and Sunni Muslim studies.
A "Good Woman" Embodied: Constructing Fatima Kubra as an Idealized Indian Shi‘a Muslim Bride/Widow
Karen G. Ruffle, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Drawing upon archival and ethnographic research in Hyderabad, India this paper argues that the Shi‘i doctrine of husainiyyat, the veneration of the third Imam Husain and his family, with Judith Butler’s theory of gender as the performed stylization of the body, creates an epistemological space in which a notion of Shi‘i sainthood is dynamically embodied, reflecting both the ideals of religion and community. Each year, on 7 Muharram, Hyderabadi Shi‘as remember the battlefield wedding at Karbala in 680 CE, of Fatima Kubra to her cousin Qasem. The marriage lasted just one night. Kubra’s role in the Karbala cycle is peculiar, for her identities form a structural dyad, that of the fortune-bearing bride and the inauspicious widow. Fatima Kubra embodies the idealized bride—obedient and fecund, and the model widow—unadorned and detached from the world. In this model of hagiography, Kubra simultaneously embodies a dually-gendered idealized Hyderabadi Indian Shi‘a Muslim woman.
A Stylometric Evaluation of Mehdi Bazargan’s Chronology of the Qur’an
Behnam Sadeghi, Princeton University
Bazargan’s proposed chronological sequence of revelations assumes that the verses of the Qur’an gradually grew longer. I examine the variation of measures of style other than verse length. I take three different, non-overlapping lists of lexical elements and examine how the frequencies of these elements vary over Bazargan’s proposed sequence. The three lists consist of (1) the twenty-eight most common lexical elements in the Qur’an, (2) 114 common lexical elements, and (3) 3693 relatively uncommon lexical elements. The application of multivariate statistical techniques to the frequencies shows that these independent measures of style vary in a gradual fashion over nine 'phases' in Bazargan's chronology. The study confirms the first half of Bazargan’s chronology, i.e. the Meccan half. The second half can be corroborated only broadly: it is established that it came after the first phase, but the relative ordering of passages internally within this second half cannot yet be confirmed.
Between Heaven and Hell: Al-Ghazālī, Ibn al-‘Arabi, Ibn Taymiyya, and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya on Salvation and the Fate of "Others"
Mohammad Khalil, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
What is the position of Islamic Scripture and Theology regarding the fate of ‘Others’? In the present study, I isolate a few case studies (i.e. al-Ghazālī, Ibn al-‘Arabī, Ibn Taymiyya, and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya) in order to arrive at a better understanding of how prominent medieval Muslim scholars: a. perceived the fate of their non-Muslim contemporaries, and b. were affected by their respective milieus. Most importantly, however, I would like to analyze the different methodologies employed by these scholars in arriving at their radically different conclusions, and see how their discourse was placed in dialogue with the larger hegemony of medieval Muslim theological discourse regarding the issue of salvation. Despite the claims made by some theologians that these are issues that have been settled via ijmā ‘ (unanimous consensus), I will attempt to demonstrate the rich diversity that exists within this discourse.
The Women of the Medieval Minbar
Irfana Hashmi, New York University
The study of women and religious institutions remains an important aspect of the project of incorporating women into the social and economic history of the medieval Islamic world. In particular, the exceptional role of the female shaykha of the medieval ribāţ (hospice) secured the path for the ribāt’s emergence as an all-female community center, which maintained the religious instruction of the unattached women in society and provided them with sufficient means to carry on daily devotional activities. Through the use of medieval notarial manuals and model endowment deeds, this paper reconstructs the physical and social space of the Cairene and Damascene ribātş between 1250-1517, attending to the specific role of the shaykha as its main preacher and religious teacher. It goes on to extract profiles from medieval biographical dictionaries of some of the women who rose to the public minbar, and in their person, came to represent exemplary piety.
A19-111
Women and Religion Section and Bioethics and Religion Group
Theme: Watch out Roe!: Religion and Reproductive Freedom
The objectives of this session are to differentiate between true conscientious objections with objections based on something other than conscience; understand how the Religious Right’s challenges to reproductive freedom make secular approaches better in safeguarding reproductive freedom; understand Christian theological support for women’s reproductive freedom;identify ways that Judaism empowers women to make reproductive decisions.
A19-112
African Religions Group and Ritual Studies Group
Theme: Making Again: Rites to Heal New Challenges in African Contexts
Modern Asante Ancestorhood: Retrieving Meaning and Invoking Identity through Rituals of Remembrance
Kara Ellis Skora, University of Virginia
I examine how contemporary Asante Christians shape cultural, personal, and ancestral memory after the funeral through ritual gatherings and subsequent family rites. These efforts to honor the dead also serve to define the living. The Asante culture of death shapes personal and communal memories--and, therefore, identities--long after the mourners disperse from the public funeral. The post-funerary rites draw upon the latest available technologies and images. I show how Asante traditional culture incorporates the latest world trends into its own distinctive elaboration of self. This is a clear example of how one historic religious culture confidently appropriates what it wants from the modern world of which it very much sees itself a part. The on-going response to death in Kumase allows the past to talk to the present about the future. The rites surrounding death comprise a traditional re-creation and transmission of memory shaping identities and guiding culture.
Shielding Girls at Risk by Weaving Zulu and Christian Ritual Heritage
Jone Salomonsen, University of Oslo
When poor women try to save their daughters from AIDS they do not choose interreligious dialogue. Rather, taking risks, they create new interreligious ritual. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in KwaZulu Natal, I explore the attempt of a Zulu "warrior" mother to protect her daughter from the risk of infection with HIV/AIDS by orchestrating, with her sons, a new version of the Umemulo rite. This customary passage rite for virgin girls, bent to include ecstatic prayers to Jesus, animal sacrifice and feasting, was performed to build "inner" protective shields, personal boundaries and communal interdependence. Jesus and the Ancestors represent different media of communication (possession and sacrifice), including clashing notions of kin, lineage, gender and agency. I will discuss this peculiar intertwining of plural ritual bodies and the claiming of subjectivity and agency by Zulu mothers/women aided by critical theory (Luc de Heusch and Nancy Jay).
The Making of Protective Spaces
Sidsel Roalkvam, Diakonhjemmet University College, Oslo
Income inequality, absence of social cohesion, dislocation, inequality, civil unrest, population mobility, radical changes in community belief and standards has become constant motif of HIV /AIDS in Africa. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in KwaZulu Natal the paper explores how township women create, construct and re-constitute protective spaces within an un-protective society. The paper describes how protective spaces are laboured into being as shields or shelters against the harsh reality of everyday life. The paper discusses how protective spaces need to draw upon something; a choreography to use the term of Wendy James, that makes these spaces recognised for what they attempt to be. The paper will analyse the tools by which such protective spaces are brought into being, the tools by which protective spaces can be recognised as a sacred ritual space, a powerful protective social space, a space of valued tradition, of origin or as the institution of life.
A19-113
Black Theology Group
Theme: Healing the Hurt: Black Theology and Human Suffering
Suffering As Identity: A Call for Dialogue between Liberation Psychology and Liberation Theologies
Athur Pressley, Drew University
This essay explores how the fields of liberation theology, and Black Psychology attempt to meet the social and spiritual needs of African-Americans. Black Psychology has made a sustained commmitment to analyze the effects of the slave trade and middle passage on the lives of African Americans. In a parallel effort, liberation and womanist theologies have sought to interpret the significance of chronic suffering for the spiritual and communal life of African men and women in the Diaspora. Because of this focus on suffering, numerous scholars have critiqued liberation theologies and psychologies for developing an approach that creates identity through suffering, and a spirituality that requires victimation. The central question for this essay is, What does it mean to create a meaningful dialogue between Black psychology and Black theology that moves beyond suffering as the primary point of departure?
The Reclamation: The Nature of Black Theology’s Response to Human Suffering
Derek Hicks, Rice University
This paper shall first consider Black Theology’s reckoning with the issue of black suffering in North America. Further, it will develop a constructive hermeneutic wherein a theory of black religion will be advanced. Important to this paper’s theological considerations are Anthony B. Pinn’s critiques of Black Theology and its position that God sides with the oppressed. This investigation will thus operate on the following fronts: first, to provide a critique of Pinn’s arguments, offering a corrective to his too swift claim of Black Theology’s inadequacy on matters of theodicy and black suffering. Secondly, tacking into account historical raw data, this analysis will advance a hermeneutical argument to augment Black Theology’s theodical claims by asserting that, at its core, a religious praxis resides that actively reformulates biblical Christianity in transformative and restorative ways. Such activity forms a basic underpinning for the viability of Black Theology’s theme of liberation.
Black Theology and Its Health Care Microscoping into Human Suffering: Addressing Black Community Health Oppression in the Twenty-First Century
Nessette Falu, New York Theological Seminary
This paper offers a compelling analysis of how Black Theology might rigorously open a discourse on U.S. health care and its perpetuation of human suffering and health oppression in black communities today. To embrace the depth of these issues we must be willing to dig deep into the abyss of self and community through a “quest of complex subjectivity” as asserted by Anthony B. Pinn. I will posit that human suffering is not redemptive in the setting of health oppression and such religious thought is counterproductive toward liberation and healing in the face of chronic illnesses, oppressions and forms of primary and secondary marginalization. I will analyze works by James H. Cone, Dwight L. Hopkins, Anthony B. Pinn and Karen Baker-Fletcher to answer questions like: How can Black Theology truly serve as a vital realm of theory and praxis to speak on behalf of and to the black health oppressed.
Toward a Revised Humanocentric Theism: A Consideration of William R. Jones on Divine Power and Human Freedom and Suffering
Kurt Buhring, Saint Mary's College
This paper explores the potential value of a further development and revision of William R. Jones’ category of humanocentric theism, which questioned divine goodness and asserted the functional ultimacy of humanity, in regard to the topic of human suffering. The paper will suggest a revised notion of William R. Jones’ humanocentric theism that draws from both black liberation theology’s claim of divine preferential option for the oppressed and from process theology’s interpretation of divine power as persuasive. Consequently, the divine will for the liberation of the oppressed is conveyed through persuasive power. Human efforts to carry out this liberative will are then understood as manifestations of divine power. It is argued that this revised humanocentric theism may provide a meaningful way to understand human liberation efforts and also demand human resistance against suffering and oppression.
A19-114
Chinese Religions Group and Confucian Traditions Group
Theme: Self-Cultivation: Reworking Old Methods, Creating New Ones
Crossing the disciplinary divide between intellectual and social history, Confucian Studies and Buddhist Studies, the members of this panel will attempt to tease out the relationship between thought and practice as it was understood by varying networks of sixteenth-century literati who took seriously either Pure Land Buddhist treatises and other Buddhist exegetical writing, the Classic of Filial Piety, or the importance of dream revelations. Through a close analysis of textual exegesis and the concurrent fostering of new or newly reworked methods of self-cultivation our work draws attention to a religious environment that privileged self-cultivation over strict sectarian divisions; sixteenth-century borders between textual corpuses, methods of self-cultivation, and institutional affiliation were quite permeable which in turn allowed for a creative flourishing of new approaches to self-cultivation.
The Classic of Filial Piety in Early Seventeenth-Century Confucian Scholars’ Self-Cultivation
Miaw-fen Lu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
This paper examines the relationship between a classic text and its innovative incorporation in the daily cultivation ritual of some prominent literati. The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing) was recited and meditated on in a variety of social settings by Ming-Qing literati whose beliefs and purposes ranged from religious meditation to the performance of filial duty. The main scholars discussed in this paper include Yang Qiyuan (1547-1599), Lu Weiqi (1587-1641), Pan Pingge (1610-1677), Xu Sanli (1625-1691), and Zhu Yongchun (1627-1698). I argue that there is an intrinsic relationship between the forms their practice took and their interpretations of the text, both of which grew out of unique late Ming cultural contexts. In some cases, literati created new ritual practices by reciting the text and invoking its related myth.
Convincing Yangming Schoolmen to Intone the Name of Amitābhā Buddha
Jennifer Eichman, Seton Hall University
In a search for useful cultivation techniques, a number of second-and third-generation Yangming schoolmen were drawn to Chan methods of mind cultivation. However, through a detailed exegetical accounting of the benefits of reciting the name, Amitābhā Buddha, Zhuhong attempted to persuade his skeptical Confucian-trained audience that intoning a Buddha’s name was the most effective method of self-cultivation. Some Yangming Schoolmen found Zhuhong’s arguments quite convincing, even going so far as to take refuge, adopt other Buddhist cultivation techniques, and actively promote Buddhist activities—all without disavowing their commitment to expanding innate knowing.
Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) and the Xifang Helun: Advancing Pure Land Thought in Late Ming China
Charles B. Jones, Catholic University of America
Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610) is remembered within the Pure Land tradition of Chinese Buddhism as the author of an influential text explaining and defending Pure Land thought and practice called the Xifang helun (Comprehensive Treatise on the West; T.1976). This presentation will introduce other scholars to the structure and content of this celebrated work, and also to the complexity of Yuan’s relationship to Pure Land Buddhism and his place within the late Ming “revival” of Buddhism.
A19-115
Comparative Religious Ethics Group
Theme: Assessing Recent Works in Comparative Ethics
Comparative ethics exists in a close relation with detailed studies of particular thinkers, traditions, and institutions. In recent years, a number of exciting book-length works have been published on topics relevant to the study of the self, virtue, and law. These works are often conversant with theoretical work done in ethics, but they do not necessarily take up broader questions about cross cultural dynamics that are of distinct interest to comparativists. In this panel, two key books will be the center of discussion, each one presented and reviewed by an ethicist not in the specialized field of inquiry. The crucial question, for each work, is: how does this study lead us to re-think our methods and choice of subject matter for comparative and cross cultural reflection upon ethics? Presenters will examine Mark Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue, along with Michael Cook's paired books Commending Right and Forbidding Wrong and Forbidding Wrong.
Comparative Reflections on Material Virtue
Jonathan Schofer, Harvard University
Jonathan Schofer’s paper will examine recent scholarship concerning early Confucian ethics and self-cultivation, an area that has been prominent in the comparative study of virtue ethics, for many scholars have noted that these accounts of the virtues have at least thin similarities with Aristotelian ethics. Recently, Sinologists have provided a much-expanded picture of ethical discourses in that tradition. New attention is drawn, for example, to metaphoric predication (Edward Slingerland), and to the role of sacrifice and ancestral spirits in the development of the self (Michael Puett). Schofer will discuss these works and focus on Mark Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue. This book opens up the question of how we frame the scope of materials studied in a given cultural context, and it invites broader considerations of the relations between theories and practices of self-formation, and other domains of conceiving embodiment and health, than we have so far addressed.
Reading Michael Cook on Islamic Ethics
Charles Hallisey, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This presenter will look at the issues of moral action and law as presented by Michael Cook in his twinned books Commending Right and Forbidding Wrong and Forbidding Wrong. His comments will be about the practices of comparative reading as exemplified by Cook's works, including what is suggested by a comparison of the two twinned works, the internal comparison at work in the study of Islamic intellectual history, the broad-stroked comparisons that Cook makes with Confucianism, Buddhism, etc., and the basic comparison between Islam and an idealized liberal West.
A19-116
Law, Religion, and Culture Group
Theme: Religion and Human Rights in Africa
After Forgiveness: The Morphology of Justice, the New Utilitarianism, and the Culture of Human Rights
Felix B. Asiedu, Middlebury College
The paper uses two important works by the co-chairs of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a point of departure for a discussion about the usefulness of a specifically religious and Christian notion of forgiveness as a political virtue in constitutional democratic culture. The paper argues that in spite of the appeal to Arendt’s suggestion that forgiveness offers the only way out of political conflict, current discussions about political forgiveness depend on unexamined theological and philosophical assumptions which often misrepresent the nature of evil, subvert the culture of human rights, and distort the very idea of justice.
The Burden of Religion and the Fragility of Constitutional Relief: A Critique of State Involvement in Religious Pilgrimages in Nigeria
Simeon O. Ilesanmi, Wake Forest University
This paper seeks to challenge the common assumption widely held by Christians and Muslims alike in Nigeria that the government is constitutionally permitted to financially support their religious observance of going on pilgrimage to the putative holy lands of their respective religions. I will organize my discussion around a three-pronged test: (1) Does the support serve a secular purpose? (2) Does it have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion? And, does it produce excessive government entanglement with religion? It is hoped that a careful legal analysis of these issues will also provide some guidance on how to approach other areas of conflict in religion-state relationship in Nigeria.
A19-119
Religion and Popular Culture Group
Theme: Religion, Protest, and Popular Culture
“Change-a-lujah!” Destabilizing Normative “Religion” with Reverend Billy and the Stop-Shopping Gospel Choir
Lee Gilmore, Chabot College
Costumed as a stereotypical “fire-and-brimstone” preacher, “Rev. Billy” along with his two-dozen strong “Stop Shopping Gospel Choir” has become a visible anti-war activist through his colorful and often stirring public performances. In staging “retail interventions,” he calls upon “the God that is not a product” to forestall the coming “shopacalypse.” In short, he seeks to “put the odd back into God.” While Billy is not an ordained minister--instead considering his work to be “post-religious”--his cheeky public persona and ritual performances go beyond simplistic satire. By deploying a “gospel revival” motif, combined with the deep sincerity of their message, the Church of Stop Shopping consciously blurs the lines between irony and spirituality, thereby destabilizing normative assumptions about religion, spirituality, and ritual. Drawing upon ethnographic observations and utilizing theoretical frameworks from ritual and performance studies, this paper interrogates the slippages between satire and spirituality embodied by this “Church.”
Who Shot the Mahatma? Depicting Gandhian Nonviolence in Indian Comic Books
Karline McLain, Bucknell University
Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is the leading Indian comic book series, with 86 million issues sold since 1967. The earliest issues were mythologicals, casting Hindu gods like Rama (no. 15) as a manly comic book hero, posed with his muscles rippling. Historical Indian leaders were soon added, beginning with king Shivaji (no. 23), shown on the cover riding into battle. In 1989, the producers released two issues on Gandhi: Mahatma Gandhi I: Early Days (no. 414) and Mahatma Gandhi II: Father of the Nation (no. 416). But Gandhi, known for his non-violence, presented a challenge: how to depict him in a visual medium renowned for action and violence? In this paper I analyze text-image pairing and panel sequencing (paying special attention to Gandhi’s assassination), and also draw upon interviews I conducted with the comic book producers, to demonstrate how contested the memory of Gandhi is in modern India.
Punk Pulpit: Religion, Punk Rock, and Counter-(sub)cultures
Ibrahim Abraham, Monash University
Ever since the Sex Pistols declared ‘I am an Anti-Christ’, punk rock has deliberately positioned itself as anti-religious and especially anti-Christian. Despite this, punk bands have emerged from virtually all religious traditions including Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Krishna Consciousness. Utilising audio clips and visual imagery, and employing theories of subculture, post-subculture, contemporary youth studies and sociology of religion, this multimedia presentation explores the curious rise of religion and punk and its place within various subcultures: religious youth subcultures, punk subcultures and the controversial ‘straightedge’ and ‘hardline’ movements. Does religious punk represent the emergence of a distinct counter counter-(sub)culture, or does it retain punk’s anger and subversive political agenda? Does the emergence of confessional punk significantly alter the notion of what it means to be ‘punk’? Are contemporary youth religions perhaps best understood as subcultures? What does the emergence of religious punk rock say about contemporary youth and religion?
A19-120
Religions, Social Conflict, and Peace Group
Theme: A Shabby Messiah: Bush and the "Divine Mission"
Papers will focus on the problematic ethics, language and rhetoric of the Bush Administration.
The Crusade for Freedom: A Critique of The Bush Doctrine
Andrew Fiala, California State University, Fresno
This paper critiques the Bush Doctrine in U.S. foreign policy from the standpoint of just war theory, philosophy of history, and theology. President Bush describes his goal as “ending tyranny in our world.” This goal has created a crusade for freedom that can be criticized from the stand point of the just war tradition, which developed as a moderate position between crusading idealism and absolute pacifism. Pacifists and crusaders are alike in their focus on actualizing divine commands in history. But the just war tradition has a more moderate understanding of our relation to history and politics; and it is connected to a theology that rejects the idea that human beings can use military force to actualize God’s will. This paper will critique key ideas in the Bush Doctrine, while also explicating the theological and philosophical basis of the ethical standards of the just war tradition.
Civil Religion, George W. Bush's Divine Mission, and an Ethics of Mission
Jillinda Weaver, Emory University
This paper explores the shift in U.S. civil religion described by Michael E. Bailey and Kristin Lindholm in their article, “Tocqueville and the Rhetoric of Civil Religion in the Presidential Inaugural Addresses.” The second section looks at the ways in which George W. Bush’s articulation of civil religion, framed as this country’s divine mission, is consistent with this shift. Of particular note is the shift from what Martin Marty calls a “nation under God” to what he calls a nation of “self-transcendence.” The final section uses M. Thomas Thangaraj’s prescription for Christian mission to critique Bush’s divine mission.
“Pursuing the Enemies of Freedom”: Religion in the Persuasive Rhetoric of the Bush Administration
Helen Daley Schroepfer, West Chester University
This paper will explore President George Bush’s State of the Union addresses using Stephen Toulmin’s method of rhetorical analysis to identify the religious ideology that plays a crucial role in his agenda, a role that is often quite implicit. Toulmin’s work provides useful tools for analyzing the internal logic(s) of a persuasive argument by exploring the various elements that constitute this type of rhetorical performance. Focusing carefully on each component in turn, this method is helpful in uncovering internal tensions within the text and elements of the argument that routinely remain implicit.
A19-122
Scriptural Reasoning Group
Theme: Holiness and Practice
Scriptural Reasoning brings together Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars for the shared study of scriptural texts. This session gives all who attend an opportunity to participate in scriptural reasoning. Speakers will introduce scriptural passages, focusing on the theme of "holiness and practice", and most of the session will be spent in study groups working further on these texts together.
A19-124
Wesleyan Studies Group
Theme: John Wesley's Moral Theology
This is an Ethics Panel featuring Steve Long's new book: John Wesley's Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness.
A19-133
Critical Studies of Political Theology Consultation Planning Session
The Critical Studies of Political Theology Collective is a group of scholars dedicated to developing innovative research programs and scholarly forums to critically investigate historical and contemporary expressions of political theology, including the “political theologies” that underwrite modern conceptions of democracy, capitalism, and liberalism. The collective is intentionally interdisciplinary and engages scholarship in critical theory, cultural studies, feminist theory, literary theory, philosophy, political theory, and postcolonial studies. In addition to continuing our discussions on the submission of a formal proposal to the AAR, this year’s meeting will feature a panel discussion on the issues that inform the question, “What, if any, are the conditions of possibility for a deep articulation of theological sensibilities with the politics and practices of radical democracy?” For more information contact Bruce Ellis Benson, Wheaton College, bruce.ellis.benson@wheaton.edu, Peter Goodwin Heltzel, New York Theological Seminary, pheltzel@nyts.edu or Corey D. B. Walker, Brown University, cdbwalker@brown.edu.
A19-126
Plenary Address
Theme: Tariq Ramadan
Due to the US Government’s denial of Tariq Ramadan’s visa application, he will be appearing live via satellite. See www.aarweb.org/about/announce/2006/RamadanLawsuitIntro.asp for details.
A19-127
Arts Series/Films: KanKouran West African Dance Company
A local institution based out of Washington DC, KanKouran West African Dance Company has been an integral part of the dance community for over twenty years. The company was founded in 1983 by Assane Konte, Artistic Director, and Abdou Kounta, former Director of Music, both from Senegal in West Africa. KanKouran, whose members were born in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean, is dedicated to preserving and sharing the culture of Africa. KanKouran functions much like a traditional African community where, given the communal nature of African culture, each individual understands his or her role in maintaining the oneness of the community for the benefit of the entire community, and each individual is encouraged to contribute and participate to the extent of that person’s talents and abilities.
A19-128
Arts Series/Films: Religion in Documentary Film: The Work of Helen Whitney
Helen Whitney’s documentary films have received an Emmy award, six Emmy nominations, an Academy Award nomination, and two Peabody awards. Whitney will discuss and show excerpts from her films, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero and John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, as well as talk about her forthcoming six-hour PBS series, The Future of Faith. AAR president Diana Eck, Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, will preside.
A19-129
Arts Series/Films: Gattaca
Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
Gattaca, the 1997 film depicting life in a genetic dystopia in the not-distant future, continues to be widely used in courses dealing with ethics or genetics to raise fundamental questions about the uses of genetic information. Less obvious to the naïve viewer, and to scholars who have written on the film, are its pervasive religious themes. The film illustrates why it is important to understand the ways in which genetics lends itself to an alliance with religious ideas and ways of thinking. In many ways, Gattaca is a dialogue with differing conceptions of the family as these have been traced out in biblical texts and the religious traditions they have inspired.
Directed by Andrew Niccol, 1997, 101 minutes, PG-13 (color, USA)
A19-130
Arts Series/Films: Excerpts from Toward a New Christianity: Stories of African Christians in Ghana and Zimbabwe
Sponsored by the African Religions Group
Director James Ault will show excerpts from his documentary that feature a range of churches in Ghana and Zimbabwe from mission-founded, to “old independent,” to new Pentecostal churches. The segments Ault will show have already received excellent reviews from leading Africanists such as Terence Ranger, Professor of African History at Oxford, who states that the documentary contains “the most penetrating and informative material I have ever seen on African Christianity, bringing out its vitality and variety without ever sensationalizing or exoticising.” Dr. Ault will preside and entertain questions after the screening. For more information, please contact jault@shaysnet.com; 1-413-587-6907.
A19-131
JAAR Editorial Board Reception
JAAR Editorial Board members and contributors to the 2006 volume of JAAR are invited to a reception in their honor.
A20-1
AAR Program Unit Chairs' Breakfast
Program unit chairs are invited to a continental breakfast which features a brief meeting on upcoming program initiatives.
A20-38
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Capitol Hill Advocacy Orientation and Capitol Hill Visit
Tell Congress: teaching about and researching religion matters. Unless sufficient numbers of scholars show their support for increased federal funding of religious studies, Congress is unlikely—through agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities—to provide sufficient funding. Interested AAR and SBL members who are US citizens will go in small delegations to Capitol Hill and meet briefly with the staff of their members of Congress to encourage federal funding. Scholars who have participated in such meetings in the past invariably find them worthwhile—an insightful experience into the nature of the democratic process as well as an opportunity to influence their federal representatives about a cause they believe in. Preregistration by September 30 and orientation at the Annual Meeting are mandatory. To register or find out more, contact Susan Snider at ssnider@aarweb.org or go to http://www.aarweb.org/annualmeet/2006/advocacy.
A20-3
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Posters Session
Labyrinths: Images of the Cosmos
B. Lilan Laishley, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
Labyrinths are geometric designs that are visually stunning. This poster session will use images of labyrinth to represent various different cosmological systems. It will visually examine the use of the labyrinth through the central thesis that the labyrinth acts as a template upon which participants can engage in their idea of a sacred cosmos through ritual, both inside and outside of institutional religion. The labyrinth has sparked the imagination of millions of Americans who walk its path in search of the sacred. Its design is simple – a circle with a path to the center – but within its circumference it contains a complexity of thought and action. The labyrinth acts as a representation for various ideas of a sacred cosmos. On the poster I will visually illustrate how the labyrinth represents various cosmological constructs through several different historical and cultural periods.
A Study of the Judeo-Arabic text of "The Tale of our Master Moses and the Gates of Heaven and Hell"
Matthew Long and Jennifer Schwartzberg, University of Georgia
Judeo-Arabic, an Arabic dialect written with Hebrew characters, has become an endangered language and is rarely spoken any longer. But its contributions to the history and culture of Judaism and Islam are invaluable. The texts which are written in this language provide not just written information, but also a look into the life and culture of Jews living in Arabic speaking Islamic areas. By examining Judeo-Arabic texts, the links between Hebrew and Arabic appear clearly, as do the connections in Jewish and Islamic culture.
Experiential Learning: Teaching Pilgrimage Through the 88 Sacred Places of Shikoku
Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, Wittenberg University
This poster will highlight the experiential learning and teaching potential of pilgrimage, based on a summer 2006 trip to the 88 temple circuit around the island of Shikoku in Japan. We will study key aspects of religious practice, both those that specifically characterize Japanese religious expressions and those that are found more widely across religious traditions and cultures, considering pilgrimage in general and the Shikoku pilgrimage in particular. Intellectually, this includes observing the demographics of those observed on the pilgrimage; specific ritual practices; the role of and reverence for Kobo Daishi (Kukai) expressed on this circuit; the commercialization and marketing of Kobo Daishi in particular and Buddhism in general. These will be complemented by and juxtaposed with the experience of actually being pilgrims: wearing pilgrim garb, participating in pilgrim rituals, and commitment to a reverent and contemplative attitude during the three weeks that we participate in this activity.
Child Solidiers in Africa
Dustin Reynolds, Azusa Pacific University
This paper develops a Christian response to the tragedy of child soldiers in Africa. In 2004, Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported an estimated 300,000 child soldiers globally, 100,000 residing in Africa. Particularly, Uganda has been at war for 17 years. Child soldiers in Uganda volunteer for protection or are literally kidnapped from their homes and forced to take up arms. The Lords Resistance Army is responsible for most kidnappings in Uganda. William P. Murphy (African Studies Review) informs us that the children voluntarily take up arms in response to a loss of kinship. Mike Wessells writes that children do not attempt to escape because they are desensitized, humiliated, and disconnected from their prior life. As Christians, what is our duty to these child soldiers? This paper considers if we ought to support a military response or pursue nonviolent resistance in an attempt to aid in the fight against injustice.
Unveiled: Identity in Marjane Satrapi's Autobiographical Graphic Novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2
Sarah Steele, Graduate Theological Union
Marjane Satrapi's two autobiographical novels Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return relate her childhood in post-Islamic Revolution Iran, her adolescence as a foreign student in Austria, and her young adult return to Iran. The institution of the veil is an important theme in these works, and is the main site of struggle between Islamic fundamentalists and progressives. This theme is intensified by the works' dual genre of autobiography and graphic novel. This project explores how the symbol of the veil interacts with the theory of autobiography and of comics to unpack the polyvalence of veiling/unveiling in Satrapi's work. These ideas will be presented in a series of frames that mix visual and verbal representation in a way that mimics the format of comics.
A Matter of Difference: Urban vs Roadside Memorials in the US
Denis Thalson, Graduate Theological Union
Washington's memorials form part of the context for the related phenomenon of individual memorial shrines, of which rural and suburban memorials erected by family and friends of traffic accident victims have been the most studied. Private urban memorials dedicated to murder victims, often of gang violence, are increasingly noticable. Urban and roadside memorials differ in form, address and function. Addressed to the dead, roadside versions function as a mediator between the builders and the dead, helping mourners maintain an ongoing connection with the deceased. In the more ephemeral urban murder versions the place of death cannot mediate, and mourning is expressed in other ways. Urban murder memorials are both private memorial shrines and opportunities for community organinzing. Both versions are increasingly apparent demonstrations of material religiosity, and an important part of our national memorial culture.
A20-4
Wildcard Session
Theme: Radical Life Extension: What Religions Have to Say
Advances in medical sciences raise the possibility that biomedical technology could indefinitely extend healthy human life. The most optimistic predictions envision significant breakthroughs within two or three decades. If the science of “arrested aging” or “practical immortality,” sometimes referred to with the more technical and operational term “engineered negligible senescence,” were realized, it would have implications more radical than any other development in human history. The panel will open with a summary presentation by a scientist who is conversant with current scientific research. A panel of experts, from various religious traditions, will address how radical life extension, should it occur, might impact the religions. The panel may reflect on broader sociological, political, economic, psychological, and other implications, especially as they relate to religion.
A20-5
Ethics Section
Theme: Getting Out: Ethics after a War
Getting Out Requires Acknowledging How We Got In
Glen Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary
The way the allies got out of World War I contributed to World War II: a punitive approach to the axis of evil and ambivalence about international cooperation. During World War II, many ethicists advocated acknowledging that the United States shared some of the guilt and needed a nonpunitive approach, plus international cooperation. The more adequate way the allies got out of WWII has contributed to the avoidance of WWIII. Can we learn from what went wrong in the Iraq War? If accurate diagnosis puts the finger on unilateralism, self-righteousness, and the rush to support Iraq's war against Iran and the Gulf War, then sufficient 'getting out' requires international cooperation, national humility, not hegemonic occupation in the name of democracy. Ironically, the present response to the Iraq War may resemble the response to WWI more than WWII.
Ius Post Bellum in the Indies: Light on Ethical Obligations after War from Sixteenth-Century Latin America
Gregory A. Banazak, SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary
This paper aims to shed light from the past on the ethical obligations of the United States upon withdrawal from Iraq. We study the aftermath of the wars of conquest conducted by Spain in the Sixteenth Century against the indigenous people of today’s Latin America as it was ethically evaluated by such authors as Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483-1546), Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566), and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1534 -1615). We focus on their use of insights from the practice of individual auricular confession; and we analyze this use with the aid of of Michel Foucault’s understanding of confession as formative of subjects and freeing of the “plebs”. Conclusions are then drawn for the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq understood as an analogous situation.
The Suffering of the Nazi Doctors
Tori C. Lockler, University of South Florida
When examining the phenomenon of suffering the tendency is to examine the victim. The victim has been oppressed, beaten, and robbed of personal dignity. Are the perpetrators sociopaths with no mental convictions for the agony they produce? Is it possible that the perpetrators actually suffer themselves? This is especially relevant to mass suffering throughout historical events such as the Holocaust where millions died at the hands of perpetrators acting upon orders of their superiors. The widespread suffering of the Holocaust was orchestrated by Nazi doctors. Why did the doctors trained to save lives become the directors of misery as opposed to the military? How did they reconcile the engineered slaughter with the training in the Hippocratic Oath? This is an examination of Nazi doctors with the intention of determining if it is possible that they suffered while carrying out atrocities, due to the evidence of personal defense mechanisms they employed.
Can Practice Make Perfect? Torture, Virtue Ethics, and the Christian Sacramental Tradition
Rebecca Gordon, Graduate Theological Union
Contemporary ethical commentaries on torture generally deploy either utilitarian or deontological arguments. Proponents argue that the safety of the many justifies the suffering of the few. Opposing arguments take two forms: a deontological appeal to Kant's injunction against treating humanity only as a means and not also as an end in itself, or a utilitarian questioning the of the actual efficacy of torture. Both positions, however, treat torture an isolated act or series of acts, erupting suddenly in contexts of extremity, and just as suddenly receding.
This paper argues that we can better understand torture not as a set of discrete acts but as a continuing practice. If this is so, then virtue ethics may offer better leverage on the problem of torture than utilitarian and/or deontological approaches alone. Finally, for Christians in sacramental traditions, the relatively undeveloped field of sacramental ethics provides an important contribution to an urgent discussion.
A20-6
History of Christianity Section
Theme: Constructing Christian and National Identities
At the Althing, in the Law: Constructing Christian and Icelandic Identity in the Conversion of Iceland
Kathleen M. Self, Skidmore College
The Icelandic conversion narrative imagines a community called Iceland, a society that was constituted by its law and regulated by that law that bound its members in a set of horizontal, if hierarchal, relationships. The narrative represents Iceland as autonomous, self-regulating, and independent of and resistant to outside interference. This discourse of nation presents the law as sovereign and marginalizes any missionary who is not thoroughly encompassed by and integrated into that law, i.e. not Icelandic. Two versions of the conversion narrative are considered here, Íslendingabók (The Book of the Icelanders) and Kristni saga (The Saga of the Christians). Each constructs a nationalism that emphasizes the missionaries’ degrees of alterity, contrasting Icelandic missionaries with foreign, socially non-integrated missionaries, who were often sent by the Norwegian king. According to these texts, the conversion can only be affected by the lawspeaker, who converts Iceland by means of a performative speech act.
Render the Basilica unto Caesar? Ambrose of Milan on Church and Empire
Richard Winston Bishop, University of Virginia
Ambrose’s deployment of the rhetoric of martyrdom and persecution in his Sermo contra Auxentium, preached during the Milanese basilica crisis (386 C. E.), illumines his understanding of the Christian community’s nationalizing claims on the Roman Empire. Matt. 22:21, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” had traditionally been used to express a martyr’s opposition to a hostile empire, but recontextualization of this passage enables Ambrose to offer the emperor a new role: not now a persecutor, but a filius ecclesiae. Ambrose’s articulation of this role expresses his conviction that an opposition between church and empire was an inadequate basis for fourth century Christian society, and it acknowledges an obligation on the part of the church to honor the emperor. The sermon was thus an effort to rethink what it meant to render quae sunt Caesaris Caesari, and quae dei sunt deo.
The Hour of the Church: Nationalizing Christian Identity in Post-1945 Autobiographies of German Protestant Theologians
Björn Krondorfer, St. Mary's College of Maryland
How did German Protestant theologians recall their postwar efforts of re-Christianizing German national identity in their post-1945 autobiographies? This paper examines a discourse on nationalizing Christian identity within a particular historical moment and within the particular genre of autobiographical literature of German Protestant theologians—a genre that has received little scholarly attention to date. Portraying themselves as morally intact, Protestant theologians felt authorized to point to the postwar plight of Germans, criticize Allied denazification policies, and re-moralize society under the banner of a new conservative Christian identity. Blending anecdotes with professional accomplishments, they moralized and politicized the present and the past. Even when written decades after 1945, these autobiographies reveal the degree to which theologians were actively engaged in reconstructing a new postwar identity, sometimes holding on to moral visions long after the larger cultural discourse had already shifted significantly.
Not the German Christ, but the German Christian: The Construction of a Proto-German Identity in the Ninth-Century Heliand
Regina Schwerd, University of California, Berkeley
The 9th century Old Saxon Heliand is a lively retelling of the Tatian Gospel harmony in which Jesus appears as a Germanic lord followed by a loyal retinue of thanes in a region resembling the North Sea. Through examination of select passages of the poem, this paper will argue that the Heliand uses the creation of a common Germanic identity to further its conversion efforts as well as strengthen Frankish hegemony.
Theology as "Spiritual Renewal of the Nation": Ernst Troeltsch on Christianity and German Identity, 1914-1918
Aimee Burant, University of Chicago
Beginning in 1914, many German theologians mined their nation’s religious history to interpret Germany’s role in WWI in theological terms that emphasized national identity. Ernst Troeltsch, one of the most prominent liberal Protestant theologians in Germany in this period, was no exception. This paper examines Troeltsch’s evolving war-time stance toward his 1914 claim that there is an “idea of God that is incarnate in Germanness.” Specifically, I argue that the understanding Troeltsch reached by 1918 of the relation of Christian and German identity can be linked to the development of his theology of history. Further, I argue that Troeltsch’s 1918 conception of the relation of German and Christian identity should be understood not as a simple rejection of the “Germanizing” of Christian identity, but rather as a more complex understanding of the inevitably national quality of modern Christian identities.
A20-8
Philosophy of Religion Section and Theology and Continental Philosophy Group
Theme: The Significance of Amy Hollywood's Sensible Ecstasy (University of Chicago Press)
Amy Hollywood's Sensible Ecstasy (2002) produces a “history of twentieth-century fascination with emotional, bodily, and excessive forms of mysticism.”(5). Some late modern philosophers denigrated women's affective and bodily mysticism, but Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigary, and Simone Beauvoir each found constructive themes in the work of medieval women mystics. Hollywood show the uses to which late modern philosophers put medieval writings, even as she allows the women's projects to resist some of those uses. An invited multi-disciplinary panel of scholars will evaluate Hollywood's book, and locate its significance in the fields of feminist philosophy of religion, feminist historiography, and comparative literature. Each of the panelist's own scholarship depends upon critical innovation to approach texts that are by or about women religious.
A20-9
Religion and the Social Sciences Section
Theme: "Natural" Disasters and Social and Religious Responses
In light of the South Asian tsunami, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the major earthquake in Pakistan, media and public attention have turned to "natural" disasters and human responses. Drawing upon historical, social-scientific, and theological methodologies, these scholarly papers critically examine the human actions and attitudes that have contributed to so-called natural disasters as well as social and religious responses to such catastrophes.
Burying the Dead and Feeding the Living: A Social Scientific Analysis of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Jennifer Veninga, Graduate Theological Union
This paper examines the Lisbon, Portugal, earthquake of 1755 as the first modern disaster to invoke a social scientific response, and its implications for contemporary social scientific views of natural catastrophe. The earthquake not only stimulated questions of theodicy, but also questions of anthropodicy: the justification of human beings in light of evil and suffering in the world. These questions (i.e., could humans have helped to ameliorate this disaster, and if so, why didn’t they?) will be demonstrated historically through an account of responses from the marquis of Pombal in Portugal, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and local eyewitnesses. Invoking Jon Sobrino’s concept of the earthquake as a “bearer of truth,” an “X-ray” of the physical, economic, social, political, cultural, and religious dimensions of a country, this paper suggests that the 1755 earthquake demonstrated the failure of human social structures to reduce the impact of natural disaster.
Disaster and Divinity in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
Laurie Cozad, University of Mississippi
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, finding adequate food and water in the aftermath of the storm became the necessary condition for survival. In contrast to the Federal Government’s woefully inadequate response to this disaster, one sector of society seems to have been able to step forward: local churches, synagogues, and temples. As recently noted by a resident of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, “After Katrina hit, if you wanted to eat, the one place to find food was a church.” Thus, the purpose of this presentation is threefold: First, to explore the various ways in which those affected by Katrina interacted with religious organizations; second, to examine the myriad ways that Hurricane victims make meaning of this event; and third, to document the ways in which this natural disaster may have altered the religious convictions/values of those involved.
Beyond the Medical Model: Re-examining Religious Response in the Aftermath of Trauma and Disaster
Lynn Bridgers, St. Thomas University
Today, thousands of hurricane survivors struggle to rebuild their lives, as many as one in three American women has a history of sexual assault or abuse, and thousands of soldiers are making their way back from Iraq. Our churches must re-examine the efficacy of their response to traumatized populations. That also means re-examining the assumptions that inform them. This paper examines the limitations of the medical model in informing religious response to trauma and disaster. Using an interdisciplinary phenomenological method with streams of investigation flowing into psychology, traumatic studies, ecclesiology and theodicy moves us beyond currently accepted paradigms for religious response. Bringing insights from contextual theologies and liberation theology to the radically altered contexts of survivors, this paper examines means by which churches can partner with social workers, medical professionals and mental health professionals in the design of more comprehensive support systems in the aftermath of trauma or disaster.
Relief and Repentance: Proselytism and Evangelical Disaster Responses
Stephen Dove, Fuller Theological Seminary
In the wake of the recent wave of large-scale natural disasters, evangelical Christians have taken an unprecedented role in providing relief services to victims. This participation — especially after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina — brings a new dynamic to post-disaster relief work since the social concern of evangelical organizations is integrally tied to spiritual concerns usually expressed through a call for conversion. This paper examines the role of proselytism in evangelical disaster response efforts through a study of primary documents and interviews with leaders of evangelical Christian organizations involved in disaster response efforts. The paper shows not only how proselytism is incorporated into evangelical disaster relief but also how it serves as a foundation for the presence of evangelical in such situations and how evangelicals are addressing the ethical issues raised by the relationship between proselytism and relief work.
A20-10
Study of Islam Section and Contemporary Islam Consultation
Theme: From Cyber to the Grave: Making and Marking Muslim Space
This panel proposes to challenge our conceptions of what defines Islamic space and how communities produce and engage that space in particular locations and historical contexts. Addressing cyber space, aural space, ritual space, gendered space, and dead space, the panel seeks to understand how physical and conceptual environments emerge, develop, and function. Central to the panel's concerns are the questions: How is a place signified and understood as being Muslim? What is the role of ritual, text, performance, gender, sound, time, or belief in the creation, identification, or contestation of Islamic spaces? How can the study of Islamic spaces contribute to the study of religious, sacred, and social space? By pushing the boundaries of what is considered space and how it is made or marked as Islamic, this panel will expand our thinking about Islamic spaces and develop theoretical and methodological tools for the analysis of religious space in general.
Cyberspace and Muslim Political Theology
Kristin Sands, Sarah Lawrence College
This paper analyzes the use of cyberspace by Muslim individuals and groups for formulating and developing lay theology. In reflecting upon what it means to be a part of the Muslim umma, or community, and how that community would best function in relation to the rest of the world, the architecture of the Internet shapes the parameters and possibilities of the discourse. The multiple linkages of online spaces and the particular vernacular spoken in these spaces, a mix of written text, imagery and sound, privilege new kinds of actors and new forms of expressive and rhetorical activities.
“Not Here, Sistah!": African American Women and Gender Marginalization in American Mosques
Debra Mubashshir Majeed, Beloit College
Contrary to popular and scholarly reports about the widespread marginalization of female Muslims in mosques in the U.S., most African American Muslim women experience their mosques as accessible spaces in which they comfortably and visibly demonstrate leadership and exercise religious leadership, albeit not usually as prayer leaders. Drawing upon ethnographic research of communities in Illinois and North Carolina, this paper considers gender relations in U.S. mosques as a phenomenon that is as much a product of communal understandings of American social history as cultural interpretations of “Islamic” tradition.
Ismaili Jamatkhanas: Negotiating Space, Ritual, and Identity Since Aga Khan III
Rizwan Mawani, Institute of Ismaili Studies
This paper will profile the evolution of the Ismaili jamatkhana as marking a complex site of ritual, social, and in some cases, public interaction that has effectively been deployed by the Aga Khans to reconstitute the identity of the Ismailis in the last century within a global, pluralistic framework. It will analyze how the jamatkhana’s changing architectural design, religious rituals and objects, governance and social activities have played a crucial role in defining and asserting Ismaili Muslim identity as part of a larger umma. At the same time, the paper will address the contestations between discrete Ismaili communities who have developed their own historical traditions, and how this internal pluralism has been negotiated within the framework provided by the jamatkhana
Ismaili Jamatkhanas: Negotiating Space, Ritual, and Identity Since Aga Khan III
Tazim Kassam, Syracuse University
co-presenter with Rizwan Mawani
Inheriting Islam: The Call to Prayer and the Ordinary Voice of Tradition
Naveeda Khan, Johns Hopkins University
In this paper I bring into resonance national preoccupations with the ordinary voice of tradition, theological conceptions of the human voice, and everyday receptions of the ritual call to prayer in Pakistan to suggest the ways in which a tradition manifests itself through time, space, sound and body within a particular milieu. The conclusion of this paper suggests how a certain voice of tradition calls forth a certain mode of participation, now glossed under the terms “debate and argumentation” but also a listening in oneself in the course of such participation, an ear, that is perhaps the most neglected aspect of our study of modern religiosity. It is my claim throughout the paper that attention to the most quotidian ritual sounds and its reception is as fecund a site as any to draw out this inner ear of tradition.
A20-11
Study of Judaism Section
Theme: The “New Jews”: Reflections on Emerging Cultural Practices
Recent funding of “radical Jewish culture” is intended to “reboot” Jewish cultural creativity among young adults. After exploring “finding the edge,” “connection and attachment,” and “open source Jewishness,” we examine Bar Mitzvah Disco, where “New Jews” renegotiate their ambivalent relationships with Judaism through retrospection and remediation of this life-cycle event; Storahtelling, a theater group that works with media and mediations to commit heresies in the name of religious revolution, while rooting itself deeply in traditional texts and modes of interpretation; and Hasidic reggae, which reveals how “strangeness” alienates the organized Jewish community, often leaving younger people an opportunity to forge new Jewish spaces and identities on their own. Taken together, this panel tracks emergent Jewish cultural practices and structures of feeling to illuminate creative estrangement as a mode of engagement at the intersection of media and religion.
The “New Jews”: Reflections on Emerging Cultural Practices
Barbara Kirshenbaltt-Gimblett, New York University
The “New Jews” are part grassroots development, object of experimental philanthropy, and research and media artifact. This cohort (ages 18-35) is outside the American Jewish mainstream, but attracted to the aesthetics and sociality of Jewish youth subcultures, which has prompted philanthropists to support ventures likely to engage them. This paper focuses on three aspects: finding the edge; connection and attachment; and open source Jewishness. If the historical edge, the outsider and marginal status of diaspora Jews, has dissipated, the New Jews have turned elsewhere for energy that comes from the margin. Born digital, many of them prefer the many-to-many mode of communication over the one-to-many, informal connections over formal affiliations, offering a model of Jewish without an agenda, connection without affiliation, Jewish as contextual and relational. Finally, open source principle, a way of working that is indigenous to digital technology, is attractive as a more partipatory model of Jewish engagement.
Bar Mitzvah Disco: Remediating a Rite of Passage
Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University
Bar Mitzvah Disco, a recently published collection of photographs and reminiscences about American bar and bat mitzvah celebrations of the 1970s and ’80s, constitutes a case study in how some “new new Jews” are renegotiating their ambivalent relationships with Judaism through retrospection and remediation of this coming-of-age ritual. The celebrations being reexamined were themselves subversions of the ritual’s traditional marking of the onset of adult religious responsibility, having become instead the inauguration of adolescence typically marked by neglect of religion. Revisiting bar/bat mitzvahs through various media (publishing, internet, performance) become occasions for establishing new relationships with Judaism that accommodate, and even celebrate, this ambivalence about religion, relying on these Jews’ professionalism and cultural fluency in American mass media as points of entry.
Ritual as Mediation: A Case Study in Storahtelling
Ari Kelman, University of California, Davis
Storahtelling’s innovative approach to ritual as media and the conscious effort that the Storahtelling troupe places on performance makes it an ideal site for exploring how they work to make ritual both more and less mystifying, laying its roots bare without diminishing its power. This paper analyzes five essential mediations in Storahtelling’s synagogue performances and shows how they foster relationships between aspects of Jewish sacred life generally thought of in binary terms: ritual and theater; ritual and performance; culture and spirituality; tradition and translation; Jewish texts and persons. Mediating these binaries is central to Storahtelling’s ability to challenge its audience within the ritual frame. These mediations are critical to Storahtelling’s success in committing heresies in the name of religious revolution, and upending religious orthodoxies in pursuit of spiritual experiences, while rooting itself deeply in traditional texts and historical modes of interpretation.
A Musical Space of Our Own: Negotiating Genre, Authenticity, and Identity in Music of the “New” New Jews
Judah Cohen, New York University
The last several years have seen the rise of numerous initiatives aimed at reshaping concepts of Jewish identity and commitment, many by urban Jews in their 20s and 30s. In this paper, I focus on the subset of these individuals who use music as their primary form of expression. By looking at how such artists negotiate Judaism using hip-hop, heavy metal, and reggae styles, I hope to show that a) such hybrids, while seeming unlikely on the surface, gain a clear sense of purpose when viewed from the artist’s musical tastes and background; b) they require a deep understanding of both Jewish and other musical styles to be effective; and c) the “strangeness” of the music alienates hegemonic Jewish organizations to the point that they frequently dismiss these activities, leaving younger people an opportunity to forge new Jewish spaces and identities on their own.
A20-12
Theology and Religious Reflection Section
Theme: Jim Wallis' God's Politics (Harper SanFrancisco) and Critical Responses
Since its publication in 2005, Jim Wallis's best-selling God's Politics has created new excitement and conversations around faith and politics across a wide Christian spectrum. Jim Wallis will discuss issues raised in the book and responses to it, followed by respondents from different social and racial backgrounds.
A20-13
African Religions Group
Theme: Religion and Public Life in Africa: Politics, Human Rights, and Peacemaking
Religion in Public Affairs: The Role of the Church in the Struggle for Democracy and a New Constitutional Order in Kenya
Edwin Gimode, Kenyatta University
The church-state relations in Kenya date back to the colonial period. The modern state system first came to Africa on the crest of colonialism. The state and the mission church developed a mutual relationship in their goal of making Africans submissive. In the post-colony, this reciprocal relationship continued, though the actors were now Africans. A timid church operated in deference to the political order on almost all public issues. Beginning in the mid 1980s, however, the church began a self-redefinition and set itself the agenda of “watching” state excesses and ensuring citizen rights. The paper analyses the implementation of this agenda since early 1990s. It assesses the performance of the church as an agent of social change. It makes reference to the democratization process and the quest for a new constitutional order in Kenya.
Religion, the African Concept of the Individual, and the Human Rights Discourse
Mary Nyangweso, Iowa State University
The concept of the individual in Africa has concerned many due to contemporary ideals associated with human rights. This concern which triggers a controversial debate associated with universalism and cultural relativism, is complicated not only by rapid social change in Africa but also by religion itself because of its tendency to legitimate both cultural and universal values. The advent of western religions, Islam and Christianity, complicates the controversy as these religions embrace the agency of the individual. It is my argument in this paper that cultural critique of social structure of African peoples should be embraced to promote individual agency. With agency and freedom comes the negotiation of individual and social welfare. It is important that “the dictates of the elders” are not imposed upon the individual.
African Traditional Religions and Human Rights: Initiating the Discourse
Nisbert Taringa, University of Zimbabwe
The question of whether African religion in general and Shona religion in particular is opposed to human rights has assumed a special significance. Although Zimbabwe as a member of the United Nations has ratified many of the international human rights instruments, the Shona people's dissatisfaction with what they perceive as the westernization of human rights is evident. The Shona do not generally relate to the language or conceptualization of human rights discourse which they perceive as manifestations of cultural imperialism. I propose that by relating Shona religion to the three generations of human rights--civil-political, socio-economic, and collective developmental-- we can establish resonances and dissonances more precisely. Shona religion and human rights do not collide primarily on the issue of universality of the human rights idea itself but on its philosophical justification. The Dissonances derive largely from the western legal tradition which legitimizes certain kinds of legal moves, empowering the people who make them.
Peacemaking and Reconciliation: The Contribution of African Indigenous Religious Women in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Isabel Apawo Phiri, University of KwaZulu-Natal
In South Africa peacemaking and reconciliation have tended to be associated with male leaders dialoguing with government leaders to find peaceful solutions about internal or external conflicts. This article attempts to show that African women’s peacemaking efforts are overlooked because they occur mainly at community level. It focuses on African indigenous religious women who have health assets, which are used at a local level for peace-making for the well being of African communities. The material for this paper is drawn from periods both during and after apartheid in South Africa. It uses oral history methodology in collecting information from fifteen African indigenous women healers, and discusses how African indigenous beliefs and practices co-exist peacefully with Christianity in the lives of the women interviewed. The article concludes with a challenge to take seriously the contribution of African indigenous women in South Africa in peace making and reconciliation.
A20-14
Bible, Theology, and Postmodernity Group
Theme: Genesis
The Food Web Is Sacred: Reading Genesis and Matthew through Green Eyes
Mark I. Wallace, Swarthmore College
I deploy a green hermeneutic to set forth a land-based theology of the second creation story in Genesis (where human beings and all other life-forms come from the ground) and Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about the well-being of nonhuman life-forms (God's care of the birds and the lilies). Genesis and Matthew portray the earth, divinized by God's presence, as the benevolent power in the universe that ensures the health and vitality of all living systems. In this model, earth is holy ground - the food web is sacred - because it is habitat for the energy cycle that makes all beings' lives endlessly rich and potent with new possibilities. Since God and earth are one in value and worth, practical judgments about land use should not focus only on human needs but must keep open the living channels of sacred energy that make life possible.
Suffering Responsibility: Creation, Art, and the Genesis of Ethics
Gary A. Phillips, Wabash College
Following from the works of Rosenzweig and Levinas, this paper examines and reinterprets select features of the Genesis creation accounts, raising a number of questions about traditional theological appropriations of those texts and encouraging alternative readings that foreground the ways in which these texts respond to and structure suffering. As visual intertexts we examine select works by post-Holocaust artist Samuel Bak that explore the themes of creation, expulsion, and human suffering.
Suffering Responsibility: Creation, Art, and the Genesis of Ethics
Danna Nolan Fewell, Drew University
co-presenter with Gary A. Phillips
Disabling "The Fall"
Sharon V. Betcher, Vancouver School of Theology
Persons with disabilities have been considered evidence of the “brokenness” of nature pursuant to “The Fall.” Given that modernity was mobilized by fear of the degenerate, this theological analytic migrated into the discourse of scientific and medical pathology, telescoped into the binary of brokenness/wholeness. Where “The Fall” named an ontological rupture between a past and future perfect nature, Spirit has, as during modernity, been made to collude with the powers of normalization, i.e., wholeness, and therefore has been read as a totalizing, colonizing power. But Spirit may have begun as an intensity amidst “a geo-political turbulence” (Keller) and among bodies “physicalized” and “hemorrhaging” under the impress of colonization (Fanon). We could then admit the existence of “life-denying taxonomies” (Wallace) without introducing “the vanity of metaphysics” (Trinh). While “The Fall” might consequently be “disabled,” it would also be reinvigorated for socio-cultural analysis of the western ideology of normalcy now going global.
Genesis, Diaspora, Multiplicities
Jon L. Berquist, Westminster John Knox Press
The Bible's multiple texts of creation complicate theological gestures of a unified and linear theology of creation. In the context of an original multiplicity and with reference to the philosophies of Michel Serres, I wish to ask two questions. First, how can we speak of a postmodern biblical theology of creation that resonates with the multiplicity of biblical texts? Second, how would we read the book of Genesis as a book not about a singular creation but about creative multiplicity, grounded in Diaspora, dispersion, and colonialism?
A20-15
Black Theology Group and Person, Culture, and Religion Group
Theme: Explorations: Black Theology, Psychology, and Human Wholeness
Friendly Spirits: A Womanist Theology of Mental Health through the Lens of Spirit Possession
Monica A. Coleman, Bennett College for Women
Medical and religious communities once understood mental health challenges as a form of demon-possession. As a result, individuals with mental health challenges were subject to cruel exorcising procedures and public ostracism. Psychological and medical communities have removed that image largely through a medical model that speaks of mental health challenges as a combination of neurological and emotional deficiencies that are treated, although not cured, through pharmaceutical and/or talk therapy. This model privatizes the experience and treatment of mental health challenges, and perpetuates the idea that mental health challenges are outside of or deviant from a normal, healthy or functional ideal. I suggest a reclamation of mental health challenges as spirit possession. When spirit possession is interpreted in the tradition of black women’s experiences in Pentecostal and African-derived religious traditions, mental health challenges can be understood as “normal,” and offer opportunities for hospitality, prophecy and grace for the entire community.
Breaking the Chains, Cutting the Ropes, Embodying the Disintegrated: The Liberating Work of African American Pastoral Theology
Lee Hayward Butler, Chicago Theological Seminary
African American Pastoral Theology is an indigenous liberation theology that draws upon black and womanist theologies, African psychology, African American biblical hermeneutics, and African American ministry concerns as its primary sources for the expressed purpose of declaring African American humanity in the face of life-distorting and death-dealing oppression. It works to expose the destructive efforts of a system that continually seeks to dominate Black subjectivity. With healing as the supreme goal, it promotes the resurrection and reclamation of Black humanity. This paper will explore African American psycho-spiritual expressions and theological responses to oppression. Focusing on the social challenges of the antebellum South, Reconstruction, and Post-Civil Rights, I will highlight the ways Black responses to violence are psychologically consistent throughout the periods. The fact we have survived chattel brutality, lynching nightriders, and demoralizing segregation reflects the deep psychic structure that has given rise to our unique personality and indigenous theological reflections.
Rot at the Core: Black Theology and Psychotherapy—an Integrative Approach Towards Liberation from Psychological Slavery
Trina Armstrong, Claremont School of Theology
While physical slavery ended over 350 years ago, many African-Americans are mentally enslaved to unhealthy core beliefs resulting from years of societal and cultural influences. These core beliefs or assumptions are part of a perceptual filter that African-Americans use to view themselves and the world which often result in maladaptive thoughts and behaviors. Using the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, this critical analysis will examine the effects of racial identity, religiosity, family, and intuitional systems on psycho/social/behavioral issues arising from misperceptions and dysfunctional thoughts. While psychotherapy remains suspect, in the African-American community, research will be presented on the practical implications of integrating liberation theology with cognitive behavioral therapy towards healthy cognitive restructuring, the principal of identifying and reframing maladaptive thoughts and behaviors to alleviate emotional distress derived from depression, low self esteem and post-traumatic stress.
Fatalism: An Africana Diaspora Psychology of Religion
Donald H. Matthews, University of Missouri, Kansas City
This paper examines the religious psychology that underlies Black Theological discourse. It does so by examining the presence of fatalism in sacred West African and African American narration. It asserts that a fatalistic psychology underlies and supports the everyday religious perspectives of Africana religion in the African and African American religious experience. It employs the methodology of cultural anthropologists and social scientists who have emphasized the need to allow the voices (narratives) of African people guide the scholar to the heart and soul of religious signification. This metaphoric analysis of Africana religion first championed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston and Melville Herskovits grounds the sources and norms of black theological discourse in the narrative shape of Africana discourse and by doing so shows the continuities and novelty of African and African American religious speech.
Deconstructing the Strong Black Woman
Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Duke University
Traditionally, three archetypes have shaped popular conceptions of Black womanhood: the mammy, the jezebel, and the matriarch. Since the civil rights era, African American women have constructed an alternative archetype: the strong black woman, who is characterized by resilience, caregiving, and independence. Yet, this archetype carries significant disadvantages as a model of identity. Thus, the aim of this paper is to deconstruct the strong black woman by drawing upon psychodynamic theory, cultural criticism, and Christian theology. Specifically, it is argued that as an overutilized defense mechanism, this archetype has significant negative consequences for physical, emotional, and relational health. Given its construction at the intersection of ontological blackness and the cult of true womanhood, it positions struggle at the foundation of identity without providing a means for transcendence. Ultimately, it creates a theological problem by positioning human images, rather than the imago dei, as the foundation for identity.
A20-16
Christian Spirituality Group and Wesleyan Studies Group and Wesleyan Studie
Theme: Communal Spiritual Practices in Wesleyan Traditions
The Shout Heard 'Round the World: Similarities and Differences between American and English Camp Meetings
Jonathan Cooney, Boston University
Originating in America around the turn of the nineteenth century, camp meetings were embraced by the Primitive Methodists in England after the Wesleyan Connexion refused to sanction them. Although the American and English versions were similar, there were also marked differences, including length of the meetings and whether the primary emphasis was on prayer or preaching. The critical element was the support granted or withheld by the mainline Methodist leadership. In America, Francis Asbury wholeheartedly endorsed camp meetings. In Britain, Wesleyan leaders--including Jabez Bunting--denounced them. Clearly this distinction had much to do with socio-political tensions existing in both countries. The camp meeting was an example of the extensions and limitations of trans-Atlantic Methodism as it faced the necessity of reacting to and adapting to the specific contexts in which it found itself.
The Contributions of Sarah Anderson Jones (1753-1794) to Three Communal Spiritual Practices of Early American Methodism
Rhonda Hartweg, Asbury Seminary
Communal spiritual practices were the lifelines that kept the spiritual family connected and moving forward in the spiritual race for perfection, a central theme in the Wesleyan tradition. The published and unpublished writings of Sarah Anderson Jones (1753-1794), a vital and respected leader in eighteenth century American Methodism, provide a rare insight into the thriving spiritual communities of the early Methodists and the significant role and influence of women, who were prohibited from holding any official office. Through three communal practices (hymnody, sharing of spiritual letters, and prayer meetings) Sarah Jones strengthened the very close-knit and disciplined spiritual kinship that was at the heart of early Methodism. For these early Methodists, their spiritual families were in many ways more important and more intimate than their biological ones. This study will describe and contextualize these spiritual practices as well as interpret their spiritual and theological significance.
“Jesus, United by Thy Grace”: A Preliminary Investigation of Wesleyan Hymn Singing as a Communal Spiritual Practice
Robin Knowles Wallace, Methodist Theological School in Ohio
The character of the Wesleyan movement was vibrantly formed in the “way of salvation” by the spiritual practice of singing together in community and through the contributions by Charles Wesley which shaped Methodism as a “lyrical religion.” “Lyrical religion” refers to the joining of theology and poetry, as Charles took the theology of the Wesleyan movement and set it to poetry to be sung. The practice of singing together uses both sides of the brain and thus provides for an embodied, holistic spiritual practice. This presentation will build on the work of Carlton R. Young, Sondra Higgins Matthaei, and Frank Baker, and give a new focus through multidimensional (rhetorical, linguistic, biblical, theological, and liturgical) readings of Wesley texts describing and proscribing Christian community.
Recovering the Love-Feast: Moravian Contributions to Wesleyan Bands, Classes, and Societies
Philip Wingeier-Rayo, Pfeiffer University
John Wesley's early contact with the Moravians greatly influenced his thought and practice. After a disagreement over antinomianism Wesley abruptly separated with the Moravians and began his own societies. Nevertheless the Moravian heritage left a distinct mark upon Wesley: especially his faith of assurance acquired at Aldersgate and the practice of the love-feast within bands, classes and societies. Attempting to recover Moravian contributions, this paper discusses the historical meaning and evolution of love-feasts beginning with the primitive church, John Huss and the Moravians at Herrnhut and explores their impact on early Wesleyan small group spirituality.
A20-17
Comparative Studies in Hinduisms and Judaisms Group and Religion and Sexuality Consultation
Theme: A Conversation with Wendy Doniger and Daniel Boyarin: Religion and Sexuality
Wendy Doniger and Daniel Boyarin have both contributed significantly to the study of religion and sexuality within their respective fields (Hinduism and Judaism)and in the academy more broadly. This session will include reflections on the contributions both scholars have made as well as comments by Doniger and Boyarin about the potential for future scholarship in this field. There will be significant time included at the end of the session for conversation with audience members.
A20-18
Confucian Traditions Group
Theme: Values in Conflict: Confucian Attempts to Resolve Moral Dilemmas
Early on, Confucians quickly discovered that actuating one virtue might prevent one from realizing another. Analects 13.18 already points out that loyalty might clash with filial piety: Confucius castigates a loyal man who turns in his sheep-stealing father. The moral dilemmas that Confucians faced were numerous and their resolutions to these problems often changed due to different historical circumstances. The purpose of this panel is to explore some of the types of moral uncertainties that Confucians faced and the solutions that they proposed. By examining the disparate moral impasses that Confucians encountered, we hope to accumulate snapshots of how Confucians struggled to establish landmarks in an ambivalent and ever changing moral landscape.
Concealing Morality: Moral Dilemmas, Filial Piety, and Gender in Early China
Thomas Radice, University of Pennsylvania
This paper investigates moral dilemmas in early Chinese texts, primarily from the Warring States period. From the standpoint of human relationships, I show how early Chinese texts acknowledge that moral obligations in one relationship can conflict with those in another, and that these conflicts are always resolvable. I also show that filial obligations almost always take precedence over other obligations. However, the way filial piety trumps other obligations is not always very simple. Solutions to conflicts between filial obligations and other obligations are often solved in creative ways that appear to fulfill all of one’s obligations. This method is most often used by female moral agents, who, because of their unique subordinate positions in society, conceal information from at least one person in the relationship. The result is a more complex view of moral conflict in which tensions arise between the notions of right action and harmony between relationships.
The Rectification of Names in the Analects and Daodejing?
Kenneth Holloway, University of Pennsylvania
This paper will discuss similarities between “naming” in the Analects and the Daodejing. The purpose of highlighting this similarity is to further our ability to see beyond the Han inspired notion of conflicting philosophical schools. Arguing for a similarity in naming is unconventional since the first line of the Daodejing states that “the name that can be named is not the eternal name” while the Analects believes that “rectifying names” is the key to proper government in 13.3. However, both texts are concerned with a conflict in moral values, the ideal versus the observed practices in society.
Where Have All the Loyal Retainers Gone? The Conflict between Family and State in Medieval Confucianism
Keith Knapp, The Citadel
During the Han dynasty (206 B.C.- A.D. 220) Confucians were well known for emphasizing the importance of fulfilling the requirements of both filiality and loyalty. Nevertheless, in the succeeding Period of Disunity (A.D.100-600), filiality was stressed much more than loyalty. What happened to loyalty during this period? My paper will argue that in the early medieval period, even though loyalty remained important, it was assumed to be an extension of filial piety. The reason why loyalty was subordinated to filiality had much to do with the relative weakness of central government and strength of regional families. Nevertheless, in the sixth century, as rulers struggled to centralize power, they once again began to champion and reward those who put the state above the family.
The Ethical Reveler: Confucian Morals in Tang Court Festivities
Ian Chapman, Princeton University
The Confucian canon and its exegetical traditions present varying and sometimes conflicting measures of the ethics of celebration, but frequently also the means for resolving contradictions. This paper examines the relationship to Confucian traditions of ethical arguments used in determining or challenging large scale celebrations sponsored or regulated by the Tang dynasty (618-907) imperial court, particularly those connected with annual festivals. It argues that specifically Confucian ethical categories dominated such discourses, even though many of the festivals concerned were without classical provenance, and bore the influence of non-Confucian traditions. Contradictions which historically had become fore-fronted due to tensions between classical Chinese and post-classical (especially Buddhist and Daoist) traditions were often subsumed to, and resolved according to, the categories of Confucian ethics. I proceed from this to explore tensions between a view of such prescriptions as abstract, widely adaptable ethical principles, and another emphasizing loyalty to historical precedent and cultural traditions.
Filial Vestiges: The Conflict between Confucian and Modern Structures of Selfhood
Christopher Lupke, Washington State University
This paper investigates processes and practices involved in the representation of “China” through literary means. An analysis or four modern authors, it reveals how a conflict has emerged in China centered on the construction of the self and its social underpinnings. This construction of the self is informed by the traditional notion of filiality, one of the most pervasive concepts in Confucianism, now challenged by the emergence of individuality. A filial subject must exhibit respect for one’s father and ancestors. Women are marginalized by filiality, alienating them from reproduction and legitimating a patriarchal hierarchy. I rely on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus which states that between individual action and social conditioning is “regulated improvisation,” a zone where one acts without guile yet adheres to convention. A crisis has coalesced around the conflict between filiality and individualism, the former rooted in tradition and the latter manifesting from Western thought.
A20-19
Eastern Orthodox Studies Group
Theme: Creation, the Fathers, and Contemporary Orthodox Theology
Augustine or Cyril? To Whom Shall We Go for the Oneness of Christ?
Joseph M. Hallman, University of Saint Thomas
In order to retrieve patristic dogmatic and Christological tradition, contemporary theologians need to decide on the relevance of major figures from the past such as Augustine of Hippo and Cyril of Alexandria. The hope is that such a retrieval might compete with the Ebionite and Arian views of Jesus current today. This paper examines the Christology of Augustine and compares his understanding of the unity of the person of Christ with that of Cyril. For many reasons they are quite different. Each is rooted differently in tradition, Augustine in Latin writers, Cyril in Athanasius. Also the controversy between Antioch and Alexandria over Christological concepts and terminology is largely unknown to Augustine, since it occurred in the last part of his life when he was occupied with Pelagianism. Augustine does develop, however, an understanding of the historical Christ as 'totus Christus,' the whole Christ which may be useful for Christology today.
The Natural State of the Intellect in Maximus Confessor: A Virtue Epistemology of Spirituality
Frederick D. Aquino, Abilene Christian University
The process of deification, for Maximus Confessor, reconstitutes the intellect in a fuller sense than its original created state. It does not suggest the loss of our intellectual power; nor does it come to us as a supplementary part added to our intellect. Rather, the process of deification illumines the power of our intellect with its own quality and conforms the activity of our intellect to its own. Moreoevr, Maximus couples spiritual disciplines and rigorous noetic reflection, spelling out how the journey of deification links moral discernment, praiseworthy dispositions, rigorous contemplative exercises with the process of assimilating the self into the life of God. The constructive move, suggested in the paper, rereads Maximus’s epistemology of spirituality in light of recent work in virtue epistemology, thereby offering some preliminary suggestions on how to bring this epistemic insight into this conversation with contemporary epistemology.
Salvation through Matter: Maximos the Confessor and Pavel Florensky on the Propedeutic Purpose of Creation
Thomas Cattoi, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
The purpose of this paper is to outline Maximos the Confessor’s theological understanding of the order of nature and to compare it with Pavel Florensky’s reflections on the propedeutic value of creation. Maximos’ reading of creation, developed in opposition to the spirituality of late Origenism, combines Classical natural theology with the Christology of Chalcedon, and posits the hypostatic union as the hermeneutical key of the cosmos. Florensky’s approach, on the other hand, retrieves the Patristic understanding of creation as an exercise in divine pedagogy to counter the sterile intellectualism of the Russian intelligentsia of his time. Despite their different agendas, Maximos and Florensky view material creation as setting the terms for a radically embodied spirituality. In my paper, I suggest that Florensky’s theology of creation can be regarded as a model of what Schmeeman, outlining the future of Orthodox theology, called “creative recovery” of the Patristic spirit.
Imago Dei or Microcosmic Rational Animal? The Protological Anthropology of Gregory of Nyssa
Valerie Karras, Southern Methodist University
Gregory of Nyssa, in his De hominis opificio, posited a distinction between God’s original plan for humanity and protological humanity. Gregory infers this distinction from the phrase “male and female [God] created them” in Gen. 1.27, a phrase missing from Gen. 1.26. Noting that sexual differentiation is not a divine characteristic and is therefore outside the imago Dei, Gregory opines that God added sexual differentiation to human nature out of divine foreknowledge of humanity’s impending Fall and mortality. However, this prima facie reading has been challenged by some contemporary Orthodox theologians recently, most notably by John Behr, who contends that Gregory’s discussion is ironic. This paper demonstrates the flaws in Behr’s argument: (1) on a rhetorical level, (2) in terms of the coherence of Gregory’s creation anthropology, and (3) within the broader context of a widespread patristic distinction between image and likeness in human nature, similarly based on Gen. 1.26-27.
A20-20
Ecclesiological Investigations Group
Theme: Comparative Ecclesiology: Engaging the Work of Roger Haight and Exploring the Nature, Method, and Development of Comparative Ecclesiology for the Future
Papers here will engage topics such as the nature, method and development of comparative ecclesiology; focusing, in particular, upon appreciations and evaluations of Roger Haight’s Christian Community in History, as well as his work in general. Specific papers will address the notion of "receptive ecumenism and transformative ecclesial learning"; relating the notion of comparative ecclesiology to comparative theology; discussing Haight's Comparative Ecclesiology in the light of recent Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogues; the church and sacramentality vis-à-vis Haight’s theology of symbol and a study in comparative feminist ecclesiology, Toward an Inclusive Ecclesial Communion. Roger Haight will respond to the papers himself.
Receptive Ecumenism and Transformative Ecclesial Learning: An Ethic for the Ecumenical Long Haul
Paul D. Murray, University of Durham
'The apologist sets out to teach rather than to learn... to give rather than to receive. Academic theology, on the other hand,... should be... fundamentally interrogative in character.' (Nicholas Lash) Substitute ‘Ecumenical theology’ or ‘Ecclesiology’ for ‘Academic theology’ and you have this paper’s constructive argument. The paper will, first, outline the original concept of Receptive Ecumenism as this was introduced, tested and developed during the Catholic Learning and Receptive Ecumenism International Research Colloquium hosted by Durham University in January 2006. Second, it will situate this strategy against the relevant scholarly literature, particularly Roger Haight, Comparative Ecclesiology, (New York/London: Continuum, 2005) and The Nature and Mission of the Church (Geneva: WCC, 2006). Third, it will comment upon some of the most significant constructive points arising in the Durham Catholic Learning and Receptive Ecumenism project and, with this, indicate the lines along which this work might most profitably be taken forwards.
Is Comparative Ecclesiology Enough for the Oikoumene? Remarks on Roger Haight's Comparative Ecclesiology in the Light of Recent Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogues
Minna Hietamäki, Helsinki University
Roger Haight presents in his two-volume publication on the Christian Community in History a proposal for a comparative ecclesiology mindful of the plurality of the Church in history. Haight's proposal is analogous in intention with ecumenical endeavours to articulate an ecclesiology on the one Church sensitive to differences. The aim of this paper is to reflect on Haight's proposed comparative ecclesiology in the light of two recent ecclesiological documents from the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue, the German 'Communio Sanctorum' and the North-American 'Church as Koinonia of Salvation'. They give an example of on the one hand striving for unity but on the other hand critically accommodating differences with the help of a 'differentiated consensus'. The paper will argue for an ecclesiology beyond mere comparison. It will describe with examples an emerging 'differentiated ecclesiology' as it is emerging in the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue.
A More Comparative Ecclesiology? Bringing Comparative Theology to the Ecclesiological Table
Reid Locklin, University of Toronto
In Christian Community in History Roger Haight offers an approach to comparative ecclesiology “from below,” attentive to the historical experience and development of particular Christian communities. In this paper, I suggest that such comparative ecclesiology naturally opens into a broader comparative study beyond the boundaries of Christian confession itself. I focus on two examples: 1) the sophisticated theological understanding of teachers and students in the treatise A Thousand Teachings of the eighth-century Advaita teacher Śankara, and 2) the later vijaya literature, which presents Sankara himself as a divine incarnation and “world-conqueror” on a mission to spread Advaita teaching throughout India. Precisely by making particular claims about teaching authority and mission, such Hindu traditions can complement or complicate our study of similarly particular expressions of church throughout history. A comparative ecclesiology “from below” only stands to gain from attending to such diverse particularities and thereby becoming even more thoroughly comparative.
Church and Sacramentality: The Theology of Symbol in Roger Haight’s Comparative Ecclesiology
Gerard M. Jacobitz, St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia
Roger Haight’s Christian Community in History brings to completion a trilogy, with Dynamics of Theology and Jesus Symbol of God as parts one and two. This paper presents a demythologized theology of symbol as a key element in Haight’s project, which logically culminates in a comparative ecclesiology. Knowledge of how parts disclose wholes can show how an ecclesiological pluralism reflects the unity in difference of the trinitarian God.
Toward an Inclusive Ecclesial Communion?
Ann M. Caron, St. Joseph College, Hartford
The goal of this paper is to identify theological “talking points” in response to the question is participatory governance and 'a church without patriarchal structures possible?' I propose as dialogue partners the emerging lay ecclesial ministers in U.S. Roman Catholic parishes, most of whom are women, and developments in comparative feminist ecclesiologies. The paper has three parts. First I will briefly identify developments in comparative feminist ecclesiologies presented in selected writings of Sandra Schneiders, Mary Himes, Natalie Watson and Lisa S. Cahill. Next I will examine pertinent sections of the November 2005 document from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on “lay ecclesial ministry.” In the third and final section of this essay I offer theological “talking points” for a continuing conversation in response to the question is participatory governance and 'a church without patriarchal structures possible” –toward an inclusive ecclesial communion?
A20-21
Evangelical Theology Group
Theme: Drama, Doctrine, and Evangelical Theology: Exploring Kevin Vanhoozer's "Canonical-Linguistic" Approach to Doctrine and Its Implications for Evangelical Theology
“Backdoor Balthasar”: The Theo-Drama as Template for the Drama of Doctrine and the Legitimization of an Evangelical Theological Aesthetic
Jay Smith, Howard Payne University
Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine relies heavily upon Hans Urs von Balthasar’s concept of the Christian life as theo-drama. This paper contends that such usage legitimates an evangelical appropriation of other aspects of Balthasar’s massive theological project, beginning with his theological aesthetics. To that end, this paper delineates Vanhoozer’s use of Balthasar’s dramatics; analyzes the connection of Balthasar’s dramatics to his aesthetics and then assesses the potential influence of the aesthetics on evangelical theology through doctrinal categories.
Dramatic Imagination: The Nouvelle Théologie of Kevin Vanhoozer
Hans Boersma, Regent College
Imagination is one of the central notions around which Kevin Vanhoozer structures his book, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology. This paper brings Vanhoozer’s book into discussion with Yves Congar’s approach to Tradition and with Henri de Lubac’s Eucharistic ecclesiology. The paper suggests that Vanhoozer engage more thoroughly theologians in the Catholic tradition. First, Vanhoozer’s understanding of the performance of scripture may be predicated on too strong a separation between script and performance, while his plea for theological interpretation, buttressed by the role he assigns to imagination, needs a larger role for the ecclesial space within which interpretation takes place. Second, by means of a discussion of de Lubac’s corpus triforme Christi (the Eucharistic, the historical, and the ecclesial forms of the “body of Christ) this paper makes a plea for a higher evangelical ecclesiology that provides greater warrant for ecumenical discussion.
Is the Bible a Playscript? Assessing Vanhoozer's Metaphor for Evangelical Theology
John Perry, University of Notre Dame
One of the richest metaphors of Vanhoozer's project is his notion that Scripture is a playscript. It is a script that the church must perform but may not revise. The church is called to give a spirited (not a wooden) performance, yet the director and cast may never depart from the playwright's intent. This raises interesting questions for evangelical theology, especially as it seeks to understand Scripture's relation to tradition and to history. While Vanhoozer's metaphor is not itself immune from evangelical critique, it poses an important challenge to many reigning evangelical assumptions. It is particularly interesting to note that those evangelicals who have accepted theology's 'cultural linguistic turn' (as Vanhoozer does), often do so on grounds that he rejects.
A20-22
Gay Men's Issues in Religion Group
Theme: Hopeful Instability: Queer Love and Divine Desire in Religious Tradition
"Coming Out," Witnessing, and Being Seen as Spiritual Acts in the Gay Community
Thomas V. Peterson, Alfred University
Many activities in the gay community, such as “coming out,” Pride Day, and rituals in the leather community involve witnessing and allowing oneself to be seen. How might these activities of disclosure be seen as spiritual activities? In part, the answer is found in accounts of those who have written about their experiences. In narratives that describe “coming out,” for example, there is often discussion about being healed by the very process of self disclosure. In conversations with men in the leather community, some will discuss their S/M rituals as occasions for profound spiritual experiences. But how are we to understand this spiritual healing? One theoretical possibility is using the Hindu concept of darshan and what happens when the worshipper becomes transparent before a deity. In a more general sense, witnessing may be an important key to understanding how spirituality occurs within the context of ritual.
Divine Love Letters: A Theological Instancing of Queer Love and Divine Desire
Alex Hivoltze, Boston University
This paper articulates instances of divine desire in queer love. I begin with a Christian love letter to God. I then use a same-sex love letter and parallel it to the Christian love letter, which complicates the divine relationship by introducing “messiness” as an instance of divine love, desire, and depth. Finally, I explore Brokeback Mountain as instancing “messiness” and as a parallel to the unspeakability of queer desire and divine desire.
Exploding Mystery: Identity Destabilisation in the Sacramental Moment
Elizabeth Stuart, University of Winchester
In dialogue with two mystics who have claimed to observe the inner workings of the sacraments, I will argue that the sacramental moment is one in which all forms of identity, including sexual identity, are rendered fundamentally unstable, beginning with the cultural crisis effected by baptism. Confirmation as understood in the broad catholic tradition will be analysed as an explosion of mystery which has the roots of its performance in the story of the Transfiguration. I will argue that the confirmation experience involves the pressurising of identity in a dynamic of ascent and descent in which gender and sexual orientation are queered by the very nature of the divinity which envelops and transforms it. In this sacramental space desire is also reconfigured beyond the dominant economies in which our contemporary sexual identities have been forged and thereby it offers the only plausible escape from the melancholia diagnosed by Judith Butler.
God’s Eros
John Blevins, Emory University
Contemporary scholars exploring Christian mysticism are developing new theological perspectives regarding eros and religious expression. This erotic exploration of our human desire to know God is important for the ways it helps us think theologically in ways that affirm gay male and other queer lives. What has not been explored in contemporary scholarship regarding Christian mysticism and eros is the idea that God's love for humanity is erotic as well; this paper will explore that notion and its implications for the theological concepts of incarnation and kenosis and for the ethical claim that heterosexuality is the only way to understand God’s intention for erotic expression because it alone mirrors the complementarity of male/female that God intended.
A20-23
Latina/o Religion, Culture, and Society Group
Theme: Legacies of Colonization: Comparative Religious and Theological Perspectives on "America" from the Margins
Participants in this panel will bring into critical and comparative dialogue the legacies of colonization with regard to religious experience, bringing the legacy of Iberian colonization (Spanish and Portuguese) into conversation with the legacies and experiences of other colonized, marginalized, and "minoritized" U.S. groups (African-American and Asian-American).
A20-24
Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought Group
Theme: Pragmatism: Broadening the Discussion
Dewey's Bulldog: Sidney Hook, Pragmatism, and Naturalism
Matthew Bagger, Brown University
An evaluation of Sidney Hook's defense of naturalism.
Susan Haack's "Reconsidered" Ethics of Belief
Rose Ann Christian, Towson University
In her essay, 'The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered," Susan Haack formulates an ethics of belief designed to rid us of the impression that in taking a position on the topic at hand, we must choose between 'the morally overdemanding account' defended by William Clifford in The Ethics of Belief and the 'epistemologically overpermissive account' advanced by William James in The Will to Believe. I argue that Haack's attractive account offers a fresh perspective on a question she does not consider, but that lay at the center of Clifford's and James' debate, that of the ethical permissibility of religious faith.
Rorty, Baldwin, and the Art of Story-telling
Joseph Winters, Princeton University
Richard Rorty is the most well-known contemporary pragmatist. His valiant attempt to dismantle epistemology-centered philosophy corresponds to his more recent criticism of academics on the left who act as spectactors, renouncing the abuses of American power without risking involvement in concrete projects to ameliorate our 'wretched' condition. This involvement requires, for Rorty, a broader identification with America which in turn is facilitated by the stories we tell about our past and the competing visions we project for our future. In this paper, I flesh out the relationship between narrative, imagination, and identity that Rorty delineates in Achieving our Country. I contend that he is able to place James Baldwin in his narrative of American development only by neglecting Baldwin's radical openness to the underside of the American experiment. By fleshing out Baldwin's divergence from Rorty, I hope to offer a different vision of what America might become.
A20-25
Reformed Theology and History Group and Religion in Europe Consultation
Theme: Remembering European Conflicts Past: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Memory and the Challenge of Reconciliation
In his latest book, The End of Memory (Eerdmans, 2006), Miroslav Volf returns to the theme of memory as it relates to the process of reconciliation. In it he considers the ambiguous legacy of memory in sustaining and deepening conflict, and he explores the possibility of “redeeming” memories of past offenses in ways that can contribute to genuine reconciliation. In this panel Volf’s theological reflections will serve as the common starting point of an interdisciplinary conversation regarding the role of memory in relation to specific modern European conflicts. Volf will be joined by three distinguished social scientists who in their respective fields (anthropology, political science, sociology) and in different contexts (Northern Ireland, Poland, Germany) have examined the complex interplay between memory, identity, conflict, and reconciliation.
A20-26
Religion and Disability Studies Group
Theme: Religion, Disability, and Concepts of the Other
This session spotlights papers that examine relationships between religion, disability, and concepts of the other, particularly emphasizing ways in which this otherness relates to understandings of community. Topics include hospitality, borderlands, images of the wayfarer or traveler, construction of community, distinctions between guest/host/stranger, new vantage points, communal versus individual journeys, values of creativity or beauty, the role of invitation or love, the importance of struggle, and eschatological images.
A Levinasian Perspective on Disability and Care
Joseph Ballan, Syracuse University
The writings of Emmanuel Levinas, philosopher and Talmudic commentator, seek to redress western thought’s reduction of human otherness to the horizon of the same. This oversight in the history of western philosophy is mirrored in the treatment of people with disabilities in liberal societies. Beginning from Levinas’s description of the other person as both vulnerable and needy, on the one hand, and transcendent and majestic, on the other, this paper seeks to use Levinas’s work to understand that particular form of otherness called disability. Unlike certain Christian approaches to disability that tend to look for God’s presence only in the other’s suffering, Levinas’s Jewish orientation allows for an experience of God’s presence in the other’s face as the command to serve the neighbor. Along these lines, Levinas’s work is used to call into question the assumption that caretakers are active and autonomous, while people with disabilities are helpless and passive.
Dethroning Rationality: A Theological Anthropology of/for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities
Molly Haslam, Vanderbilt University
The concept of human being has been conceived within the history of Christian theology in terms of a variety of intellectual capacities. In this paper, I engage the theological anthropology of the Christian theologian, Gordon Kaufman, who conceives of human being in terms of the intellectual capacities for symbolization and self-reflection necessary to set goals and to act with the intent to achieve them. I claim that this position is discriminatory against individuals with profound intellectual disabilities for whom symbol-use and intentional agency is not a possibility. I argue that human being is better understood in terms of the participation in relationships of mutual responsiveness. To bolster my argument, I offer a phenomenology of the responsive relations of an individual with a profound intellectual disability to demonstrate that relating to the world involves a variety of means of responding – bodily, verbally, affectively - not all of which are symbolic.
Enlightened Agency and Engagement: Three Wisdom Traditions’ Call to Be Radically Open to the “Other”
Lynne Bejoian, Columbia University
Our paper explores images, ideas, and understandings of the “Other” within three wisdom traditions. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam will be used to identity, ability, relationships, and community thereby uncovering discourses around social justice, service, and the sacred as the “Other” is considered and constructed. Dialogue across these three traditions will create a space for scholars, wisdom seekers, spiritual practioners, and religious teachers to reflect upon their own religious/spiritual traditions and consider the assumptions about the “Other” - where the disabled “Other” is still, or feels still to be, the stranger who is not welcome? How, further, to welcome one into our hearts and home?
Transgressing the Frame: A Movement towards a Transgressive Space beyond "Normality"
Mary Caygill, Trinity Methodist Theological College and University of Auckland
Beginning with the embodied experience described in Rhonda Svenson’s poem entitled "Framed," this paper begins with an analysis and critique of the hegemony of ‘normality’ by moving towards a deconstruction of this essentialism through the use of “queer” and postcolonial methodology. By appropriating the concept of ‘theological accesorising’ (adding to the wardrobe of the divine body of God) as utilized in the writing of both Goss and Althaus-Reid, some possibilities of creating a ‘third space’ will be explored. Assuming that theology is a communitarian art form, I will use some of the narrative experience, poetry and art that express the corporeal reality of persons living with disability. Drawing on this incarnated embodied reality becomes the means to enable different accessories to be taken from these experiences, to challenge the essentialism of ‘normality’, thus creating a third trangressive space out of which a new theological anthropology may emerge.
Toward a Theology of Intellectual Disability
Tracy Demmons, University of St. Andrews
This paper proposes that the Church is in need of a theology of intellectual disability. It aims to highlight this need by considering the Christian doctrine of revelation, arguing that some accounts of God’s self-communication imply a bar of hindrance for persons with cognitive handicaps. How, then, does revelation happen for a person without the ability to reason? How might one recognize God if one does not have the ability to recognize oneself? Such questions are explored in this paper. Nancy Eiesland, Stanley Hauerwas and John Swinton’s works have opened the way for an inclusive Christology, anthropology and ecclesiology respectively for persons with disabilities. This paper seeks to begin to expand this inclusiveness to the doctrinal realm. With the aid of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s works we shall explore themes of consciousness, awareness and community, seeking to begin to develop a theology of revelation that is inclusive of all persons.
A20-27
Roman Catholic Studies Group
Theme: Social Justice: Questions New and Old
Organizing for Dignity: Catholic Social Policy and Challenges to the Bracero Program
Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
Starting with Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Catholic clergy have consistently and publicly supported the rights of workers and migrants. Implicit in this support is a theological commitment to human dignity, healthy families, and a fair wage for work. The joint U.S.-Mexico Bracero guest worker migrant labor program (1942-1964) created a situation in which many Mexican Catholics were separated from their families and made to work long hours at low pay in often dangerous or demeaning conditions throughout the U.S. border states. This paper examines the ways in which Catholic social policies, especially Rerum Novarum, affected the ministry and work of several key clergy in Texas and California. It is shown that these clergy had an important role to play in bringing about the eventual end of the Bracero program.
Reconsidering John Paul II’s Ecclesia in Africa in the Shadow of the Rwandan Genocide
Jay Carney, Catholic University of America
In the recent history of the African church, two landmark events began within days of each other in April 1994: 1) the convoking of an unprecedented “all-Africa” synod of Catholic bishops in Rome, and 2) the onset of one of the worst human rights tragedies of modern times, the Rwandan genocide, in which upwards of 800,000 Rwandans would lose their lives. Despite this simultaneity, the tragedy remains far in the background of Pope John Paul II’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Africa. This paper aims to go where the late pontiff did not by analyzing Ecclesia in Africa in the context of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, grappling with such issues as the European missionary legacy, inculturation, models for church/state relations, and the connection between ethnic and religious imagination and identity formation.
Interpreting the "Common Good" According to Greek Patristic Writings of the Second through Fifth Centuries
Brian Matz, Katholieke Universiteit Lueven
This paper identifies both the relevant Greek patristic texts on social ethics and the hermeneutical issues appropriate to reading them. In the first half, it summarizes the socio-ethical content from Greek patristic texts of the second through fifth centuries. These texts regularly tie restoration of the “common good” to rectification of a variety of economic injustices. In the second half, it raises some hermenetical questions for these texts. For instance, to whom and of whom is the homilist speaking when he addresses matters of concern to the poor? Also, under what vision of the “common good” does the homilist frame his critique of economic injustices? In sum, it is believed that this paper will provide a framework for scholars of ethics, patristics, late antiquity, and Christian history in general to debate the contributions and merits of patristic social ethics for audiences of the twenty-first century.
The Intersection of Faith and Science in the Catholic Social Reform Work of Gladys Sellew and Mary Elizabeth Walsh in Washington, DC
Nicholas Rademacher, Catholic University of America
This presentation treats Catholicism in Washington, DC by reporting on the little-known Catholic social reform program of two women, Gladys Sellew and Mary Elizabeth Walsh. They were professional sociologists at The Catholic University of America who were inspired by the supernatural sociology of their mentor Paul Hanly Furfey and the example of the Catholic Worker people in New York City. Beginning in the late 1930’s, Sellew and Walsh combated poverty and racism by entering impoverished D.C. neighborhoods to live and work among the poor and outcast. Their work was unique because it was a combination of the Catholic Worker “house of hospitality” model and cutting-edge scientific social work. This presentation draws on rarely used archival material at The Catholic University of America. Photographs of the protagonists and the environment in which they worked bring to life the groundbreaking work in social justice performed by these two women.
A20-29
Christianity and Academia Consultation
Theme: Christian Higher Education: History, Theology, and Practice
This inaugural session of the Christianity and Academia Consultation will examine the complex relationship between academic life and Christianity through three lenses: history, theology, and practice. All three papers examine the forces that are sometimes thought to marginalize theological conversations within the academy; in some cases, however, these forces turn out to have a rather different impact than is sometimes assumed. By including specific case studies from both the past and the present, these papers provide excellent concrete analyses of the issues facing church-related institutions of higher education.
Politics, Epistemology, and Divinity: The Ghettoization of Theology at Nineteenth-Century Harvard
Stephen P. Shoemaker, Harvard University
Students at Harvard College in the early 19th century were taught systematic theology during at least half of their undergraduate program of study--as had been the case since the school's founding. However, its days as a presence in the undergraduate curriculum were numbered. In a movement initiated in the 1840's, the College's president boldly declared that 'Harvard University is not a theological establishment.' His successors in office, for a variety of reasons, followed suit. Why, after 200 years of providing mandatory instruction in theology, did Harvard College deliberately abandon the 'Queen of the Sciences'? At least two key factors were responsible for ushering in the demise of theology in the undergraduate curriculum: politics and epistemology.
The Creator, the Administrator, and Administrating: Can Theology Inform the Decision-making of Higher Education?
Bryan V. Hillis, Luther College, University of Regina
Can Christian theology inform academic university administration? Two former Canadian deans think so though their contexts of a secular university and a Christian College whose academic program is subject to the secular university’s approval are quite different. The question of what a university is and the various interests it and its administrators must serve is foremost in the mind of any University administrator. However, for these two former deans, Christian vocation in the service of more broadly defined interests is also paramount. Working with a theology of creation and grace informed by Reinhold Niebuhr and the critical realism of sociologist Roy Bhaskar, the authors propose that being “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” in university administration does not mean that theological values, broadly defined, must be sacrificed on the altar of administrative expediency.
Is Secularization a Bad Thing? The View from St. Olaf College
L. DeAne Lagerquist, Saint Olaf College
After George Marsden and James Burtchaell traced the secularization of American higher education, responses varied from alarmed to contrary to efforts to reverse the trend. Few challenged the implied charge that “secularized” schools are unfaithful. This paper argues that such judgments require a thick understanding of an institution’s “big tradition” and its local history and culture. St. Olaf College (included in four recent studies of religion and higher education) provides the illustrative case for this general methodological point. This paper responds to previous studies by: 1) it examining notions of religion and its proper manifestations in higher education; 2) considering St. Olaf’s “big tradition” theological tradition: Pauline-Augustinian-Lutheran Christianity; 3) exploring local history and educational practice as a manifestation of that tradition; and 4) suggesting that an understanding of faithfulness derived from this tradition can not easily judge secularization as unfaithfulness.
A20-31
Open and Relational Theologies Consultation
Theme: Intelligent Design: Theological Considerations
Intelligent Design and Theology: What Place for the Creator?
Taede A. Smedes, University of Leiden
In Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (InterVarsity Press 1999), William Dembski argues that intelligent design (ID) is basically three things: a scientific research program, an intellectual and cultural movement, and a way of understanding divine action. In this paper, I respond to Dembski’s third characteristic: divine action. In order to consider ID as a way of understanding divine action, three questions have to be asked: 1. How does Dembski know the designer is God? What reasons does Dembski give for this inference? Can other reasons be given for this inference?; 2. Can we know that the designer is God? Is it even remotely possible for human beings to make inferences from the world to God?; 3. Can God be the intelligent designer of ID?
ID believes that humans can come to understand God through science. I will argue, on the other hand, that all ID can conclude to is some inner-worldly causal force and that there is no justification in identifying this force as the Biblical or Christian God.
The Theological Stakes of Intelligent Design
Anna Case-Winters, McCormick Theological Seminary
After a brief historical overview of the evolution of the argument from design and how it has been regularly reformulated in relation to
changing scientific perspectives, I take up the present formulation referred to as Intelligent Design. By way of assessing ID, I will raise questions regarding the science and the theology that underlie.
Implications of Intelligent Design Theory for Cosmos as Creature and God as Creator
Brian Madison, Duke University
The theory of intelligent design attempts to be a scientific program and must be judged as such; however, a theistic construal of intelligent design theory has several implications for a theology of creation. Regarding “creation” as “the created cosmos,” ID raises questions about the nature and extent of creaturely freedom and the degree to which creaturely reality can in and of itself manifest divine intentions for it. In regard to “creation” as a uniquely divine form of activity, the theory of intelligent design theistically understood would bring with it a need to assess the nature of divine action, what God desires the creaturely realm to be, how God relates to it, and by what means God interacts with it. Finally, intelligent design theory brings with it a return to questions of theodicy with a new twist: what if ID theorists established deadly viruses were specifically and irreducibly complex?
The Theological Failure of "Intelligent Design" and a Whiteheadian Alternative
Palmyre Oomen, Radboud University Nijmegen
Against the claim that ID allows for faith in the context of science, it is argued that ID seriously injures religious belief and theology by impoverishing the theological and religious heritage. Specifically, by clinging to a mechanistic world view that reduces the world to ‘dead’ matter and extrinsic forces, ID reinforces the concept of an intrinsically purposeless world, contrary to its promise of rehabilitating purposiveness. This mechanistic perspective is challenged by the scientific view that the world consists of inherently dynamic, self-organizing processes (e.g. the biological process of evolution). The latter perspective calls for a different conception of God and of the God-world relationship. In line with Aristotle, Aquinas, Whitehead and adaptive dynamics, a conception is explored in which the relationship between God and the world is conceivable in terms of an intrinsically purposive nature, and God as the condition for the possibility of the world’s freedom and directionality.
A20-32
Sacred Space in Contemporary Asia Consultation and Tantric Studies Consultation
Theme: Inner and Outer Landscapes: Tantric Dimensions of Sacred Space in Asia
This panel focuses on divine bodies in and as the extra-ordinary spaces of the Indo-Tibetan sphere. In West Bengal, the goddess is dismembered and remembered in her prison-turned-temple pithas. In Benares, the goddess is transformed and reformed into the object of brahmanical control. In the literary spaces of Kalidasa’s poetic imagination, landscape is re-fashioned into the manifestation of divine bodies. In Kham (Eastern Tibet), the Hayagrīva mandala provides a conceptual trope and a tantric landscape within which Bonpo exorcism rituals of bodies may take place. Taken together, these papers explore the contours of subjective vs. objective reality, and investigate the role of ritual and the influence of imagination in transforming the commonplace into the not-so-common places of the natural world.
Fragments of Body, Pieces of Mind: Sacred Space in the Kali Temples of West Bengal
June McDaniel, College of Charleston
According to puranic and tantric myth, the goddess Shakti/ Kali was dismembered long ago, and the pieces of her body fell to earth and created sacred sites, the Shakti pithas. These are believed to still retain the goddess' living presence. Kali's identity has also been fragmented over time, coming to dwell in rocks, trees and statues. Often she is there involuntarily, entrapped in matter. The religious goal is not to liberate her, but rather to create a sacred space and worship her. This takes her from debasement and to honor, and her prison is transformed into a temple. This paper will examine origin stories for a variety of Kali temples in West Bengal, India, and the transformation that sacred sites undergo in the traditions of folk, bhakti and tantric Shaktism.
Urbanized Goddesses: The Yoginis in Banaras
Istvan Keul, Free University of Berlin
As part of a larger ongoing project on the Yogini cult in the past and present, this paper focuses on selected aspects related to the worship of Yoginis in one of the major religious centres of Hinduism: Banaras/Varanasi. Generally regarded as a group of goddesses associated with Tantric Hinduism, the Yoginis and their worship underwent a gradual change in the centuries following the heyday of the cult (ca. 9th-12th centuries C.E.). On the basis primarily of textual but also of contemporary ethnographic material, in my presentation I will argue that, in the case of Banaras, beginning with the 14th century at the latest, we can observe attempts to bring the Yoginis, whose worship was rooted in non-brahminical, rural traditions, into the range and control of the brahminical tradition.
The Tantric Body of Kalidasa
E. H. Jarow, Vassar College
This paper investigates the Tantric nature of poetic language and sensibility in the works of Kalidasa, in terms of how they reconstitute relationships between interiority and exteriority, between subjectivity and the natural world. The landscapes of the Meghaduta literally bend and transform through language and figuration as the “protagonist- Cloud” takes on forms suitable to the geography and mytho-history of a particular area. And the invocation of Siva’s eight manifest forms (Ashtamurti) at the opening of Sakuntala depicts a natural world resounding with the echoes (dhvani) of divinity. When the dramas of heroes and heroines are seen within the context of the divine interplay of Shiva-Shaktî, the Tantric aspect of the poet’s work emerges. This paper explores a number of these landscapes and asks if this revisioning of the natural world (that clearly informed Abhinavagupta) may have been one of the roots of Tantra itself.
Tibetan Bonpo Exorcistic Ritual and the Shared Tantric Landscape of Kham
J. F. Marc des Jardins, Concordia University
This paper, based on fieldwork conducted at Ye shes monastery in Nyag rong together with textual research on ritual manuals and commentaries, investigates the shared relationships which exist between a Buddhist, a Bonpo and the cultural landscape of Kham. It researches the Tantric worldview of the Mandala of Hayagrīva across sectarian boundaries and finds it a pliable and highly adaptable instrument which has been used to unify ethnic and religious communities’ worldview, dictate strategies and create a common religious landscape. At the core of this are principles inextricably linked to Tantric Teachings which are universalistic in nature and coming from the Tibetan conception of it as the Path of Transformation (‘gyur lam).
A20-40
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Capitol Hill Advocacy Orientation and Capitol Hill Visit
Tell Congress: teaching about and researching religion matters. Unless sufficient numbers of scholars show their support for increased federal funding of religious studies, Congress is unlikely—through agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities—to provide sufficient funding. Interested AAR and SBL members who are US citizens will go in small delegations to Capitol Hill and meet briefly with the staff of their members of Congress to encourage federal funding. Scholars who have participated in such meetings in the past invariably find them worthwhile—an insightful experience into the nature of the democratic process as well as an opportunity to influence their federal representatives about a cause they believe in. Preregistration by September 30 and orientation at the Annual Meeting are mandatory. To register or find out more, contact Susan Snider at ssnider@aarweb.org or go to http://www.aarweb.org/annualmeet/2006/advocacy.
A20-33
National Museum of African Art Tour
Sponsored by the Arts, Literature, and Religion Section and African Religions Group
The collection of the National Museum of African Art embraces the diverse artistic expressions found throughout Africa from ancient to contemporary times. Collection objects range from ceramics, textiles, furniture, and tools to masks, figures, and musical instruments. The arts of painting, printmaking, sculpture, and other media are well represented by living artists whose works highlight individual creativity, address global and local art trends, and innovatively transform artistic traditions into modern idioms.
Questions can be directed to Brent Plate: b.plate@tcu.edu.
A20-34
Restoration Ecology of the Anacostia River and Environmental Justice Boat Tour
Sponsored by the Religion and Ecology Group
Doug Siglin, head of the Religious Partnership for the Anacostia River, affiliated with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, will direct a boat tour of the river and discuss the work of the partnership and the issues connected to the river. The main stem of the Anacostia River, one of the most polluted in the country, has become the object of intense efforts to restore the quality of the water, the number of wildlife species, and the beauty of the shoreline. These efforts have brought together environmental groups, industry, governments, local citizens, and the faith community. Redevelopment is certain to lead to physical improvements in those areas as well as the displacement of people who have made them their home. Opinions on whether redevelopment of the Anacostia would be good for the city and its people are as varied as they are tightly held. Contact Laurel Kearns at lkearns@drew.edu for information.
A20-36
Plenary Address
Theme: An Interview with Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Albright was nominated in 1996 by President Clinton as the first female Secretary of State. Prior to her appointment, Secretary Albright served as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as a member of President Clinton’s Cabinet and National Security Council, and as the President of the nonprofit Center for National Policy. She earned a doctorate in public law and government from Columbia University and is the Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in international affairs, US foreign policy, Russian foreign policy, and Central and Eastern European politics, and is responsible for developing and implementing programs designed to enhance women’s professional opportunities in international affairs. Her most recent book is The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (HarperCollins, 2006), which focuses on religion and foreign affairs.
A20-50
Sacred and Religious Sites of Washington Bus Tour
Sponsored by the North American Religions Section
Join us on a bus tour emphasizing houses of worship associated with the American presidency. Jeanne Halgren Kilde, University of Minnesota; Dewey D. Wallace, George Washington University; and Peter W. Williams, Miami University Ohio will be the tour guides.
A20-51
Special Topics Forum
Theme: How to Publish Your Book: Advice from Oxford University Press and from the Editors of the AAR Book Series and JAAR
Sponsored by the Publications Committee
Founded on the premise that scholars know best what books are needed in the field of religion, the AAR publishing program with Oxford University Press produces quality scholarship for religion scholars and their students. OUP is a premier international publisher, and the AAR has published hundreds of titles, many of which have become essential tools in the development of our field and in the training of new scholars. AAR/OUP books are published in five series: Academy Series; Religion, Culture, and History Series; Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series; Teaching Religious Studies Series; and Texts and Translations Series. The JAAR editor will also discuss essay-publishing. This panel provides the opportunity to hear from experienced OUP and AAR editors and ask any and all questions you might have about publishing in the AAR/OUP Series. There will also be an opportunity to speak individually with an editor.
A20-52
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Religion, Health, and Social Justice: African Perspectives on a Global Issue
Sponsored by the Regions Committee
This panel will probe the interface between religion, religious tradition, and health in Africa in the context of the Millennium Development Goals and the new UN/WHO/G8 program for Universal Access. The serious challenges presented by multiple public health crises such as HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, trauma and, potentially, avian flu to health systems in Africa, and the widespread engagement of faith-based organizations or initiatives from diverse religious traditions in response to some of these challenges offer an opportunity to rethink our understanding of religion, health, and social justice, with global implications. The panelists collectively embody a mix of experience, practice, current research activity, and sustained reflection on these themes in Africa. The theme itself acts as a particularly effective lens on the status of social science, religious practice, and theological reflection in our time.
A20-53
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Theology in the Public Sphere: The Challenges of Being a Public Intellectual
Sponsored by the Theological Education Steering Committee
With increasing appeals to faith traditions in public political discourse by candidates for office and by the media, the opportunity, demand and need for scholars of religion to become more articulate public theologians is increasingly urgent. Catholics and Evangelicals play a powerful role. Recent publication by the US Catholic bishops of The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, and by Evangelicals for Social Action and the National Association of Evangelicals of Toward an Evangelical Public Policy and For the Health of the Nation: an Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility, offer striking opportunity for asserting a more responsible and centrist understanding of those two powerful traditions. The degree of overlap between centrist evangelicals and official Catholic teaching is dramatic and different from much public perception. It could increase the quality of political discourse. The four panelists are involved in delineating that common ground and are effective practitioners of public theology.
A20-54
Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section
Theme: Reflecting on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Success Stories
Differing and Oppositional Religious Voices in Our Classrooms
Nathan Kollar, St John Fisher College
Should graduate and undergraduate schools bring radically different, and sometimes oppositional, religious ways of life into the classroom? If we do encourage encounters with these ways of life, what are the pedagogies we should use? What are the dangers? What options should we make available for students to protect both their freedom and conscience? Indeed, what are the principles upon which a listening curriculum and pedagogy should be built into our institutions of higher learning? Select faculty and administrators from four graduate schools of theology and three undergraduate departments of Religious Studies in Rochester, NY discussed and experimented with the theories, pedagogies, syllabi and curricula surrounding these questions during the last academic year. This session will share the results of that year’s work and seek how the participants have answered similar questions in their professional life.
Exploring the Spirituality Gap between Faculty and Student Expectations in the Introductory Class in Religious Studies and Theology
John K. Simmons, Western Illinois University
This presentation explores the tension between maintenance of academic rigor in the classroom and personal transformation, especially student interest in their own spiritual journey. A spirituality gap exists between faculty and student course objectives in the setting of the introductory course in religious studies or theology. This three-part presentation includes: 1) Evidence of this gap in course objectives and desired outcomes drawn from my involvement in a nation-wide study, “Teaching Introductory Technology and Religion: Lessons From the Practices of Fifty Effective Teachers” funded by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion; 2) Further evidence from student comments drawn from my experience teaching all freshmen classes in Western Illinois University’s inaugural First Year Experience program; 3) An interactive discussion with the audience on the topic at hand.
Intersections, Parallels, and Integrations: Oral History, Pedagogy, and Research
Claire Bischoff and Mary Elizabeth Moore, Emory University
This paper introduces the value of oral history methods for religious and theological pedagogy and scholarship. We make a case for integrating pedagogy and research when goals and methods are compatible, then explore the potential for enriching and intensifying both of them in that process. Our thesis is that oral history provides an apt method for working at the intersection of teaching and scholarship because it serves well the values and goals of humanistic pedagogy and of social science research with human subjects. To test this, we analyze a graduate theological course that included oral history research methods and contributed to an ongoing research project. We draw constructive conclusions from the case in dialogue with oral history literature, pedagogical research, and supplemental cases. Among these conclusions are that teaching through oral history is an adaptable, life-engaging method that enriches teaching and contributes to a significant body of research.
Writing Theology Well: Reflections on Process, Pedagogy, and Writing as a Theological Practice
Lucretia B. Yaghjian, Episcopal Divinity School, Weston Jesuit School of Theology
Recent changes in the demographic landscape of theological schools have prompted many institutions to provide writing courses and tutorial support for a more diverse student population, but instructional resources have not kept up with the pace of these programs. In this presentation I reflect on the process, pedagogy and theological practice of “Writing Theology Well: A Theological Writer’s Rhetoric,” which provides a discipline-driven introduction to theological writing and research for students enrolled in theological schools and seminaries, their writing instructors and tutors, and theological faculty. Integrating the disciplines of writing, rhetoric and theology in its pedagogy, the book strives to map the terrain of the emerging sub-discipline of theological writing by providing a standard text for theological educators engaged in the teaching and mentoring of writing, while helping to equip students for their wider vocations as writers, preachers and communicators in varied ministerial and professional contexts.
A20-55
Arts, Literature, and Religion Section
Theme: Art, Apocalypse, and Katrina: Poetic Responses to Disaster
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans, coastal Mississippi, and Louisiana, revealing how unprepared our government, relief groups, and military are for a major disaster. Considering this tragic event alongside others underscores a number of consistencies: for example, socio-political inequalities, which cause the poor to suffer the most; feelings of vulnerability by those outside the affected areas; and survivor guilt and double-consciousness among those directly affected. Three Gulf Coast poets will read work dealing with the hurricanes and their aftermath as well as with the environmental prelude. A fourth writer, in concert with the other panelists, will contextualize their artistic responses within the realm of literature and trauma/disaster: 9/11, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, among others. Ample time will be reserved for audience comments about the poetry and the insights of the panelists and respondent. The audience, by responding to poetry in the immediacy of performance, will provide the context for further discussion.
A20-56
Christian Systematic Theology Section
Theme: Global Mission after Colonialism
The Missio Spiritus as an Under-explored Ground of Post-colonial Missiology and Praxis
Robert Hughes, University of the South
The Missio Spiritus has often been a missing element in even contemporary Trinitarian missiologies. A constructive proposal to give the Spirit her own theological locus, based on Tillich and several recent pneumatologies (Jenson, Johnson, McDonnell, Rogers) provides a new ground for understanding the missiological character of the church and of post-colonial missiological praxis. In particular, attention to the Missio Spiritus, from gifting the Word/Wisdom with a surprising body to sacramental consecration of the pleroma, provides new insight into the besetting issues of interfaith dialog, economic development, and environmental stewardship in a highly contextualized, post-colonial praxis. Specific examples from the experience of one service-based mission society provide support for this hypothesis.
Church and Empire: Free-Church Ecclesiology in a Global Era
Earl Zimmerman, Eastern Mennonite University
The mission of the church in our global era is to recover a vision of human flourishing rooted in the life and vision of Jesus and to form a covenantal community that is thick enough to embody that mission. This way of being present in the world will not only resist the onslaught of hegemonic social and economic and forces, but go beyond them by using the energies of globalization in ways that are both antagonistic and cooperative. Christian communities that live out of their religious tradition create an alternative ontology and practice which enables them to embody more humane and life-giving communal models of peace, justice, and care for creation. Accordingly, a free-church or Anabaptist ecclesiology offers a model of the church that is especially adept at negotiating the terrain of the emerging global era.
Inclusive Love beyond Inclusivism: Modeling the Church’s Mission after the Inclusive Love of the Trinity
Daniel Ott, St. Andrews Presbyterian College
The God/world relationship can be imagined by use of a model wherein God lovingly includes the world in God’s own being through the missions of the Trinity. Such a model provides a useful tool for ecclesiology. The church’s identity and mission can be modeled after the Trinity’s inclusive love. Using a term like ‘inclusive love’ when thinking about the church’s mission in a pluralistic age, immediately brings to mind notions of inclusivism like that put forward most prominently by Karl Rahner. This paper insists that the kind of inclusive love modeled by the Trinity pushes the church past such inclusivism. What is needed is a truly pluralistic perspective that loves the other precisely as other. This paper suggests that an ‘orientational pluralism ’ can do just that. Using such an approach the church is empowered to work in and with the world expressing the inclusive love of the Trinity.
From the Ends of the Earth: "International Minister" or Missionary? A Roman Catholic Perspective on the Changing Face of Mission in the United States
Margaret Eletta Guider, Weston Jesuit School of Theology
Given current trends in World Christianity and the complex dynamics of globalization, this paper provides a contextual U.S.-based theological assessment of the Roman Catholic church's understanding of its missionary nature and the implications of this understanding for Roman Catholic missionary identity in the United States. Secondly,the paper advances the claim that participation in the missio Dei is predicated on more than sending forth missionaries to the ends of the earth (Mt 28:19). Participation also is predicated on receiving missionaries from the ends of the earth (Jn 13:20) in a posture of relational interdependency that contributes to the building up of local churches through mutual concern and mutual correction. Finally, the paper critically examines the use of the term 'international minister', its theological, ecclesiological, and social presuppositions, as well as the label's potential to circumscribe the the missionary identity of ministers who come from other lands and cultures, especially from Africa.
A20-57
Comparative Studies in Religion Section and Buddhist Philosophy Group
Theme: Buddhist Philosophy as a Comparative Enterprise: A Solution to Philosophy's Problem of Truth
The so-called "Problem of Truth" in philosophy is primarily a conundrum drawn from the recognition that human knowledge is mediated by concepts and language. These are always imperfect tools, conditioned by culture and history and marked by human motives. To what degree, then, is it sensible to believe that we have access to anything worth calling "truth"? Just what makes something "true"? While no unified vision of truth is poised to appear on the horizon, the members of this panel all have found the method of Comparative Religion to be a powerful tool in circumventing the all-too-familiar hazards of the problem of truth. More specifically, the panel participants all approach these large topics through the relatively focused, particularized—and therefore heuristically useful—perspective of Buddhist philosophy. Questions of central concern in this enterprise, consequently, surround the very notion of “Buddhist philosophy” itself.
A20-59
Philosophy of Religion Section
Theme: Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Religion
Foucault, Biopolitics, and Religion
Matthew Chrulew, Monash University
This paper will explicate the complex web of inheritance and betrayal that makes up Agamben’s and Foucault’s discussions of biopower, which has its origins in the Christian model of the pastorate. How do we keep open the possibility of critiqueing this conjunction of politics and life? Is Agamben right to reposition biopolitics within sovereignty and law, in order to seek a somewhat ‘transcendent’ messianic alternative? Or ought we return to Foucault’s insistence on performing a thoroughly immanent critique of biopower?
Law beyond Law: Agamben, Deleuze, and the Unconscious Event
Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas
A major crisis in contemporary belief concerns law, theorized in Carl Schmitt’s political theology and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics. One response to this crisis is the attempted reconstruction of society on the basis of Biblical (or Qur’anic) Law. This fundamentalism is seen by many as the only alternative to the cynical manipulation of law by power, or the skepticism of a legal relativism that takes refuge in moral feelings. On the other hand, the “zone of indiscernability” of law established by the state of exception represents an opportunity to radically construct a “pure law” (Benjamin) that is fully immanent, and not grounded in life, morality, scripture, or institutions. Re-reading Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, this law beyond law concerns the dynamic unconscious that accompanies an event as it crosses both sense and body. Pure law concerns the unconscious event.
Biopolitics, Immanence, and the Wages of Life
Gregory Kaplan, Rice University
Recently the question of how the transcendence or the transcendental -- either going beyond or getting behind -- of the phenomenon and its experience figures in the history of philosophy has served as a way to reposition the modern critique of metaphysics in a postmodern epoch which has reevaluated onto-theological inquiry. Even theologically minded philosophers who press for transcendence either in principal or de facto authorize a conception of immanence as well. Nonetheless, immanence remains largely unthought or, more critically, unthinkable. For this reason the so-called theological turn in phenomenology must, in my view, begin to take into account the biological and the political as the structure and movement of immanence. My paper will make a two-pronged argument. Biopolitics supplies us with the models and the metaphors to rethink immanence; and rethinking immanence as biopolitics allows us to reconsider the vitality of immanence for (or against) transcendence.
Biopolitics, Ecotechnics, and the Possibility of Subjectivity
William Robert, Louisiana Sate University
This paper calls for a “return to Foucault” in discussions of biopolitics, in particular those that include readings of Agamben’s Homo Sacer. It does so through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, who offers a careful and critical response to Agamben focused on the “bio” in “biopolitics”—in other words, on the question of life. Nancy’s emphasis on bios and on the technical qualities of life, or ecotechnics, makes way for a return to Foucault’s intertwined concepts of biopolitics and technologies of the self. This paper explores this intertwining as a way of considering the possibility of human subjectivity in a biopolitical frame. Considering Foucault's account of subjection opens ont the possibility of agency, whether subjective or biopolitical, grounded in particular techniques. Drawing on a careful reading of Foucault, this paper argues for an inextricable link between biopolitics and the possibility of human subjectivity and agency grounded in self-subjecting ecotechnics.
A20-60
Religion in South Asia Section
Theme: Transgressing Traditions and Traditional Transgressions
This session explores the nuances of transgression through providing a series of case studies that examine transgression in a variety of contexts and valences. Each paper addresses a unique cluster of transgressions, but taken together, they survey the wide range of types of transgression. The case studies also cover a range of religions (Sufism and three variants of Hinduism); types of practitioners (virtuosos versus regular people), historical periods (medieval through contemporary), and type of evidence (classical texts, popular pamphlets, ethnographic interviews). In some cases, transgression is represented in a negative light: pamphlets on domestic vows assert that violating rules will destroy the vrat’s efficacy; many middle-class citizens regard an illegal shrine’s presence on the street as transgressive. In other cases, transgression is represented more positively. Tamil Saiva hagiographies celebrate certain ritual-ethical transgressions, while South Asian Sufis transgress the norms of gender and sexuality, thereby constructing the sanctity of a saint.
A20-62
Study of Judaism Section
Theme: “God Is the Truth”: The Star of Redemption between Philosophy and Theology
This panel will be devoted to unpacking Rosenzweig’s statement “God is the Truth,” and to answering some of the questions it raises about the core teachings of The Star itself, and about the “New Thinking” which The Star is meant to represent. We will try to shed light on this statement by approaching it from four different perspectives, or within four different contexts: 1) in the context of Rosenzweig’s relation to his philosophical past, and his relation to German Idealism, in particular; 2) in the context of Rosenzweig’s relation to the Jewish mystical tradition; 3) in the context of Rosenzweig’s relation to the philosophical and theological trends of his own times; and 4) in relation to Rosenzweig’s future, to those thinkers who, inspired and perplexed by Rosenzweig’s thought, came to rethink the “new thinking” of the Star in new and fruitful ways.
A20-63
Theology and Religious Reflection Section
Theme: Memory, Suffering, and Hope
Black Holes and Blue Skies: Trauma and Suffering in History
Flora A. Keshgegian, Brown University
This paper, an exercise in critical and constructive Christian theology, will argue that traditional Christian formulations of suffering and hope as well as theological approaches to historical violence are not adequate to address fully the dynamics of suffering and injury inflicted by such violence, especially when the violence is ongoing and/or not fully and publicly acknowledged. Trauma theory and victim studies offer alternative resources for understanding the dynamics of inflicted suffering that prove fruitful for theological reconstruction. Within these broad claims, this paper will investigate one particular theological symbolization of hope: God’s promise of redemption imagined as completion, either by the realization of time’s telos or by images of restoration and fulfillment in eternal life. The nature of trauma as interruptive and symbolizations of traumatic wounding and loss contrast with imagined, promised completion. This paper will explore such contrasts in order to re-imagine hope in relation to inflicted suffering.
Empire, Enforced Migration, and Solidarity: Pursuing a Theology of Migration
Lester Edwin Ruiz, New York Theological Seminary
The pursuit of a “theology of migration” has arisen as a profound, if sometimes unarticulated, need of Filipino migrant workers to find not only the tools that will assist them in their struggles for survival in their radically displaced, dislocated, and dispersed lives, but also a culturally- and spiritually-appropriate framework to help them in their struggles for meaning and hope. Filipino migrant workers are part of a growing number of Filipinos-in-Diaspora, the majority of which are women, on whose bodies the structures, meanings, and purposes of empire—of which U.S. empire is one form—are inscribed; whose lives through the fusion of exile and migration, re-present the dynamics of contemporary human migrations that follow the scent of transnational, if not global, capitalism; and, whose political, economic, and cultural situations—particularly their suffering and oppression—raise questions about the religio-moral demand for solidarity. This paper will explore the relationship among empire, enforced migration, and solidarity.
Remembering the Nakba: Tours of Destroyed Palestinian Villages as Pilgrimages of Lament and Hope
Alain Epp Weaver, University of Chicago
Zochrot, an Israeli organization based in Tel Aviv dedicated to 'remembering the Nakba in Hebrew' (Nakba being the Arabic word for 'catastrophe,' the word used to designate the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948), organizes tours for Israeli Jews and internally displaced Palestinian citizens of Israel ('Israeli Arabs') to the sites of Palestinian villages inside Israel destroyed in 1948. These tours consist of hearing the testimonies of Palestinian refugees from the visited villages and of posting signs in Hebrew and in Arabic naming the original functions of buildings now in ruins (e.g., churches, mosques), naming that which had been erased from memory and the landscape. In conversation with Israeli political theorists and historians, Palestinian Christian theologians, and recent theological work on memory and forgiveness, this paper offers a theological analysis of the role of lament and of the possibilities of reconciliation and hope in Zochrot's work.
Empire’s Other: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future
Roger S. Gottlieb, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
In this essay I will describe how the guiding values of religious environmentalism—a theological and ethical vision of earth community which respects and sustains all forms of life—constitute a fundamental Other to the different dimensions of Empire: the now dominant values of globalization, consumerism, and fundamentalism. After describing some of the features and possible points of weakness of Empire, I will also provide a highly condensed overview of its Other as a whole and sketch three brief sketches of concrete examples of contexts in which it poses a profound and hopeful alternative to Empire: The Jewish Shalom Center’s campaign against ‘Big Oil,’ the Sarvodaya movement’s challenge to destructive modernization in Sri Lanka; and the transcontinental coalition of resistance to Indian’s Narmada Dam project.
A20-64
Women and Religion Section and Native Traditions in the Americas Group
Theme: Can the Subaltern Speak? Revisited: Gender, Colonialism, and the Politics of History in Noenoe Silva's Aloha Betrayed
Historians of Hawai'i had argued that Native Hawai'ians had not resisted annexation. However, these historians focus only English sources. Noenoe Silva's Aloha Betrayed, however, has rewritten Hawai'ian history by focusing on sources written in Hawai'ian. In so doing, she discovered there was a widespread resistance movement to annexation involving the majority of the Native Hawai'ian population. Furthermore, Silva also discovered that it was women who were central to the organizing, whereas previous historians have written women of the history of Hawai'i. Silva goes on further to look many English translations of spiritual/cultural texts of Native Hawai'ians excise the role of women. This panel will assess the impact of Silva's work for religious studies, biblical studies, and women's studies. Her work puts a twist on the question of "can the subaltern speak?" by showing that the subaltern may in fact have a huge written legacy that is not being read.
A20-65
Anthropology of Religion Group and Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Group
Theme: The Ethics and Politics of Museum Display
This session is designed as an extended seminar exploring the dynamics of museum display. Taking advantage of this year's AAR meeting location, four papers reflect on religious, ethical, and political concerns raised by the conditions of museum display in Holocaust-related institutions and other museological sites associated with atrocity. Topics include voyeurism, virtue, the treatment of human remains, and the issue of pedagogical intent. Presider Edward T. Linenthal will serve as a moderator/discussant.
The Victim's Body and the Ethics of Viewing
Jennifer L. Geddes, University of Virginia
This paper explores the ethics of viewing the bodies of victims of atrocity in order to suggest that our viewing be informed by an awareness of two poles of temptation: voyeurism, at one end, and willed blindness, at the other. While voyeurism involves sight as a mode of pursuing curiosity, fascination, and titillation, willed blindness rejects looking at images in an effort to protect oneself from discomfort, disruption, and the duty to respond. By being aware of these two poles of temptation, we can work towards an ethics of viewing that includes respect for the dead, for their bodies, and for their dignity, while also taking seriously the duty to acknowledge and face, as best we can, the full brutality of their murder, torture, and/or humiliation; to bear witness, in whatever meager way we can, to their suffering; and to keep present the memory of the atrocities inflicted on them.
Sugihara Chiune and the Political Utility of Altruism: One Hero, Two Museums, and Myriad Competing Shared Cultural Memories
Jane Marie Law, Cornell University
In 1940, the Japanese consulate to Lithuania, Sugihara Chiune, acting against orders from the Japanese government, wrote over 2100 visas for Jews fleeing to Lithuania from German-occupied Poland. In 1947, upon his return to Japan, he was forcibly retired from public service. This paper, based on research conducted at the two major Sugihara museums, Kaunas, Lithuania and Yaotsu, Japan, explores the uses of narratives of virtue, altruism and religious conviction in the construction of the cultural memory of Sugihara. Focusing on the creation of a central Sugihara narrative and its disproportionate use in discussing Japanese involvement in World War II’s European war theater, this paper analyzes two Sugihara museums and their multi-focal identification of the museum attendee. This paper situates the identification with such themes of altruism and heroism in the larger discussions of cultural memory, to see how such themes advance other projects, including historical revisionism and selective forgetting.
Torah and Taboo: Is the United States Holocaust Museum Jewish?
Oren Baruch Stier, Florida International University
“Is museum space religious space?” “Do the strategies of display, i.e., the ways certain objects, such as human remains, are presented and/or experienced, make them into sacred objects?” This presentation focuses on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and on a series of staged encounters there with spaces, objects, and other people, which shape the visitors’ museum experiences while simultaneously framing what might be called the USHMM’s worldview. In the course of addressing my two central questions, I will also engage the question, “Is the USHMM a Jewish Museum?” while asking as well “How would we know?” and “Why would it matter?” This question of Jewishness is more than a mere organizing rubric for this presentation, because it foregrounds the issues of religion and, in particular, religious identity that I argue are central to the questions of design and experience I have made the focus of my proposed discussion.
Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders? Witnessing, Remembering, and the Ethics of Representation in Museums of the Holocaust
Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh
Controversies about the appropriate representation of the Holocaust in exhibitions, in particular in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and at the Imperial War Museum London (IWM), have highlighted the contested nature of these representations. In these debates questions about the ethics and aesthetics of representing atrocity, the role and responsibility of displaying artifacts of the Holocaust, and about the challenges and limitations peculiar to an object-led display have been joined by concerns about the pedagogical intent of Holocaust exhibitions.
A20-66
Augustine and Augustinianisms Group and Eastern Orthodox Studies Group
Theme: Augustine and the Christian East
The Place of Augustine in the Ecclesiology of Georges Florovsky
Will Cohen, Catholic University of America
The paper begins by noting longstanding tensions within Orthodox ecclesiology concerning the recognition of non-Orthodox sacraments. It then offers an extended examination of how the 20th century Russian émigré theologian Georges Florovsky articulated a sacramental theology based expressly on the premises established by Augustine in De Baptismo. Not all the ways in which Augustine’s perspective was developed by the medieval West are acceptable to Florovsky, but he affirms Augustine’s basic distinction between the “validity” and “efficacy” of sacraments. Ultimately, the indispensable contribution of Augustine was in his understanding of schism as what Florovsky calls a “dissipation of love.” It is through a creative appropriation of this insight—presenting its flip side, as it were—that Florovsky is able to recognize “preparatory grace,” already at work as a will and thirst for unity, in presently separated communities. This approach neither obscures the presence of division nor minimizes the imperative to overcome it.
Good Sex? Desire in Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa
David Dunn, Vanderbilt University
I argue that the function of sexual desire in the anthropologies of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo is illustrative of a larger theological break between East and West. This comparative analysis is be constructed in three parts. The first treats marriage, virginity, and sexual pleasure in Augustine's theology. The same pattern is repeated with Gregory of Nyssa in the second section. The conclusion draws out the larger anthropological implications suggested by the different functions of desire in the three contexts mentioned above.
The Liturgical Commemoration of Augustine in the Byzantine East: An Ambiguous Lex Orandi for an Ambiguous Lex Credendi
Peter Galadza, Saint Paul University
The ambiguity surrounding the status of Augustine's theology within Orthodoxy is matched by ambiguities surrounding his liturgical commemoration. Notwithstanding certain assertions to the contrary, Augustine's name does not appear regularly in Orthodox synaxaria until the 19th century. And in spite of the fact that it is the Russians (after the latinophrones of the 14th century) who begin to appropriate his thought most consistently, it is the Greeks who first compose akolouthiai to Augustine. The first of these appears in 1861, and the second in 1914. Nonetheless, neither of these has entered the Greek menaion. Only in 1955 do the Russians (the Synod Abroad) compose an akolouthia to Augustine. This paper studies the provenance, use, and themes of these akolouthiai, which, incidentally, extol Augustine, as 'a confirmation of the Orthodox faith,' and 'flame burning up heresies.' Such encomia must enter any discussion of Augustine's place within Eastern Orthodoxy.
The Vision of God: Reconciling the Controversy Concerning Augustine’s Exegesis of the Old Testament Theophanies
John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Boston College
This paper examines the debate regarding the nature of Old Testament theophanies. Augustine’s innovative exegesis in his De Trinitate asserts their creaturely character, while on the East the very same epiphanies were regarded as manifestations of the uncreated energies of God. What is at stake in this tension between East and West is nothing less than the very possibility of an experience of God. We shall attempt to reconcile the two seemingly antithetical positions by developing a more nuanced theory of signification that grounds theological aesthetics on Christology. The theologies of Nicholas of Cusa and Hans Urs von Balthasar will be discussed as well as recent developments in the phenomenology of God.
A20-67
Bible in Racial, Ethnic, and Indigenous Communities Group
Theme: Biblical Reading and Colonial Hermeneutics
Biblical Reading and Colonial Hermeneutics will consider the history and interpretation of particular biblical texts in the colonization and/or subjugation of racial, ethnic minority, and indigenous peoples.
Does Contextual Exegesis Require an Affirming Bible? Lessons from "Apartheid" and "Africa" as Narcissistic Hermeneutical Keys
Christo Lombaard, University of South Africa
It has become almost impossible to critique the concept of contextual exegesis of the Bible in Africa. Moreover, 'relevance' in biblical interpretation is implicitly understood as the texts of the Bible affirming the current socio-political project(s) of a group with a current claim to power. Such hermeneutics are ideologically determined efforts at seeking legitimacy for these socio-political project(s). Criticism of or alternatives to such efforts in biblical interpretation are regarded with severe suspicion. Building forth on four previous studies, this paper analyses the ways in which, first, 'apartheid' and now, 'Africa', function as such narcissistic hermeneutical keys. The critical religious and socio-political functions of the biblical texts are thus lost in this 'political carnival' (J. Ellul).
The Ebonics Bible: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Charles E. DeBose, California State University, East Bay
This paper engages multiple ambiguities of the term Ebonics, which, as a technical term, is pan-diasporic in scope. The term “U.S. Ebonics” refers specifically to the cultural language of African Americans. Analysis of ongoing or recently-completed projects to translate the Bible into English-lexified language varieties spoken in various parts of the African diaspora sets the stage for discussion of the untapped potential of such cultural treasures as Negro Spirituals, and James Weldon Johnson’s version of “The Creation,” for a future effort to translate the Bible into U.S. Ebonics. Such an effort can benefit greatly from lessons to be learned from extant translation projects in other diasopra communities, especially if care is taken to plan its implementation in such a way that its timeliness, importance and seriousness of purpose is clear, and its most attractive and least controversial elements are effectively promoted.
American Samson: Learning from the Schoolmaster
Laura E. Donaldson, Cornell University
Most people would regard the harsh injunctions of Mark 9:43 as hyperbole, or an extreme exaggeration, stressing the necessity of dealing with potential problems before they become actual ones – unless, of course, they happened to be a Christian Indian in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. For this group of American Indians, Mark’s terrifying mandate assumed a word-for-word significance that had profound implications for them, their families and their communities. Indeed, the experience of the Ninnimissinuok (Massachusett) who largely populated New England’s seventeenth century “praying towns” reveals that a literalist biblical interpretation of Mark 9: 43-48 and Matthew 8: 8-9 was crucial both to the Puritan-Native encounter and the colonialist ideology of America as a biblical nation.
Three Points and the Poem: Theopoetics and Non-Canonical Texts, Tones, and Tools of Black Preaching
Raedorah Stewart, Proclaim and Publish Ministries
With more recent scholastic intentions towards Theopoetics in theological and spirituality discourse, this paper discusses the rhetorical phenom of Black Preaching as theopoetic in form, context and praxis. Considering Katherine Keller’s definition that theopoetics is in essence a “paraphrase of theology;” coupled with Roland Faber describing theopoetics as the “poetic character of religious language,” this paper asserts that theopoetics is a normative and historical expression of biblical hermeneutic in Black preaching. As a method of biblical interpretation, theopoetics emerges through definitive metaphors of culture, race and gendering in Black Preaching. Likewise as art and theology, Black Preaching employs non-canonical texts, rhythmic cadence and tonality, and public performance tools to facilitate the ontological experience of God in Scripture. Critically analyzing slave sermons to contemporary pulpiteers as parenthetical embrace, this paper observes theopoetic evidence in Black Preaching including sermons by Howard Thurman, Theresa L. Fry Brown, and Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
Zora Neale Hurston's Bible
Danielle Sigler, Austin College
This paper will examine Zora Neale Hurston's interpretation of the Bible through her works of fiction, most notably her book-length work Moses, Man of the Mountain and her one-act play, The First One. It will consider Hurston's engagement with and her rejection of dominant readings of the 'curse of Ham' and the story of Moses. Hurston's work on and inspired by the Bible (including the Book of Harlem, The Seventh Veil, and the unpublished mansucript Herod the Great), has been largely overlooked and yet it is a rich source for a better understanding of Hurston as well as African American biblical interpretive traditions.
A20-68
Bonhoeffer: Theology and Social Analysis Group
Theme: Which Bonhoeffer? For Whom?
As the study of the writings and legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has matured in this country, new works have emerged analyzing the "Bonhoeffer phenomenon" itself (to quote a 2004 book title). These studies examine the lenses through which particular interpreters frame Bonhoeffer, or the inevitable extent to which given understandings -- including those of his peers and contemporaries -- reflect a constructed Bonhoeffer. Last year this Group hosted a session exploring the interpreted mutability of the "historical" Bonhoeffer; in this session we wish to bring the conversation forward into questions of how Bonhoeffer is taught, interpreted, or received in particular contemporary U.S. contexts. Framed around broader questions of pedagogy and reception, the papers will explore instances of contemporary U.S. construction of Bonhoeffer and his significance: in a college classroom, in churches' confession of sin, and in Christian political identity.
Terrorist or Saint? Teaching Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Twenty-first Century
Jacqueline A. Bussie, Capital University
In the minds of many, unprecedented violence, terrorism, warmongering, and political and religious intolerance scar the young face of the 21st century. Christian terrorists such as abortion clinic bomber Mike Bray cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer as their moral exemplar. In such a complex environment, how do professors of religion and ethics responsibly teach the life and legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Is he a terrorist, a saint, or somehow both? In the current climate, how can we teach Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in a way that is not tantamount to a facile advocacy of violence as the solution to political and religious strife? This essay provides critical insights and practical recommendations for teaching Bonhoeffer not merely as a martyr or hero as the tradition tends to portray him, but instead in a manner that provides students with the tools to evaluate both the strengths and limitations of Bonhoeffer’s choice.
"Religionless Christianity" for North America: Confession of Sin as the Privileged Church’s Sociopolitical Praxis
Jennifer McBride, University of Virginia
As the 21st century begins, American Christians urgently need a public theology accessible to lay people and congregations and also mature and nuanced enough to guide us into efficacious and humble acts of social healing. This essay draws upon Bonhoeffer’s works for a rich theological account of the Protestant church’s sociopolitical witness in North America. The essay gives primacy to one aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought – the christological confession of sin – and claims that the privileged church should enter and sustain a place within the sociopolitical sphere through a dual and overlapping confession of its own sin and the sin of the world. Reading Bonhoeffer’s works through this lens could enact in America what he called for in his prison correspondence: a “religionless Christianity” – a christological interpretation of the secular, which can be examined within the three interrelated dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s theology: Christ, the world, and the church.
Bonhoeffer’s “Secret Discipline”: The Duty to Conceal Christian Identity in Public Life
Jonathan Malesic, King's College, Pennsylvania
Claiming that Christianity should have a strong voice in public life is almost axiomatic for contemporary American Christian thought. It is rare to hear that Christianity should be hidden from public view because otherwise it runs the danger of losing its distinctiveness or of being reducible to a platform of positions on social issues. Bonhoeffer recognized this need for Christians to maintain their identity while trying to transform the secular, and in suggestive remarks in Letters and Papers from Prison, he presents a case for Christians to adopt a “secret discipline” as part of his program of “religionless Christianity.” In these letters and in related sections of The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer calls for Christians to intentionally conceal their Christian identity, silently transforming the secular by living in the world and practicing good works, but nourished by prayer and liturgy that exist primarily behind closed doors.
A20-69
Chinese Religions Group
Theme: Daoist Images of the Gods
This papers session is inspired by the Daoist Iconography Project, an international research project, which aims to create an electronic resource for the study of Daoist images, based on the interpretation of images in the context of religious practice. The session aims to review some of the issues raised by this project, and to discuss some of the main perspectives and challenges facing this kind of research. It includes papers based on fieldwork, which analyze concrete examples of Daoist images in ritual context, as well as more general attempts to interpret the overall iconographic language of Daoism. Some papers discuss the historical and social factors that determine the use of religious images, while others address the general question of the status of images in Chinese religion, including the question of their origin in visualization practices, and the problem of the “life of images” versus their function as symbols or signs.
Categories and Visual Representations of the Gods in the Daoist Altar
Poul Andersen, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This paper gives an overview of the evolution of the Daoist altar, tan, from the Tang and Song dynasties to the present day. The main purposes of the paper are to identify the categories of deities included in the Daoist altar (in terms of their visual representations), the structures that determine their individual placements within this altar, and the different metaphors that govern these structures—as well as to give an account of the historical evolution of these categories and structures. Focusing on some sets of images included in the database of the Daoist Iconography Project at the University of Hawaii, it attempts to develop the overall conceptual tools for the analysis of these sets. It is a long-term goal of this project to apply such tools to tracing the history of Daoism through mapping the variations of its pantheon.
The Visual Ritual Canon of the Li Family of Jilong, Taiwan
Terry Kleeman, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Li family of Jilong, Taiwan, have been Daoist priests for five generations and perform a wide variety of rites from both the Daoist and the ritual master (fashi) traditions. This paper is the result of a half-year of observer-participant fieldwork in 2005-06. I will introduce the images that the Lis employ in both Daoist and ritual master rites and make some comments on how they are used and how the Lis understand these ritual images to function. These ritual images demonstrate both how the Daoist tradition has maintained a constant ritual core over the two millennia of its existence as well as the way that living practitioners of the faith have adapted and adopted elements of the common religion to respond to the varied needs of their diverse clientele. This is a first step toward understanding the visual aspect of one of the Daoist iconographic traditions.
The Ancestors, Births, and Lives of Yao Daoist Manuscripts
Clarke Hudson, Indiana University, Bloomington
In this presentation, I discuss the iconography, religious use, and socio-cultural significance of two Daoist artifacts produced by people of the Yao ethnic group. These artifacts were produced in southern China, carried by emigrants to Thailand, and finally sold on the international folk-art market. One of the artifacts is a charter rehearsing the Yao origin myth, and the second is a rough altar-cloth covered with drawings and inscriptions that link it to popular Daoism. I will discuss the iconography of these artifacts with reference to other published examples of Yao Daoist art. I will also argue that these artifacts reflect both 1) the Yao people working to situate themselves within/against the Han Chinese cultural sphere, and 2) the strategic action of specific Yao individuals within the Chinese/Yao community. Religious artifacts such as these are not merely genre-pieces, but have their own pre-histories, geneses, and histories—their own ancestors, births, and lives.
A20-70
Korean Religions Group
Theme: The Transformation of Korean Religious Rituals and Their Characteristics in Contemporary Korea
This panel aims to investigate the historical transformation of representative religious rituals of Korea and their characteristics in contemporary South Korea. To this end, this panel focuses on Buddhist daily rituals, Confucian family ancestor worship, Protestant Sunday services, and the Sunday services of God-Humanism (Taejonggyo). The methodology of this research includes both analysis of religious texts and field research. Presenters have participated in and observed the rituals in a group at a representative organization of each religion. Interviews with the religious leaders and believers have also been conducted. The papers presented by this panel will provide momentum for scholars in Korean Studies, ritual studies, and comparative religious studies to recognize the significance of religious rituals in contemporary South Korea.
Buddhist Daily Rituals in Korea: Transformation and Characteristics
Kim Jongmyung, Graduate School of Korean Studies
Since its introduction to Korea in the fourth century, Buddhism had played a significant role in every corner of the Korean people's life at least for a millennium. This paper aims to examine the historical transformation of Buddhist daily rituals (yebul) and their characteristics in contemporary Korea. The first part of the paper will review the historical development of Buddhist rituals in Korea, including such government-sponsored rituals as the Assembly of Eight Prohibitions (P'algwanhoe), rituals related to meditative cultivation, and popularized form of rituals that have developed in Korean history. The second part of the paper will be devoted to analyzing the transformation, content, and procedure of Buddhist daily rituals in Korean history. Finally, the third part of the paper will clarify the characteristics of those rituals in contemporary Korea.
Confucian Family Ancestor Worship (Chesa) in Korea: Transformation and Characteristics
Jeonghyun Ha, Academy of Korean Studies
Confucianism has long exerted great influence on Korean society, in particular, from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. This paper will explore the historical transformation of Confucian family ancestor worship and its characteristics in contemporary Korea. In particular, a statistical report points out that about sixty percent of Korean households are still performing family ancestor worship, but of transformed nature due to the change of life-styles of the Korean people with the modernization of Korea. Section One will study the historical development of Confucian rituals in Korea, including both national and folk rituals. Section Two will survey the change of family ancestor worship in terms of its content and procedure. Finally, Section Three will explore the characteristics of family ancestor worship in contemporary Korea.
Protestant Revival Services in Korea: Transformation and Characteristics
Sang-un Park, Korea Institution for Religion and Culture
Christianity in Korea, which is composed of Catholicism and Protestantism, has exercised its strong influence over Korean society, in particular, with the modernization of Korea. The paper aims to investigate the historical development of Sunday services in a representative Korean Protestant church and their characteristics in contemporary Korea. Section One will investigate the formative process of the Sunday services in major Korean churches, focusing on the origin of the Korean services and their formation as distinctive rituals. Section Two will be devoted to analyzing the transformation of Sunday services of Korean churches in history. Section Three will elucidate the characteristics of Sunday services of a representative Protestant church in contemporary Korea.
God-Humanism (Taejjongyo) Rituals in Korea: Transformation and Characteristics
Byoungchul Ko, Academy of Korean Studies
This paper aims to clarify the relationship between the ritual transformation of God-Humanism and its change in identity. Prime focus will be given to why and how religious rituals have transformed and how the religious identity has changed during the modern period of Korea. God-Humanism experienced three periods of transformation in terms of ritual and identity in the 1960s, in particular, in relation to Confucianism and modern religious culture. Sections One and Two will discuss these major transformation of God-Humanism, with a focus on the change in its Sunday services. Section Three will manifest the relationship between the ritual transformation of the religion and its changes in identity. Based on field research at the Central Parish (Ch'ong ponsa) of God-Humanism.
A20-71
Law, Religion, and Culture Group
Theme: The Bible, Education, and American Civil Religion
The notion of a discernable American religious identity has been a point of great contention since before the inception of “these United States.” Of particular concern to the question of America’s religious identity is the interplay between religion and politics, and especially the issue of whether or not there exists something like an American civil religion. It is the purpose of this panel to explore the concept of American civil religion in its most recent form through the context of Bible literacy programs in public schools. The papers in this panel will: first, explore the general dimensions of American civil religion, showing its connection to Bible literacy programs; secondly, examine and critique the specific content of Bible literacy programs while evaluating the notion of cultural literacy; and finally, consider the viability of such programs under the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the Constitution.
Reestablishing American Civil Religion? American Identity and Bible Literacy
Nathan D. Raybeck, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The purpose of this presentation is to explore the connection between American civil religion, public education, and Bible literacy programs. A detailed analysis of the components of American civil religion will be provided, specifically examining the notion of American civil religion as it appears in the work of Samuel P. Huntington. The pedagogical implications of Huntington’s proposal will be investigated, particularly the question of what role the Bible is to play in inculcating future citizens into the American civil religion. The paper will conclude with a brief introduction to the concept of Biblical literacy, showing its connection to the overall theme of American civil religion.
The Bible and Its Influence: Problems and Paradoxes of Cultural Literacy in American Public Schools
Sara Shrader, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The purpose of this presentation is to examine the role of Bible literacy programs in American public schools, specifically within the context of American civil religion. An overview of Bible literacy programs will be provided, including a discussion of the programs’ objectives, the extent to which the programs have been implemented, and the subsequent justification given by the programs in promoting the importance of Bible literacy. In addition, the idea of “cultural literacy” will be explored. Specifically, what does it mean for citizens to be culturally literate as proposed by advocates of Bible literacy programs? How does this interpretation of literacy impact the notion of American civil religion? In contrast, what are some of the critiques of cultural literacy, and how do these critiques challenge the notion of American civil religion? Finally, to what extent can these opposing views be reconciled in order to satisfy the requirements of multicultural education?
The Constitutionality of Bible Courses in American Public Schools
Jeffrey Thibert, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The recent development of two curricula designed to introduce a course on the Bible into American public high schools—one provided by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and the other by the Bible Literacy Project—raises a number of important questions. This paper will focus on a question surrounding the legality of teaching about the Bible in public schools: In short, is it possible to teach students about the Bible in a way that does not stand in violation of either the Establishment or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution? After a brief review of First Amendment jurisprudence with regards to religion in public schools, the paper will move into an analysis of the two Bible curricula to determine if they pass constitutional muster, not only in terms of content but also in terms of pedagogical approach.
"Disestablishment" as Legal Paideia? Assessing Michael McConnell’s Educational Pluralism
Erik Owens, Boston College
The legal doctrine of “disestablishment” plays a central role in American law and culture as a touchstone for thinking about religion and public life. As such it serves as a sort of legal paideia, shaping the character of both American citizens and American law. But can the concept of disestablishment extend to other areas of public life beyond religion? This paper assesses McConnell’s concept of “education disestablishment” as a justification for universal school vouchers, and considers its potential impact as a form of legal paideia. I argue that despite its rhetorical power (grounded in appeals to pluralism and the nearly universal support of religious disestablishment), McConnell’s analogy of religious and educational disestablishment is inapt, and that therefore the expansion of disestablishment as legal paideia would have unwelcome consequences, even within the “thin” “pluralist” political philosophy McConnell espouses.
A20-72
Men's Studies in Religion Group
Theme: Men's Studies in Religion: Cross Cultural Perspectives
XODUS Wilderness: Failed New Masculinities and Hope
Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, Texas College
While starting out with hopeful visions of creating multiple anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, inclusive, polyphonic, multicultural, inter-religious, ecologically-sensitive, woman-loving, and man-loving visions of masculinity; the Men's Studies in Religion Group may have attached itself to covert Christian perfectionism. One particular example of this kind of theo-ethical perfectionism is Xodus: An African American Male Journey. While its rhetoric may have provided limited inspiration, it failed to two fundamental areas: 1) to present critical metaphors and symbols potent enough to organize anbd uproot deeply-seated patriarchal symbolic norms and behaviors; and 2) to provide ideas for ways in which XODUS Journey could organize itself into potent communities of resistance, support, nurturance, and ongoing liberation during the ongoing struggle to displace oppressive masculinities within all men, and exorcise patriarchy in general. prophetic revision urges us toward ongoing exploration and renewed structures of responsibility and accountability in order to create a genuine XODUS from oppression.
Two Men Dancing: Cross-Cultural Supervision, Colonization, and Difference as Resistance and Promise for Men's Studies in Religion
Philip Culbertson, University of Auckland
To date, most of the work published on theology and male bodies has been written by privileged white male academics. Because masculinities are products of specific cultural configurations, as are theologies of the male body, the field of Men’s Studies in Religion stands at a crisis point in not knowing how to take its principles and insights out of the white environment without colonizing emerging non-white scholars. This presentation will address some issues which arise in the academic supervision by white theologians of men’s studies who are working with non-white graduate students in men’s studies. Derrida’s theory of différance will be explored as offering a way in which white and non-white academics can stay in relationship during supervision, yet avoid the re-colonization of the non-white students through the overly-rigid application of theories of white hegemonic masculinities and theologies.
Who’s Afraid of Gay Theology? An Intellectual Probing of Heterosexual Silence
Björn Krondorfer, St. Mary's College of Maryland
Despite the growing body of gay/queer scholarship in religious studies, there is a dearth of responses by heterosexual men, including the field of men’s studies in religion. Gay/queer scholarship can still count more predictably on the ire of a conservative public than on a nuanced, non-homophobic critique by their heterosexual colleagues. What contributes to disregarding gay religious voices? Paradoxically, their voices are marginalized to the point of invisibility and yet are also in the center of public discourse. This paper sifts through some reasons of why heterosexual men shy away from a public debate of the merits of gay/queer scholarship. Besides methodological reservations, heterosexual male anxieties may cause such weariness. Autobiographical insertions by gay/queer authors combined with discipline-transgressions may lead to a “homosexual panic” even among non-homophobic scholars. The paper concludes with tentative suggestions of how to go beyond the heterosexual silence.
Against Destructive Male Habits: Rereading the New Testament in European Christian Men's Groups
Christoph Walser, Bildung und Gesellschaft, Reformierte Kirche Zürich
In this paper, I will describe the emerging interest in theological research in the context of the European growing field of men’s studies in religion. I will speak about the concept of male habitus and show its relevance for research in the field of men’s studies. I will discuss a concrete example of the Christian tradition, Mark 9:33-37, and show how a Jesus’ story can be read and interpreted in the European context. I argue that the concept of male habitus can serve as a hermeneutical key to understand how the gospel writers construct masculinities through their portrayals of protagonists and how they stage the bodily interaction between Jesus and other men in a way that calls into question dominant, destructive male habits.
A20-73
Platonism and Neoplatonism Group
Theme: Living Tradition
Christian Neo-Platonism, Medieval and Modern
Garth W. Green, Boston University
The character and influence of Neoplatonism as a “living tradition” can be seen in two modern and contemporary traditions; in the (1) “transcendental philosophy of religion” of J.G. Fichte’s “doctrine of revelation” or manifestation, and in the (2) phenomenological theology of Michel Henry’s “doctrine of the essence of manifestation” and the “turn to religion in contemporary phenomenology” that it represents. The paper will argue that this “turn to religion” is actually a return to neo-Platonic method and structures of thought on the question of the ordo cognoscendi or “order of cognition,” and more generally the nature of our cognition and self-cognition. The paper will suggest that neo-Platonism continues to structure and animate both modern traditions, and that understanding a “Fichte neo-platonicien” (Cattin) and the “revival of neo-Platonism in Jean-Luc Marion (Hankey)” illuminates both the character of these modern contributions and the context thereof in the “living tradition” of neo-Platonism.
Neoplatonism at the Margin of Fundamental Ontology: Inklings of Ascent "Beyond Being" in the 1929 Footnotes to Heidegger's On the Essence of Ground
Matthew C. Halteman, Calvin College
My aim in this paper is to sketch an intriguing structural parallel between Heidegger’s Denkweg and the path of Neoplatonic ascent beyond being. My suggestion, in brief, is that Heidegger’s fundamental ontological inquiries, in their own way and for their own time, chart an itinerary that may be plausibly interpreted as following a Plotinian arc, leading Heidegger from the sphere of Soul (the ontic world of beings) into the sphere of Intellect (the ontological “understanding-of-being” or “transcendence” that grounds the intelligibility of beings), and finally along the cognitively impassable outer edge of the latter sphere, from which glimmers of the One (the mystery of “being”) may be glimpsed. I develop this suggestion through a reading of Heidegger’s crucially important but largely neglected treatise On the Essence of Ground, in which a mysterious series of footnotes calls for the destruction of the account of ontological transcendence advanced in the main text.
Nature’s Voice: The Auditive Structure of R.W. Emerson’s Neoplatonic Spirituality
Willemien Otten, Utrecht University
This paper focuses on the similarity in thought patterns between the philosopher John Scottus Eriugena and the writer/philosopher Emerson, both of whom focus on nature to indicate the cosmic embeddedness of their ideas. Looming large in the background of both Eriugena’s and Emerson’s thought world is the Christian idea of creation. What is needed to tease out the source of the universe’s dynamism in Eriugena and Emerson as well as to get a firmer grip of their respective intellectual projects is to find a way to be able to hear Nature’s voice directly without interruption and without the interference of ‘background noise’. Articulating the melody of Nature’s voice with the aid of a spiritual listening device may go a long way in helping us to understand the current renaissance of spirituality, including the interest in nature, as an alternative for conventional theological or metaphysical discussion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: From Neoplatonism to Nondualism?
David L. Smith, Central Michigan University
Ralph Waldo Emerson is generally understood to have been a Neoplatonist by affinity and by enthusiasm. There is, however, a striking difference in the way Emerson handles the dualistic categories with which Neoplatonism typically operates. In Emerson’s hands, categories distinguishing the one and the many, path and goal, received a critique that takes them in the direction of nondualism. Thus, for example, union with the One is not so much a goal or achievement in Emerson’s thought as it is an immediate and inalienable condition, our ignorance of which constitutes the primary mystery. The aim of this paper—and of the discussion it is meant to provoke—will be to explore the extent to which Neoplatonism itself opens out in the direction of a nondualist analysis of its own categories.
A20-74
Practical Theology Group
Theme: Political Aspects of Practical Theology
The setting of the 2006 AAR Annual Meeting in Washington, DC affords a lively opportunity to draw connections between work in practical theology and its political and public aspects. With this particular context as backdrop, we will focus on how contemporary political realities affect what practical theology can or should do, and how practical theology can actually make an impact on contemporary political realities. From the diverse perspectives of congregational studies, liturgical catechesis, pastoral theology, and social action, the presenters in this session turn their practical theological insights to address the political and public issues of class, ethnicity, violence, and political action.
Showing Some Class: Practical Theological Contributions to the “Classing” of Congregational Studies
Joyce Ann Mercer, Virginia Theological Seminary
Research on congregations has not shown much class lately. While focusing considerable efforts on the analysis of other factors at work in congregations (e.g., race, gender, immigration status) matters of class receive limited attention. Wide variations exist among theorists in the meaning of class. Its constitution by multiple factors (e.g., type of employment, income, education, access to social and cultural capital, etc.), and subsequent difficulties in operationalizing class as a variable in research, make it hard to determine class let alone study it. This paper explores how situating congregational studies within practical theology can make a significant contribution to the ability of researchers to “show some class,” as theological meanings of class-related categories become part of analyzing congregations. The paper draws upon a congregational study in a Pacific Coast protestant church whose members span class identities from homelessness to the uppermost tiers of affluence and education.
Teaching Against Torture: Liturgical Catechesis in Exceptional Circumstances
Gordon S. Mikoski, Princeton Theological Seminary
The ongoing crisis concerning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners by U.S. personnel or under U.S. auspices in the "war on terror" raises issues central to the identity of both church and society. The practice of torture cries out for practical theological reflection inasmuch as it threatens to eviscerate the moral integrity of both American Christian churches and the nation as a whole. Serious practical theological attention needs to be paid to the challenges of teaching youth and adults in mainline Protestant congregations in ways that will move them from awareness to action around the issues raised by the torture crisis.
De-colonizing Practical and Pastoral Theologies: A Reconfiguration En Conjunto
Carmen Marie Nanko-Fernández, Catholic Theological Union
Latino/a theologians are virtually absent, as partners and resources, in shaping agendas in pastoral and practical theologies. This absence is attributed to the misconception that U.S. Hispanic theologies are indistinguishable from their Latin American counterparts. It can also be argued that Latinos/as do not identify ourselves exclusively as pastoral or practical theologians; and two significant reasons emerge, one grounded in our realidad and the second grounded in a distinctive method of doing theology latinamente. This paper explores the development of teología y pastoral en conjunto.as a means of de-colonizing pastoral and practical theologies. This paper proposes that doing theology latinamente contributes to and enriches the field. Attention will be given to privileging daily living (vida cotidiana) as a locus theologicus; re-interpreting the role of liberation in a US context; navigating the relationships between sacred and secular, public and domestic; highlighting the prophetic character of teología y pastoral en conjunto.
Waiting for a Glacier to Move: Practical Theological Reflections on Social Witness Practice
Jennifer R. Ayres, Emory University
One Presbyterian elder describes his long history of social activism in the following way: "You always have the feeling that you're attacking an iceberg with an icepick... But, as they say, even glaciers move every now and then." This paper describes, analyzes, and identifies openings for practical theological reflection upon religious political activism, herein described as "social witness." Through a critical engagement with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and other interlocutors, the paper develops an analysis of social witness through the lens of practice theory, taking into account the practice's political and theological dimensions. The essay concludes with proposals for new and inclusive directions for the role of theological reflection in the nourishment of the practice.
A20-75
Religion and Ecology Group and Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation
Theme: Sacred Space and Time: Contemporary Paganism and Spiritual Ecology
An exploration the dynamics of sacred space and time - the experience of the holy, the persistence of commemorative celebration, and the attraction of pilgrimage and numinous places within the context of popular culture and spiritual ecology.
Deep Currents: The Two Tides of Neo-Paganism
Adrian Harris and Christina Welch, University of Winchester
Conventional wisdom has it that the many streams of Neo-Paganism flow from a common source. However accumulated ethnographic research reveals a pattern of practice that strongly suggests two distinct currents within Neo-Paganism. One, which we call ‘Esoteric Paganism’ emerges from the Western Magical Tradition and is focused on personal development and power. The second, which we might call ‘Earth-based’ or ‘Eco’ Paganism, attends more to environment, community action and empowerment. Significantly, this distinction transcends the conventional classification of Pagans into (amongst others) Wiccans, Druids and Heathens, with both ‘Esoteric’ and ‘Eco-Pagans’ found across Traditions. We conclude that Neo-Paganism is more complex than previously believed and that further research into these differences will provide a more sophisticated understanding of the movement. The two scholars presenting reached this common conclusion from researching quite different areas of Paganism; appropriation within Western Paganism and Eco-Pagan ritual practice.
Speaking Nature: Multivocal Participation in the Search for a Sustainable World
Chris Klassen, Wilfrid Laurier University
Discussions about the ‘nature’ of nature, in the context of Paganism, tend toward a dichotomy between the organic and the technological, leaving the “diversity of ecological actions” (Harvey 1997, 126) potentially truncated. My paper explores the multiplicity of voices within the natural world, including but not limited to the organic, which should be listened to for a full range of possible actions to create a sustainable world. Despite its seeming dichotomies of organic and technological, Paganism, with its nature-focus and polytheism, offers a significant contribution to ecological discourse. To focus the scope of this paper, which is part of a larger project, I will limit myself to an analysis of the discussion of ‘earth religion’ found in the January-March 2006 edition of PanGaia. I will focus on how ‘earth’ is constructed in these Pagan contexts, critiquing organic/technological dichotomies while elucidating places where multivocal discourse is either alluded to or evident.
Teenage Witches and Environmentalism
Helen A. Berger, West Chester University
Witchcraft is called a religion of nature because the sacred is viewed as within the natural world. The seasonal cycles are celebrated, and the earth is viewed as alive, as the Goddess, or as her body--deserving veneration and care. Does this religious worldview result in greater environmental activism or awareness? Scholars differ in their assessment, some suggesting that Witchcraft is a nature religion in name only, others that Witchcraft draws to itself those who are already activists but does not affect that activism. Based on interviews with ninety individuals, thirty each in the US, England, and Australia between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three who began practicing Witchcraft as teenagers, we find that there is an elective affinity between environmentalism and Witchcraft. In this paper we explore teenage Witches’ responses to environmentalism finding that few are activists, but most have changed their personal behavior and none is anti-environmental.
A20-76
Religion in Latin America and the Caribbean Group
Theme: Beyond Mestizaje: Revisiting Race, Syncretism, and Hybridity
Afro-Caribbean Religions as Realms of Memory: The Concept of Polyphonic Bricolage as Critique against Syncretism and Mestzaje
Bettina E. Schmidt, University of Oxford
Afro-Caribbean religions such as Vodou, Santeria and Shango represent conjoining of different religious traditions and the rebirth of new forms. This paper argues against the use of the term syncretism because the inclusion of Christian elements was not just a replacement of the missing or suppressed religious icons but refers to a complex process of memory. The gaps caused by the slave trade and the time of slavery were filled with elements at hand, in the case of religion with Christian elements. But they did not remain being Christian elements; they became central parts of the Afro-Caribbean religions. In order to explain the process the paper refers to the concept of realms of memory (Nora), and to the concept of collective memory (Halbwachs/Bastide). The last part presents the concept of polyphonic bricolage (Lévi-Strauss/Bakhtin) developed based on fieldwork among religious communities in New York City and Puerto Rico.
Mestiçagem, Brasilidade, and Feijoada: Extending Brazilian Writings on Hybridity
Steven Engler, Mount Royal College and Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
Brazilian culture offers a useful case for rethinking race, syncretism and hybridity, with its complex history of racial and cultural mixing across a complex set of boundaries; and Brazilian writers have done important work theorizing these issues. This paper briefly reviews key Brazilian works, highlighting and developing the metaphor of feijoada in order to distinguish four types of mixture: in terms of origin, trajectory, horizontal mediation, and vertical mediation. This typology is used to interpret observations of a mixed race largely middle-class Candomblé terreiro.
Hybrid Cultures or Multiculturalism: Navigating the Contested Spaces of Mestizaje Discourse(s)
Nestor Medina, University of Toronto
In line with contemporary debates on ethnocultural identity, the discourse(s) of mestizaje has gained great appeal as many discover its potentially disruptive nature. With the present phenomena of mass migration and its resulting cultural encounters, many see in mestizaje a category capable of communicating the reality of cultural intermixture. At the same time, many have found in mestizaje a dangerous category reinscribing ideological notions of racism, ethnocentrism, and androcentrism. Because of this ambiguous character resembling Derrida’s Pharmakon, the category of mestizaje has come under heavy scrutiny. Nevertheless, mestizaje continues to evoke strong opinions from both side of the spectrum. Focusing on the present state of the debate, this paper engages the works of Nestor García Canclini and Jacques Audinet. The intention is to highlight Canclini’s focus on hybridity as transcending mestizaje, and Audinet’s emphasis on multiculturalism as precursor to a future oriented mestizaje.
The Racialized Christ: Reconceptualizing Mestizaje as Transcultural Paradigm
Ruben Rosario-Rodriguez, Saint Louis University
In spite of the anti-hybridity backlash, I remain optimistic that mestizaje—despite its ethnocentric and nationalist undertones—can serve as a transcultural paradigm for resisting racism in our increasingly globalized society. While mestizaje is an integral part of Latino/a Christian experience, this investigation contends that the reality of mestizaje (understood as mutual exchange between two or more cultures) has always been a vital part of the Christian tradition (though not always identified by that name).
Accordingly, an exploration of mestizaje as descriptive of the work of the Holy Spirit yields concrete liberating practices that must be embodied by the Christian community, including: (1) political action to resist racism grounded in the belief that the racialized “other” shares in the imago Dei, (2) embodying Christ’s “way of the cross” as adversarial politics, (3) recognizing Spiritual community wherever God’s liberating work occurs, and (4) cooperating with Spiritual communities outside traditional understandings of ecclesia.
A20-77
Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group
Theme: Tapestries of Motion and Spirit
Loves the Spirit
Karen Baker-Fletcher, Southern Methodist University
This paper considers womanist love of “the Spirit” as represented by writer/activist Alice Walker. Second, it considers understanding of love of “the Spirit” in the life of Mamie Till Mobley, a Mother in the Church of God in Christ (C.O.G.I.C.), who lost her son Emmett Till to a brutal lynching near Money, Mississippi in 1955. Across the particularities of at least these two activist, spiritual perspectives, the Spirit is the source of African American women’s courage to say NO to Christendom’s production of “crosses we must bear” and YES to the life-loving power of “the Spirit.” Employing a womanist both/and approach, the paper proposes a a syncretist Christian pneumatology that draws on Walker’s Pagan womanist understanding of “the Spirit” and Mother Mobley’s Trinitarian based Christian understanding of “the Spirit”, while honoring the differences between them.
God’s Daughters: Nairobi Women and Visions of Gender Justice
Keri Day, Vanderbilt University
This paper is an ethnographic study of Nairobi women and liberation, disclosing the marginalization of Nairobi women in efforts to reclaim the beauty of their voices concerning oppression and visions of liberation. Specifically, this paper will explore Nairobi women and their visions of gender justice through: analyzing the religious and cultural problems that underlie gender injustice in the lives of these women; seeing how religion reinforces gender injustice; examining what emancipation or gender justice means to these women; and unearthing how these women’s faith and education contribute to the promotion of gender justice for themselves and their larger society.
We Shall Overcome: The Beautiful Tapestry of Womanist Transformation in Dance, Literature, Poetry, and Hip Hop
Deborah Buchanan, Fuller Seminary
Black women have always matched ultimate concern with liberation and thriving with creative and artistic gifts. Womanist across the ages have through their songs, quilts, words, dances, scholarship, spirituality and other Womanist means sought to nurture themselves, other women and girls, as well as the larger community. Their creative endeavors are not simply instrumental means of liberation but possess in themselves the power to transform. This paper proposes that in the particular literature, dance and hip hop are transformational, through an examination of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide: when the rainbow is enuf, Blue Tights by Rita Williams Garcia and the song “Black Girl Pain” performed by Talib Kweli and Jean Grae. Through the artistic products examined, it is clear that literature, dance and hip hop function both separately but more importantly intermingle to affirm, liberate and aid in the self-definition actualization of young woman.
Jan Willis' Dreaming Me: Constructing a Baptist-Buddhist Womanist Identity
Carolyn Medine, University of Georgia
Jan Willis' Dreaming Me recounts her journey from her childhood in Alabama to her present position as a professor of Religion at Wesleyan University. Willis, who is named consistently as one of the most important religious innovators in our time, constructs her religious identity as a hybrid one; she is a Baptist-Buddhist. Here, I will examine this hybrid as an 'audacious' womanist identity and as one that addresses the challenges of religion in modernity and posmodernity.
Loving the Spirit: Expressions of Paganism in Alice Walker's Non-Fiction
Melanie L. Harris, Texas Christian University
This paper explores the meaning of Alice Walker’s definition of “spirit” from the religious perspective of paganism. Specifically, this paper engages the non-fiction essays and reflections by Alice Walker on her religious identity as a pagan, the influence of this religious orientation upon her ethical system, and her understanding of “spirit.” Traditionally, womanist religious scholarship uses a Christian oriented lens and relies upon Christian-centered categories to describe black women’s experiences of religion. Although the definition of womanist is not inherently Christian, the third part of the womanist definition regarding the “spirit” has often been interpreted from a Christian point of view. By giving attention to Alice Walker’s identity as a pagan, womanist dialogue becomes more inclusive of non-Christian religious traditions and widens its scope to uncover and validate the religious experiences of black women that are liberating and life giving for black women and their communities.
A20-78
World Christianity Group
Theme: World Christianity in Local Contexts
World Christianity is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand Christian faith and practice on six continents, informed by the multitude of world historical and cultural experiences, and expressed through diverse local religious traditions. This panel will feature presentations that explore local contexts within a global framework.
Classifying African Christianities Past and Present
Paul V. Kollman, University of Notre Dame
This paper will attempt to make sense of the varieties of ways Africans, both on the continent and in diaspora, manifest their Christianity. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa in particular, it will recount some of the terms commonly used to name the varieties of Christianity in Africa, including missionary, syncretic, authentic, independent, indigenous, traditional, international, local, missionary, and universal. Mindful of the achievements and shortcomings of these and other labels, and with brief references to three typical manifestations of African ways of being Christian in the 21st century—a so-called African Independent Church operating in Chicago, a contemporary Pentecostal Church in Nigeria, and a Roman Catholic parish in Nairobi—the paper will then explore the potential utility of terms associated with the notion of identity, especially hybridity, in describing Christianity in Africa and the African diaspora.
The New Christianity in Africa and Radical Orthodoxy: An Apology for Dialogue
David Tonghou Ngong, Baylor University
Radical Orthodoxy (RO) is concerned with the systematic marginalization of the religious (Christian) worldview in the Western world. Proponents of this movement aim to supernaturalize a world that has been made natural by both modernity and post-modernity so that the immanent world may once again be valorized by the transcendent. This paper argues that for this goal to be achieved RO must not only draw from medieval theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas but also from the New Christianity in Africa because the holistic worldview that funded the theology of Augustine and Aquinas is similar to the holistic worldview funding the New Christianity in Africa. On the other hand, the New Christianity in Africa has to engage RO’s cry against the marginalization of religion in the public sphere.
Between Inculturation and Globalization: The Situation of Roman Catholicism in Contemporary Japanese Society
Mark R. Mullins, Sophia University
As latecomers to Japan's religious scene, both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches have experienced considerable difficulty in shedding their reputation as “foreign religions.” While at times the “Westernness” of Christianity has contributed to its appeal among Japanese, for the most part it has been viewed as a problem. However, there is considerable evidence of inculturation within these churches. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, this paper will review the process of inculturation within the Roman Catholic Church during the post-war period. Particular attention will be given to adaptations in ritual and practice and to church policies that address Japanese cultural concerns. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) inculturation has been endorsed at many levels of church leadership. Nevertheless, tensions remain between those who advocate efforts to “de-Romanize” the faith and those who continue to emphasize that being Catholic requires faithfulness to the Apostolic Roman tradition.
The Necessity of the Particular in the Globalization of Christianity: The Case of Christian Higher Education in China
Peter Ng, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper attempts to re-examine mission history from the perspective of globalization. Christian higher education is found to be an ideal model for the examination of such processes of pluralization, relativization and particularization of Christianity in a non-Christian world and how Christianity underwent a modern reconstruction when confronted by ‘the cultural otherness’ of China. In recent mission studies it has been argued that Christian colleges and universities in China served as the most appropriate place for the cultivation of educational dialogues and discussions of the reconstruction of a modern theology, and relate Christianity to other religions as well as relating it to other non-religious cultures and systems. With this vivid case in mind, the present author will further explore the significance of the ‘Chinese factor’ in the above developments and argue for the necessity of the particular in the globalization of Christianity in China.
A20-79
Cultural History of the Study of Religion Consultation
Theme: Medicalizing Religion: Inherent Biology, Pathological Emotion, and Missionizing Hygiene
Popular Phrenology and the Biology of Natural Religion
Lisle Dalton, Hartwick College
The foundations of the modern academic study of religion are often traced through the writings of 18th and 19th c. deists who speculated about a “natural religion” presumed to be an original and essential aspect of human nature. Often neglected in general surveys of the concept of natural religion, however, is the recognition that early 19th c. medical and popular discourses pursued similar interests. In Anglo-American culture, the notion that human nature is intrinsically religious thanks to innate biology was widely entertained thanks medical doctors and others who promoted the study of phrenology. Though support for phrenology eventually faded, many of the general views on religion pursued by phrenologists linger on, notably the possibility of a “natural” comparative study of religious phenomena that focuses on brain activity and the propriety of an evolutionary framework for understanding religious development.
Emotionalism Described and Dissected: The New Psychology and the Pathologizing of Black Religion
Curtis Evans, Florida State University
The rise of the New Psychology in American universities in the 1890s played a key role in the construction and pathologizing of black religion as emotionalism. By medicalizing black religion and rendering it as the exotic beliefs and practices of a “child race,” psychologists and social scientists legitimated popular beliefs about African American culture and provided scientific support for such practices as disfranchisement, lynching, and segregation. Evidence for these assertions is found in the writings of a core of prominent social scientists (G. Stanley Hall, Frederick Morgan Davenport, and Howard Odum) who discussed and dissected black religion and culture. Attention to the social and cultural context of the scientific study of black religion at the turn of the century demonstrates how clinical language and scientific methodology permitted practitioners to detach themselves from appearances of animus toward blacks even as their work dehumanized and objectified African American culture.
An Aseptic Religion: Discovering a Hybridity on the Flux of Hygiene and Christianity in Korea
Shin Kwon Kim, Drew University
This paper deals with a historical process of the Christian mission to Korea in the late 19th century and the early 20th century by analyzing narratives reported by American missionaries. This research discerns the hidden motives of Christian mission and the actual influences in the daily life of Koreans in the process of enculturation and Christianization. This will try to clarify followings: How was the separation between Church and State, the American hallmark, crumbled for colonization? How were Christianity and hygiene intermingled with each other in terms of power/knowledge nexus on the context of the colonization? What was the purpose of the power gained by the hybridity between hygiene and religion? And how did the colonized, Korean people, recognize and deal with a new religion and a new medicine from the West? These questions will be analyzed through a postcolonial point of view, especially with a very important concept, “Hybridity.”
A20-80
Death, Dying, and Beyond Consultation
Theme: Memorials to the Dead
Between Worlds at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Cat Ngoc Jonathan Tran, Duke University
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is widely regarded as a singular achievement of memorial architecture. Since its establishment over two decades ago, the VVM has set the standard for commemoration of the dead. Some have located its greatness in its celebration of the American spirit while others claim its moral (and national) ambivalence. This paper will offer a philosophical and theological analysis of the Wall, theorizing why so prosaic a design has left such an enduring legacy on the American imagination. Proceeding in three parts, the paper will recount the Wall's secret history, conceptualize it as memorial boundaryland between worlds, and highlight the mnemonic powers of hegemonic narrativity. Aiding my analysis will be Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work on perception, Alasdair MacIntyre's championing of narrativity, Sheldon S. Wolin's and Paul Connerton's respective ruminations on memory and ritual, and Walter Benjamin's figuring of story-telling and gathered publics.
Composting a Life: Recycled Bodies, Green Burial, and Meaning Making in the Natural Death Movement
Sarah McFarland Taylor, Northwestern University
What does it mean to die “naturally,” to be buried in a “green” manner, or for one’s remains to be recycled “organically”? For those espousing strong environmental commitments in life, ensuring a comparably "eco-friendly" death is increasingly becoming an imperative. The so-called "natural death movement" promotes low-impact, environmentally sound ways to recycle human remains back into the biosphere. In conducting ethnographic research on those who choose “green burial,” my central question has been how these individuals use their preparations for death as a way to define and make sense of their lives. Using a multimedia format, I will present my research into the world of ecological funerals, wildlife conservation death parks, recyclable “ecopod” caskets, and other aspects of “natural death” culture. I consider what the scope and significance of the natural death movement might reveal about Americans’ spiritual sensibilities and attitudes toward both death and nature in the twenty-first century.
Organ Donors, Fallen Soliders, and the Sensuous Civil Religion
Arlene Macdonald, University of Toronto
This paper examines the complex ritual work of the ACDO Memorial Service, arguably the largest organ donor recognition event in North America, held annually in Sherbrooke, Quebec and hosted by l’ACDO, an organ donation advocacy group. Through a close examination of the rite’s construction, I elaborate on the memorial’s diverse functions as a commemoration of organ donors, as advocacy for organ donation, and as a sacrament of the republic. The paper reflects on the particular location of this rite in Quebec and it looks beyond Quebec’s borders to a national obsession with public health care. Through its epitaph of organ donors as fallen soldiers and its insistence that organ donation generates not just health, but a healthy collective memory, the ACDO memorial service promotes an intercorporeal citizenry and carves a nation from the exchange of their organs.
A20-82
Queer Theory and LGBT Studies in Religion Consultation
Theme: Queer Religion, Queer Communities
Something Whatever in Common: Prospects for Queer Community
Heather Thiessen, University of Louisville
“Queer” and “community” seem like incompatible terms. The staples of queer theory – challenging the coherence of linguistic conventions, questioning the stability of identifications and their contents, celebrating disruptions of unconsciously-equated or –linked phenomena (male-man-husband-father, e.g., or female-women-wife-mother) – undermine the consensus about reality and individuals’ place within it that is often taken to be the essence of community. Community as it emerges in communitarian discourse includes a level of compulsory compliance with the externalized demands of others that is simply incompatible with a queerness that insists on radical freedom for radically singular subjects. This paper argues, however, that queer practice is compatible with an alternative vision of community, in which “community” denotes a dynamic and informative collective encounter with the unknown, a vision of community that has roots in perennial religious and philosophical intimations of truth and transcendence.
Public Theologies from the Inner Sanctum: A Queer Look at Public-Restroom Graffiti
Justin Waters, Graduate Theological Union
This paper deconstructs instances of public restroom graffiti around the Berkeley academic campuses. While presenting profane, perverse, and pornographic imagery under the stall-door’s cover of anonymity, graffiti is socially produced reiterating/contesting dominant discourse. Constraints posited by politically correct speech outcast graffiti’s authors – both critics and sympathizers of society – who prophetically make public their privately held beliefs in an unsavory and subversive manner. By co-opting the indecent, and publicly punishing the perverse and private while simultaneously existing within it, the graffiti necessarily disrupts binary systems by removing their own subjectivity as constructed heteronormativity. Within this paradox, every instance of graffiti participates in broader dynamics of closeting what is different in society, confining to the cubicle what in public speech is ostracized. Que(e)r(y)ing graffiti through contributions of Althaus-Reid, Bakhtin, Butler, Foucault, and Ricouer, this paper presents graffiti as revelatory act, unexpectedly confronting us with unthinkable theologies in unexpected sanctuaries.
Being Creature, Becoming Human: A Theological Conversation between Oliver O’Donovan, Judith Butler, and Joan Roughgarden
Gerard Loughlin, Durham University
The Christian ethicist, Oliver O’Donovan, and the feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, may seem an unlikely pairing, but both offer similar accounts of how human identity is constituted in modern societies. For Butler identity is produced through performativity, the incessant repetition of gendered discourses on and in bodies: a corporeal writing that effects a sustained sense of self. Thus identity is an artifice, a fashioning by unbidden discourses and—on occasion—individual and group intervention in those discourses: the work of parody that drags the social into new formations, different constellations. O'Donovan sees and rejects this. In response, this paper stages a conversation between O’Donovan, Butler and the evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden, in order to argue that Christian thought can return to itself when it learns from evolutionary science and queer theory that human identity is given as (erotic) diversity and becoming, as openness to an infinite future—the becoming-being named creature.
A20-83
Religion, Media, and Culture Consultation
Theme: Freedom of Expression and Religious Sensibilities: The Danish Cartoon Controversy in a Global Media Environment
For many weeks in early 2006, global attention was focused on the international reaction to the publication of a series of images of Mohammed by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. The western media devoted much attention to reactions in the Muslim world, much of which served to deepen and extend western stereotypes of that context. The incident thus seems to have done little to increase understanding between Middle East and West. For publics in both contexts, the mediated conversation about the cartoons has replaced older ideas of difference with newer ones of greater difference. In all of this the fact of the media age looms large. This panel will address this controversy with particular attention to the European context and the West more generally in a time of increasing religious diversity. The primary themes to be addressed include: 1. the relationship between visual cultures and religious sensibilities; 2. the mediation of religious conflicts in political, religious, and media culture; 3. freedom of expression and religious pluralism; and 4. the globalization of religion, media, and culture.
A20-85
Library of Congress Forum: Writing the Story of America's Religious Origins
Sponsored by the AAR, Library of Congress, and National History Center
Sponsored by the AAR, Library of Congress, and National History Center
The panel features the following esteemed writers and their books: Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism; Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln; Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon; and Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History. The presider is Catherine Albanese, author of A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion.
Mumford Room, Madison Building
Library of Congress
Independence Avenue and 2nd St, SE
(near Capitol South Metro Station)
A20-100
Foucault Consultation
Theme: The Future of Foucault in Religious and Theological Studies: Engagements with Derrida and Postcolonialism
Foucault and Derrida in the Return of Religion
Matthew Chrulew, Monash University
This paper will seek to outline the terrain and stakes for an engagement between Foucault and Derrida in relation to the question of religion. The focus will be on the practice of confession, which both sought to problematise. Derrida took a somewhat personal approach to this theme in Circumfession, seeking the possibility of autobiography without confession, while Foucault — who notoriously avoided such self-expression, preferring the anonymous murmur of the Outside — sought concretely to situate the technique of confession within social institutions and power-relations. In examining this convergence, I will touch on the implications for studies of religion of the relationship between Foucault’s notion of the ‘historical a priori’ and Derrida’s description of ‘quasi-transcendentals’—both of which are centrally tied to each thinker’s inheritance from Kant.
Postcolonial Religious Studies and Foucault
Susan Abraham, St. Bonaventure University
Since postcolonial studies in religion and Foucault’s work is only burgeoning, this paper will examine some thematic issues arising from the analyses of identity and ethics, two issues at the forefront of postcolonial theory. The paper will argue that the construction of religious identity in formerly postcolonial societies while continuing to be the challenge as Amartya Sen and Anthony Appiah in their latest books point out, cannot rely completely on the secular liberal/democratic project either which fails to examine the manner in which Foucault pointed out that power constructs identity of self and other and ethics in social contexts. However, following Sen’s suggestions to create religious spaces that “do not halve the mind” and in dialogue with Talal Asad’s astute observations regarding the exclusions of secular power, the paper in its constructive move will suggest theological correctives to secular “solutions” such as hybridity and strategic essentialism as one form of resistance to such secularizing moves.
A20-101
Special Topics Forum
Theme: Debate: Just War Theory Versus Just Peacemaking Theory: Which Produces the Better Answer to Terrorism?
Sponsored by the AAR Program Committee
Moderated by Lisa Sowle Cahill, author of Love Your Enemy: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (Augsburg Fortress, 1994), the session features two panelists debating about the answer to terrorism from two diverse standpoints. Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Basic Books, 2004), and Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, 1998) versus Glen Harold Stassen, author of Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace (Westminster John Knox) and editor of Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices to Abolish War (Pilgrim Press, 1998 and 2004).
A20-102
Special Topics Forum
Theme: "Required Reading" Writing for the Secondary School Market
Sponsored by the Religion in the Schools Task Force
States require public high school teachers to include material about religion in history and other courses. Consequently, widely used textbooks written for high school use include religion content. What are these textbooks like and how would we evaluate their approach to religion? What do editors in large textbook publishing houses look for? What do high school teachers need and want? This panel will consist of a review by religion scholars of two widely used world history textbooks. Panelists include an editor working in a major publishing house on high school textbooks, a scholar who has written for the secondary school market, and an experienced secondary school teacher with special interest in teaching about religion in her classroom.
A20-103
Arts, Literature, and Religion Section and Afro-American Religious History Group
Theme: Performing African-American Religion
This session will contribute to an underdeveloped area of research: the performance of African American religious life in venues that have not been marked as “sacred space.” Telling three very different stories, these papers explore the public expression of African American theological and ritual life in the context of music, theatre, and television and portray the rendering of discourse typically associated with churches and seminaries being reconstituted in the arts and in popular culture. In doing so, this session seeks to challenge taxonomies that would comfortably delineate between the realms of the “secular” and the “sacred,” while at the same time looks anew at those elements that go into constructing “sacred” space. Each paper presents a study in the politics of negotiating black religious identity from the stage and before the public, and points to more expansive possibilities for defining “useful” data in the chronicling of African American religious history.
A20-104
Buddhism Section
Theme: Clerics and Family, Clerics as Family: Rethinking the Role of Families in Monastic Buddhism
This session will consider the ways in which monks and nuns function as family members after their ordinations. It will approach monastic roles as compatible with lay roles and, in fact, demanding that the monk or nun retain his or her lay family identity. In this way, the abundant evidence showing that men and women in different Buddhist countries, at different times, did not dichotomize their various roles in secular and monastic society can be considered across geographical boundaries to provide a broad picture of monastic family patterns. The papers cover Japan, India and Tibet, and range in time from well before the common era to the twentieth century.
Locating the Family in Homelessness: On Monastic Families in Indian Buddhism
Shayne Clarke, McMaster University
It is generally assumed that when men and women left home for the religious life in India they left their families - spouses and children - behind. Indeed, they are said 'to go forth from the home into homelessness.' Although this phrase has been taken to imply complete severance of familial ties, what exactly is meant by 'homelessness' remains somewhat unclear. The present paper will present evidence from Buddhist monastic law codes (vinayas) suggesting a very different interpretation of 'homelessness' than that which has been presented by scholars to date. Indeed, the authors of these monastic law codes seem to assume that some men and women would leave home for the religious life with their children, that monks and nuns might locate-and perhaps relocate-their families in homelessness. Our task, then, will be to locate the family in Indian monastic Buddhism.
Serving the Buddha through Serving the Emperor: Imperial Buddhist Monks and Nuns as Abbots, Abbesses, and Adoptees in Edo Japan
Gina Cogan, Boston University
When Buddhist monks and nuns are ordained, they take on specific roles in relation to their family members and to lay society. In biographical literature, example, monks and nuns are often shown devoting their lives to the religious welfare of their families (Kieschnick, Tsai). During the Edo period in Japan (1603 - 1868), this pattern took on a new aspect for elite monastics as aristocratic men and women were adopted into the imperial family in order to serve as the heads of Buddhist institutions closely connected with the emperor. This paper will examine this phenomenon in order to rethink how family allegiance and monastic lineage intersected in premodern Japanese Buddhism. This will in turn allow us to reconsider how the family itself is conceptualized as a religious entity throughout the Buddhist world.
Homeless Fathers, Sons (and Daughters): The Renunciant Relationships of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen and the Non-Sectarian Ideal
Annabella Pitkin, Columbia University
This paper will consider the interplay between the theme of renunciation in the ideal of a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner's life and the familial roles created or re-produced by the institution of lineage, understood as the crucial matrix through which Buddhist ideas and practices are transmitted. I will specifically examine the tension between the 'home-leaving' of renunciation and the intimacy of guru-disciple lineage relationships in the life of one twentieth-century Tibetan scholar-adept, Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (Khu nu bLa ma bsTan 'dzin rgyal mtshan 1895-1977), or Khunu Rinpoche. Khunu Rinpoche's activities as a student, teacher and practitioner highlight questions about the relationship between the renunciation that is part of the Tibetan yogic ideal and the strong family-style personal connections that are constitutive of Tibetan Buddhist meditative and intellectual lineages. My paper explores Khunu Rinpoche's involvement in receiving and propagating lineages of both meditational practice and of philosophical interpretation.
Inheriting the Monastic Trade: Buddhism and Family Business in Medieval Japan
Lori Meeks, University of Southern California
This paper will look at several cases of Kamakura-period families who cultivated and transmitted Buddhist practice as a specialized family trade. Focusing in particular on cases in which the wives and children of Nara scholar monks themselves embarked upon successful careers as monks and nuns, often becoming abbots and abbesses, I will make broader observations about the relationship between Buddhist monasticism and the family in medieval Japan. Although it has oft been suggested that Buddhist monasticism made peace with the family in East Asia by focusing on funerary and ancestral rites, these stories suggest something more: namely, that monastic practice in Japan often took place within the structures of the biological family, and that at least some monks and nuns understood and cultivated Buddhist knowledge and ritual practice as a family trade that should be passed down not to strangers, but to one's own biological heirs.
A20-105
Christian Systematic Theology Section
Theme: Reimagining the Political: Kingdom, Church, and State
Karl Barth and Jürgen Habermas: Christian Mission and Global Civil Society
Timothy Stanley, University of Manchester
Currently, religion and globalization seem to be working towards opposite ends. As Mark Juergensmeyer has noted, while religiously invoked terrorism fragments society, the Internet, cell phones and the media industry foster the formation of an increasingly global social fabric. But religion is not a single faceted phenomenon. As much as there are prophets of violence such as Osama bin Laden, there are prophets of peace and reconciliation such as Bishop Desmond Tutu. How a global civil society might be configured in relation to the inherent ambiguity surrounding religious traditions remains difficult to discern. How might Christian traditions make a positive contribution to this context? How might this contribution be conceived in relation to their sense of mission in the world? To answer these questions I will evince a synthesis between Jürgen Habermas’s theory of civil society and the politico-ethical theology of Karl Barth.
K. H. Ting's Contribution to the Contextualization of Christianity in China
Miikka Ruokanen, University of Helsinki
In today's China, all religions are growing, Protestant Christianity most of all. Since the 1950's, Bishop K. H. Ting has been the leading figure of Chinese Protestant theology. The spirituality of most Chinese Protestant believers is deeply rooted in the profound conservatism of the Evangelical-revivalist and Pietistic missionaries. Ting broadens the exclusive theological scope of Chinese believers. He fosters meaningful dialogue between the church and socialist society, between Christianity and Chinese culture, and between Christians and non-believers/believers of other faiths. Ting creates a dialogical theological method, based on an emphasis on the Trinitarian view of the Christian religion and on natural theology. His method helps Chinese Christians engage in dialogue with the society and culture they live in. The Chinese Protestant church has adapted well to so-called socialist society. Even more challenging: How do today's Chinese Christians relate their faith to the five thousand years of China's cultural experience?
Standing at the Crossroads: A Political Theology of Justification
Steffen Lösel, Emory University
The question of capital punishment raises the problem of the church’s relationship to the state. Only when both entities are understood in light of their distinctive tasks vis-à-vis the Kingdom of God can Christians avoid the dangers of being absorbed by or rejecting worldly responsibility. I propose that the relationship between God’s Kingdom, church, and state must be seen in light of the doctrine of justification. This doctrine implies that the Kingdom is neither identical with church nor state, and yet, that the church serves a critical function in society as the Kingdom’s herald. I analyze the church’s differences from Kingdom and world, lay out a constructive notion of the church rooted in the doctrine of justification, and apply my political theology to the question of the death penalty.
"Public" Re-imagined: An Alternative to Church and State
Kristen Deede Johnson, Hope College
This paper offers a way to reimagine our current configurations of church, state, and civil society through a sustained engagement with contemporary conceptions of 'public.' Its concern is to re-think the very conceptions of public and private that have come to be taken-for-granted within contemporary liberal society. Public, by definition, refers to a group of people united around common ends and purposes. In our context, the public realm has been almost entirely eclipsed by the political; the institutions and associations that supposedly inhabit civil society have been severely restricted and diminished, albeit often by their own acquiescence, by historical and contemporary conceptions of political liberalism. We need to re-imagine our understanding of public so that new spaces begin to exist for multiple publics that can overlap and interact, publics that are richer and more identity-constitutive than what we now consider voluntary associations.
A20-106
Comparative Studies in Religion Section and Animals and Religion Consultation
Theme: Comparative Religious Approaches to Species Depletion, with Emphasis on Africa
Comparative religious approaches to problems of species depletion illuminate much, including theological, political, cultural, ethical, social, scientific, ecological, and economic challenges. This panel foregrounds African issues in particular in order to see world-wide problems well. The presentations are divided evenly into general and tradition-specific topics. The general topics include the current state of species around the world, with special focus on Africa, and a discussion of how religious NGOs respond to the World Conservation Union’s Red List of Threatened Species. The tradition-specific presentations look first at Islamic and Muslim voices on endangered species, with emphasis on African Muslims’ views, and then at Christian voices, again with emphasis on African Christians’ views. The concluding group discussion will go beyond panelists' topics to both (a) additional species problems and (b) other religious traditions. The emphasis on Africa will be maintained throughout.
A20-107
Ethics Section
Theme: Disciplining the Body as Ethical Training
Chastising the Body, Cultivating the Soul: Food and Drink as Ethical Issues during the Reformation
Susan E. Hill, University of Northern Iowa
This paper examines how theological quarrels between Catholicism and Lutheranism made their way into 16th century discussions about proper eating habits. Using texts by, among others, Martin Luther, (Sermon on Soberness and Moderation), and Luigi Cornaro,(How to Live Well), I argue that restricting the body's intake of food and drink is seen as the way properly to cultivate the soul, while indulgence and gluttony leave one spiritually bereft. These debates participate in a long history of bodily discipline with regard to food in the west, highlighting once again how food practices circumscribe regional and ethnic, as well as religious differences. Using insights from anthropologist Mary Douglas on purity, pollution and social boundaries, and social historian Michel Foucault's analysis of the use of bodily disciplines to reinforce authority, I suggest that these debates reveal a particular investment in corporal control that defines the proper Lutheran or the proper Catholic.
Martial Discipline and the Way of Peace: The Virtues and Vices of Zen-inspired Martial Arts in Japan
Jeffrey K. Mann, Susquehanna University
Legends abound of the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma and his role in the development of Asian martial arts. It was he, so the story goes, who taught certain physical exercises to his disciples in order to strengthen them for the physical rigors of his school of Buddhism. Much of the religious connection between Ch’an (Zen) and the martial arts was lost in China, but was rediscovered by the samurai in Japan, starting in the 13th century. Since that time, martial disciplines (e.g. iaido, kyudo, judo, karate-do) have become hearty companions of the religious discipline of Zen. This paper considers the role of these types of physical discipline as means to spiritual development as well as the ethical character that they may tend to inculcate in their adherents.
Integration and Discrimination: The Significance of Artistic Activity for Moral Formation
Joyce Shin, University of Chicago
This paper examines the practice of artistic activity in order to develop an aesthetic approach to the moral life that addresses the moral formation of persons who must negotiate among their personal commitments to multiple cultures. Adequately addressing the problem of the self's integrity in the midst of cultural pluralism requires that ethicists account for the emotion-laden relationships that persons have with those to whom they feel responsible. This paper argues that, by calling our attention to the integrating and individualizing functions of emotions in creating artistic coherence, an aesthetic approach to moral formation can be especially relevant for persons who are struggling to integrate their personal commitments to multiple cultures.
Eucharist as Preparation for Martyrdom in Third-Century North Africa
Sheila McCarthy, Duke University
The liturgy of the Eucharist was a way for early Christians to heal from the trauma of persecution by learning to be martyrs, that is, witnesses, instead of victims. Gatherings for worship became schools of martyrdom, training potential martyrs not to be overcome by the shame of persecution, and teaching them to discipline their bodies so that prison will not break them physically, mentally, or spiritually. Cyprian and Tertullian use the language of soldiers and athletes in training to describe the necessity of disciplining one's body for the coming day of contest.
A20-109
Study of Islam Section and Women and Religion Section
Theme: Approaching the Problem of Qur'an 4:34: Divine Legislation for Male Authority and the Beating of Wives?
With its apparent sanction of male authority and wife beating, Qur’an 4:34 is one of the most controversial verses in the modern period; because of certain ambiguities, it was also the source of medieval debate. These four papers explore modern and medieval hermeneutics and the relationship between modern understandings and those of authoritative medieval sources. One speaks of how al-Shafi’i reconciled one source of law (the Qur’anic verse) with another (prophetic behavior/sayings); another, of the use of a medieval source as a lens for modern interpretation; the third, of differences amongst medieval, and between medieval and modern exegeses; and the fourth of the successes and failures of contemporary revisionist interpretations. At the heart of these papers lies the timeless problem of how to reconcile the word of God with contradictory evidence, variant authoritative understandings, and one’s personal convictions about what is just.
“In the Book We Have Left Out Nothing" (Q 6:38): The Ethical Problem of the Existence of Verse 4:34 in the Qur'an
Laury Silvers, Skidmore College
Medieval Muslim mystic and thinker Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 1240) claims all meanings drawn from within the semantic boundaries of the language of the Qur’an are intended by God. If so, how do Muslims concerned about violence against women reconcile their faith with verses such as 4:34 which can be read as a prescription to beat women to control their rebelliousness? I will explore the problem posed by the existence of verse 4:34 in the Qur'an through the lens of Ibn al-`Arabi's ontology and ethics and the traditionally received example of the Prophet Muhammad. God’s self-disclosure through the macrocosm, logocosm, and microcosm demands the full expression of his beautiful and terrible attributes as well as the human responsibility to cultivate the proper balance between the two. I argue that Muhammad’s example demonstrates that cultivating that balance requires resisting divine prescriptions that are ultimately not worthy of us as children of Adam.
The Problems of Conscience and Hermeneutics with Respect to Verse 4:34: Some Contemporary Muslim Approaches
Ayesha Chaudhry, New York University
In this paper, I explore some modes of reconciling the problems that arise when believing Muslims approach the Qur’anic text and find verses that violate their pre-existing notions of justice – which among other things are informed the by the text itself. This moment of interruption in the relationship between the believer and text has been dealt with in various ways throughout Islamic history. However, this paper will focus on the particular problems raised by verse 4:34, and specifically, with the prescription of ‘hitting’ one’s wife as the last of three mitigating directives when dealing with a wife who embodies the quality of nushuz. In particular, approaches that have been adopted by some contemporary English-speaking Muslim scholars will be examined in order to see the results they yield. Some of the scholars whose work will be considered are Fazlur Rahman, Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, Khaled Abou El-Fadl and Farid Esack.
“I Wanted One Thing and God Wanted Another:” Al-Shafi‘i’s Attempt to Reconcile Qur’an and Sunnah on Subject of Striking Wives
Kecia Ali, Brandeis University
In al-Umm, al-Shafi‘i (d.204/820) attempts to carry through in substantive law the principles elucidated in his famous methodological treatise al-Risala, which discusses at length the relationship between the Qur’an and sunnah as sources of Islamic law. In discussing a husband’s right to strike his wife, al-Shafi‘i must resolve the tension between the Qur’anic permission in verse 4:34 for men to strike their wives in certain cases and the Prophet’s reported actions and words, never striking his own wives and counseling or commanding other men not to do so. Reconciling these seemingly contradictory sources of law is complicated by al-Shafi‘i's commitment to the exclusive authoritativeness of Muhammad’s own sunnah, not that of any of his Companions, and his view that this sunnah could not contradict or abrogate the Qur’an. This paper also considers the implications of al-Shafi‘i’s approach to sunnah for contemporary Muslim debates about gendered marital rights and duties.
“Traditional” Exegesis of 4:34: Men’s Authority and Women’s Rational Deficiency
Karen A. Bauer, Princeton University
In this talk, I examine some major and minor trends in medieval and modern exegeses of 4:34, the Qur’anic verse that has historically been understood to legislate men’s authority over women. Variations in the medieval exegeses of this verse demonstrate methodological developments in the genre of tafsir (exegesis of the Qur’an), while modern exegetes’ selective quoting and reinterpretation of this medieval tradition enables them to confirm modern notions and values. Thus, some medieval trends disappear in the modern age. Yet some exegeses, for instance the explanation of women’s rational deficiency, are preserved wholesale from the medieval to the modern period. This wholesale preservation may be more complex than it appears; drawing on fieldwork conducted in Syria, medieval and modern exegeses, and a treatise on the subject of rationality written by the medieval jurist and exegete al-Mawardi, I explore differences in how medieval and modern exegetes used the terms “rational deficiency”.
A20-111
Theology and Religious Reflection Section
Theme: Critical Responses to Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Duke University Press, 2005)
This panel seeks to focus upon the precise role that a certain “theological” mode of thinking (undertaken in the Judeo-Christian tradition) plays within recent theoretical approaches to such political concepts as “empire,” “universalism,” “multiplicity,” “marginality,” “difference,” etc. The panel will explore these issues on the basis of critical responses to Theology and the Political: The New Debate, edited by Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek. All of the panelists will express the conviction that an emerging global economy of "empire" poses a devastating challenge to the supposed intersections between "theology" and "politics," especially as previously theorized within the past century. A critical engagement with the issues raised in this book in particular will prove to be of vital importance to theorizing these intersections anew for our time.
A20-112
African Religions Group and World Christianity Group
Theme: African Christianity
World Christianity is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand Christian faith and practice on six continents, informed by the multitude of world historical and cultural experiences, and expressed through diverse local religious traditions. This panel, co-sponsored with the African Religions group, will look at Christianity and African religions in Africa and in the African diaspora in the United States.
Redrawing the Boundaries of Early Christianity: The Case of the Axumite Empire and Its Sources
Gay Byron, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School
The boundaries of early Christianity have been prescribed around a set of historical and geographical contexts and assumptions that preclude any real engagement of peoples and places beyond the contours of the Roman Empire. In this paper I examine the Axumite Empire, an empire that flourished from the first through the sixth centuries CE and was considered one of the four great kingdoms of antiquity alongside Persia, Rome, and China. I will also explore some of the ways in which the sources and traditions from this ancient African (specifically Ethiopian) empire might broaden the geographical and hermeneutical lens through which early Christian writings are understood and, likewise, facilitate discussions between biblical and World Christianity scholars specializing in various aspects of Christian faith and practice.
Ghambageu Encounters Jesus: Change and Continuity in the Mythology of the Sonjo (Tanzania)
Mika Vähäkangas, University of Helsinki
The Sonjo of Northern Tanzania are famous for their hero-god Ghambageu, whom they expect to return at the end of times. Despite strong Christian missionary activities the Sonjo have not abandoned their traditional religion. However, Christian mission has introduced a thorough transformation of Sonjo traditional religion. An analysis of Sonjo mythology recorded during more than five decades reveals that the position of Ghambageu has become increasingly central. Myths that used to tell about other persons have been shifted to refer to Ghambageu. The position of Ghambageu is becoming like the position of Jesus in Christianity. Additionally, there is a tendency to edit old myths of Ghambageu to conform to the Gospel accounts of Jesus. As a final development, Jesus and Ghambageu are identified. According to this interpretation, when Ghambageu resurrected, he moved on to Europe to live there as Jesus.
The Ancient in the Mind, Memory, and Religious Life of the Contemporary African Peoples
David Ogungbile, Obafemo Awolowo University
The twenty-first century has proved to be a period when there appears to be divine intervention by African spiritual beings to return to the root the peoples whose lives had been influenced by Christianity and Islam. Indigenous religion continues to live in the consciousness of most African peoples as evinced in the religious lives of the peoples. There is a new resurgence to hegemonic indigenous festivals in most towns and villages, particularly among the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria. Added to this is a wider space opened to indigenous religions by the participation of African Diaspora, tourists and movie- and song makers in the Southern part of Nigeria. This paper examines some principal indigenous festivals and also analyses movies, to show the power and vitality of indigenous religions on the African peoples, in different areas including politics, medicine, culture and so forth.
African Christianity and the Neo-Diaspora in Minneapolis
Frieder Ludwig, Luther Seminary
From the outset, the spread of Christianity has been linked to migrant networks, and today, in the “age of migration”, there are crucial implications for congregational life, pastoral leadership and our understanding of mission. In Minnesota, the number of African immigrants grew in the 1990s by 620.7% -a tendency which continues. Nowhere is Minnesota's new diversity more apparent than in Minneapolis and St. Paul. There is little doubt that church life in Minnesota has been significantly affected in different ways by these new arrivals. This also has an impact on how theology, and especially mission theology is done. The connection between Minnesota and Africa is particularly relevant, since a high number of African immigrants come to Minnesota and since our European-derived congregations can learn from Africa as the area with the “fastest church growth of any region in the world” which demonstrates the dramatic Southward shift of Christianity.
A20-113
Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Group and Asian American Hermeneutics
Theme: Teaching “Difficult” Texts in Communities—Asian North American Scholars in Conversation
This session will be a conversation among Asian North American biblical scholars and religious educators teaching “difficult” texts in communities. Using interactive round table discussion as a method, the participants will address the following questions: 1. How does one determine which texts are defined as “difficult” texts? What is the role of context in defining which text is considered to be “difficult”?; 2. What are some of these “difficult” texts? Why?; 3. What are some of the hermeneutical stances ground one’s pedagogical and interpretive approach?; 4. What are some of the pedagogical strategies that are useful in these teaching contexts?; 5. In your experience, what has worked and what has been less successful?
A20-114
Bioethics and Religion Group
Theme: The Human Genome Project: Religion, Bioethics, and Public Policy
As director of the Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins led the successful effort to complete the Human Genome Project. In addition to his contributions to basic genetic research, Dr. Collins is concerned with the ethical and legal implications of genetics. He has been a strong advocate for protecting the privacy of genetic information and has led efforts to prohibit gene-based insurance discrimination. Building on his own experience as a physician volunteer in a rural missionary hospital in Nigeria, Collins is also very interested in opening avenues for genome research to benefit the health of people living in developing nations. In this session, Collins will address the religious and ethical implications of the human genome project. His respondents are James Childress and Ronald Green, both important contributors to the national debates on bioethics in the past several decades.
A20-115
Comparative Studies in Hinduisms and Judaisms Group
Theme: Ritual in Hindu and Jewish Diasporic Spaces
First Comes Love Then Comes Marriage...? Domesticating Queer Jews
Gwynn Kessler, University of Florida
Queer Jewish weddings, as public performances and celebrations of the “private” institution of marriage, have burst onto the North American and International political and religious scene(s). Instead of being framed by the language of assimilationist vs. anti-assimilationist tensions and tendencies inherent in the expression of queer identity, this paper explores the questions—and challenges—posed by such public rituals within the framework of domestication. How have queer Jews been both domesticated by the current clamoring after the rights of marriage and how have they domesticated traditional Jewish rituals associated with Jewish marriage in order to remain tied to the collective body of Israel—thus remaining at home in Judaism?
A Global Polycultural Miracle: Ganesh Drinks the Milk
Shreena Gandhi, University of Florida
On September 21, 1995 Ganesh moortis all over the world drank milk from the hands of devotees in temples and in homes, from consecrated and un-consecreated moortis. For many Hindus, ritual life is not relegated to just the temple or the home, rather both spaces have vibrant ritual cultures, however, there are distinctions between consecrated and unconsecrated moortis. The Ganesh milk miracles blurred this distinction. This paper discusses the life of moortis in temples and in Hindus homes, and attempts to show how Hindu domestic space in the diaspora becomes polycultural, in that it shifts and adapts to contemporary environments and needs, making obselete orthoprax ideas surrounding consecration and ritually unpure space.
“You Have Peruvian Blood”: Creating Home at the Annual Hebraica Maccabi Games
Hilit Surowitz, University of Florida
The MAR-JCC Annual Maccabi Games, a tradition of the South Florida Latin American and Caribbean Jewish communities, is a ritualized space which acts as a bridge between the communities’ current home and their former homelands in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Opening Ceremony of the Maccabi Games is a reflection of the multiple diasporic horizons of the community and the centrality of the transmission of communal identity and values to younger generations. This paper explores ideas of diaspora, identity, home, community, and the reaffirmation of community in the MAR-JCC Annual Maccabi Games.
Creating Community Spaces in American Hinduism: Authority, Authenticity, and Identity
Vasudha Narayanan, University of Florida
Hindu rituals in the United States reconfigure domestic and community spaces and differ from the ways they are celebrated in India. By looking at two women’s rituals (one south Indian and one north Indian - varalakshmi vratham, and karvachauth) and Deepavali, a festival celebrated by most Hindus, I show that the reasons for reconfiguring the spaces have different motives. Women’s rituals traditionally celebrated in individual homes in India become multi-family celebrations in America; in other cases, rituals conducted in domestic spaces in India are conducted in temple spaces in America. The reasons for the changes in spaces, I argue, are predicated on multiple layers of being “authentic.” Deepavali, on the other hand, which has components of domestic rituals and the display of fireworks in family homes in India becomes, in America, a time for the public performance of “Indian” and “Hindu” identities through music and dance on community stages.
A20-116
Comparative Theology Group
Theme: The Comparative Religious Ideas Project: A Critical Retrospective Five Years Later
2006 marks the first year of the new Comparative Theology Group - and also five years since the completion of the Comparative Religious Ideas Project, the cross-cultural research conversation hosted at Boston University during 1995-1999 (though including a wider group of participants). Led by Robert Neville and Peter Berger, a group of senior and junior participants collaborated in investigating possible categories for comparative theology with special attention to the challenges related to balancing religion-specific expertise and theorizations of religion and comparative practice. The project resulted in a three volume set consisting of The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth (SUNY Press, 2001). It is the purpose of this panel to revisit this landmark project by providing a forum for critical reflection about its distinctive contributions to comparative studies, its reception within the broader academy, and its implications for the future study of comparative theology and religion.
A20-117
Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group and Western Esotericism Group
Theme: Disciplinary Traditions Reconsidered: Comparative Approaches to the Study of Western Esotericism and Religion
This session discusses issues implicit in defining the fields/categories of "esotericism," "mysticism" and "religion." The four papers examine a variety of related issues, including criteria of differentiation, theoretical implications, institutional allegiances, and self-representations of the contemporary "field."
Utopian Thinking and Esoteric Discourse: Esotericism as a Comparative Category
Olav Hammer, University of Southern Denmark
The study of Western esotericism was made possible by a comparative perspective. The various currents encompassed by the term were at an early stage seen to display a family resemblance that set them apart from the broader category "religion." A fruitful typology of objects needs to share some interesting trait beyond the mere fact of fulfilling the criteria set out in the definition. A crucial comparative issue is thus what further common traits might unite the scholarly construct "esotericism". The present paper suggests that the discourses of political utopianism and dystopianism provide an arena in which characteristic esoteric tropes can be played out. In order to do so, the paper draws particularly on two currents that are widely separated in time and space, yet manifest considerable structural similarities: the political gnosis of the 10th-century Islamic philosopher al-Farabi, and the early 19th-century Romantic esotericism of the New School.
Esotericism and Mysticism: What Is the Difference?
Kocku von Stuckrad, University of Amsterdam
Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the academic study of religion has been wrestling with the definition and demarcation of 'mysticism.' The difficulties have not become less when from the 1980s onward the study of '(western) esotericism' entered the scene, addressing many phenomena that had previously been labeled 'mysticism' under the new rubric of 'esotericism.' Focusing on Jewish traditions in particular, the paper discusses some approaches to this ongoing debate and proposes an interpretation that helps idealtypically differentiating mysticism from esotericism. The paper applies Kocku von Stuckrad’s twofold discursive interpretation of esotericism as a 'claim of higher knowledge' and 'means for accessing that knowledge.' This concept of esotericism does not refer to secrecy but to processes of revealing hidden knowledge by appropriate means. It is the strategic goal of gaining knowledge that differentiates esotericism from mysticism.
Chips from Another German Workshop: Schleiermacher among the Theorists of Religion
Theodore Vial, Iliff School of Theology
This paper continues the work of Andrew Dole in correcting a misreading of Schleiermacher common among scholars interested in theory and method. It furthermore turns from a strategy of using this misreading to promote one strategy of explaining religion, to a more pressing question, that of historicizing the development of the category of 'religion' in the 19th century. It does so by showing the ways in which the category as constructed by Schleiermacher (dark hat for contemporary theorists) influenced the category as constructed by Friedrich Max Müller (the white hat). In doing so it works out of the call for critical self awareness needed for good contemporary theory building, as called for by Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad, and Tomoko Masuzawa, among others.
Discipline and Interdiscipline: On Magical Comparisons
Christopher Lehrich, Boston University
The problem of definitions has resurfaced in the study of esotericism. Definitions are analytical tools and frameworks; they do not describe and classify preexistent objects. "Esotericism" is something we construct for analytical purposes. For most of the major figures in this emergent field, such construction is pragmatically necessary, because (as von Stuckrad puts it) esotericism is "an academic 'field' ... that wants ... to bring together scholars from various research areas and disciplines...." But granting this practicality, we must ask whether categorical debate in a limited disciplinary context can achieve the goal. I argue that the emerging consensus of 'esoteric studies' amounts to the invention of a discipline, limiting interdisciplinary cooperation and, ironically, threatening to perpetuate academic exclusion of esotericism. From several models, I propose an alternative, comparative approach, and also suggest that a radically integrative model of comparison has instructive precedents in the heart of "Western esotericism."
A20-118
Islamic Mysticism Group
Theme: Permutations of Islamic Mysticism
Islamic mysticism is a broad umbrella category that can encompass many religious phenomena. This panel undertakes a wide regional coverage (West Africa, Persia, Central Asia, South Asia) to investigate ways in which the themes of Islamic mysticism have taken on local forms in relation to other kinds of discourse. These include the Islamic credentials of just leadership (Shehu Uthman Dan Fodio), the esoteric cosmology of the Hurufi movement, the ethnography of women's Sufi rituals in Tajikistan, and the balancing of mystical and legal epistemology is by the scholars of Deoband.
Defining an Islamic Notion of Justice: Shehu Uthman Dan Fodio's Kitab Al-Usul Al-Adl
Heba Khan, Rice University
In the early nineteenth century, a series of revolutionary movements or jihads caused radical social and political change and resulted in the formation of Islamic states in West Africa. The most successful of these was the Fulani jihad led by Shehu Uthman Dan Fodio between 1804 and 1808. The Shehu and his followers successfully overthrew the Hausa ruling aristocracy and established an Islamic government ruling from Sokoto. Distinguishing his cause from marginal rebellious uprisings, the Shehu emphasized that his jihad was based on the principles of justice, which he outlines in his political treatise, Kitab al-Usul al-‘Adl. However, the Shehu discusses two widely differing concepts of justice in this treatise and fails to achieve a cohesive picture of leadership. Using the Shehu’s work, I argue that Islamic rulers have forever been plagued with problems of legitimacy because of a lack of clear concepts of justice and just leadership in Islam.
The Hurûfî Concept of Knowledge According to the Early Hurûfî Texts
Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Hurufism is an Islamic movement of Gnostico-messianic trend which originated in Iran in the second half of the 14th century. The Hurûfî doctrine is strongly influenced by the occult sciences, particularly by the 'science of letters' (‘ilm al-hurûf), whence the name of the movement. Most of the Hurûfî writings have not yet been published and are only available as manuscripts. The views presented in this paper are based on the study of the manuscript of the Jâvidân-nâme, the major work of the founder of the Hurûfî movement, Fadlallâh Astarâbâdî (d. 796/1394), and some early commentaries of this work by his direct disciples. The general idea here is to follow the complete 'cycle' of Knowledge, from its origins in the timeless Essence of God, through its entering the Time and unfolding until its return to the Origin, in the movement of universal Hermeneutic (Ta'wîl), in the end of the Time.
Inside a Women's Sufi Ritual: Modern Responses to the Transmission of Baraka in Tajikistan
Margaret Jean Rausch, University of Kansas
The ability of otins to access and transmit baraka has been misinterpreted, ignored or overlooked by scholars studying these Uzbek and Tajik women religious experts and Sufi ritual leaders. This paper argues that baraka is key to understanding otins’ religious authority and ritual performances. This paper explores local understandings of baraka by examining a mevlud ritual filmed in Dushanbe in July 2004. The ritual features an exchange on baraka among participants including the otin, an Islamist woman and two American missionaries. The paper emphasizes the physicality of baraka, revealing local understandings of embodying discourse in ritual and daily life. It underscores the centrality of baraka to otin’s ritual performances and ongoing local deliberations about Islam and Muslim identity. The juxtaposition of competing Islamic viewpoints and impinging Western globalization, played out at all levels of social interaction, are revealingly illustrated in this women’s Sufi ritual.
Sufism, Reform, and Heterologies: The Case of Deoband
SherAli Tareen, Duke University
In this paper, I investigate the character of Sufi discourses during the early years of the Deoband Madrassa in Northern India. The central question that I address is as follows: how do the Deoband Ulama of the 19th century deal with the inherent tensions between the ideals and responsibilities of traditional Islamic learning (Maulwiyyat) and those of mystical devotion and practices (sufiyyat)?
I argue that the early Deoband ulama were not only willing to but were also highly adept at embodying multiple heterologies simultaneously, at once negotiating and balancing the needs and responsibilities of the mystical-self with those of the rational-self. In this sense, the adoption of heterologies not only allowed the early ulama of Deoband to successfully wrestle with the inherent epistemological tensions between mysticism and the rational-self, but it also allowed them to think through the idea of ‘religious revival’ in a distinctly elastic and non-doctrinaire fashion.
A20-119
Person, Culture, and Religion Group
Theme: Spiritual Care in Diverse Cultural Contexts
The Identity Marketplace: Conceptualizing Religious Identity Development for Research and Spiritual Care in Pluralistic Societies
David Bell, Emory University
With the influence of postmodern globalization, scholars acknowledge that achieving and sustaining an identity is under an increasing tension pulled into a marketplace of meanings as countries, cultures, and faith communities are brought into an increasing awareness of and interaction with each other. The latest research in identity posits that there is not one identity, but multiple identity domains for each person, i.e. ethnic, sexual, familial identity domains. Grounded in developmental contextualism and identity status theory, the paper reframes the question of how religion influences overall identity to investigating how religious identity is a cognitively unique process for individuals and should be attended to by researchers and spiritual caregivers. Four psychosocial statuses of religious identity are proposed and explained. Recognizing these religious identity statuses is crucial to understanding the formation and development of religious identity and overall spiritual development.
Doing the Splits: The Professional Identity of the Spiritual Counselor in Contemporary Dutch Health Care
Hetty Zock, University of Groningen
The professional identity of the spiritual counselor in Dutch health care institutions is at stake. In former days, s/he was primarily a religious office holder fulfilling ecclesiastical functions. Against the background of secularization and depillarization, the spiritual counselor turns more and more into an existential counselor, focussing on worldview and meaning issues of all clients/patients/residents, irrespective of their philosophy of life. This brings along the need for a new conceptualization of the profession. What is the spiritual counselor’s particular contribution to care and treatment, compared to that of, for instance, psychotherapists and social workers? What are the specific goals, methods and key images of the profession? The paper sketches the specific context the Dutch spiritual counselor has to work in and the dilemma’s s/he is faced with. A theoretical foundation of the profession is sought in the psychology of meaning giving (Jan van der Lans, Donald W. Winnicott).
Spirituality through Theater for Healing the Broken-Heartedness
Jae Haeng Choi, Graduate Theological Union
This paper begins with the broken-hearted girls and their context at a Korean juvenile reform school where I was a student pastor from 1993 to 1998. It analyzes the girls’ broken-heartedness from the perspective of psychoanalysis and social psychology, focusing on James W. Fowler’s and Archie Smith Jr.’s understanding of Self and of broken-heartedness. Then, it constructs a four-stage spiritual pedagogy through theater for healing the girls’ broken-heartedness: via (1) building a loving community; (2) writing autobiography; (3) finding voice and (4) visioning. In order to create a spiritual pedagogy, it utilizes twentieth century American theaters such as Bertolt Brecht’s “Dialetic Theater” and Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed,” which emphasize communal space, critical thinking and social consciousness about liberation.
The Impact of Postmodernization on Worldview Construction and Spiritual Care in Sweden
Valerie DeMarinis, Uppsala University
This paper draws upon the findings of two Swedish empirical studies to present a psychological and socio-cultural orientation to the impact of postmodernization on worldview construction and spiritual care operating in contemporary Sweden. The first study, a national sample survey, focuses on the Swedish data for the 2005 World Values Survey. These data are used to formulate an overarching worldview typology, including coordinating value components, which provides a socio-cultural mapping of the postmodernization process in Sweden thus far. The second study concentrates on a nation-wide survey conducted in 1998 of priests in the Church of Sweden and pastors in two other Protestant denominations. The data from this study are used to construct a mapping of spiritual care activities as well as evolving definitions of such care in Northern Europe’s most secularized context. Attention is focused on defining the parameters of psychological need for spiritual care in this postmodernized context.
A20-120
Religion and Popular Culture Group
Theme: Museums, Monuments, and Memory
Shrines to the Muse
Louis A. Ruprecht, Georgia State University
Modern museums have been analyzed from the perspectives of cultural anthropology, feminism, post-colonialism, even performance studies and marketing/communication. They have been interpreted as everything from storehouses for ill-gotten Euro-American loot, to essential modern institutions consciously placed in the service of national identity-formation. Museums have also been criticized for the ways in which they institutionalize the imperial gaze, the male gaze, the erotic or aesthetic gaze. I propose an historical, rather than an ethical, analysis which emphasizes the subtly “pagan gaze” that originally defined modern public art museums. Such museums become especially fascinating places when they are viewed through the lens of Comparative Religion. The first modern, Classical art museum was organized inside the Vatican in the mid-1700s; its subsequent influence was enormous, and still is. Few have commented on this essential link between Modern museums and Romantic spirituality, the unprecedented way in which Art came to be privileged.
Palace and Mosque 2005: Evaluating Islamic Culture at the National Gallery of Art
Rosemary Hicks, Columbia University
In this presentation, I utilize the National Gallery of Art’s floor plans, design notes, and promotional materials to explore some of the “poetics and politics of representation” involving museums and religion. I place materials from the Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit (housed at the Gallery in DC from July 2004 to February 2005) in conversation with cultural theorists’ arguments about the dynamics of display at Smithsonian Institutions. I thus highlight particular underlying notions about the relationships between science, art, and authority in secular societies, and how the choices made in creating this display about medieval Islamic art expressed prevailing attitudes on the relations between the secular “West” and the Islamic Middle East. I conclude by demonstrating how secularist assumptions about what counts as science overlapped with the pre-existing question of what counts as art when dealing with Islam.
Sacred Histories and Prophetic Spaces: Civil Religion in Museums of the American West
Evan Berry, University of California, Santa Barbara
Museums have generally been theorized as secular spaces that are “like” religious ones. Rejecting the simile of religion, this paper interrogates the religious function of museums as they spatially embed historical narratives of the American West, articulating the teleology of civil religion. Where Frederick Jackson Turner’s unilinear dialectic of providential progress shaped museums throughout much of the 20th Century, James Clifford’s theory of museums as “contact zones” more accurately describes the spatial practices of contemporary memory work. In this shift, the struggle between two kinds of civil religious authority comes into clearer view: priestly attempts to maintain Turner’s traditional historical teleology find themselves challenged by a prophetic call to overturn established narratives of the American West. A theological ambivalence between the priestly and the prophetic seems a more robust description of American civil religion as museums produce and reproduce it through the profound symbolic power of “the West.”
The Bell and the Bomb: Cultural Memory and Civic Identity at the International Friendship Bell
Isaac Weiner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The International Friendship Bell, a traditional Japanese bonshō bell cast in Kyoto, was installed in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1996 to commemorate the city’s fiftieth anniversary. It serves 'as a symbol of the bonds of friendship that have developed between Oak Ridge and Japan over the past 50 years.' The Bell provoked a tumultuous decade-long dispute, culminating in a lawsuit. I interpret the International Friendship Bell as a highly ambivalent site of cultural memory. Both the Bell’s proponents and opponents attempted to fix its meaning within competing narratives, but I argue that the Bell’s power emerges precisely from its capacity to accommodate multiple unresolved, conflicting and ambivalent meanings. I also explore how a religious material object can be 'secularized' by civic authorities and invested with meanings far removed from its original context. The International Friendship Bell does not reverberate in a single tone, I conclude, but rather resonates polyphonically.
A20-121
Religion, Politics, and the State Group and Religion, Public Policy, and Political Change Consultation
Theme: Assets and the Poor: An Interreligious and Interdisciplinary Dialogue
The purpose of this panel is to initiate a critical dialogue among social scientists and scholars of different religious traditions regarding recent public policy proposals aimed at facilitating ownership among the poor. This approach to poverty reduction, arguably one of the most significant developments in poverty policy in decades, has gone virtually unnoticed among religious ethicists. By encouraging interreligious and interdisciplinary dialogue, we hope to raise awareness about new approaches to reducing poverty and provide a forum for critical evaluation of public policies that enable ownership for those who most need it.
A20-122
Religions, Social Conflict, and Peace Group
Theme: Grassroots Peacebuilding around the Globe: Case Studies
This session showcases five case studies from across the world (South Africa, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and Syria) of grass roots, religiously-based activism structured to mend social conflict. In different contexts, these five women ask and answer: on a more local level, what constitutes effective "peacebuilding"?
Christianity and Justice in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Case Study in Religious Conflict Resolution
Megan Shore, St. Jerome's University, University of Waterloo
Historically, international conflict resolution theorists have largely adopted the position that religion is an instigator of violence. As a result, these theories have tended to exclude religion as a force for peacebuilding. Recently, however, scholars such as R. Scott Appleby and Douglas Johnston have suggested that religion can contribute constructively to a theory of conflict resolution. Their general thesis is that, if religion played a significant part in people’s lives, and if religion played a part in fuelling the conflict, then conflict mediators and policy makers must at least take religion into account, for without this consideration, mediators and policy makers not only fail to deal with the fundamentals of the conflict, but they also miss potential peacebuilding resources in the religious traditions themselves. This paper examines the controversial and ambiguous role that Christianity played in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and in the pursuit of transitional justice.
Walking in Step with the Spirit: Applying Pentecostal Commitments to HIV/AIDS in South Africa
Katherine Attanasi, Vanderbilt University
Pentecostalism is the fastest growing form of Christianity in developing countries. Built into this faith is a commitment to following Biblical commands, including loving one’s neighbor. Notably, paralleling Pentecostalism’s growth has been the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As such, African Pentecostals have not been able to isolate themselves from the disease. This paper examines how post-Apartheid South Africans are responding to the conflicts born of the HIV/AIDS crisis. It suggests how some South African Pentecostal believers engage HIV/AIDS, their rationale, and its limitations. In particular, it strives to uncover Pentecostal believers’ understandings of moral and ethical responsibilities by utilizing data collected from participant observation and qualitative interviews. Overall, this paper argues that an understanding of existing projects, as well as their theoretical underpinnings and limitations, can enhance successful endeavors and challenge Pentecostal believers to determine how their faith commitment speaks directly to the AIDS pandemic.
Saying No to Empire: Filipino Feminist Theologians against America's Unjust Wars
Kathryn Poethig, California State University, Monterey Bay
This paper reviews a Filipino ecumenical women's discourse of just peace and unjust war developed in the first two years of the Bush administration's global war on terrorism. Ecumenical Filipino feminist theologians have argued that the US in its impulse to empire has launched a series of unjust wars. They offer a revolutionary feminist theological critique of Empire and its relation to Filipino 'terrorists'. This critique redefines just and unjust wars through the lens of sovereignty and people's struggle for justpeace. Thus, they argue, the route to justpeace is not necessarily nonviolent.
Interfaith Dialogue at the Grassroot Level: A Case Study of an Interfaith Empowerment Program in East Java Indonesia
Siti Sarah Muwahidah, Gadjah Mada University
Interfaith dialogue is commonly used in building peace and understanding among religious groups. According to Knitter (1995), the grassroots interfaith dialogue starts with discussion of common problems in the local community, which leads to interreligious cooperation, and is finally followed by dialogue about their own particular religions. This paper presents findings from fieldwork carried out in Banyu Urip, a small village in East Java, Indonesia where land authority problems became a common ground for conducting interfaith cooperation. I observed interfaith empowerment efforts lead by a group of Catholic activists and students who arrived in 1997; they successfully supported the villagers in claiming their land. My general finding is that there is no one model of religious dialogue at the grassroots level, that in communities that lack knowledge of their own particular religion, the dialogue may take other forms. However, an interfaith perspective and sensitivity remains necessary in those dialogues.
Muslim/Christian Dialogue in Syria
Edith Szanto, University of Toronto
In contrast to their government’s stance in its ongoing conflict with the United States and Israel, the late Syrian Grand Mufti Sheikh Kuftaro, Parliamentarian Mohammad al-Habash, Ayatollah Fadhlullah and Father Paolo all value and engage in dialogue. Yet this dialogue does not necessarily promote egalitarian religious pluralism. Instead, the “dialogue” that these religious figures deem necessary and actively engage in, means something quite different to each. Their diverse views are partly due to these men’s own status in their respective societies, their involvement in intra-religious disputes and their strength vis-à-vis governmental control and international pressure. In their works they express their opinions on Christian-Muslim ecumenism, conversion, armed conflict, militancy, “the others” (Jews), spirituality and legitimacy. Still, their attitudes often conflict though they use similar strategies. In other words, they have come to use very similar sets of vocabulary, the “vocabulary of dialogue” no less, to express radically conflicting beliefs.
A20-123
Science, Technology, and Religion Group
Theme: Re-thinking the Engagement between Science, Technology, and Religion in the Public Sphere
The Human Machine: Dignity and Blame in Conceptualizing Humanity
Robert Geraci, Manhattan College
Fundamentalist Christians, particularly in the intelligent design movement, have criticized modern science for dehumanizing the human being, for turning the human being into a machine. However, contemporary scientists accused of stripping free will and dignity from the human person struggle with their mechanical descriptions of human beings and, more importantly, they are not the first but rather the most recent in a long tradition of defining and resisting mechanical descriptions of humanity in Western (i.e. Christian) culture. Early Christian debates over free will demonstrate the same difficulty in defining humanity that continues in modern science. Just as theologians struggled with the transcendence of God and the dignity and responsibility of the human being, scientists engage both mechanical and “more dignified” definitions in their descriptions of personhood. When fundamentalists blame modern science for mechanizing the human being, they ignore similar trends in their own traditions.
Disputational Friendship: A Model for Science, Religion, and Public Policy
Lisa L. Stenmark, San Jose State University
In this paper I address the role of religion and science—as discrete practices and in the science and religion discourse (the “SRD”)—within the public sphere, particularly in relation to public policy. Borrowing from categories developed by Hannah Arendt, I argue that truth claims—such as those made by religion and science—stifle debate and therefore hinder public policy. This suggests that to the extent that science, religion and the SRD make truth claims, they should be excluded from public debate. But, excluding truth claims is also disastrous to discourse and public policy. This paper presents an alternative model for thinking about the relationship of religion, science and the SRD to the public sphere: disputational friendship. After describing this model, I will apply it to public policy issues, such as stem cell research, teaching of evolution and global warming.
At the Touch of a Button: The Significance of Tillich’s Thought for an Understanding of Technological Culture
David Lewin, University of Kent
Where philosophers have considered the problem of modern technology they have noted a trend to marginalise any consideration of ultimate ends in favour of ever-improving means. But if, as Tillich suggests, Christian theology can have no other object than what is of ultimate concern, then it might appear that theology has nothing to say to modern technology. However, Tillich’s thought exposes the ultimate commitments latent within the technological project. Because that project is not considered as a whole, those ultimate ends are not reflected upon and thus the technological project is often experienced as a deterministic fate. This paper will show the relevance of Tillich’s theological method to an understanding not of particular technologies but of the technological project as a whole. It is only by reflection upon the ultimate concern of technology that technological fate can be transformed into destiny.
Evangelical Science: Examining the Scientific Beliefs of Evangelicals and Fundamentalists
George Tsakiridis, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago
In the last century or so the interaction of religion and science has taken on a significant role in the evangelical community. More than just framing the debate around creation science, evolution, and origins, this dialogue has many underlying hermeneutical foundations that are often overlooked amidst the political and scientific debate. This results in an oversimplified approach to religion and science. It is reduced to a conflict between evolution and creationism.
The goal of this paper is to look at the underlying conceptions that evangelicals and fundamentalists have about science, building a bridge from which further dialogue can take place. The evangelical community is often painted as only containing an anti-evolutionary stance, but Intelligent Design and creationism are only part of the picture. This study opens the door for dialogue by looking at some of the foundational beliefs of evangelical and fundamentalist views regarding religion and science.
A20-124
Scriptural Reasoning Group and Biblical/Contextual Ethics Consultation
Theme: Resident Aliens and the Ethics of Immigration: Biblical Ethics and Scriptural Reasoning
The session is a joint effort between Biblical/Contextual Ethics and Scriptural Reasoning to integrate study of biblical teachings in their social/ethical context with critical study of present social/ethical contexts. The panel will deal with the topic of resident aliens and the ethics of immigration.
A20-125
Theology and Continental Philosophy Group
Theme: New Directions in Continental Philosophy and Theology
The Religious Climate: Genetic Technology, Global Warming, and The Natural Contract
Thomas A. Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara
If anxious and sometimes violent resistance to emerging forms of technology and science will often speak today in the name of religion, one might nonetheless argue, in fact, that the techno-scientific dimension of human experience is itself profoundly, even fundamentally, religious--and perhaps above all in its tendency to shape the temporality of human (and other) life. This paper stages such an argument in and through a constructive reading--informed both by contemporary Continental philosophy and by the history of Christian theology--of the 'natural contract' theorized by French philosopher Michel Serres in his book by that name and in more recent works on technological humanity such as Hominescence (2001) and L'Incandescent (2003).
Departure as Prophesy: Drawing on Bergson’s Intuition, Whitehead’s Value, and Butler’s Agency to Read Temporality Anew
Christina Hutchins, Graduate Theological Union
Amid 21st century socio-political realities, reading and religion cannot be disentangled. How we read is inextricably linked to how we enact religion. Moments of rupture, such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent U.S. wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, and “terror,” offer unique portals into habitually assumed linkages between reading and religion, and afford opportunities for rethinking the interpretive moments that constitute those linkages. Drawing on Judith Butler's excess, loss, and subversive iterations, and on A.N. Whitehead’s novelty, perishing, and transitional processes, this paper demonstrates the efficacy of Bergson’s method of intuitive philosophy for constructing an aesthetic of reading literary texts and events of experience as/for departures toward an open-ended, plural future. Intuitively continuing through and beyond the well-theorized contractions of a “subject” constituted by constraint (Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Whitehead, etc.), departure is theorized as the temporal mobilities of agency and value when read toward sacred and social futures.
Haunting Religious Identity: The Enemy, Heresiology, and the Ghost
Theodore Wilson Dickinson, Syracuse University
This paper seeks to problematize an exclusionary notion of religious identity and gesture toward what this could mean for future theology. Gil Anidjar’s The Jew, the Arab and Daniel Boyarin’s Border Lines both provide vital criticism of dominant modes of religious identity on the grounds of their violent implications, historical construction, and inner incoherence. Both of these works, however, are at risk of being re-inscribed in their own criticisms through their treatment of “Christianity”—a short-coming that does not undermine these two projects, but that instead calls for future historical and theological work that relates to traditions in both a critical and affirmative manner. In the final move of the paper I want to suggest that Jacques Derrida’s figure of the ghost opens a space for religious identity that bears Anidjar and Boyarin’s criticism and provides a manner of affirmatively relating to traditions in a future, haunted theology.
A20-126
Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group
Theme: Transformations in Research and Teaching on Tibetan Buddhism with the Use of New Technologies
An exciting development in the academy is the rise of humanities computing, a discipline that integrates new technologies with humanistic teaching and research. Beyond merely rendering traditional approaches more efficiently, humanities computing allows us to rethink fundamental assumptions about theory, practice, and social partnership that govern the academy. Five panelists will present innovative projects focused on Tibetan Buddhism that span five areas in humanities computing: text-critical work, ethnographic approaches, reference resource development, thematic research collections, and pedagogy. The panelists will describe specific active projects that illustrate features and possibilities of these new approaches, as well as difficulties and areas for further development. Presentations will address ethno-historical studies of major monasteries integrating interviews, interactive maps, and textual analysis; new paleographic approaches to manuscripts; development of large scriptural databases integrated with associated scholarly resources; teaching strategies involving blogging and textual mark-up; 3D online exhibitions; and new communication tools.
A20-127
Childhood Studies and Religion Consultation
Theme: Children as Moral and Religious Agents in Literature and Film
This session features four papers that elucidate and analyze images of children and youth as moral and religious agents in children’s fiction and recent cinematic adaptations thereof, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and His Dark Materials, followed by a response by Dawn A. De Vries.
St. Charlie and the Chocolate Cathedral
Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner, Southern Methodist University
Charlie, a young boy impoverished financially, enters the Chocolate Cathedral of adult Willie Wonka. Three other children enter as well, but they succumb to the seven deadly sins: envy, pride, sloth, covetousness, greed, lust, and anger. Somehow, Charlie's life of poverty on the town's periphery has equipped him to morally navigate the luscious labyrinth of the Chocolate Cathedral. How are the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity manifested in this child-guide? How does Charlie connect with the 'child within Willie Wonka' so that, in a role reversal, Charlie becomes the tour master of the maze of Willie's childhood? Remembering himself as a young boy, Willie Wonka, impoverished emotionally, re-enters his 'family factory' and is led through this enterprise by Charlie. This paper portrays Charlie as moral guide and religious agent in the film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Harry Potter and a Fate Worse than Death: Landscaping the Moral Imaginations of Our Children
Dana Dillon, Duke University
Harry Potter has been discovering a world of magic that he never knew existed, but he is also learning how to see the world morally. This paper explores Harry’s growth in the conviction that it is better to die than to do evil and how this conviction shapes him as a moral agent. The first section traces Harry’s growth in this conviction, how his friends and teachers affirm it, and how his sense of what is evil changes over time. The second section attends to Voldemort as a contrast to Harry in his refusal to be limited by moral concerns. The third section argues that, although Harry Potter is no model of morality, he is a compelling moral agent who can help draw children into conversations about moral issues. The final section suggests possibilities concerning the seventh book and where J.K. Rowling will take our young moral agent.
Coming of Age: Nonviolence and Just War Theory in The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter
Devin Kuhn, Claremont Graduate University
The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter present battles of good versus evil in which children act as moral agents in this battle. Although both stories portray the main characters as initially engaging in creative nonviolent tactics to overcome injustice, as the stories progress, the children are eventually confronted with a moral moment in which they must choose violence to achieve their goal, and in Narnia, to even be considered worthy of that goal. This paper examines the ethical and religious implications of these moments of moral agency, as well as their relevance in the current political climate. The danger of these portrayals is the tendency to see the enemy as a disposable other – a tendency that leads to conflict both personal and global. Yet there is room in both tales for nonviolent alternatives, and the potential for children to reimagine their own moral agency in similar situations.
Interior Life and Moral Agency in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
Stephanie Paulsell, Harvard University
Although there are sharp theological differences between Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, both authors are preoccupied with the relationship between the cultivation of children’s inner lives and the ways in which they interpret and respond to the world. This paper will explore the relationship between the interior lives of children and their moral agency in the novels and ask how each author’s exploration of that relationship helps shape the distinctive religious vision of each series.
A20-128
Religion and Sexuality Consultation
Theme: Sex in the Field: Current Ethnographic Research in Religion and Sexuality
What does it mean to talk about sex with religious informants in the field? This session focuses on this question by highlighting important new ethnographic work on religion and sexuality. Pioneering work in this area has emerged in recent years, but few venues have thus far enabled ethnographers to discuss the methodological complexities of discussing sex in the field across religious traditions and cultures. This session does just that, featuring the emergent work of five researchers working in a wonderfully diverse array of geographic areas and religious traditions. The research includes sexuality discussions among Mormons and Catholics in the U.S., Muslims in Indonesia, Buddhist nuns in Thailand, and Candomble practitioners in Brazil. Papers will be both theoretically informed and ethnographically rich, enabling the session to facilitate a vital exchange of strategies that work for investigating religion and sexuality in the field.
Matriarchy, Cosmology, and Discretion: Female Homosexuality in the Afro-Brazilian Religion, Candomblé
Andrea Allen, Harvard University
The purpose of this paper is to delve into the relationship between the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé and homosexuality, and the seemingly divergent ways homosexual women and men engage the religion. Principally, I am interested in the disparity between women and men in their focus and use of myths and beliefs about the homosexuality and bisexuality of the orixás in Candomblé. I argue this divergence centers on women’s position in Brazilian society, their conceptualization of Candomblé as a “safe haven”, and stereotypes about the religion within Brazilian culture. My main argument is that women involved in same-sex relationships in Candomblé separate their religious and sexual identities, and hence do not seek affirmation of their homosexual relationships in the religion, unlike what seems to be occurring amongst gay men. This study departs from previous studies that have been done about Candomblé and homosexuality as it emphasizes female homosexuals’ negotiation of this religion.
Prostitution and Bhikkuni Ordination in Strategies of Thai Women’s Organizations
Sandra Avila, Florida International University
Proposals to introduce full ordination for women in Thai Buddhism have been discussed for a decade now and a bill has now been introduced into the legislature to allow such ordination. This paper will examine and evaluate from religious, economic and sociological perspectives, one of the most common arguments in favor of full ordination for women: that an effect of such ordination will be to seriously decrease the high rate of female sex trade workers in Thailand. Thai women’s organizations such as the Institute of Thai Maechi and EMPOWER illustrate how global thinking at the local level can develop a new kind of women’s movement which drives and breeds innovative action and activism despite women’s confusion and suffering embracing the Think Globally, Act Locally trend of today.
Sex and the Celestial City: Consecration to a Life of Virginity for Women Living in the World
Mary T. Kantor, Harvard University
The Rite of Consecration to a Life of Virginity for Women Living in the World comes from the Second Vatican Council's reforms of the Catholic Church and its liturgical life. Currently, there are almost 200 consecrated women in the United States and close to 2000 worldwide. Their lives are shaped and defined by this rite through its principal metaphors of virgin, spouse of Christ, mother. This paper will present a textual analysis of the liturgical texts for this rite, with particular attention to the principal metaphors of the ritual language. This analysis will be compared to, and discussed in light of, the consecrated women's self-understandings of their roles within the Church, within the world, as spouse, virgin, and mother. From interviews, a survey, participation/observation at consecration rituals I will present the experiences of these women and their understandings of the rite, as they live as consecrated virgins in the world.
The Jamu Industry, Islam, and Women in Indonesia
Sarah Krier, University of Pittsburgh
The purpose of my proposed presentation is to examine how Indonesian traditional medicine, or jamu, influences Indonesian Muslim women’s sexual and gender identities and shapes desire and pleasure in post-Suharto Indonesia (1998 – present). Having played an important part in discussions of sexuality and marriage in Indonesia for centuries, jamu can be used as a lens through which to see the interplay of gender relations, medical systems and sex. I find that discourse concerning jamu has traditionally worked to empower Javanese Muslim women by creating a unique arena where women can negotiate their sexual health choices. My research points to how pre-Islamic indigenous belief systems radically altered the introduced theories of Islamic medicine and of the science of sexuality. These combined Javanese-Islamic belief and medical systems continue to affect sexual and reproductive health practices in contemporary Indonesia.
A Mormon Philosophy of Sex: Some Surprises
Melissa Proctor, Brown University
Recent sociological evidence indicates that Mormons are successful in retaining pre-marital sexual purity. In this paper I explore what it is about the way sex is taught to Mormon teens that elicits such surprisingly effective compliance with sexual norms. In addition to adolescent chastity, what effects does the LDS sexual code produce? What happens when young Latter-day Saints don’t comply? Is premarital chastity an unalloyed good? What are its implications for young marrieds? What about those perpetually single souls who must live as celibates? One of the perennial feminist critiques of patriarchy stresses the deleterious effects for women’s sexual agency. Some feminist theories of sexual oppression in patriarchal societies would suggest that Mormon women are undermined in their sexual subjectivity. How applicable is this critique to Mormon women? While some ethnographic evidence lends support to this critique, there seem to be as much data challenging it.
A20-129
Sacred Space in Contemporary Asia Consultation
Theme: Structures of Re-Enchantment
Traditional theorists of modernity maintain that "secularization" and the "disenchantment of the world" necessarily accompany the development of modern societies. Revisionist scholars, however, highlight the myriad ways in which modern cultures "re-enchant" the world in fascinating, hybrid ways. This panel seeks to identify common elements in the transnational circulation of old and new forms of enchantment. It investigates a variety of sacred spaces in East and Southeast Asia that are shaped by the past even as they literally construct the future. It examines tradition and innovation in modern Japanese Buddhist architecture, and surveys the historical and transhistorical grounds for making Catholic, Won, Cheondogyo, and Dan’gun pilgrimage sites in Korea. It analyzes the old ways of enshrining new European deities in Singapore, and problematizes continuity and change in the Muslim academies of Indonesia. Taken together, these sites indicate the complexities of adapting to, and thriving in, the contemporary period.
Buddhism's Sacred Spaces in Contemporary Japan
Patricia Graham, University of Kansas
Numerous sites for Buddhist worship have been newly erected or restored in Japan since the end of World War Two. Some are found at institutional temple complexes and others in secular environments, such as art museum galleries and public parks. This paper introduces three distinct types of these newly-constructed sacred spaces: temple buildings reminiscent of traditional worship halls, those that reject tradition and embrace modernist architectural values, and non-denominational, secular sites inspired by Buddhism that are permeated with its sense of spirituality. All of these, even those that emulate traditional buildings, strive to create wholly new types of religious spaces, light-filled and comfortable, in accordance with principles of modern design. In pre-modern Japan, although each Buddhist sect required slightly different building types, certain consistent stylistic elements identified all their buildings as Buddhist. Not so for recent Buddhist monuments, which reflect the varied nature of Buddhist practice in Japan today.
Hallowed Ground: Surveying the Religious Geography of Korea
Don Baker, University of British Columbia
South Korea has developed a complex religious culture over the course of the 20th century, leading to competition among a growing number of religious organizations. One way those organizations compete is by making themselves more visible. And one way to make themselves more visible, besides building more worship halls, is to establish attractive sacred sites to which believers and potential believers may be drawn. Surveying pilgrimage sites established by Korean Catholics and Buddhists as well as by some of Korea’s new religions, I argue that different religious organizations in Korea have different criteria for what makes a site sacred and therefore attractive to pilgrims. For Catholics, sites where martyr’s blood was shed are the most sacred. For the new religions, it is ground on which their founders walked. For Buddhists, sacred ground must have a long tradition of manifesting supernatural power.
A German Goddess in Singapore
Sor-Ching Low, Trinity University
This paper argues that the creation of a goddess on an off-shore island in Singapore is part of a trend o of globalizing religions. In a country made up of immigrants who brought along their gods from India and China, the creation of the German goddess is part of a reverse trend of trying to 'settle' early newcomers by deifying them. The consecration of the German goddess on Pulau Ubin, an island northeast of Singapore, is an example of that. Accompanied by a legend that spans the two World Wars, and the British occupation, the German goddess is now housed in a Chinese shrine on the island. The consecration of this little German girl, I argue, is an example of how the nation attempts to re-invent its past and mythology in time and space, by creating a sacred shrine on what is the last piece of wilderness in Singapore.
The Mosque in Indonesian Education: Integrating the Learning Space
Florian Pohl, Emory University
The association of the mosque with education has remained one of the mosque’s defining characteristics throughout history. Indonesia’s Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) have maintained this tradition. The pesantren leader traditionally teaches his students in the mosque, regarded as the most appropriate place to gain knowledge. More recently and owing to growing socio-economic pressure, many pesantren have adopted government curricula. As a result, much of the instruction has moved into new buildings within the pesantren, complex giving rise to a new, functional differentiation of the learning space. Looking at four pesantren in and around the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, the presentation uses an analysis of the pesantren mosque and its role within the learning community as a prism through which to describe the emerging tensions between religious and formal education and to illustrate the conscious effort to maintain a level of integration of the learning space.
A20-133
Daoist Studies Consultation
Theme: Laoshan Daoist Monks Discuss Daoism
Representatives from the famous Daoist sacred site of Laoshan (Mount Lao), near Qingdao in Shandong province, discuss their views concerning contemporary Daoism. Planned topics include the defining characteristics of Daoism as a Chinese religion, contemporary Daoist monastic life, the relationship between Daoism and modern Chinese society, as well as the potential contributions of Daoism for addressing contemporary social problems such as ecology, ethics, and so forth. Short informal talks will be followed by a question and answer session. This panel is intended for specialists and all scholars interested in Daoism and Chinese religions. A translator will attend.
A20-134
Nineteenth-Century Theology Group
Theme: Responses to Hans Schwarz, Theology in a Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years (Eerdmans, 2005)
The Shifting Context of Global Context: The Changing Task and Scope of Historical Theology
Russell C. Kleckley, Augsburg College
Histories of theology, or of some part of the theological tradition, tend to appear at points where the writer notes a significant shift in the theological or global context. Historical surveys then attempt to reinterpret the theological tradition in light of that shift. This paper examines the reinterpretation of the theological tradition in selected histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, identifying the changing understanding of the theological tradition and the global context in which the tradition operates.
Schwarz's Theological Vision: The History of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Theology
Craig L. Nessan, Wartburg Theological Seminary
This contribution is a response to Hans Schwarz, Theology in a Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years (Eerdmans, 2005). The respondent will provide: 1) Assessment and reflection on the methodology, scope, and theological orientation of this book; 2) Commentary on the normative theological vision that organizes Schwarz’s narrative of Christian intellectual history and that holds it together; 3) Reflections on the continuities and discontinuities the author draws in the history of modern Christian thought; 4) Analysis of ways that the various 20th century theologies remain indebted to 19th century theologies and how 20th century theologies diverge from 19th century theologies. Special attention will be paid to the relation between 19th and 20th century
Context, Continuity, and Discontinuity in Hans Schwarz's Survey of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Theology
Darrell Jodock, Gustavus Adolphus College
This paper explores several implications of Hans Schwarz’s Theology in a Global Context: The Last Two Hundred Years (Eerdmans, 2005). Schwarz’s book provides a brief biographical introduction for each theologian, thereby recognizing the importance of historical context. And it seeks a global scope, thereby paying attention also to geographical context. Whenever attention is given to context, diversity is acknowledged. With diversity comes the question of continuity and discontinuity. As this 200-year epoch was beginning, thinkers found ways to affirm continuity amid historical discontinuity. One topic discussed in this paper is what Schwarz’s book suggests regarding the continuity and discontinuity of theologies in various parts of the world. The second is what it suggests regarding an explanation for the increasingly tenuous character of the assertions theologians make. The third is the significance of recognizing that a book about historically-contextual and geographically-contextual theology is itself historically and geographically contextual.
The Historiography of Modern Theology
Arie Molendijk, University of Groningen
This paper discusses Hans Schwarz’s new history of modern Christian thought in the context of the historiography of the field. First, I will compare his point of view to other recent studies in the history of modern theology and ask how they relate to intellectual, political and social history. Secondly, I will comment on Schwarz’s global perspective, which includes Christian thought on various continents. Thirdly, I will discuss the systematic theological import of the book. Schwarz’s ultimate aim is to help his readers to set a course for the global theological future. In what way and in what direction does the author guide us? Finally, I will make an attempt to draw the various themes addressed in this paper together by commenting on the unity and diversity in global, modern Christian thought.
A20-139
Mysticism Group
Theme: Mystical Healing: Modes and Methodologies
"Map of Consciousness": A New Paradigm for Mysticism and Healing
Fran Grace, University of Redlands
This presentation highlights the creative integration of science, mysticism, and healing developed by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. Following a radical dissolution of the personal 'I' (sudden enlightenment) near-death at age 38 (he did not speak of the transformed condition for thirty years), Hawkins observed thousands of psychiatric patients heal inexplicably. They came from all over the world to his clinics in New York. He was suprised by the healing effect on others of what he considered an impersonal 'energy field' that accompanied the transformed condition in which he found himself. After many years of ascetic solitude in silent Samadhi, he returned to the world of form to research the scientific basis of his mystical condition and present his findings in such a way that all people could learn to cultivate a 'healing' field. His 'Map of Consciousness' represents a new paradigm for understanding mysticism and healing.
Healing Narcissism: From Regression to Transformation in the Psychoanalytic Encounter with Unchurched Mysticism
Ann Gleig, Rice University
In his debate with Romain Rolland, arguably the locus classicus of the psychoanalytic encounter with modern unchurched mysticism, Sigmund Freud interpreted the “oceanic feeling” as a regression to the stage of primary narcissism. This paper explores two later perspectives-one from the psychoanalytic lineage and one from the unchurched mystical lineage-which radically reposition mysticism and narcissism effectively postulating a healing and transformative relationship between the two. First, I examine Heinz Kohut’s religio-ethical goal of “cosmic narcissism,” an existential and ethical developmental achievement indicative of a mature mysticism which enables constant participation in a contentless, supraordinate and supraindividual Self. Second, I discuss on A.H. Almaas’s Diamond Approach which utilizes but goes beyond psychoanalytic theory to identify a spectrum of narcissistic disturbances which are activated in the process of spiritual realization and offers a detailed map of the necessary stages for working through and transforming them.
Memory, Trauma, and Healing
Mark Graves, Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley
Memory provides conceptual knowledge that permits one to categorize experience, regardless of whether one categorizes that experience as natural, religious, mystical, or traumatic. Brain science describes the human memory as distributed throughout the brain. However, shared community takes form through individual minds, and one may view an individual’s distributed memory as connecting to shared social memories across “larger synaptic clefts” from one individual’s brain to another. At times of stress, conflict, or trauma, biological mechanisms related to survival tend to focus the individual, and consequently the group, on personal immediate needs rather than cross-cultural commitments. Prolonged or intense stress leads to desensitization regardless of whether it originates in painful situations or intense religious experience. The human condition includes both wounds and healing. Healing occurs in the brain in ways that effect emergent relationships when it connects disassociated networks or shifts dysfunctional systems to improve higher-level, emergent functioning.
Heavenly Visions, Holy Stigmata, and the Human Brain: A Neurotheological Look at the Life of Padre Pio
Anthony Chiffolo, Praeger Publishers
This paper examines what the new field of neurotheology has to say about the nature of mystical experience and the relationship between brain activity and function and spiritual events. Drawing on the research of such neurologists and neuropsychologists as Norman Geschwind, Michael Persinger, V. S. Ramachandran, Olaf Blanke, Andrew Newberg, Patrick McNamara, and others, this paper will use events from the life of stigmatist Padre Pio to explore whether there are neurophysiological reasons for the experience of heavenly visitations, stigmata, demonic warfare, prolonged fasting, high fevers, bodily scents, and so forth. Further, this paper will look at how neurotheology is changing people’s worldviews, particularly about the nature of religious experience.
A20-140
Library of Congress Forum: Legislating International Religious Freedom
Sponsored by the AAR, Library of Congress, and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Sponsored by the AAR, Library of Congress, and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
The panelists are Thomas Farr, former Director of the State Department Office of International Religious Freedom; Allen Hertzke, Director of Religious Studies, University of Oklahoma, and author of Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Human Rights; Elizabeth Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University, who has served as a Commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom; and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program at Buffalo Law School at State University of New York, and author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Timothy S. Shah, Senior Fellow in Religion and World Affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, will moderate.
Mumford Room, Madison Building
Library of Congress
Independence Avenue and 2nd St, SE
(near Capitol South Metro Station)
A20-130
Plenary Address
Theme: Karen McCarthy Brown--Telling My Stories: Race, Responsibility, and Historical Consciousness
Karen McCarthy Brown, a sociologist of religion, is one of the foremost scholars on Haitian religious traditions, and particularly on the role of women in these traditions. She is best known for her book, Mama Lola, and for her work as the Director of the Newark Project. She plays a particularly important role as an advisor in Haitian approaches to healing, and about broader project design based on her experience leading a large urban ethnographic study over an extended period. Her other important contribution has been to add significant theoretical sophistication to ethnographic data analysis.
A20-131
Arts Series/Films: Mooladé
Sponsored by the African Religions Group
A topical drama about a woman who shelters a group of girls seeking to avoid female circumcision, thereby sparking a conflict that tears her village apart. Directed by Africa’s renowned filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, this movie explores the controversial practice of female genital mutilation, highlighting the way protective spiritual forces are invoked in the course of the conflict. Natasha Copeland, scholar of Francophone literature and specialist on the work of Sembène, will preside.
Directed by Ousmane Sembìne, 2004, 120 minutes, unrated (color, Senegal, subtitled)
A20-132
Arts Series/Films: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Sponsored by Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group
Hedwig and the Angry Inch has a unique place in film history as only the second wide-release film to feature a sympathetic transsexual protagonist (Boys Don’t Cry being the first). Perhaps more importantly, however, it is the first wide-release film that encourages the audience to identify with a transsexual character who is not primarily a victim. It is not a film about the “plight” of transgendered people. Instead, Hedwig is represented in all her gender-malleable glory as a little boy, an androgynous young man, a transsexual woman, an over-the-top drag queen, and lastly, as a gender-ambiguous - but, it is implied - finally authentic self.
Directed by John Mitchell, 2001, 95 minutes, R rated (color, USA)
A21-1
Academic Teaching and the Study of Religion Section
Theme: Body, Mind, Spirit: Integrative and Innovative Pedagogies
Picture Yourself (Praying) Naked: Contemplative Practices and Self-disclosure in the Teaching of Religious Studies and Theology
Ridgeway Addison, Catholic University of America, Georgetown University
Certainly recognizable as a reworking of the calming mantra “Picture your audience naked,” tendered to public speakers, ‘Picture yourself (praying) naked’ is more importantly a heuristic developed to explore the sophic use of contemplative practices and self-disclosure in teaching various courses in theology and religious studies. Based on research and teaching experience, I believe that while these two methods can be “filler-fluff” replacing important intellectual data and existential exchange, I nevertheless contend that the discerning use of contemplative practices and self-disclosure can greatly enhance the quality of the educational experience for both teachers and students. In this paper composed of four primary moves, I will systematically unpack the pedagogical challenge, 'Picture yourself (praying) naked' by positing a potential resonance between quality teaching and quality contemplative practice in terms of standardized terminology (intellectual conversion; spirituality of teaching), constructive analysis ('contemplative teaching'), and offering educator-models (Parker Palmer, Joan Chittister, Howard Thurman).
Embodying Learning: Post-Cartesian Pedagogy and the Academic Study of Religion
Michelle M. Lelwica, Concordia College, Moorhead
In this paper, I explore the concept and practice of “embodied pedagogy” as an alternative to the dualistic approach to knowledge that is tacitly embedded in traditional modes of teaching about religion. Drawing on the works of scholars who suggest more holistic approaches to learning, my analysis will focus on an experimental class that combines the study of aikido, a Japanese martial art, with seminar-style discussions based on texts that explore the mind/body relationship in the context of diverse spiritual traditions. Aikido’s emphasis on cultivating mindfulness through non-competitive partner training makes it an interesting “case study” of embodied pedagogy. Ultimately, the insights and issues that this class present illustrate how post-Cartesian pedagogies can expose, challenge, and correct the lingering epistemological assumptions that contribute to one-dimensional views of religion. The paper concludes by considering other possible venues for embodying teaching and learning in the academic study of religion.
The Ecology of Learning: Some Buddhist Insights on Teaching Methodology
Jane Compson, University of Central Florida
In this paper I note that certain insights from ecology have parallels in Buddhist thought, and then I suggest how the application of such insights might have implications for academic teaching methodologies. As Callicott noted in his “triangular affair” analysis of the animal rights debate, awareness of the insights of ecology can bring a whole new angle to a discussion. In much the same way, Buddhist thought seems to suggest a certain ‘ecology’ of our minds – our ‘intellectual’ thought is best understood as being interdependent with a multitude of factors, both within and outside our skins. According to Buddhism, when it comes to ‘learning’, intellectual assent is only one part of the learning process – action and reflection are the other elements, and knowledge is incomplete without them. What would it mean to apply these insights to the academic classroom, and would it be appropriate to do so?
What Would We Be Doing if We Weren't Doing This? An Experiment in Liberatory Departmental Practice
Tina Pippin, Agnes Scott College
Over the past fifteen years in the Religious Studies Department at Agnes Scott College students and faculty have committed to engaging in liberatory practices in (some) classrooms and gradually toward transformation of our departmental structure. From this work has recently emerged a student group in the department, Safe Agnes (Scott) Sisters (SASS). SASS’s main role is preventative—to serve as an outward presence of the commitment to liberatory practice and to help us live into our vision statement. The beginning of our departmental vision statement has that “we seek to nurture a mutually inclusive and responsive community of scholars.” We are designing a session to invite critical assessment, including our own assessments to date. We are planning a “participatory paper” that is more dialogical and involves the audience in our imaginings.
A21-2
Arts, Literature, and Religion Section
Theme: Religion, Representation, and Resistance
Liberation in Black and White: Visual Representations of America’s Freedom Struggles in Philadelphia-area Episcopal Churches
Matthew Hunter, Temple University
Examination of two Philadelphia area Episcopal churches – Washington Chapel in Valley Forge and Church of the Advocate in north Philadelphia reveal divergent views of America, American freedom struggle and race. In each sacred space, artistic depictions of liberation are sacralized by the constituents of that church. Imagery enshrined in these churches distinguishes their constituents and demonstrates three ways that images participate in religious practice, as described by David Morgan and Sally Promey (The Visual Culture of American Religions, UC Press 2001, 2).” Each of these spaces establishes a communion around a particular mythology of 'freedom,' creates and organizes the memories of their members and fuels religious meaning-making action. They also demonstrate J.Z. Smith’s categories of locative and utopian space and exercise politics of exclusion and inclusion to solidify loyalty in America’s pluralistic society. Similarity and tension between these spaces makes them a fascinating couple. This presentation will include pictures.
Dancing in the Spirit: Rhythmic Movement in Hip-Hop “Krumping” Dance Culture as Liberative Praxis of Hope and Resistance
Melva L. Sampson, Spelman College
The purpose of this proposal is to acknowledge the religious and/or spiritual dimensions in the hip-hop artistic dance form “krumping,” an aggressive, cathartic, freestyle dance, as liberative praxis of hope and resistance. The 2005 film RIZE which tracks the vivid transformation of raw lives and anger into the wild beauty of the artistic expression will provide a foundational framework for validating this style as socially committed art. This work will provide a brief historical overview exploring the natural connectedness between worship, spirit, and dance in the African American context. Acknowledging the art form’s inherent religious and spiritual dimensions, this paper proposes that the galvanizing dance movement created on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles, by inner-city youth who identify their social location within hip-hop culture, serves as a therapeutic release amidst extraordinary struggle for survival against and triumph over brutal systems of exploitation.
Spinning Texts and Images: Derek Walcott, God-Talk, and Caribbean Identity
Michael Jagessar, Queen's Foundation, Birmingham UK
This paper will explore selected pieces of Walcott’s works to demonstrate how the Caribbean poet laureate engages with spiritual themes, negotiates Caribbean identities, and reworks selected biblical narratives and theological notions. I will contend that insights from Walcott can enable Caribbean God-talk counter totalising proclivities and over-dependence in exactitudes. To this end, I will be particularly keen to highlight and explore Walcott’s creative use of Caribbean metaphors and images with their potential to enable the release of biblical texts and theological notions from ideological and cultural captivity in Caribbean (inherited) theological discourse. While this piece will underscore that Caribbean hermeneuts and theologians and Caribbean God-talk can learn much from Walcott, it will also make a case for the much-needed conversation between Caribbean literature and theological discourse in the region.
Human Rights, Suffering, and the Moral Imagination
William Barbieri, Catholic University of America
In what ways does human rights discourse, as a discourse of justice, break down some social boundaries while constituting or reinforcing others? I examine this question in connection with one particular venue for human rights work, namely the arts. Representations of suffering in literary works, visual arts such as painting and photography, and various multimedia genres including film and hypertext have been instrumental in eliciting responses to human rights abuses, and have moreover become integral tools in the discursive construction and revision of communal boundaries in our globalizing world. Paying special attention to questions about the relationships between distance and compassion, image- and narrative-based genres, and documentation and artifice, I discuss representations of suffering in painting (e.g. Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra, Picasso’s Guernica), writing (e.g. Wiesel’s Night, Spiegelman’s Maus), and film (e.g. Hotel Rwanda, Sometimes in April).
A21-3
Buddhism Section
Theme: Tantric Buddhism through the Chinese Looking Glass
This session is part of the growing movement in the field of Buddhist studies to readdress the nature of Tantric Buddhism in East Asia. If it is no longer fruitful to look at Chinese Tantric Buddhism through the lenses of Japanese sectarian scholarship how then should we observe it? The five papers in this panel explore the literature, practices, and participants in the putative Tantric Buddhist tradition of China during the Tang (618-907), Liao (907-1125), and Song (960-1279) periods and their influence on later traditions and suggest that scholars need to take a more nuanced approach to understanding their significance. While so-called Tantric monks in China did not envision themselves as being part of a separate esoteric school and describe their practices in an ever-evolving "esoteric" rhetoric of mainstream Mahāyanā, it does seem apparent that they were doing new things based upon yet perceived as superseding earlier performances and teachings.
If Not "Tantric" or "Esoteric" Then What? Notes on the Nature of Certain Tang Buddhist Practices
Paul Copp, Western Michigan University
Recent scholarship has called into question the assumed existence of a self-consciously Tantric or Esoteric school in Tang China. Yet, that the figures in question practiced a rather singular style of Tang Buddhism remains beyond dispute. The task remains, then, to determine precisely how they understood their own practices. This paper focuses on the monk Fachong (fl. late eighth cen.), particularly on his commentary on the Chinese translation of the Uşnīşavijaya dhāraņī sūtra. Fachong’s text, when examined in light of others produced within his circle that explicitly discuss the nature of their Buddhist practice, clarifies the nature of their own understandings of their activities. Prominent among the terms employed are 'yoga,' 'dhāraņī,' and 'dhāraņī-teachings.' I explore the ways these terms are limited to specific discursive genres (i.e. dhāraņī texts) and the ways they seem to have had wider relevance among the people and practices considered in this paper.
The Mysteries of Body, Speech, and Mind: The Three Esoterica in Medieval Sinitic Buddhism
Richard D. McBride, Washington University, St. Louis
The three esoterica or three mysteries (Ch. sanmi, Jpn. sanmitsu) play a seminal role in early Tantric Buddhist literature in medieval China (ca. 317–907). While the term is typically understood as referring to the replication of the body, speech, and mind of the Buddha, other meanings are also attributed to this concept. This paper analyzes the history of the term from its earliest appearances in Mahāyāna exegetical literature to its deployment in early Chinese Tantric literature and hagiographical accounts of practitioners. It suggests that from its inception the secret meaning of the three esoterica was dependant on the preexisting mainstream intellectual tradition. Also, it shows that the ritual deployment of the three esoterica was a conscious adaptation of an avowedly Mahāyāna concept, suggesting a symbiotic relationship between preexisting B