Online Program Book

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.

This book panel engages the recent text After the Worst Day Ever: What Sick Kids Know About Sustaining Hope in Chronic Illness, offering opportunities to re-imagine hope, eschatology, chronic illness, and healthcare from the perspectives of children. The book's guiding question asks, "What do sick children know about hope that the rest of us have forgotten?" Illustrating how children articulate hope amid chronic illness, a distinct type of trauma and adversity, the book allows their voices to contribute to the constructive work of theologies of childhood. It offers readers an opportunity to engage and reimagine doctrine and practice from children's perspectives, in light of their lived realities. The children in the text shift hope from a future-oriented expectation of assurance from God to a lived experience of abundance in the moment--as much a social resource as a feeling, thought, or virtue. Five scholars respond to the text, which identifies five practices that children with end-stage renal disease use to nurture hope: realizing community, claiming power, attending to Spirit, choosing trust, and maintaining identity. Panelists discuss significant themes and questions raised by the book.

In its fourth year, the “Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship” seminar continues to work towards better delineating the contours of this distinctive field in formation. The work of constructive Muslim thought and engaged scholarship is inseparable from politics at many levels, from conducting research to community engagement to the precarities of advancement and publishing. For this session, the participants have been invited to join a roundtable conversation aimed at exploring how politics and engaged scholarship intersect or are intertwined in their respective work. What possibilities and challenges emerge in the course of engaged scholarship? For whom is our work done? With whom are we in critical conversation? And with whom are we not? What approaches can we take to advance and further develop this field in light of these many concerns? All seminar attendees are encouraged to join the conversation after the invited participants have shared their opening remarks.

This Author Meets Critic session highlights Jon Ivan Gill’s Underground Rap as Religion: A Theopoetic Examination of a Process Aesthetic Religion, celebrating its fifth anniversary on 11/1/24. The book explores how underground rap, known for its subversive, grassroots, and revolutionary nature, intersects with religious traditions. Gill argues that underground rap artists absorb, critique, or reject religious ideas, creating evolving conceptions of God that reflect their social contexts. Drawing on scholars like Monica Miller and Alfred North Whitehead, Gill develops an aesthetic philosophy of religion grounded in secular religious methodology. He uses Whiteheadian process thought to argue that rap functions as a theopoetic force, acting not just as a response to divine creation but as a creator of its own quasi-religion. This groundbreaking work will appeal to scholars in Religious Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, Process Philosophy, and Theology for its innovative examination of the religious dimensions of underground rap.

This roundtable brings together several scholars to discuss Loriliai Biernacki’s recent book The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2022) in the broader context of South Asian philosophies of materiality. What does it mean for a thing to be “material”? What is the relationship between matter and consciousness? What does it mean to speak of the divine as immanent within the material world? How might premodern thinkers like Abhinavagupta contribute to contemporary philosophies of materiality and the recovery of wonder? Participants will discuss these questions and engage with Biernacki’s book from a variety of perspectives, including Śaiva Tantra, Sāṃkhya, and Jainism, followed by a response from the author.