Exploring _Animals and Religion_: Meet the Authors Roundtable

In this roundtable, the three editors and ten of the contributors will introduce their new volume on Animals and Religion. Routledge published this book in February 2024, but we have been working on it for a number of years. It offers the first comprehensive multi-authored overview of the field of animals and religion since A Communion of Subjects was published in 2006, and includes new research on the topic by many of the contributors. Each chapter is accessibly written to ensure that the volume can be used in undergraduate classrooms, and we are excited to share it at AAR.

To begin, first editor Dave Aftandilian will explain how and why we organized the chapters as we did into sections on religion and identity, religious practices involving animals, and religious and ethical responses to animal lives. He will also discuss the volume’s topic-based rather than tradition-based approach, and the importance of including multiple chapters authored by scholars who work in fields other than religious studies. And he will close by considering how each chapter’s consideration of the impacts of its topic on the lives of real animals will help students see the practical consequences of our religious ideas about other living beings.

Then another editor, Aaron S. Gross, will focus on the theoretical work we hope that this volume will do. On the one hand, the volume will help students better understand the diversity of human religious expression, as well as what religion means, what it consists in, and who can practice it. And on the other hand, the volume specifically explores how animals shape our imagination of religion, the important roles animals play in religious traditions, and the ethical dimensions of animals and religion.

Next, ten of the contributors to the volume will present concise, four- to five-minute overviews of (one of) their chapters in the volume. Each presenter will focus especially on how they use their chapter’s concepts/cases in their teaching, and/or as jumping-off points for future research or developing new pedagogies, so that audience members will get more out of this roundtable than they could learn from just reading the chapters. Barbara R. Ambros, our third editor, will moderate the roundtable, and help presenters keep to the tight time limits. Participating authors and their chapters will include (in the order they appear in the book):

• Katharine Mershon, “Gender and Sexuality”
• Christopher Carter, “Race, Animals, and a New Vision of the Beloved Community”
• Lina Verchery, “Learning to Walk Softly: Intersecting Insect Lifeworlds in Everyday Buddhist Monastic Life”
• Sarra Tlili, “An Islamic Case for Insect Ethics”
• Allison Covey, “Animal Theology”
• Beth A. Berkowitz, “Animal Families in the Biblical Tradition”
• Andrea Dara Cooper, “The Cat Mitzvah: Jewish Literary Animals”
• Geoffrey Barstow, “The Difficult Virtue of Vegetarianism in Tibetan Buddhism”
• Barbara Darling, “The Spiritual Practice of Providing Sanctuary for Animals”
• Eric D. Mortensen, “The Council of All Beings: A Deep Ecology Ritual Connecting People with Animals and the Natural World”
• Laura Hobgood, “Companion Animals”

After the contributors present, we will open the floor to discussion with the audience. Despite the large number of participants in our roundtable, each will speak briefly, which will allow us to leave plenty of time for audience members to ask any questions they might have about the book in general, individual chapters, and/or their use in teaching.