Online Program Book

This panel centers questions of theory and historicity, two vital but often underexamined areas in scholarship on clergy sexual abuse. The first paper, “’You Better Tell The Truth,’" examines the intersections of racial and sexual violence through a (re)reading of archival materials from Black Catholic Chicago, raising critical questions about the tension between the ethical imperatives of anti-racism, truth-telling, and historical accountability. The second paper, “Shedding Light On Silence and (in)Action,” brings oral histories of contemporary Belgian survivors into conversation with centuries-deep cultural concepts of ‘bystandership,’ thus working towards a theory that can explain why historical research on clergy abuses in Belgium remains severely limited. The third paper, “Breaking the Silence,” explores a critical lack of language around childhood sexuality, as evidenced by the narratives of 15 Catholic survivors interviewed through Fordham University’s recent Taking Responsibility grant, then suggests a more robust and inclusive vocabulary informed by trauma studies.

This panel critically interrogates the “material turn” in religious studies by examining its major interventions in intellectual and cultural context. Over the last three decades, the “material turn” has effected significant transformations in how scholars theorize and discuss religious phenomena, countering the field’s historic emphasis on meaning with a focus on objects, practices, spaces, and embodiment. How has this revision been articulated and achieved? Why have religionists come to think about materiality in the terms that they do? And what alternatives may have been elided in the process? The panel’s contributors pursue these questions from three distinct, though related perspectives. We engage the material turn in sequence as a feminist project, a decolonial intervention, and a reaction to the “linguistic turn” before reflecting on the overarching context of  neoliberalism. By doing so, we seek to provoke new understandings of the field’s recent history and alternative conceptions of materiality.

The margins of religion and other conceptual categories are where meanings and definitions are contested, where belonging is debated and where the boundaries are drawn between in-groups and out-groups, where otherization occurs, and where narratives are (re)constructed. Contributing to the study of Korean Religions and of discourse and constructivism, the papers in this panel address the marginalization of Muslim immigrants in modern South Korea (Mert Sabri Karaman), the marginalization of Korean shamanic traditions of the inter-Korean border area (Seonghee Oh), the marginalization of contemporary self-cultivation movements in the study of Korean religion (Victoria Ten), and the marginalization of South Korea’s LGBTQ community by evangelical Protestants (Timothy Lee). The panel thus speaks also to the fields and disciplines of LGBTQ and sexuality studies, legal studies, race and migration studies, heritage studies, inter-Korean politics, and reflection on the epistemologies of our own scholarly approaches to the fields of religion and culture.

Did poetical language and Buddhism co-create each other around the turn of the Common Era in South Asia? If so, how? And what are the implications for the beginnings of Indic literature and for the development of Buddhist, Vedic, Jain, and other literary and religious traditions of Asia? Our seminar hosts four research presentations on sources from early to early medieval South Asia, bringing them into conversation with each other through formal responses and general discussion. In this second session, Andrew Ollett and Aleksandra Restifo respectively examine the cultivation of kāvya by Buddhist poets in the first three centuries of the common era, and how Jains envisioned aesthetic experience in the context of renunciation through early dramatic literature. Laurie Patton's and Thomas Mazanec's responses will broadly contextualize their presentations and raise questions in light of major scholarly paradigms concerning the history and development of Indic and Chinese literature.

This panel explores the politics of materiality and material culture in the context of Middle Eastern Christianity, including the dynamics of violence and destructive acts on material culture in the context of manuscripts, the manuscript trade, cultural heritage management, and archaeology. The papers delve into historical, sociopolitical, and theological perspectives, offering critical insights into how these elements intersect with the preservation and destruction of cultural heritage.

The seminar engages Black, queer, Indigenous, and feminist approaches to the study of religions, inquiring whether the contemporary university facilitates or stymies the pursuit of these critical approaches. Each of these papers examines collaborative pedagogies involving multiple stakeholders, from incarcerated citizens, to Indigenous groups and other community-based organizations focused on “bottom-up” knowledge production.