Representatives from the AAR’s Status Committees briefly present some of their past work addressing structural inequity and violence against women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTIQ+, and persons with disabilities; then address some current and future challenges; and open up discussion to attendees to discuss strategies to effectively engage structural violence in the academy.
This session seeks to widen Jewish-Christian dialogue by considering how Orthodox exegetical traditions, liturgy, history, contemporary thought, and ongoing political experience, especially in the Middle East, can and should affect not only Orthodox Christianity’s own relationship to Jews and Judaism, but also its relationship to Jewish-Christian dialogue more broadly.
Theosis is a consummate expression of transcendence in the mystical, Gnostic, Platonic, and Esoteric traditions from antiquity to the present. As such, borders, limits, and edges characterize it, and the overcoming of these. It challenges the delimitations of knowledge, cosmos, and contemplation and strains at the very boundaries of experience. Theosis challenges epistemological limitations, bending and breaking ways of knowing, and complicates the boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as expressed in the statement of Athanasius that ‘the Son of God became man, that we might become god’. This joint panel encourages submissions exploring the boundaries that characterize theosis, where they are, whether they exist, what they may be, how they function, and how they constrain, restrict, enable, and inspire.
Inspired by Georgia Frank's 2023 book Unfinished Christians , especially chapter 3, we invite papers that discuss portable and shifting objects in lived religions; e.g. that mediate between religious cultures or act as portable signifiers of religious identity, diversity, continuity, and/or transformation. Examples of portable mediating objects might include relics, reliquaries, amulets, icons, talismans, monstrances, elaborate vestments, jewelry, scrolls, codices, holy people, pilgrimage badges, lamps, censors, votive objects, spolia, and other "portabilia."
Throughout African Diaspora history there have been archives, inviting deep exploration into the unknown, the obscured, and the known. Sometimes hidden in plain sight, including Obeah oaths in the narrative of Tacky’s Rebellion and Jamaica’s Baptist War; juridical, birth, and death records compared against oral histories, historical art, and illustration of colonial encounters that include but are not limited to narratives of race, ethnicity, gender, class, dis/ability, sexuality/ies under an array of micro and macro violent technologies (fear, shame, physical, psychological and psychosocial abuse); and the Colored Conventions Project (1830) or the Early Caribbean Digital Archives (2011).
This panel seeks to explore the idea, presence, and importance of archives among us when all too often our archives were oral and aural, normatively shaped, vanished, or erased.
Following the recent attempted and successful coups in West Africa, this panel seeks papers that address the numerous ways religion and politics are intertwined in Africa. With growing concern about the democratic and electoral processes around the world, what role have, do, or should African religious traditions play in politics? Are there lessons the rest of the world can learn from the ways religious traditions in Africa have engaged with or distanced themselves from politics and elections? Although headlines frequently focus on examples of religious and political violence, the panel actively invites papers that focus on nonviolent engagement in political and religious spheres as well, or interrogate the violence/nonviolence binary that is often superimposed on social and political movements. The panel also encourages papers that are attentive to issues related to the differences between traditional and modern/post-colonial political systems, the complicated nature of “secularism(s)” in African societies, and the interplay between religious authority and figures and political authority and figures.
In Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner , Ralph H. Craig III explores the place of religion in the life and career of pop culture icon Tina Turner (1939-2023). To explain her religious beliefs in articles, memoirs, interviews, and documentaries, Turner drew on a synthesis of African American Protestantism, American metaphysical religion, and Nichiren Buddhism. This book reads across her public archive to provide a genealogical study of Turner’s religious influences and of her as a religious influence in her own right. This roundtable brings together scholars from the subfields of Buddhist Studies and African American Religions to consider the implications of Craig’s book for the study of religion and popular culture, Buddhism in the West, American Buddhism, and African American Religion.
Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South is a social movement ethnography of the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) focusing on their rebirth after an arson attack destroyed their headquarters in 2012. Laura McTighe and WWAV's Deon Haywood weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with other movements for liberation around the globe. They share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. This roundtable will emulate a "front porch talk" and showcase responses that address the themes of social organizing, Black feminist liberation, collaborative scholarship, ethnography, the context of the American South, and other facets relating to Fire Dreams.
E. Franklin Frazier’s *The Negro Church in America* is a foundational text in African American religious studies, examining the intersection of religion, sociality, and politics. Published in 1964 amid the Civil Rights Movement, it analyzes the historical trajectory of African Americans, from the transatlantic slave trade to the Great Migration. This roundtable reevaluates Frazier’s work, assessing its enduring significance and offering contemporary insights. Presenters delve into specific chapters, discussing themes such as the impact of slavery on religious practices, the development of independent Black churches, and their roles post-Emancipation. Panelists critique Frazier’s theories on assimilation and gender dynamics, reflecting on their implications today. With diverse perspectives from scholars of various backgrounds, the roundtable aims to deepen our understanding of African American religious history. The discussion seeks to engage multiple audiences, highlighting Frazier's enduring legacy and the ongoing relevance of his scholarship in contemporary discourse.
Soufflé bear claw jelly sesame snaps cake cookie. Croissant shortbread cotton candy croissant powder chocolate cake gummi bears chocolate cake macaroon. Wafer tart cotton candy cake cookie carrot cake chocolate bar. Candy powder gingerbread jelly bonbon sugar plum dessert. Lollipop soufflé toffee croissant powder halvah marzipan cookie cake. Sweet dessert jelly beans dessert chocolate tiramisu cake. Caramels chocolate cake cake carrot cake chocolate cake wafer apple pie marzipan tart. Apple pie cake toffee liquorice candy sweet gingerbread bonbon pie. Sugar plum candy croissant sweet roll cake marshmallow pie cheesecake. Candy sweet candy soufflé powder cheesecake jelly. Sugar plum chocolate cake chocolate bar lemon drops candy canes. Cheesecake gummies jelly-o gingerbread gummi bears. Soufflé biscuit gummies pastry tootsie roll.
In Year 3 of this five-year initiative, we engage papers that surface missiological currents within Anglicanism, past and present, that contribute to the development of processes of Anglican identity formation and the ecclesiologies that arise alongside those identities. The complicated and fraught history of missionizing goes far beyond the typical account of how the non-European “peripheries” have been the recipient of colonializing mission work from the imperial “center” in England. This is only a part of a much larger story that extends through Anglican history to the present in a more complicated manner. These complex forces demand nuanced scholarly treatment of the de- and postcolonial dynamics at work in Anglican identity formation and “operative ecclesiologies."
The papers are provided for reading in advance so that our time together can be spent discussing them, both separately and by putting them into conversation.
In this third year of the seminar, the focus is on missiological currents within the Anglican Communion and how these have contributed to complex identity formations and "operative ecclesiologies" in diverse Anglican contexts. A first session on the theme, immediately preceding this one, is described separately. This session will feature three scholars with recent publications relevant to this theme who will converse with one another and with seminar participants and attendees about the missiological implications of their work. These are: Gary Dorrien, author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism (Baylor UP, 2024), Kwok Pui Lan, author of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective (Seabury, 2023), and Jennifer C. Snow, author of Mission, Race, and Empire: The Episcopal Church in Global Context (Oxford UP, 2023).
This session will also include a business meeting for planning Year 4 of the seminar.
Anyone examining justifications for violence and motivations for nonviolence quickly encounters both animals and religion — and often both at the same time. This session draws together explorations of animals and religion at the watershed moments between violence and nonviolence in a range of traditions and practices—from discussion of cats and witchcraft in Yoruba Pentecostalism in Nigeria to premodern Islamic teachings about human and animal skins, from aspiration toward ahiṃsā / nonviolence in Jain and Hindu traditions to contemporary North American discussions of hunting rituals on Reddit. In all of these cases, animals are caught up conceptually and bodily in human questions about violence, dominance, difference, and virtue.
In this roundtable, the three editors and ten of the contributors will introduce their new volume on Animals and Religion . This book, released in February 2024, offers the first comprehensive multi-authored overview of the field of animals and religion since A Communion of Subjects was published in 2006. It also includes significant new research and analysis 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. After the editors provide an overview of how we designed the volume and the theoretical work we intend it to do, contributors will discuss how they each use the concepts and cases presented in their chapters in their own teaching and/or research.
