Online Program Book

In a world of violent, traumatic, and tragic rituals, objects, and histories, three authors reckon with the ethics of moving forward. On this panel, Molly Farneth, Laura Levitt, and Karen Guth respond to one another's recent books. Each author has analyzed examples of dominating power and its effects in contemporary society. Each has found ways of describing a positive vision for communities responding to the tragedies and violent circumstances in which they are caught up. Drawing on work in feminist theory and religious studies on care, practice, and performance, Farneth, Levitt, and Guth will discuss the vivid examples that sparked their books, the similarities and differences in their disciplinary motives, and their answers to a pressing contemporary question: what will we—and what should we—bring with us from the past to a present in which tragedy, violence, and trauma remain?

Followers of the Nyāya school famously held that the existence of God (īśvara) can be established through inference. Their best-known argument is deceptively simple: the world must have an intelligent maker (kartṛ) because it is an effect (kārya), like a pot. This roundtable will focus on Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s formulation of the argument in the Nyāyamañjarī (āhnika 3; critical edition by Kataoka [2005]); Jayanta offers a relatively early (9th c.) defense of the inference from kāryatva (“being an effect”), written in characteristically lucid prose. The session will bring together several scholars to analyze and debate Jayanta’s argument. The goal of the format is to create a space for lively and rigorous discussion, rather than traditional paper presentations. A handout with the original Sanskrit and an English translation of selections from Jayanta’s text will be provided.

Author Meets Critics: Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024). In this panel, critics will engage Payne’s work, which traces the history and trajectory of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in America and argues the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped - and continue to shape - conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and political activism. Through the almost billion-dollar industry of Contemporary Christian Music, Baptists, Holiness People, Pentecostals, and Charismatics, who made up a sizable majority of the industry, created the political imaginary of white American evangelicalism. Through CCM’s twenty-first century successor, the so-called worship industry, those Charismatic and Pentecostal political and theological visions have gone global.

This roundtable discussion re-examines religion in the mid-twentieth century United States. Histories of this time period have traditionally emphasized a religious boom post-World War II, Cold War anxieties, suburbanization, and “tri-faith” consensus. Our conversation will begin the process of destabilizing these familiar historiographies. Each panelist brings new questions, characters and theoretical frameworks to bear on religion in the mid-twentieth century United States. Topics will include corporate media bureaucracy, Hasidic Jewish migration to the United States, theologies of family planning, disability politics, African decolonization, religion and law, and the Asian American religious left. We seek to add increased depth, detail and variety to histories of religion in the postwar period, while at the same time asking about the extent to which we still live in the Midcentury's world. With a willing and experimental presentism, panelists will think about how postwar formations persist and permutate in the 21st century.

Science fiction is often used in the classroom as an accessible form of popular culture that can offer examples that resonate with students. In this roundtable session, however, panelists argue that science fiction’s pedagogical value for teaching religious studies and ethics goes much deeper than this. By its very nature, science fiction demands we imagine worlds outside of our own, and in so doing helps us to question what we have taken for granted about human society. During this roundtable, eight scholars of religion will discuss their experience designing and teaching courses that explicitly use science fiction to reflect, form, and challenge students’ moral imaginations and the religious sensibilities of the cultures that produce them.