This round table brings together authors of recent or forthcoming monographs on esoteric or tantric Buddhism broadly conceived and invites them to reflect on how "esoteric" or “tantric” Buddhism formed and transformed both as emic doxographic and as etic scholarly categories, as well as on the ways in which the interplay of these two levels influences their scholarly work. The round table focuses on esoteric or tantric traditions of Buddhism spanning geographically from India via Central and southeast Asia to Japan, and historically from their inception into the early modern period. It thus seeks to contribute to the wider field of tantric studies by moving beyond the emphasis on Indian or Indo-Tibetan forms of tantra and by thereby stimulating debate on the ways in which the "esoteric" or "tantric" has always been a translocally, even globally, entwined and contentious arena for the articulation of religious and scholarly identities.
This round table panel engages the complex topic of embodied pedagogy in the academic study of religion. It is animated by a concern that one of the more basic goals of the academic study of religion, namely developing “informed understandings of belief systems and worldviews” other than students’ own, is not possible if that understanding is only engaged as the process of a disembodied subject. In response to this problem, this panel gathers a group of scholar-teachers who cultivate bodily experience in the classroom. Panelists will discuss their pedagogical practices, including the underlying assumptions and concerns that guide them, and will debate the benefits, challenges, and risks of engaging the body and bodily practices in the the classroom. While their approaches and personal pedagogical commitments differ, these scholar-teachers are committed to engaging bodily experience in the service of shaping more thoughtful and religiously literate students.
In this pre-arranged panel, the editor and contributors of Teaching in the Study of Religion and Beyond: A Practical Guide for Undergraduate Classes (Bloomsbury 2024) come together to discuss practical issues related to the undergraduate classroom. This panel is constructed with new teachers in mind and offers insights from professors who have taught for many years in various institutional contexts, although any teacher will benefit from the shared insights around the many practical issues that emerge across the teaching career. Each contributor will share brief summaries of their contribution to the volume (topics may include Accommodations, Teaching Assistants, Digital Humanities, Experiential Learning, DEI, Extra Credit, etc.). Following their presentations, the remainder of the session will be dedicated to a Q&A / rapid fire advice / open conversation about issues involved in teaching undergraduates.
This pre-arranged roundtable will focus on best practices, innovative ideas, and resources available to AAR/SBL members interested in taking students on short-or long-term faculty-led study abroad programs. Participants will spend five minutes speaking to a specific component of their teaching abroad experiences (planning an itinerary, tying learning objectives to site visits, successful assignments, challenges of framing a pilgrimage vs. secular travel, pros and cons of working with a provider company, fundraising, etc.) before breaking into small groups for discussion and consultation.
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.
In this non-traditional roundtable, panelists will share how they use graphic novels, zines, comics, and even Legos in their classrooms. Our presentations engage a variety of religious traditions, topics, and methodologies, including religion and incarceration, American Muslim experiences, trans religious lives, Black theology, and Hindu sacred texts. Throughout the session, attendees will rotate in small groups to discuss various materials and pedagogical approaches. Together, we will explore how using non-traditional material as “text” highlights diverse voices from populations often excluded from the religious studies classroom and facilitates engagement with the thematic, artistic, emotional, ethical, practical, and lived dimensions of each text or creation. By inviting students into this dynamic analysis, we also encourage them to participate reflectively in the process of meaning-making themselves. Our conversation-station format will lend itself to a deeper dialogue on how non-traditional materials might work in each attendee’s specific courses, fields, lived identities, and institutional contexts.
While many scholars of religion and theology are passionate about mitigating the catastrophic pace of human-induced climate change, few are equipped scientifically and pedagogically to intentionally integrate climate science into the curricula of their respective disciplines. However, such integration is crucial for adequately preparing and mobilizing students to resist climate violence. This roundtable will convene a diverse group of theological school faculty, spanning various disciplines, all of whom have benefited from the inaugural grant provided by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, equipping professors of religion and theology to engage climate science. The roundtable will discuss a range of curricular approaches designed and tested by the participating faculty which incorporate climate science in diverse contexts within theological education. Additionally, the discussion will explore effective approaches and available resources for fostering intentional collaborations between climate scientists and educators of religion and theology, aligning academic efforts with climate action.
This session will examine the relationship between the US and Israel/Palestine from a variety of historical and contemporary perspectives. The papers will focus on Muslim and Jewish approaches to this connection.
Christian Zionism has become a vital topic for academic engagement in both Religious Studies and Biblical Studies. This transdisciplinary discussion among both AAR and SBL members will start with short presentations on their respective areas of critical engagement and then seek to determine the state of their fields' conversations on the topic. Over the past decade, discourse surrounding Christian Zionism has changed drastically, especially within the academy, even as the movement itself has changed and adapted to new conditions. Join us for an exciting, critical assessment not only of the movement but of the ways it is understood and discussed within teaching, learning, and research environments.
This session will highlight the experiences of several scholars who have been subject to "the Palestine taboo." In their presentations they will recount what happened at their respective schools when they presented the Palestinian perspective in their teaching about the Middle East or their role as public intellectuals. Each presenter will describe and analyze their experience, examine their students' reactions and discuss the consequences they faced at their institutions. The panel will also focus on possibilities for change.
This panel interrogates the way that figures and figurative language are strategically deployed in the history of Christianity to secure a claim, or claims, to religious and political hegemony; that is, to describe its own central doctrines (the figure of the Crucified), or to argue its case against Jews, heretics, and pagans (figural or typological hermeneutics), etc. We are also interested in the way that figurality plays a pivotal role in movements in the Christian tradition that seek to avail themselves of biblical narratives and figures to ground a particular political or ethical project, and in the extent to which figurality is an essential feature of human life, language, and thought. Figures and figurative language are, so to speak, up for grabs. What this panel proposes is an analysis of how the Christian tradition wields its figures—be they swords or plowshares.
Although violence is a commonly used concept in the scholarly and public spheres, its definition shifts profoundly with the value-laden politically-saturated boundaries of its users and critics. Violence is never a neutral concept, and it is most often used to name and condemn violations across the spectrum from the physical and corporeal, to the symbolic and linguistic. Beyond its conceptual range, violence also serves as a convenient polemical term that is radically open to both careful uses and disquieting abuses. In his 2023 book _Ontologies of Violence_, Maxwell Kennel explores these problems through detailed and comparative interpretations of the works of Jacques Derrida, Mennonite pacifists, and Grace Jantzen – all in order to reframe violence as a diagnostic concept that reflects the values of its users, but cannot be abandoned to relativity. This panel discusses, critiques, and extends this paradigm with contributions from scholars of anthropology, race, critical theory, and decoloniality.
Author-meets-critics session on Eziaku Nwokocha's Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023).
This Author-Meets-Critics session is a roundtable on Carlos Ulises Decena's Circuits of the Sacred: A Black Latinx Faggotology (Duke, 2023).
What does it mean to think the human otherwise, beyond practices of captivity and carcereality and the dominance of Man? Looking at women and flesh in Blackpentecostalism, at theories of the hu/Man that contribute to the maintenance of carceral logics, and at Fanon and King's legacies of Black radicalism, these three papers push religious and theological reflection to consider how enclosure is maintained, and what it will take to undo it.
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?
How does movement across borders affect the self-understanding of a Korean immigrant church in the United States? How does the trauma experienced by Vietnamese refugees lead to the need for an embodied epistemology? And how might the trauma of Christ's passion be represented in differently situated gospel narratives written in contexts of political contestation - conquest and exile from an emperor's court? Exploring the complicated textures of trauma, its consequences, and its movement into new political conditions, these three papers offer case studies in trauma and representation across borders.
The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Unit, in conjunction with the Womanist Approaches to the Study of Religion Unit, is excited to host this roundtable on AnnMarie Mingo's 2024 University of Illinois Press publication, Have you Got Good Religion? Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. From the Publisher: "What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created." In this session, our panelists will engage and think with Mingo in relation to the arguments of the text. AnnMarie Mingo will offer a response.
For those who seek to grapple with violence, conflicts, wars, and conundrums across the globe, a timely religious and ethical consideration of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's nonviolent philosophy is timely. King's critical response to the "three evils of society"–racism, militarism, and materialism (poverty)–represents a point of departure for considering the movement that emerged from his philosophical thinking. These three evils are sites of ethical inquiry and engagement where one can consider how social change, civil rights, and the human condition carry religious intonations in King's nonviolent philosophy. How does King's nonviolent philosophy empower displaced or dehumanized persons? How does his philosophy utilize religious elements (e.g., moral and ethical inquiry, sense of community, and Divine-centeredness) to pursue liberation?
