Online Program Book

This panel seeks to unravel the intricate web connecting Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the study and understanding of religion, shedding light on how AI impacts and is influenced by religious concepts, practices, and ethics. It brings together three distinct but interrelated explorations into this emerging field. The first segment addresses AI's role in compassionate care for dementia patients, reflecting on how the integration of technology in healthcare settings poses questions about compassion, identity, and the ethical dimensions informed by religious and cultural values. The second discussion explores AI and Ann Taves's idea of 'special things'.  Is AI itself a special thing? And if so, how does it relate to other applications of specialness in things from art to conversation? The final presentation advocates for the application of AI in analyzing religious rituals, suggesting that AI can significantly enhance our understanding of religious expressions and practices through sophisticated, data-driven analyses. 

This panel examines noncanonical and paracanonical genres to highlight the ways karmic thinking is embedded in three different social contexts. First, against the backdrop of the Yuan Mongol court’s demotion of Confucian literati and elevation of Buddhist monks, Confucian dramatists promoted Confucian family moral responsibility through the use ofBuddhist karma in both individual and collective terms as a transformative force for the entire family. Secondly, Ming literati argumentation on whether a monk could finish a blood-copy of the Huayan Sutra through three successive reincarnations reveals how late Ming literati conceived of karma and reincarnation. And finally, the third historical case examines sponsorship of the printing and distribution of the Yongle Northern Canon as a means to generate merit for one’s own future rebirths, consolidate power, and support Buddhist monastic institutions. Our discussant will juxtapose these noncanonical understandings with those of Buddhist canonical theories of karma, particularly Yogacara.

This panel demonstrates how research on women religious challenges our predominant narratives of Catholic clergy sexual abuse. The first paper, on “The Sexual Economies of Clericalism,” centers questions of agency, subjectivity, and submission for survivors of abuse by Catholic nuns and theorizes the gendered construction of sexual knowledge. The second paper, “Abuse in the Latin American Church,” reframes these questions by arguing that women religious are a distinctively vulnerable population for abuses perpetrated by male clergy – a problem that is particularly pronounced in countries like Bolivia, where the Church’s high social status has continued to silence victimized nuns.  The third paper, “Everyday Spiritual Abuse,” draws attention to broader patterns of gender-based violence in Australian Catholicism, theorizing how everyday forms of gendered harm, including misogyny and breadcrumbing, create the foundation for systemic Catholic sexual violence.

In this panel we explore the ways that different Jewish sources, from different times and places in Jewish history, demonstrate what it means to be in community with the dead. Our papers discuss stories from the Talmud Bavli, burial rituals in medieval Ashkenaz, and a painting cycle from 18th c. Prague to show that across these diverse times and places Jews were concerned with how to be in relationship with the dead, as well as their Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors. In the sources we present it becomes clear that the dead are not simply absent, but rather continue to have an emotional, ethical, religious, or even conscious presence. In these sources the dead are owed some kind of relationship with the living, whether it is with those who care for the body, visit the cemetery, or the larger Jewish and non-Jewish society who observe these various rites and rituals.

This panel challenges commonly held notions of esotericism as a necessarily elite, exclusive, or even private form of the religious practice. The authors examine a diverse range of examples of esoteric religious practice as an artistic, activist, and thoroughly public form of religious expression. From pacificist American poetry, to the integration of Swedish Spiritualism and Christianity, to popular comic book as a form of esoteric art, these papers show how modern esotericism has been a socially engaged and vividly public form of religious belief and practice.