Online Program Book

This session centers on the traditional four last things in eschatology (death, judgment, heaven, and hell) from a Reformed perspective. It offers fresh approaches to disability, mortality, and hell, drawing on insights from Calvin, Barth, and others, and reinterpreting these in light of present demands.

Art Theology is a method of making art to make new knowledge and understanding of theological ideas that discursive reasoning alone cannot provide.  This interactive and collaborative workshop will engage participants in making theology.  Participants will be invited to gather their own experience, knowledge, and wisdom through various materials (pastels, paints, colored pencils, markers, crayons, fabrics, and colored paper will all be supplied). We will make theology on the question: What is divine love in the margins? and/or What is non-violence?  We will then discuss the emerging ideas of art historians and cognitive scientists, which explain how Art Theology arrives at different knowledge than discursive reasoning. Art Theology is an interdisciplinary method that centers on indigenous wisdom like the Matauranga Maori of Aotearoa, New Zealand, which has always included a variety of ways of accessing knowledge, including making art.

This session examines women’s use of text, images, video, memes, and audio across various social media platforms and spanning four religious traditions in North America. By focusing on brujas on Instagram, Muslims on TikTok, evangelicals on Twitter, and Catholics on YouTube, the papers explore situated digital practices. How do women use media to contest dominant and hegemonic interpretations of religious texts and practices and put forth their own? How do they use humor, creativity, and referentiality to create digital content to assert authority and build community? What are some of the ways that the relationship between online and offline worlds are impacting religious experience? This papers’ session approaches these questions from a variety of perspectives to theorize some of the ways in which religious women’s use of diverse social network sites contribute to theorizing digital religion and digital archives and methods. 

Presenters in this session will examine religious thought and practice in situations where borders are violently guarded, the rights of migrants (and others) often brushed aside, and democratic norms come under attack. The papers explore diverse forms of religiously-inflected activism that arise under situations of significant human rights violations. The first paper uses a Christian ethical lens to examine rights across borders when strict ideologies of sovereignty diverge from facts on the ground. The second considers how gender-based rights violations in immigration detention arise out of the context of detention itself. The third elucidates the role of religion in undocumented Filipino Americans’ activism to resist violence in the immigration enforcement system. And the fourth considers how religious actors and scholars have acted across borders to resist manipulation of historical memory, advocating for both democratic norms and the rights of migrants and the most vulnerable.

John and Charles Wesley saw the eighteenth-century Wesleyan revival as a restoration of primitive Christianity, as well as ‘true Christianity’ throughout the ages. If Methodism is viewed within the context of such continuity, there is a sense in which the Wesleys are not the sole founders of Wesleyan Methodism. This session includes scholarly analyses of where "Methodism" can be perceived in the history of Christianity before the Wesleys. Where can we see "Methodism" in the global history of the church prior to the eighteenth century, even if no direct genealogical connection can be drawn? This question can be explored in particular movements or churches, the lives, ministries, and writings of Christians, and in devotional practices. The question can be framed as an exercise in ressourcement—a return to the varied sources of Methodism—with the goal of renewal of the tradition today.

This session is linked to our unit’s session on “The Reception History of the Wesleys,” which examines how their ministries and writings have been received in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions and beyond.

This session will explore the capacity and limits of the concept of moral injury to describe particular kinds of harm suffered in wartime and in situations of racist discrimination and violence.  Papers offer examinations of the language and concepts that undergird understandings of violence, guilt and morally injurious circumstances in the contexts of Anti-Asian hatred in the US during the COVID pandemic and its aftermath, the Colombian civil war, and the current US defense posture and its philosophical frameworks.

Sacred sites and religious spaces can employ material, narrative, and ritual associations to link themselves into a global network across time and space. Following this broader perspective of religious sites and devotional spaces, this panel explores different ways of making sacred ground and the making of Buddhist sites in varying cultural geographies ranging from India and Central Asia to China and Nepal. The panel organizes the four papers into nodes in the lifecycle(s) of religious shrines and objects, from the birth of a shrine, its reproduction beyond the geography of its origin, and finally, the treatment of “expired” shrine objects. While the first three papers deal with the creation of Buddhist sites for devotion, the last paper is about the Manichaean-influenced creation of repositories for the “sacred waste” generated in devotional and religious lives. 

The first part of the session will offer the paper examining the religious experience in the October fiestas commemorating the spiritual birth (initiation) of world-famous magico-religious healer and miracle worker, el Niño Fidencio (1898-1938). It situates contemporary Fidencista religious practices in the periphery as a response to the violence inflected by political and religious centers of power. An ethnographic engagement with the primary sources will demonstrate that for Fidencio’s followers—pilgrims attending the fiestas—“imposed suffering” is transformed into “joyful suffering.” 

The second part of the session will be a roundtable discussion of the Religions, Borders, and Immigration Seminar's collaborative project exploring migration and various dimensions of forced displacement in the form of essay volume. This is the concluding year of RBI Seminar before the publication of the essay volume. Panelists include Mary Beth Yount, Michael Canaris, Anne Blankenship, Helen Boursier, Kirsteen Kim and Kristine Suna-Koro. 

The panel explores how to make sense of gender and sexuality that does not explain gender away but envisions gender as a crucial category in Buddhist doctrines and narratives. Coming from religious studies, philosophy and literature, scholars in this panel re-read the canon from diverse perspectives for a new imagination of gender and sexuality that can contribute to discussions on social justice for combating dominance and promoting inclusion. As such, these panelists initiate a critical-constructive reflection: critically, they provide a methodological intervention on approaches that de-gender doctrinal philosophy, dismiss differences in sentient beings’ lived experiences, and disassociate philosophy from other disciplines in Buddhist studies (e.g., literature, anthropology, and social history); and constructively, they propose to cross disciplinary boundaries in cherishing narratives as resources for re-gendering the Buddhist discourses of consciousness, body, karma, and cosmos. Together, these scholars strive to expand the shared horizons of philosophy, literature, feminism, and queer studies.