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.
The late Bishop Carlton Pearson was an extraordinary religious figure by almost any measure.This roundtable will consider how Bishop Pearson as a sonic and visual performative figure transgressed racial boundaries; how Pearson’s embrace of universal salvation might be situated within the Black radical tradition, and perform a type of Black radical constructive theology and liberative praxis more readily associated with Black, Womanist and Queer theologies; how Pearson’s Pentecostal consideration of Black suffering sparked the largest and most widespread theological rebuke of his ministry via the Joint College of African American Pentecostal Bishops suggesting Pentecostalism’s reliance on Black suffering for forms of order, theological normativity, and respectability; and finally, how Pearson mastered media performances of piety, even in death.
This session will explore varieties of antiBlack violence, and the viablity of Black theological imagination in response. Considerations will range from scripture to slave rebellion; spiritual violence in the Black churches and the violence of ideological conscription in the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. Special attention will be given to the complex dialectic of hopelessness against hope amidst the flesh and blood realities of Black life.
The participants in this roundtable all agree that minority perspectives yield new insights into biomedical enhancements, particularly when persons are vulnerable to health disparities, including persons with disabilities, and persons of color. The presenters for this round table come from different denominational backgrounds and represent different minority perspectives and they bring those perspectives to bear on questions of bioenhancement.
The foci of this panel present multifaceted thoughts by medieval philosophical viewpoints and neuroscientific discoveries on Mind and Body. These viewpoints and neuroscientific discoveries help us understand the path to spiritual fulfillment across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Christianity, which are based on various geographical locations within South Asia and major European civilizations, especially Roman and Greek. The first paper is about Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu views on the perfect and imperfect body and contemporary practices of the body. The second paper explores eligibility and ineligibility of mind and body in medieval Digambara Jainism. The third paper addresses some interesting neuroscientific discoveries on the relationship of mind and body that could be drawn from Christian practices.
Bodies can be envisioned in a multitude of ways that simultaneously help and hinder the religious imagination and experience: the flesh of a fat body reimagined as absently thin in the afterlife, the digital and simultaneously enfleshed body in the Zoom box, the malleable yet rigid embodiment of transness. This panel brings together five papers to think through the interconnection between bodies considered to be “other” and the associations of both violence and beauty that attend othered bodies. Based in theories of the body, this panel strives to envision bodies within religious spaces and identities that work through both positive and negative processes of enfleshment.
“Single Mothering as Critique and Vision,” is a roundtable session on single mothering as an ethical, theological, philosophical, and historical act from which to challenge contemporary systems and theories of social reproduction and to imagine alternatives. We ask what it means to single mother under white supremacist heteropatriarchy and capitalist ableism. Single mothering serves as a binary breaker against the hierarchies constructed under contemporary systems of social reproduction: mother/whore, straight/queer, independent/dependent, mature/immature, able/disabled, and productive/unproductive. Hence, rather than the single mother representing lack, we offer theological, theoretical, and religious visions of single mothering as a force for more just approaches to social reproduction. Scholars have long pointed out the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics of care labor, and offered alternative visions of family. However, lacunae exist in terms of single mothering as a theological, theoretical, and political frame. This roundtable addresses this absence.
Despite impressive accomplishments, CSR has been constrained by being wed to cognitivists models of the mind. 4E approaches, especially enactive cognition, bring cognitive science into meaningful partnership with cultural, historical, and phenomenological studies, reintegrating these disciplines with psychology and biology, presenting a path toward a more comprehensive study of religion. This roundtable panel’s starting point is a Religion, Brain, and Behavior symposium on John Teehan’s article, “Toward an Embodied CSR: Enaction, Evolution, Emergence,” that makes a case for integrating 4E approaches into CSR. It brings together two scholars who employ 4E cognition in their work (and who contributed to the RBB symposium), with two scholars who take a more cultural studies approach (but who also address cognitive models of religion) into conversation with the author. The article is a jumping off point for a larger discussion of the potential contributions, and limitations, of integrating 4E cognition into the study of religion.
The papers in this session engage Bonhoeffer's thought in relation to politics and various political theology discourses, including secularism and Christian nationalism; queer theory; global and racial capitalism; whiteness, fascism, anti-racism, and anti-Semitism; and retributive justice and violence.
The papers in this session explore Bonhoeffer's theological legacy in relation to various aspects of theological education, including decolonial methods, theological formation, and pastoral care.
This co-sponsored session examines various dimensions of the legacy of Bonhoeffer’s political theology and ethics. Bonhoeffer’s theology emerges in dialogue with contemporary theory, Bonhoeffer’s own Lutheran contemporaries, or the work of Martin Luther himself. Papers in this session offer new perspectives on Bonhoeffer through the lenses of Moral Injury, dialogues with the Black Pentecostal Tradition, earthly love poetry in the Song of Songs, and Martin Buber’s personalism.
This roundtable presents recent and ongoing research on Buddhism in the land that is now known as Australia. It will consider: historical and contemporary complexities of racial and religious diversity; cultural norms regarding religion and spirituality in Australia; the multicultural governance of diversity in Australia; the impact of Australia’s geographical positioning; and transnational flows of religion and culture in shaping Buddhism in Australia. The presentations examine 1) preliminary findings from the first nationwide study of Buddhism in Australia; 2) the use of digital media by Buddhist youth to negotiate religious belonging, visibility and identity; 3) triangulated flows of religion and culture among Indigenous, White-Australian and Asian immigrants in the Far North of Australia; and 4) the influence of Buddhism on deathcare practices in Australia. In doing so, we identify emerging insights about Buddhism in this overlooked region, and bring these into conversation with scholarship on Buddhism in the West.
Buddhist Studies has increasingly attended to what Helen Jin Kim characterizes as the “transpacific turn,” namely the transoceanic cultural flows through which Buddhist identities and communities are constructed. In situating their subjects within multiple transoceanic imperial contexts, these papers orient contemporary Buddhists within modernist frameworks that disrupt a simple West/East binary. Paper 1 re-examines the fault lines of the disciplinary boundaries of Buddhism in the West to draw out various subaltern Buddhist modernities. Paper 2 utilizes an ecological and colonial studies framework to consider the ecological consequences and neocolonial limitations of Tibetan nāga practice in North America. Paper 3 situates Shaku Sōen’s discussions on Buddhist notions of social equality within anti-colonial solidarity and imperialist projects
The panel aims to explore how early South Asian Buddhists utilized languages, embraced, and critiqued Brahmanical language theories, developed their own theories of language, and achieved literary innovations through multilingualism. We will examine the practical and theoretical aspects of language as understood by the early South Asian Buddhists. Individual presentations will encompass topics such as the stage of fluid Middle Indo-Aryan languages and their role in the formation of Buddhist canons. We will reconsider the fluidity of the MIA texts and the process of linguistic standardization in light of intellectual reflections on the nature of language in commentarial and scholastic texts, as well as associated knowledge of languages (Abhidharma, grammar, etymology, etc.) Additionally, we will seek to understand how regional and transregional languages functioned in their cultural historical contexts, allowing the textual traditions to establish transregional connections and contribute to the formation of local literary, religious, and political identities.
This omnibus session showcases work by newer scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies. Papers address two common themes: Buddhist landscapes and children in Buddhism. Topics include contesting the ‘decline’ paradigms of Indian Buddhism by attending to built landscapes, autogenous phenomena (or rangjön) and monasteries as pilgrimage sites in Tibet, quiet and pure sensory experiences on Mount Putuo in contemporary China, the soteriological capacity of children in medieval China, and contemporary Japanese lay Buddhist childcare programs in the Tendai tradition.
This panel considers how Buddhist texts display an awareness of their audiences and—relatedly—seek to take agency in their own reception. A common trope in Buddha-biographies, emphasized in discourses on "skillful means," is the Buddha's ability to anticipate the needs of his audiences and adapt his profound teaching to their terms. Working from a range of perspectives, our panelists demonstrate how Buddhist texts themselves incorporate subtle techniques for engaging their audiences, often at the level of affect, from depicting idealized audiences in-text to providing explicit rubrics for preachers. Others, meanwhile, use powerful affective cues to create certain kinds of audiences, distinguished by their feelings on certain matters. While recent literary scholarship has begun to consider the strategic roles Buddhist texts take in their reception, this panel reveals an awareness and creative engagement with the concept of audience to be the fundamental yet neglected element underlying these diverse pedagogical operations.
Justin Henry's _Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below_ (OUP, 2023), shortlisted for the AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions 2023 prize, offers an innovative study of the reception of the Ramayana, the famed Hindu epic, among Sri Lankan Buddhists spanning from the medieval period to the present day. Three panelists will offer critical perspectives on the position of _Ravana’s Kingdom_ amid the theoretical spectrum of the History of Religions discipline, Henry’s engagement with "many Ramayanas" at the margins of the Indic world, and the relevance of the book to ongoing issues of interreligious antagonism and interreligious cooperation in Sri Lanka. The panel will contextualize _Ravana's Kingdom_ alongside other recent monographs marrying rigorous, text-critical philological research with theoretical interventions related to contemporary "lived religion," populist movements, and religion and politics.
Yunnan Province, located in southwest China, has long been a hub in transregional Buddhist networks. However, it has received less scholarly attention than Silk Road sites and maritime routes. This panel’s four papers demonstrate Yunnan’s significance as a place for encounters between different forms of Buddhism and Buddhists of different backgrounds, with a focus on political themes in the late imperial period (1368–1911). Each paper uses a specific case study— Xitan Temple, the Yongle Buddhist Canon, an _abhiṣeka_ ritual text, and the _Săpº kammavācā_—to foreground a different encounter zone that connects Yunnan to Tibet, the Ming (1368–1644) court, middle-period South and Southeast Asia, or Theravada Southeast Asia. The papers draw on diverse sources in various scripts to reveal different facets of Buddhist encounters in Yunnan. The panel shows the benefits of treating Yunnan as a whole, rather than separately addressing Sinitic, Tibetan, or Pali forms of Buddhism.
Anthropologists of Buddhism encounter marginalia constantly, from scribbled notes in a book or the smudge of pigment in a ritual manual, to figurative ducking in and out of the crowd at a possession event. Despite being far from young, the stunted development of the sub-field within Buddhist Studies is partly attributable to a pejorative view of this ethnographic project as the marginal scribbles to Buddhist Studies’ normative text critical and philological work. Heeding Gellner’s (1990) and Sihlé and Ladwig’s (2017) calls for an ethnographic, comparative, and inter-textual Anthropology of Buddhism, this panel brings together interdisciplinary scholars situated across the Buddhist world working towards a rapprochement of text and context by drawing on both these disciplines. Each paper plays with, trespasses, and reconstitutes boundaries by openly thinking through Buddhist Studies’ diverse marginalia, questioning the outmoded binary of text-primary and ethnographic approaches.
