Online Program Book

This is the preliminary program for the 2024 in-person Annual Meeting, hosted with the Society for Biblical Literature in San Diego, CA - November 23-26. Pre-conference workshops and many committee meetings will be held November 22. If you have questions about the program, contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. All times are listed in local/Pacific Time.


	A23-124 Islamic Mysticism Unit Theme: Authority as Guidance: Studies in the History of Sufism Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Elizabeth Sartell, Lewis University, Presiding The papers in this panel explore the varying dimensions and nuances of authorities, such as women’s authority, ascetical and renunciant, political authority, particularly through the prism of mahdis, ‘awliyas, and imams. These modes of authority are explored using various textual (hagiographies), hermeneutical traditions, and more. The discussions in these papers unsettle normative assumptions of guidance in Islamic mystical movements, from Sufism to Shi‘ism, across space and time and its continued legacies today. Aziza Shanazarova, Columbia University Female Religious Authority in Central Asian Sufism Abstract This presentation introduces the recently published critical edition (Brill, 2020) and monograph (Cambridge University Press, 2024) on the legacy of the sixteenth-century female Sufi master from Bukhara, celebrated as Aghā-yi Buzurg, along with the hagiography Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib dedicated to her by her male disciple Ḥāfiẓ Baṣīr. John Zaleski, Loyola University Maryland From Fear to Love: Celibacy and Nuptial Mysticism in the Accounts of ʿĀmir b. ʿAbd Qays Abstract It is widely held by scholars of early Sufism that Sufism developed out of ascetic and renunciant traditions (zuhd). In this view, Sufi ideas about the love of God and about union with the divine Beloved enriched, or in some cases, replaced earlier ideals of renouncing the world, fear of God, and fear of divine punishment. This paper reconsiders our understanding of a transition from ideals of fear to ideals of love by examining the seventh-century ascetic of Basra, ʿĀmir b. ʿAbd Qays. ʿĀmir was remembered for his lifelong celibacy, which he defended as an act of “betrothal” to God. I argue that ʿĀmir’s biographers saw him as an early exemplar of love mysticism, saw no conflict between his fear of God and his engagement to God, and understood him as articulating the value of celibacy for Muslims as a form of spiritual marriage. Daniel Watling, Pomona College Normalizing the Mahdī: Ibn ‘Arabī’s Khātim al-Awliyā’ as a Constitutional Principle Abstract Recent studies on Islamic mysticism in the early modern period have explored the influence of Muḥammad ibn ‘Arabī (1165-1240) on political theory and social movements in Asia. However, to what extent did Ibn ‘Arabī see himself as contributing to Islamic political theory. This paper explores the ways in which Ibn ‘Arabī bridges the classical Ṣūfism of the Islamic East with a native, Andalusī-Maghribī mystical tradition (I‘tibār). I argue that the political dimensions of texts like The Meccan Revelations and the Bezels of Wisdom represent draw heavily on caliphal and mahdist ideologies from the Islamic West (Fāṭimids, Umayyad Córdoba, Almohads) that are absent from classical Ṣūfism. I further argue that Ibn ‘Arabī’s “Seal of the Saints” (khātim al-awliyā’) recasts the mahdī as a transhistorical, mystical influence on awliyā’ across time and functions as new constitutional principle for a caliphate that incorporates the mahdī’s power to create post-prophetic sunna. Arthur Schechter, Independent Scholar The Hidden Imam in the Teachings of the Early Niʿmatullāhiyya: Sufi Shiʿism and Communal Autonomy in Iran before the Safavid Empire Abstract This paper is about how borrowings from Shiʿism shaped ideas of mystical and political authority among the Niʿmatullāhiyya, a major Sufi order of medieval and modern Iran. Roughly a century before becoming Iran’s official religion and political instrument of the Safavid Empire, Twelver Shiʿism provided inspiration for the Niʿmatullāhiyya’s founder Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī and his successors in their formulation of a decentralized view of collective identity that gave nominal recognition to worldly sultanates, while teaching complete loyalty to a Sufi shaykh and ascribing ultimate authority only to the Hidden Imam. I present evidence for these Sufi Shiʿite teachings for the first time in scholarship, considering their significance as a quietist alternative to the centralizing imperial messianism of the Sunni Timurids. I argue that Niʿmatullāhī teachings reflected the order’s social and political reality as a loosely incorporated, transregional network with economical and political autonomy on the margins of imperial power. Responding Rebecca Makas, Villanova University Business Meeting M. Shobhana Xavier, Queens University, Kingston, Presiding Cyrus Zargar, University of Central Florida, Presiding
	A23-125 Law, Religion, and Culture Unit and Religion, Holocaust, and Genocide Unit Theme: "Paperwork is Life: Legal Status, Necropolitics, and Sovereignties" Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Benjamin Sax, Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, Presiding Lack of legal status renders peoples subject to direct violence by state actors. States and, to a large degree, to their populations, adopt categories such as “illegals” to justify, subtly or directly, implicitly or explicitly, disposability. Our interest in this panel is with the lived reality of those without legible legal status as “citizens” and the use of religious thought and practice to negotiate such status. This includes the investment in (or recognition of) metaphysical qualities to citizenship and its documents as well as the mobilization of religious traditions for prophetic critiques of the very notion of the nation-state and the idea of citizenship, and, ultimately, the imagination of alternative sovereignties above but also existing in tension with that of states. Panelists Spencer Dew, Ohio State University William Calvo-Quiros, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University Atalia Omer, University of Notre Dame Carlota McAllister, York University Ronan Lee, Loughborough University London Christopher Sheklian, Radboud University
	A23-126 Liberation Theologies Unit Theme: Global Solidarities and the Margins Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Francisco Garcia, Vanderbilt University, Presiding This session will include papers exploring the formation of global solidarities and offer responses to the general AAR theme (“Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margins”) from the perspective of liberation theologies. Papers will explore these themes from multiple angles and locations. Panelists will attend to the decolonization of the politics of extractivism in Indonesia from the perspective of Islamic ethics, resistance to military violence in Myanmar, the "power of negativity" in queer studies in religion, and Franz Hinkelammert's contribution to Latin American liberation theology. Combined, these papers will offer avenues for conversations on intersectional acts of solidarity and new developments in liberation theologies. Kai Moore, Graduate Theological Union Crucifixion, Self-Immolation, and Queer Refusal: The Power of Radical Negativity Abstract This paper uses Lee Edelman's theorization of queer negativity to read the crucifixion of Jesus together with the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell in protest of the Palestinian genocide, arguing that Edelman's construction of the "nothing" as critique of the social order can interpret (some of) the inarticulable power of these public deaths. In the context of Western biopolitics, both events present a confrontation of the "meaninglessness" of a painful, innocent death against the explicit meanings stated before their deaths and by interpreters. Through Edelman's theory, this meaninglessness becomes itself an affective political force which exposes the fantasy of invulnerable wholeness that sustains the illusive rational subject and the intersecting axes of marginalization that both enable and maintain that illusion. Etin Anwar, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Decolonizing the politics of extractivism: Towards an Islamic ethics of repair (iṣlāh) in Indonesia Abstract My paper addresses the intersection between environmental harm brought about by capitalist production and the societal and religious solidarity in response to violent eviction. I will contextualize the politics of extraction by examining the Rempang Eco-City in Indonesia that infuriated residents over the governmental policy of forced eviction and elicited distress among Muslim leaders. I will first discuss the relationship between indigenous people and their land and show how their violent removal is unjust. I will secondly connect the indigenous people’s claim to their land to the legal discourse on land inquisition by the state as expressed in the 2023 Omnibus Law on Job Creation. I will finally examine Muslim leaders’ grievances over the forced eviction in Rempang island, their attribution of the Islamic theological notion of unjust (ẓulm) to the land-grabbing practices, and their advocacy for an Islamic ethics of repair (iṣlāh) to address violent measures directed toward indigenous people. Sau Nam, University of Denver The Solidarity of Myanmar People in Resisting the Military Regime for Collective Liberation Abstract Myanmar is a diverse country, divided along ethnical, political, social, and religious lines. Amidst the unresolved internal problems due to differences, the three-year-long military coup is ongoing. I posit that the Myanmar people are establishing a just and liberated country by resisting the regime, embracing the “deep solidarity” among different ethnic groups, and establishing mutual understanding among differences. First, I briefly introduce the political background of Myanmar, and then, different marginalized groups’ experiences will be discussed. Lastly, the oppressed people’s collective efforts for liberation will be presented. I will analyze the current political turmoil in Myanmar and the oppressed groups’ struggles for liberation from the lens of the margins by using postcolonial liberative and feminist approaches. It is a timely, intersectional, and insightful proposal for different disciplines. Filipe Maia, Boston University Franz Hinkelammert’s Contributions to Latin American Liberation Theology Abstract This presentation will examine the intellectual trajectory of liberation theologian and economist Franz J. Hinkelammert. The paper will offer an analysis of three major contributions his scholarship made to the development of Latin American liberation theology and three theses pertaining to each of these aspects of Hinkelammert’s work. First, the paper will offer an account of the development of Hinkelammert’s theological critique of capitalism and argue that it gained shape through a theological stylization of Marx’s critical project. Second, the presentation will investigate Hinkelammert’s call for a critique of utopian reason which will be described as the setting up of a liberatory social-epistemic analysis about the limits and possibilities of transformative action in the world. Finally, Hinkelammert’s more recent writings (2003-2023) will be summarized to demonstrate his engagement with contemporary political theology and mark how his work might highlight new development within liberation theologies. Business Meeting K. Christine Pae, Denison University, Presiding
	A23-127 Men, Masculinities, and Religions Unit and Mormon Studies Unit Theme: Wrestling with Mormonism: Gender, Religion, and Sport in Film. Conversations with David Walker Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Jana Riess, Religion News Service, Presiding . Panelists Michael Altman, University of Alabama Cody Musselman, John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis Taylor Petrey, Kalamazoo College Responding David Walker, University of California, Santa Barbara
	A23-128 Mysticism Unit Theme: The Things We Do Not Talk About: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM David Odorisio, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Presiding Originally published in 2001, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism opened doors into the hidden lives of scholars of comparative mysticism. By way of his own “secret talks” – vulnerable, first-person reflections, interwoven between historical case studies – Kripal demonstrated a methodology with the potential to redefine insider-outsider debates through rigorous, transparent, and participatory self-reflexivity. This panel invites papers that challenge the norms of objectivity and subjectivity in scholarship, extend first-person narratives into academic discourse, and interrogate the borders and boundaries between self and other, human and more-than-human, and the intimate intersections of eros and the body as sites of mystical transformation and transgression. Jason James Kelly, Hidden Nature: An Erotic Reading of Nature Mysticism Abstract For over twenty years Jeffrey J. Kripal’s classic work, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), has served as an enduring source of critical insight into the comparative study of mysticism. In this paper I extend Kripal’s comparative approach by placing his concept of “the erotic” in dialogue with nature mysticism. I claim that the erotic can enhance the way nature mysticism is addressed in contemporary ecological discourses because it offers a nondualistic lens of interpretation that can integrate the experiential knowledge of both body (nature) and soul (culture). Most significantly, I’m suggesting that constructing an erotic dialogue with the teachings of certain nature mystics, such as Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, underscores the hybrid and ultimately holistic significance of nature mysticism as a uniquely embodied esoteric movement within the history of American environmentalism. Gloria Hernández, West Chester University Secret Lessons from Vrindavan Abstract This presentation addresses questions such as: Where do scholars of mysticism situate themselves, ontologically speaking, when writing words about words or events that point to that which cannot be described? What are the scholarly spaces, other than ethnography, to examine the transformations they experience in the process of learning and writing about mysticism? And what are the limits of those spaces in a mostly white academy which prides itself of objectivity? While such questions may invite larger interdisciplinary conversations, Hernández will address them using self-referential materials taken from the process of writing her book Savoring God. She will also refer to how her own positionality as a Latino woman in her early career influenced the writing process. This self-reflection, that can only be done post-factum (or post-writing), questions the limits between scholars’ subjectivity and the scholarly products in the disciplinary field of the studies of mysticism. Maximillian Wetter, Harvard Divinity School Transcending Methodologies: Comparative Mysticism and Textual Affect in Elliot Wolfson's Mystical Hermeneutic Abstract This paper highlights the mystical hermeneutic of Elliot Wolfson as a methodological bridge between the neuroscientific and textual study of mysticism by emphasizing the role of affect within mystical experiences and their textual analysis. Therapeutic and cognitive science of mystical states of consciousness have rightfully recentered the importance of affect within mysticism, an emphasis that has been lacking in the scholarly history of constructivism and perennialism. By setting in conversation Jeffrey Kripal’s Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom with the modern therapeutic model, this paper explores how Wolfson’s work demonstrates the necessity of scholarly self-reflexivity and empathetic engagement with the text for a phenomenology of mysticism to be illuminated. While these texts may report memory and reflect culture, they invoke affect, and it is the responsibility of the scholar to adopt a methodology that uncovers the affective states embedded within the text. Rachael Petersen, On Translating – and Being Turned On By – Gustav Fechner Abstract In this paper, I reflect upon my experience translating the mystically-inspired book Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plant by the 19th century German thinker Gustav Fechner. Though Paul Ricœur describes translation as an openness to the other, a practice of extending “linguistic hospitality,” I recount my translation experience as one of seizure by the other in a way that blurred the boundaries between 1848 and 2024, plant and human, Gustav and me. And because language is formed in the body, translation meant embodied occupation; in short: my experience of translation is a fleshy and fully erotic affair. I will share how what seized my body, through the text of Nanna, was the same thing that seized Fechner to write it —the ever-reaching plant soul. I'll reflect on what is at stake for scholars translating texts inspired by mystical experiences, and how translation itself can be considered an ecstatic practice.
	A23-129 Pentecostal–Charismatic Movements Unit Theme: Keri Day's Azusa Reimagined, the Azusa Street Revival, and Ethical Inquiry Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Daniel Ramirez, Claremont Graduate University, Presiding This panel takes Keri Day’s Azusa Reimagined (2022) as a starting point for charting new relationships between the Azusa Street Revival and a diverse array of ethical inquiries. Day’s work, which places Azusa Street in the ongoing context of prevailing norms of racial capitalism, fundamentally alters the study of Pentecostalism in the US and widens the range of its potential impacts. From her own reading of the sermons and practices of the Azusa Street Mission, Day draws out a radical critique of racial capitalism and argues for a vision of democratic practices and belonging that prioritize intimacy and grave attending to those on the margins. While serving as an opportunity to respond to Day’s work, this panel also takes Azusa Reimagined as a starting point to think further about the Azusa Street Revival and ethical reflection more generally. Panelists Michelle Bostic, University of Virginia Luke Bretherton, Duke University Creighton Coleman, University of Virginia Erica Ramirez, Auburn Seminary Responding Keri Day, Princeton Theological Seminary
	A23-130 Philosophy of Religion Unit and Political Theology Unit Theme: Economies of Violence: Race, Pathology, Capital, Reason Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Maureen Kelly,, Presiding This panel challenges the presuppositions that have underwritten the “return of the religious” as a historical and conceptual phenomenon. This return, we argue, is based on a tacit equation of religion and violence that has not only defined modern European philosophy but is also complicit with liberal forms of reason and governmentality. Against this equation, we strategically reinhabit the canons of modern philosophy and political theology. Considering the domains of pathology, capital, reason, and race, we offer a more capacious understanding of violence in both its negative and positive valences. On our readings, violence in its economic and transcendental instantiations is more insidious than often recognized. At the same time, it may be undervalued as a resource for critique and struggle. In all cases, we aim to think violence independently of its dialectical relationship to non-violence in order to face its perils and promises head on. Zoe Anthony, University of Toronto Nietzsche's “War Praxis," Violence, and the Instinct for Healing Abstract This paper explores Nietzsche’s conceptualization of violence as a physiological concept, manifested in degrees of “defense and attack.” This paper situates itself between three areas: Nietzsche’s conceptions of health and sickness, literature on violence within a Nietzschean framework, and broader discussions of health, sickness, religion, and violence. I argue that Nietzsche views the “instinct for violence” as a measure of health, but with certain conditions. By offering an interpretation of Nietzsche’s four-point “war praxis,” and by exploring the counterintuitive proposition that healing requires an instinct for “war,” it argues that disease, for Nietzsche, is not an abnormality but a distorted relationality to reality, rectified by regaining the capacity for war. William Underwood, Oberlin College and Conservatory The Epoch of Annihilation: On the Formal Violence of Capital Abstract In the first volume of Capital, Marx famously describes the historical advent of capitalism as a kind of horror story. Nourished by colonial wars, enslavement, and the massacre of indigenous populations, capital constitutes and sustains itself through a near-limitless exercise of violence, conceivable in both physical and ideological terms. This paper investigates another modality of violence proper to capital, namely, formal violence: the diffuse, but titanic power by which human and non-human entities are constrained to appear as species of value. I develop this concept through the juxtaposition of two related, but distinct treatments of formal violence in the respective work of contemporary philosopher Jean Vioulac and Karl Marx. For Vioulac, formal violence constitutes a quasi-ontological subreption of humans’ essential purposive activity. Re-reading Marx, however, we come to see that formal violence operates on two levels, naming both a structure of phenomenality and the ruse of its false critique. Kirsten Collins, University of Chicago Black Masks, White Masks: Structural Violence in Fanon and Genet Abstract In On Violence, Hannah Arendt defines violence as a tool wielded to serve particular interests, and unjustifiable on universal moral grounds. Drawing on Arendt’s response to Frantz’s Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and its role in justifying what she terms the “violence” of Black Power political strategies in the 1960s, I turn to Fanon’s earlier Black Skin, White Masks to define the structural violence of racism excluded from Arendt’s definition. Showing how Fanon’s text exposes the racial hierarchy that sacralizes the notion of the human, I place his text in conversation with Jean Genet’s play, The Blacks. Arguing that both works expose the structural violence of race, the rituals that maintain it, and the difficulty of countering it, I show that they both position literary and performative excess as a violence that can counter this structure from within the conventions that maintain them, and give rise to unpredictable political action. Matthew Peterson, University of Southern California The Impossibility of Nonviolence: Metaphysics after Derrida Abstract In 1964, Jacques Derrida published an extensive commentary on the then-little-known Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The text was an emphatic celebration and devastating critique of the latter’s attempt to break with the inherent violence of philosophical language through recourse to religious sources. Sixty years after the initial publication of “Violence and Metaphysics,” I argue that this essay still contends that the best we can ever hope for is mitigating violence. In dialogue with Martin Hägglund, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Jean Vioulac, I address its contemporary purchase along the axes of politics, technology, and religion. On my reading, religious concepts are insufficient to break the complicity between theory and technological-political oppression. At the same time, the thought of God is ineluctably produced by war and violence. These problems converge around the question of Zionism, a theme in the background of Derrida’s questioning that today must be explicitly submitted to its demands. Responding Daniel Schultz, Whitman College
	A23-131 Psychology, Culture, and Religion Unit Theme: Breathing Life into Religion through Teaching, Research, and Writing: Building on the Contributions of Bonnie Miller-McLemore Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Eileen Campbell-Reed, Union Theological Seminary, Presiding The corpus of Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s writing makes invaluable contributions to the study of lived religion, practical theology, and theological education. She shines a bright light of critique on deep intractable problems, misdirection(s) of overlapping disciplines of study, and unavoidable conundrums at the intersection of theology and practice. As an undisputed leader among practical theologians for 30 years, Miller-McLemore constructed significant ideas about theological method, research, writing, teaching, and practicing faith. Her contributions, however, often appear in articles and books inaccessible to students and beginners. Participants in this round table will discuss how to translate Miller-McLemore’s critiques and concepts for our students who are learning to study religion, engage theology, take up writing, and practice ministry (broadly defined). Rather than continue the amnesia that keeps re-inventing important ideas, we aim to proliferate and popularize Miller-McLemore’s contributions, giving more people access to everyday approaches to the intersection of theology and practice. Panelists Peter Capretto, Phillips Theological Seminary Katharine Lassiter, Meadville Lombard Theological School James I. Higginbotham, Earlham School of Religion Melinda McGarrah Sharp, Columbia Theological Seminary Kishundra King, Iliff School of Theology Responding Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Vanderbilt University
	A23-132 Quaker Studies Unit, Religion and Human Rights Unit, and Religion and Politics Unit Theme: The Religious Logics of Nonviolent Action Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Seulbin Lee, Vanderbilt University, Presiding This session explores the religious logics of a variety of nonviolent movements, ranging from the civil disobedience of M.K. Gandhi to the legal efforts of Quaker conscientious objectors in the U.S. The papers examine the intersection of religious principles and spiritual development with nonviolent direct action – whether on the streets, in legislatures, or in the courts – and each paper complicates conventional conceptions of nonviolent action in important ways." Isaac May, Yale University Litigating the Draft and the Peace Testimony after World War I Abstract This paper argues that Quaker's legal efforts against the draft in federal courts, draft boards, and military tribunals need to be understood as core to their pursuit of the Quaker peace testimony in the twentieth-century United States. It contends that Quakers of an earlier period had tried to avoid interactions with the legal system, handling disputes internally; they increasingly relied on lawyers and legal expertise. The paper argues this shift to legal activism also made the Quaker peace testimony startlingly effective; legal victories helped to undermine the draft to such a degree that by the early 1970s, it was no longer a viable policy. Johanna Mueller, Stanford University Negotiating the Right to Nonviolence: American Mennonite Conscientious Objectors in World War I Abstract This paper explores the impact of the Wilson administration’s 1917 Selective Service Act on pacifist religious minorities in the United States, using American Mennonites as a case study. As the first successful universal draft law in the nation’s history, its implementation changed the demands of (male) US citizenship in a way that made it difficult for members of historic peace churches to comply. Mennonites—whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe to escape religious persecution; often specifically to avoid draft laws—made up the majority of this group. Although the Selective Service Act made provisions for the exemption of religious “conscientious objectors” from combatant service, both the terms of exemption and its implementation continued to be negotiated throughout the war. For the first time in US history, the community was forced to make a case for the recognition of their theological commitment to the principle of nonresistance to the US government. I argue that conscientious objectors in WW I were early actors in the movement towards a more thorough accommodation of minoritized communities’ rights to freely exercise their religion in the US. Darren Yau, Princeton University The Ethics of Non-Violence’s Power: On Collective Action & Sanctions Abstract Non-violent action has often struggled to find its place within contemporary ethical and political theory. While often conflated with absolute pacifism and civil disobedience, this paper draws instead on social scientists who demonstrate the tremendous expressive range of social movements that claim the banner of “non-violent action.” But once non-violent action can be associated with a range of tactics—from prayer vigils to law-breaking to statue destruction—how ought we think about the norms that govern non-violent action? Using recent work in sanctioning and debates in just war theory, this paper proposes that for large scale collective actions, the use pressure and economic harm to achieve a movement’s goal can be understood under a general ethics of sanctioning. Applying basic intuitions in just war thought for the ethics of social movements yields larger insights about contemporary non-violence’s relation to debates in labor history and war, rather than absolute pacifism. Daniel Wyche, University of Chicago From the Scale of Despotism to the Scale of Freedom: Violence and Perfectionism in the Nonviolent Tradition Abstract This paper addresses the ways that several major figures in the nonviolent tradition, including William Lloyd Garrison, MK Gandhi, and M.L. King Jr., understand the place of violence in the service of just causes from the perspective of principled nonviolence. I argue that only a genuinely principled, rather than merely practical, commitment to nonviolence can render violent protest intelligible, in ways that challenge standard ethical outlooks. These perspectives present especially productive challenges for forms of virtue ethics and moral perfectionism.
	A23-133 Reformed Theology and History Unit Theme: Eschatology 1 Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Cambria Kaltwasser, Northwestern College, Orange City, Presiding 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. Preston Hill, Richmont Graduate University Holy Saturday in Calvin’s Theology: Recovering a Forgotten Theme in Reformed Eschatology Abstract Given the cottage-industry of research on John Calvin, it is surprising there are no substantial studies on his interpretation of Christ’s descent into hell despite the centrality of this theme in his thought. Some emerging studies have clarified that Calvin’s interpretation was not novel given his inherited tradition. However, it has not yet been clarified that Calvin primarily interpreted the descensus in relation to eschatological themes on soul-sleep, the intermediate state, and Holy Saturday. In this paper, I survey the eschatological context of Calvin’s descensus interpretation and show how this context was decisive for Calvin’s enduring opinion and included a robust theology of Holy Saturday. This eschatological evidence contradicts a widespread misunderstanding that Calvin reduced the descensus to a metaphor for the cross, which cannot be the case, since for Calvin the descensus refers to the soul of Christ and its relation to the state of souls after physical death. Arnold Huijgen, Protestant Theological University To Hell and Back: Christ's Descent into Hell as Interpretive Key to Current Hell-Talk Abstract The doctrine of hell represents the dark side of traditional Reformed eschatology, which many reject or ignore. Meanwhile, the language of hell is on the rise in society ("climate hell", mental health issues, wars). This paper seeks to connect traditional understandings of hell with present-day "hell talk" by a reinterpretation of Christ's descent into hell. Eastern traditions understand this as Christ's victory over death, and John Calvin interpreted it as the depth of Christ's sufferings. This paper adds the exclusion of humans by humans as third layer. In dialogue with Hannah Arendt's reflections on hell and punitive methods, this paper reinterprets hell christologically. Taylor Holleyman, Baylor University Total Mortality: Reformed Reflections on the Death of the Soul Abstract This paper puts forward the argument that, so long as it does not inhibit the preaching of eternal hope and security, it is both right and profitable to assert the death of the soul. This argument builds on two premises: (1) If total depravity, then total mortality; (2) That which does not die cannot be resurrected. If the soul is something that is corrupted by sin and something that participates in the resurrected life, then it is also a thing that dies. Toward this end, to speak of the immortality of the soul is at least misleading and bares the possibility of being altogether incorrect. By affirming the death of the soul, we can minimize body/soul dualisms and metaphysical speculations, resting instead on the proclamation of the gospel: That which was dead has been raised to life! Daniel Rempel, University of Aberdeen Liberation beyond Action: Witness, Disability, and Glimpses of the Eschaton Abstract In the recent turn to liberation in Christian theology, personal action and advocacy are paramount. Such action is indeed liberating for many oppressed minorities, but fails to take account of the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities, many of whom are unable to self-advocate. In this paper, by drawing on Barth’s theology of witness, I argue that the invading work of Christ through the Spirit in the life of Christians provides a means by which those with profound intellectual abilities experience the liberation of God. As they are liberated by the action of God, people with intellectual disabilities are simultaneously empowered to witness to this liberatory event, thus becoming sites of liberation themselves. As witnesses to their own liberation, people with intellectual disabilities offer glimpses of the coming kingdom of God, disrupting our tidy eschatological vision by the Kingdom appearing in the places some may least expect.
	A23-134 Religion and Economy Unit and Religion and Memory Unit Theme: The Costs of Memory and Ethical Economies of (Un)Just Remembrance Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Rebecca Bartel, San Diego State University, Presiding This panel explores metaphors and practices of painful and potentially costly memory. The papers focus on the ethics of remebering and the stakes of collective memory in processes of justice. How, the papers ask, does studying religion and the capital costs of remembering inform the ways that the economies of memory are tied to power? Laura Simpson, Villanova University Narrative and Reproductions of Power at the Prison Museum Abstract Amid growing public enthusiasm for “dark tourism” excursions—that is, travel to locations featuring an engagement with the deathly, horrific, or macabre—the American prison museum has become an increasingly lucrative site of intellectual and affective stimulation. Over the last two decades, an expanding collection of scholarship in the fields of architecture, history, sociology, and criminology has sought to address the purpose, appeal, and ethics of the prison museum, with particular attention to its role as a site of cultural memory and meaning-making. The present paper builds on this literature to explore the ways that the prison museum functions temporally – that is, how it reproduces (and occasionally refuses) linear understandings of time that underwrite popular appeals to American progress. Zachary Taylor, The Costs of Unjust Memory in Augustine’s City of God Abstract In a recent essay, Richard Miller claims that Augustine presumes a duty to remember justly in the City of God. However, Miller’s cursory reference to a presumed duty of “just memory” does not explain how Augustine conceptualizes this duty, or how it relates to his theological concerns. In this paper, I demonstrate how Augustine presumes a duty to remember truly for the sake of justice in the City of God. I first analyze the relationship between forgetting and the earthly city, then explain how the earthly city’s logic of forgetting contributes to a false remembrance that denies the suffering of empire’s victims. Ultimately, I conclude that Augustine understands just remembrance as an obligation of properly ordered love. For Augustine, our failure to fulfill this obligation comes at the cost of a distorted view of the created order that inhibits our capacity for loving relation with God and other persons. Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Fordham University The Price and Pain of Memory: Institutional Reckoning with White Supremacy Abstract For nearly twenty years, institutions of higher education have been increasingly coming to terms with their histories of racial violence involved with slavery and its afterlives. From the 2006 Brown University Slavery and Justice Report to the 2024 Yale & Slavery Research Project, the work of recovering histories has become a practice of institutional reckoning. It is, in a sense, a project that requires reconstituting painful memories that have been willfully erased. Following the theoretical path of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, this work of uncovering histories and reconstituting institutional memory is part of the truth-telling necessary as a first step to healing from our national trauma of White supremacy and racism. But what are the many costs -- financial, emotional, personal and institutional -- for doing this essential work? Responding Timothy Rainey, St. Olaf College
	A23-135 Religion and Politics Unit Theme: Religion and/or a State: Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist Perspectives Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Marie W. Dallam, University of Oklahoma, Presiding This panel of five papers explores aspects of how religions or religious communities benefit or suffer from ties between religion and state, and/or the ramifications of such ties. The geographical range of the papers is wide, including Israel, the United States, the Arab world, India/Pakistan, Indonesia, and Japan. They cohere through investigating the nexus between religion and state as it relates to issues including “diasporism,” Zionism, the caliphate, the concepts of popular sovereignty and constituent power, religiously-sourced redefinitions of the religious and the political, and the ways in which religious doctrine, art, and ritual may reinforce political authority. Shaul Magid, Dartmouth College Jewish Nationality and Diaspora Nationalism: Reading Louis Brandeis through Daniel Boyarin Abstract There is not much of a connection between Louis Brandeis and rabbinics scholar Daniel Boyarin. But in this paper, I argue that Brandeis’ 1915 essay on Zionism “The Jewish Problem and How to Solve it” and Boyarin’s 2023 anti-Zionist manifesto No-State Solution share a great deal in their understanding of the Diaspora and Jewish nationalism/nationality. I will argue that we can see Brandeis’ Zionism anew through the lens of Boyarin and Boyarin’s anti-Zionism anew though the lens of Brandeis, each aware of the dangers of an ethnostate and each committed to a robust Jewish life lived among others, particularly in America. Simon Wood, University of Nebraska, Lincoln A Religion and/or a State: Revisiting the Abolition of the Caliphate Abstract This conference coincides with the 100-year anniversary of the caliphate’s abolition. Initially sensational, the sense of shock it precipitated dissipated fairly quickly. Thus, it might be asked: why, beyond historical interest, is the caliphate a topic for conversation in 2024? Beyond the endurance of the caliphal ideal, however imaginary, one may point to a turn occurring around the end of the twentieth century. The sense that secularisms had failed to deliver led to interest in revisiting the caliphate and the works of those who had embraced, reimagined, or rejected it. This paper examines the works of two such authors: Rashid Rida and Ali Abdel Razek. While the two were rhetorically opposed, some authorities find that the implications of their discourses actually have much in common. This reading rests on the claim that Rida, in effect, pointed towards a partitioning of religious and secular. I argue that this claim overreaches. Danielle Widmann Abraham, Ursinus College Legible Solidarity: Women’s Politics in Conflict and Post-Conflict Aceh. Abstract Throughout the period of separatist conflict, women in Aceh organized to remediate the effects of armed conflict on women, including addressing the use of sexual violence as a tactic of war. Like women across the world, they sought to have women’s experiences (of violence) and material reality integrated into the political sphere. If Acehnese women’s conflict-era discourse represented an attempt to expand the sphere of the political, then their post-conflict discourse signals a multiplication of axes of expansion. Tracing the transformation of politics in Aceh from the conflict period to the post-conflict sharia regime allows us to see how women’s organizations coordinated a challenge to the instantiation of Islamist politics with a distinct, Islamically-sourced Muslim politics of solidarity. The political project of women’s organizations in post-conflict Aceh, especially their opposition to the new sharia criminal code, can thus be characterized as a struggle to make solidarity legible to the state. Andrew F. March, The Discovery of Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought: The Question of Constituent Power Abstract Constituent authority refers to the idea of the original source of legitimate government, the right to authorize the exercise of political power, or the authority to create a new constitutional order. Modern Islamic legal and political theory has struggled with the concept of constituent authority (al-sulṭa al-taʾsīsiyya). On the one hand, most Islamic political doctrines hold that governance itself is divinely ordained and specific offices are also required by the divine law. On the other hand, modern Sunni political thought has sought to deepen its commitment to popular sovereignty and the ultimate authority of the people over public institutions. This has led to a rich debate in modern Islamic thought about the scope of constituent authority: are specific offices and institutions seen as ordained by God, thus locating all constituent authority in the interpretation of divine law, or are powers to create and authorize new institutions assigned to other agents? Pamela D. Winfield, Elon University Buddhism and the Imperial Body Politic of Japan Abstract This paper explores the symbiosis of state-sangha relations in premodern Buddhist Japan, where temples gained state sponsorship in exchange for performing state-protecting rites. It specifically examines how Buddhist doctrine, art, and ritual equated the emperor’s own body with the greater state polity of Japan, and how these imperial body-schemes rhetorically invoked, artistically imagined, and ritually reinforced religio-political authority throughout Japan’s clerical and governmental power structures. It primarily focuses on the Nara (710-794) and Heian (794-1185) periods, but it also notes modern echoes of these themes as well. The Buddhist reformer Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903) used the Buddha’s hand as a metaphor for discussing the inseparability of personal and state morality, and Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) integrated pre-existing Buddhist corporeal tropes into his ‘organ theory of government.’ As a result, this paper demonstrates the centrality of the emperor’s body in bridging both religious authority and political power in Japan. Responding Curtis Hutt, University of Nebraska, Omaha
	A23-136 Ritual Studies Unit Theme: Creating and Reshaping Rituals with Political Stakes Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Jone Salomonsen, University of Oslo, Presiding The political instrumentalization of ritual performances is as old as ritual itself. The contributors to this panel present a variety of cases in which rituals are created or reshaped to propagate national ideologies and to rehabilitate those whom civil institutions have marginalized. Soodeh Mansouri, University of California- Santa Barbara Hajj as a Political Ritual Abstract This paper presents how Hajj, as one of the five pillars of Islam, modified and became a political ritual with aggressive aspects that represent political and sectarian conflicts and struggles between Saudi Arabia and Iran at both structural and individual levels in post-revolution of 1979. Theoretically, the paper is based on new formulation of political ritual concept and methodologically, it is based on content analysis of speeches, photos, open messages and Hajj costumes for Iranian pilgrims. Lukey Ellsberg, A New Nuclear Metaphysics: Civil Defense Rituals and the Reclamation of Possibility Abstract This paper argues that early American civil defense drills, large-scale rehearsals for nuclear war performed in cities across the United States, are usefully interpreted as rituals inscribing new nuclear metaphysics. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) operated with the stated goal of preparing the nation for surviving atomic attack, even as planners privately acknowledged the implausibility of national survival. This paper argues that an under-theorized tactic—if not goal—of the FCDA was the transmission of a nuclear metaphysics assigning ultimate causative power to the bomb itself. Bringing scholarship on civil defense from the fields of affect theory, performance studies, and cultural criticism into contact with the framework of ritual to reevaluate the FCDA archive allows a clearer evaluation of these metaphysics. This paper further argues that the reinscription of the bomb as a metaphysical entity rendered invisible all forms of imperial violence other than total nuclear war. Renee Cyr, University of Kansas After Time Served: Utilizing Rituals to Transition Back Into Society Following War or Incarceration Abstract For centuries, civilizations and communities around the world have utilized ceremonial rites of passage to welcome home returning warriors. Yet today, veteran reintegration into society after being deployed in a war context is often a fraught process. We don’t have a standardized ritual or a structured method of offering returning soldiers a sense of purification, emotional release, or the time and space for personal healing. When soldiers are too quickly reintegrated it can be detrimental to their mental health, overall well-being, and the well-being of their families. In a similar vein, people returning to society after incarceration are often plagued by both the trauma of their past actions and their experiences in prison. Yet a rite of purification and intentional reintegration is not part of the prison release process. In this paper I utilize Turner’s social drama theory to examine two organizations tat offer models of what a reintegration ritual might look like. Responding Sarah M. Pike, California State University, Chico
	A23-137 Science, Technology, and Religion Unit Theme: *Author Meets Critics Book Panel: Critical Approaches to Science and Religion* (Myrna Perez, Ahmed Ragab, and Terence Keel, eds.)** Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Donovan Schaefer, University of Pennsylvania, Presiding The essays in Critical Approaches to Science and Religion (edited by by Myrna Perez, Ahmed Ragab, and Terence Keel, published in 2023) deploy three methodological orientations--critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial theory--to offer fresh perspectives on classic questions in the field of science and religion. This unique roundtable will bring four readers of the book with expertise in a range of different religious traditions into dialogue with two of the book's editors to build a collaborative, multidisciplinary conversation. Panelists Megan Loumagne, Elizabeth Perez, University of California, Santa Barbara Peter Harrison, James Miller, Duke Kunshan University Responding Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles Myrna Perez, Ohio University Business Meeting Donovan Schaefer, University of Pennsylvania, Presiding
	A23-138 South Asian Religions Unit Theme: New Directions in South Asia Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Aarti Patel, Pennsylvania State University, Presiding The New Directions panel introduces new research in the study religion in South Asia by recently-graduated Ph.D. students and doctoral candidates. This year's papers examine wide ranging topics including Pakistani khwaja sara, Da’udi Bohras, medical missionary work, and Sanskrit philosophical texts. In doing so, panelists consider the intersections of religion with gender, caste, authority, and literary genre. Khadeeja Majoka, The Khwaja Sara in Faqiri Abstract This paper explores the lifeworlds of third gender khwaja saras in Pakistan within the expansive, underexplored religious tradition of Faqiri. Faqiri refers to the transgressive, often antinomian, tradition of Sufi holy poverty. Khwaja saras in Pakistan have been the locus of well-meaning activism and legislation to integrate them into the state as rights-bearing subjects through the secular category of Trans, which has also produced a strong backlash from right-wing conservatives. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in which my khwaja sara interlocuters turn to Faqiri to explain what Trans and other categories fail to capture, I argue that both khwaja sara lifeworlds and Faqiri produce gendered selves that cannot be flattened into secular categories. Moreover, what unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism.” Vineet Gupta, Vanderbilt University From the Miracle-performer to Reformer: Articulating Authority among the Da’udi Bohras of South Asia, 1803-1921 Abstract This paper examines how modernity has altered the notions of authority in a South Asian Muslim devotional community. In focus are the Da’udi Bohras, a close-knit community of Shi‘i Isma‘ili Muslim merchants led by a lineage of holy men called da‘i al-mutlaq (or da‘i, the summoner). In response to colonial modernity, the Indic caste of Bohras (Gujarati, traders) became a global Isma‘ili community, claiming to be the true heir to the Fatimid-Isma‘ili heritage. This redefinition has also seen the representation of the da‘i shifting from a miracle-performing “perfect guide” to a scholarly figure. Such articulations have significant implications for the post-colonial identity of the Bohras and Muslim communities in South Asia. Stephanie Duclos-King, University of Toronto Are They Saviors? Medical Missionaries in the Development Sector Abstract In this paper I examine the Christian Medical College (CMC) founded by a Protestant medical missionary, Dr. Ida Scudder (1870-1960) in 1900 in Vellore, South India. I focus on the work conducted in the department of the Rural Unit of Health and Social Affairs (RUHSA), an NGO offshoot of the CMC founded in 1977. I draw primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at RUHSA in the summer of 2023, supplemented with archival records from “The Ida Scudder Papers,” an extensive archive dedicated to Ida Scudder and the CMC. I use one of the self-help groups on campus as a case study to explore how developmental ideals are translated into action, and how the women within the self-help group interact with those ideals. I argue that the racial capital accrued by foreign missionaries has found new expressions in both caste and religious positionality in modern day medical missionary endeavors. Hershini Soneji, University of Cambridge Vādagrantha as Genre: The Systematisation of a Commentarial Tradition Abstract In scholarly treatments of Sanskrit textual traditions, the genre of commentary (bhāṣya) has generally overshadowed a closely adjacent genre known as vādagrantha, no doubt a result of its capacious and elusive nature. This paper focuses on the Svāminārāyaṇa-Siddhānta-Sudhā, a 21st-century vādagrantha text of the theistic Vedānta school Akṣara-Puruṣottama Darśana. It first engages with definitional questions concerning the nature and purpose of this genre—which appears prominently across the Vedānta, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, and Buddhist traditions—and locates its conceptual origin in the eponymous Nyāya notion of vāda. The paper demonstrates the significance of this genre in two respects: 1) its concern first and foremost with ideas, as opposed to the shastric texts alone, and in turn 2) its crucial relevance in systematising the beliefs of a religious tradition in a Sanskrit philosophical register, in view of a particular socio-historical context. Responding Jennifer Ortegren, Middlebury College
	A23-139 Special Session Theme: Rethinking Religious Studies Programs Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Katherine Dugan, Springfield College, Presiding The place of Religious Studies programs, majors, and courses feels precarious: departments and programs are being cut, enrollments are down, and the question of how to maintain thriving programs is on many of our minds. The challenges of attracting and retaining students is ever-present. We propose a lightning-round-style roundtable to focus on practical and innovative strategies that departments have used to successfully increase and retain enrollments. Our colleagues are changing department names, changing program goals, redesigning courses, and renaming classes. This is an opportunity to discuss and share strategies that have and are working in response to these challenges. The work of figuring out how to reimagine our place in the landscape of higher education is falling on us, as scholars and professors in Religious Studies. This proposal for Teaching Tactics/Teaching Gift Exchange centers solutions and strategies for maintaining vibrant Religious Studies programs. Panelists Adrienne Krone, Allegheny College Julie Byrne, Hofstra University Susan Ridgely, University of Wisconsin, Madison Adrienne Ambrose, Amy Howe,
	A23-140 Status of LGBTIQ+ Persons in the Professions Committee Theme: Special Topics Forum: The Status of Trans Scholars and Scholarship in the Study of Religion Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Siobhan Kelly, Harvard University, Presiding This roundtable will reflect on the current status and future directions for trans scholars and trans scholarship in the study of religion. We will hear from innovative scholars across the field on the conditions for trans scholars today and how we hope to see these conditions improve in the future, as well as on the present and future of trans scholarship in the field. How might trans scholars best be able to thrive in the study of religion, particularly given entrenched resistance to trans life from many religious leaders across the globe? What transformative scholarship will the present and future generations of trans scholars of religion contribute to our guild? Panelists J Selke, University of California, Riverside Sahin Acikgoz, University of California, Riverside Bee Scherer, Intersectional Centre for Inclusion and Social Justice Max Thornton, Drake University
	A23-141 Teaching Religion Unit Theme: Teaching Tactics Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Kate DeConinck, Other, Presiding This interactive session will feature short presentations of specific "tactics" -- a single activity, lesson, or other piece -- for teaching religion. Each presenter will demonstrate their tactic, and then the audience will have time to discuss questions and possible applications in different types of classrooms/settings. Jill DeTemple, Southern Methodist University Teaching Tactic/Gift Exchange: Dialogic Moment Abstract Teaching and Learning literature often underscores the value of inviting students to connect what they know to previous experiences as well as sociality and what Eyler (2018) calls "beautiful questions" as beneficial for learning (Rovai 2022, Cozolino 2013, Bandura 1977, Vygotsky 1980). This quick demonstration will introduce "dialogic moments" as a way of connecting students to course content and each other at the beginning of a class. After opening the session with a dialogic question meant to demonstrate the approach, participants will be invited to think of one question appropriate for their context and field test it in small groups in the room. April Simpson, Georgetown College Reading Old Mail: Interpreting Paul's Letters Abstract As an introduction to the challenges of interpreting ancient primary texts, and especially letters, students are invited to analyze an image of a short personal letter between sisters written just over a decade ago. Students are not given any context for the letter, however, and are led through a process of identifying cultural information and analyzing the author’s apparent intentions in order to maximize understanding of the letter. The conversation posits explanations—with varying degrees of confidence—for some of the letter’s contents while leaving other references unexplained. This activity is designed as a segue into study of the Pauline letters, but it can be applied to other letters or primary sources. John Miller, In the Jurist’s Seat: Teaching Analogical Reasoning by Debating Intoxicants in Islamic Jurisprudence Abstract In an recent contribution to Islamic studies pedagogy, Shahzad Bashir noted that “theological, nativist, and orientalist” modalities of teaching frequently persist, even in well-intentioned courses on Islam (A New Vision). Carl Ernst likewise articulates the need to destabilize stereotypes of Muslims as automatons, rotely applying scriptural texts (Not Just Academic!). In a recent course on “Islamic Law, Ethics, and Practice” these pedagogical interventions were pursued when students chose the roles of legal theorists (faqihs), oral advocates (wakils), and judges (qadis) and deployed the rational toolkit of Muslim legal thinkers. In the august setting of law school courtroom, student-jurists debated whether, based on analogical reasoning (qiyas) a Qur’anic injunction against wine rationally entailed a prohibition of kombucha, cigarettes, psilocybin, or caffeine. In reaching the divergent conclusions with the same sources and methods, students experienced firsthand the domain of Islamic law as an arena of spirited debate, rational disagreement, and nuanced analysis. Holly Hillgardner, Bethany College Teaching Tactic: Role Playing Religious Voices at a Judy Chicago-Inspired Dinner Party Abstract Using food, art, and role playing, students and professors throw a dinner party, inspired by Judy Chicago's installation art project "The Dinner Party." John Soboslai, Montclair State University Martha Smith Roberts, Denison University Immersive Religion: Harnessing Extended Reality in Teaching about Religious Practices Abstract Immersive Religion is a web-based, extended reality resource for teaching about religious practices. Joining 360-degree footage of diverse religious practices with translations, video interviews with scholars and religious professionals, interactive 3d objects, virtual tours of sacred spaces, and other explanatory elements, Immersive Religion offers an engaging and interactive resource for integration into a host of religious studies classes. This "Teaching Tactics" demonstration will introduce the resource and provide attendees with a sample lesson plan that models active, experiential classroom learning using Immersive Religion, adaptable to participants’ own courses. Business Meeting Kate DeConinck, Other, Presiding Joseph Tucker Edmonds, Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis, Presiding
	A23-142 Theology and Religious Reflection Unit Theme: Imagining Possible Futures with Mark Jordan's Queer Callings Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Abdul Rahman MUSTAFA, University of Paderborn, Presiding Using Mark Jordan's Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires (Fordham, 2023) as a jumping-off point, this roundtable considers the possible futures into which it invites its readers. If the history of identity shows it as a tool that carries with it constrictions that may limit the possibilities through which queer and trans people understand themselves, how do we write into new (or rework old) languages of sexuality and spirituality? How do we honor the role that spirituality, as a non-teleological openness to what has not been captured by the forces that insist on thingifying the world, has played in the lives and work of queer and trans people? Panelists Mark Jordan, Harvard University Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Linn Tonstad, Yale University Harrison Hall, Harvard University Business Meeting Linn Tonstad, Yale University, Presiding Abdul Rahman MUSTAFA, University of Paderborn, Presiding
	A23-143 Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit Theme: Mining the Prophetic Wisdom of Womanist Scholar Jacquelyn Grant Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM TERRI LAWS, University of Michigan, Dearborn, Presiding On the 35th Anniversary of womanist scholar Jacquelyn Grant’s teaching career and retirement, a look at the constructive theological contributions in the seminal text, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Responses (1989), Perspectives on Womanist Theology (1995). Grant has been featured in many publications and media tributes and served on numerous international and national organizations as a noted pioneer in the first generation of self-identified Womanists matriculating from Union Theological Seminary. Panelists Ashlyn Strozier, Georgia State University Linda Thomas, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago Iris Manburg, University of Chicago Rose Archer, Kelly Brown Douglas, Episcopal Divinity School At Union Theological Seminary Responding Jacquelyn Grant, Interdenominational Theological Center Business Meeting Valerie Miles-Tribble, Berkeley School of Theology, Presiding Melanie Jones Quarles, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Presiding

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