Collectively, this panel offers critical perspectives on animal ethics, food politics, and social justice within the context of religious belief, practice, and community. The growing adoption, visibility, and diversity of veganism have led to heightened scrutiny, fostering new debates in academic, political, and popular spheres. In response to this evolving discourse, this panel assembles scholars with diverse backgrounds and specializations to delve into the complex intersections of religion and veganism. Scholars of Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism examine moral discourses and ethical dilemmas associated with animal slaughter and animal captivity. Other panelists explore recent shifts in the acceptance of veganism / vegetarianism within the Nation of Islam and the Conservative Jewish movement. Further, scholars will present critical perspectives on the “omwashing” and “veganwashing” of the Israeli state, and a Jainism-inspired case for “freeganism” under consumer capitalism, the distinct practices of Black Veganism—all of which complicate conventional arguments for vegan praxis.
This panel extends current theoretical discussions in the anthropology of secularism regarding the subtle ways that secularism(s) shape social life, including bodies, to consider “secular sensibilities.” Put differently, as ethnographers, how can we capture the sensorial, bodily and affective dimensions of secularism?
The first paper by Oliphant situates secular sensibilities in two carnivals in France, pointing to local and contextual theorization. The second paper by Selby and Barras takes up ethnography with French nonreligious immigrants to Montreal and Toronto, Canada and compares their emotional engagements with the secular sensibilities they encounter in public schools.The third paper by Mossière draws on fieldwork with energy-based movements in Montréal, Canada to consider her participants' cultivation of secular-sensing scientific bodies. The panel concludes with a paper by Amir-Moazami, who examines secular sensibilities in contemporary Europe through her fieldwork and anthropologically informed discourse analysis of securitization.
It has become commonplace to refer to the “climate crisis” as the defining feature of our time. But, how do people come to know and name a crisis as it unfolds? Focusing on the role of other-than-human agents in ecological change across a variety of field sites, this panel considers how local community lexicons and knowledge systems are activated to identify and name a crisis. Our papers ask what insights can be gained by better understanding people’s relationships with non-corporeal presences, such as ancestors and gods, along with their interactions with nonhuman animals and plants. What role(-s) do these relations play in people’s constructions of ecological stability or normativity as well as ecological crisis? How do their understandings of other-than-human entities’ forms of agency shape people’s explanations of why crises occur and what (if anything) can be done about them?
This session aims to explore the significant contributions of the anthropological perspective to Jain Studies, highlighting the work of both emerging and senior scholars who have conducted extensive fieldwork in India. Ethnographic methods and anthropological concepts have played a constitutive role in shaping the field of Jain Studies. Participants will reflect on how these approaches have influenced their own scholarship and fieldwork with Jain communities, fostering understanding of Jain society and practice. In light of the recent passing of anthropologist Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb, this panel also serves as a tribute to the influence of his scholarship and enduring legacy in the field. Through engaging overlaps and intersections of anthropology and Jain Studies around positionality in the field, ritual culture and practice, social organization, and theory, this conversation aims to stimulate critical dialogue and inspire fresh insights into the changing dynamics of Jain culture and society and its academic study.
This session presents cutting-edge research on the use of artificial intelligence to simulate religious societies and explore dynamics of belief, practice, conflict, and cooperation. It will showcase projects employing multi-agent systems and other AI models to understand complex religious phenomena, from the evolution of religious practices to the mechanisms of interfaith dialogue and conflict resolution. By creating virtual environments where religious behaviors and social dynamics can be studied in detail, these projects offer new perspectives on the study of religion as a human creative act. Speakers will discuss the theoretical underpinnings, methodological challenges, and potential insights gained from simulating religious life in artificial societies, highlighting the contribution of AI to the academic study of religion.
This panel seeks to unravel the intricate web connecting Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the study and understanding of religion, shedding light on how AI impacts and is influenced by religious concepts, practices, and ethics. It brings together three distinct but interrelated explorations into this emerging field. The first segment addresses AI's role in compassionate care for dementia patients, reflecting on how the integration of technology in healthcare settings poses questions about compassion, identity, and the ethical dimensions informed by religious and cultural values. The second discussion explores AI and Ann Taves's idea of 'special things'. Is AI itself a special thing? And if so, how does it relate to other applications of specialness in things from art to conversation? The final presentation advocates for the application of AI in analyzing religious rituals, suggesting that AI can significantly enhance our understanding of religious expressions and practices through sophisticated, data-driven analyses.
Work in the study of Arts, Literature, and Religion has tended most often to read and reflect on cultural expression through ideas, themes, and texts deemed religious, theological, spiritual, secular, philosophical, and ethical (to name a few). What would it mean to reverse this course, effectively understanding expressive texts, artifacts, repertoire, and phenomena to intervene actively in (rather than to respond to) discourses understood to be religious, theological, secular, philosophical, or ethical? What difference does this reversal of readings make? What aspects, functions, and significances of artistic expression, broadly construed, illuminate the condition or experience of being human, of living and working in community? Is art uniquely capable of doing this? How and why does this matter—both generally and within the particularities that generate identity and other social and political aspects of human experience? These papers take up this series of questions, turning their attention to a diverse array of interventions—ranging from neuroaesthetics, liturgical sign language, and theopoetical practice to expressions of indigeneity and combatting the dehumanization of incarceration—situated in a variety of religious contexts.
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.
To explore what it means to think “cartographically,” this session investigates the connections between cartography and religious meaning-making through the study of material culture, literary analysis, and artistic practice. The first paper explores maps of pilgrimage created with needle and thread as records of spiritual pilgrimage. Through line and symbol, recorded in stitches, the process of pilgrimage is remembered and captured as physical artifact. The second paper examines geopolitical disputes of 20th-century eastern Europe and renders visible the maps created by lay Catholics as they moved between Marian shrines and rural chapels in the Hungarian landscape. The final paper explores the “mapping” out of sacred stories in the novel A Record of Romantic Marching (2002) by Hikaru Okuizumi through the themes of exilic wandering, apocalypse, and imperialism.
This session considers the embodied knowledge of the artist and artwork. Embodied art in papers presented include dance, theatre, and literature, with a discussion of theological and religious discovery inherent in the embodied act of creating art. Papers deal specifically with Cormac MacCarthy, Religion, and Theatre; Dancing as Transformational Knowing in Christian Faith; Queer Sacramentality in Paul Taylor’s "Beloved Renegade"; Embodied Knowledge and Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance (Cham); Embodying the “Correspondent Subjective” within Religion and Literature. A small theatrical performance is included.
In conversation with contributors and the co-editors, this roundtable session will explore the decolonial, subversive, intervening, and interrupting processes imagined and facilitated around the innovative anthology in the field of theopoetics, _Theopoetics in Color: Embodied Approaches in Theological Discourse_. The impetus of Black women, _Theopoetics in Color_ itself is not only an intervening resource in theopoetic discourse, but its constructive process also illumines the innovation, expansive, and empowering capacity of Black women’s imagination.
The panel “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margin” examines the complex dynamics of power, resistance, and transformation within marginalized communities. Through diverse lenses of art, theology, documentary, and literature, the panelists explore how narratives of violence and nonviolence intersect at the margins of society, reshaping identities, reclaiming histories, and redefining theological and literary landscapes. The first paper examines the intersection of art and theology by juxtaposing Browder’s monument, “Mothers of Gynecology,” against Sims's monument. By analyzing Browder's work's aesthetic and activist dimensions, the paper highlights the power of art to challenge historical injustices and provoke theological reflection. This second paper discusses the emergence of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries Movement within the LGBTQ+ community, redefining the traditional Black church. Through the lens of a documentary filmmaker, the paper documents personal transformation and spiritual renewal and showcases how marginalized communities are reshaping religious landscapes on a global scale. This third paper reevaluates Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s novel The River Between and proposes him as an ethnographic writer through a fresh interpretation of his novelistic work. By examining the novel's historical and imaginative functions, the paper positions his work within broader discussions of religion, literature, and indigenous narratives, like Chinua Achebe and Mongo Beti.
This session explores modern and contemporary developments in religious iconography, both within and beyond Eastern Orthodox Christianity, especially as these developments relate to iconography as a mode of social engagement and resistance to injustice. Specific topics that will be discussed include the imagery of Black Madonnas as a tool for resistance to the multidimensional oppression facing Black Christian women; the iconographic work of Russian Orthodox priest Fr. Teodor Zinon as an alternative to the religious and social vision currently dominant in Russian Orthodoxy; the military features of the divine feminine in the Ukrainian Javelin Madonna mural and Hindu representations of the goddess Durga; and the history of the modern and contemporary Anglican engagement with Eastern Orthodox iconography.
This panel presents a topically and historically diverse array of papers for the sake of bringing a methodological point into focus. We examine how literary, cinematic, visual, and ritual arts have not merely transmitted but creatively engaged and reshaped Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and so-called popular-religious thought in China from the medieval period to the present. In each case, we consider how the formal and conceptual affordances of artistic media respond to the needs of their respective practitioners. By engaging these affordances, practitioners have synthesized concepts from disparate traditions; redefined or reinterpreted pre-existing concepts; and illuminated ideas in ways that are uniquely accessible through certain art forms. To make sense of such artistic adaptations of religious thought, it does not suffice to have a grasp of the religious traditions at play. Instead, arts should be understood as actively intervening in and contributing to the repertoires of Chinese religions.
What is a transpacific approach to Asian American religions in particular and American religions in general? How does it shape historical and social scientific approaches to studying religion? How does a transpacific turn help us rethink the religious and secular as well as categories such as race, empire and the state? This roundtable will engage such questions at the intersection of Melissa Borja’s Follow the New Way, Helen Jin Kim’s Race for Revival and Justin Tse’s The Secular in a Sheet of Scattered Sand.
This Roundtable focuses on religion, social movements, and social media of Myanmar and its diasporas. Because of the 2021 military coup d'état and prior conflicts, millions born in Burma/Myanmar have been displaced while resistance to military rule has been ongoing. The Myanmar diaspora are committed stakeholders at the “forefront of activism in response to the coup” as the “single most important source of funding” for the resistance movement. Given how much work of nation-building has been occurring within and outside the borders of Myanmar, this Roundtable reflects on Myanmar from multiple perspectives with a public theologian, an anthropologist, a scholar of religion, a political scientist and her PhD student, and a feminist comparativist. This roundtable offers a rare overview of Myanmar and would also be the second time in AAR history that a discussion fully focuses on the often-overlooked multiethnic nation-state of Myanmar.
This session explores the ways APIA communities in the United States have navigated the various state institutions and theological discourses that enact, perpetuate, and enforce the organizing logics of American secularism. It will open with a historical analysis of the theological presuppositions built into the nation's secularist legal regimes as they applied to Chinese laborers, followed by a contemporary exploration of processes by which Hindu ritual practices at a New Jersey temple have been reshaped to address secular assumptions of American life. A final paper then returns to the late-nineteenth century to scrutinize how the translation practices of Japanese Pure Land Buddhists influenced the community's legibility as "religion" within the American context.
The session examines the integration of spiritual beliefs, ethical principles, and health advocacy in addressing socio-political and health crises. The first paper explores how Buddhist teachings and AI ethics can guide bioethical decision-making in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The second paper analyzes the lived experiences of Korean immigrants in the U.S., highlighting the spiritual and cultural influences on prenatal care practices. The third paper assesses the role of violence in Haiti from historical and contemporary perspectives, exploring how healthcare workers utilize liberative medicine to combat health and political instability. Collectively, these studies emphasize the importance of culturally and contextually informed approaches for resolving complex global challenges, advocating for a synthesis of faith, ethics, and advocacy in public health and policy.
Karen LeBacqz was one of the first women in the field of American bioethics, serving on the first Presidential Bioethics Commission under Jimmy Carter, writing the Belmont report, the National Commission on Human Subjects, serving as an advisor to the projects in biotechnology, stem cell research, and the Human Genome Project, and publishing six books, among them Six Theories of Justice and Justice in an Unjust World. She was instrumental in structuring some of the first policies to regulate science, and critical to advancing theological arguments within our field. As a professor at the Graduate Theological Union, she taught a generation of scholars, stressing always the need to foreground questions of justice in bioethics. Yet, her work is relatively unknown in comparison to the men with whom she served: Callahan, Jonson, Englehardt, Brody, Gaylin, and Jameton. This panel will reflect both on her contributions to the field and think carefully about the question of how and who is central to our developing canon.
This panel explores how religion intersects with brain-machine interfaces, neuroenhancement, and related technologies. Analyzing advancements in AI technologies, embodied cognition, and psychology, panelists will delve deeply into questions about bioethics, identity, agency, and moral responsibility raised by these technological prospects.
