The panel explores how to make sense of gender and sexuality that does not explain gender away but envisions gender as a crucial category in Buddhist doctrines and narratives. Coming from religious studies, philosophy and literature, scholars in this panel re-read the canon from diverse perspectives for a new imagination of gender and sexuality that can contribute to discussions on social justice for combating dominance and promoting inclusion. As such, these panelists initiate a critical-constructive reflection: critically, they provide a methodological intervention on approaches that de-gender doctrinal philosophy, dismiss differences in sentient beings’ lived experiences, and disassociate philosophy from other disciplines in Buddhist studies (e.g., literature, anthropology, and social history); and constructively, they propose to cross disciplinary boundaries in cherishing narratives as resources for re-gendering the Buddhist discourses of consciousness, body, karma, and cosmos. Together, these scholars strive to expand the shared horizons of philosophy, literature, feminism, and queer studies.
Intentionally breaking from the norms of intellectual argument, where one presents a thesis and defends it against critique from others, this roundtable provides an occasion for scholars to reflect and critique their work from multiple perspectives, some complimentary, some adversarial, some exploratory. Led by two moderators who begin by showcasing conflicting reflections on their own scholarship, each panelist will pick a category (gender, identity, state, violence, mind, pluralism, and disciplinary boundaries) and critically reflect on (at least) two modes of engaging with these categories in Buddhist Studies, by making rival arguments that are equally valid. This conversation aims to create a space of openness and vulnerability where difficult dialogues between emic Buddhist and religious studies categories can take place, in hopes that situating a multiplicity of epistemological categories in the mirrors of one another will provide a vantage from which both scholarly and Buddhist notions of truth can be revalued.
This roundtable session brings together instructors from a variety of institutions to explore different examples of Buddhist pedagogy in practice. The presentations discuss Buddhist Studies courses that examine instances of Buddhist violence and nonviolence, that explore issues of identity and positionality influencing study abroad instruction, and the results of engaging contemplative practices within a graduate curriculum. The demographic makeup of their students and their institutional contexts differ: they include a private university operated by a Buddhist organization in Thailand, a Catholic research university, a private liberal arts college, and a Buddhist graduate school.
This roundtable introduces the Rubin Museum’s recently launched Project Himalayan Art, a multi-disciplinary resource for teaching about Buddhism through art and material culture. Project Himalayan Art (PHA) is designed to help scholars and teachers make connections across diverse regional expressions of Buddhist culture, and to expand representation of Himalayan and Inner Asian religious cultures in the classroom. This roundtable will be structured as a dialogue, in which attendees can explore new multimedia resources for teaching Asian religions through object-centered approach, while also giving feedback on PHA materials. Session presenters are particularly interested in receiving input on PHA from the practical pedagogical standpoint, and welcome attending participants’ thoughts on using art and material culture in their teaching, including from faculty who have already experimented with using Project Himalayan Art resources (https://projecthimalayanart.rubinmuseum.org/ ).
Both classical and contemporary scholars have raised critical questions regarding the consequences of Nāgārjuna’s analysis of emptiness for ethics and politics. If all distinctions, phenomena, values, ideas—even suffering, karmic fruit, vulnerable sentient bodies, and ethics—are empty of inherent existence, what does this mean for how we act in the world, both as individuals and as members of social and political groups? Does the Madhyamaka analysis of emptiness undermine ethics and political values? And if not, what is the basis and motivation right action in a world in which suffering is ultimately empty of inherent existence?
Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland: A Teaching for a King (Rājaparikathāratnāvalī), is widely regarded as one of the most important Indian Buddhist texts to address this question of the relationship between Madhyamaka ideas of emptiness and ethics and politics. Despite its stature in Buddhist traditions and contemporary scholarship, it has not received as much attention as other texts attributed to Nāgārjuna. This is perhaps because it is a dense, enigmatic, and provocative text, primarily devoted to addressing leadership and the Buddhist path, integrating philosophy, ethics, politics, and the aspiration to become a bodhisattva.
Buddhist epistemology directs to knowledge of reality as it is and serves as a path toward liberation from suffering. Meanwhile, how one perceives reality fundamentally influences moral conduct and decision-making. So, what is the structure of such intellectual virtue? Reflecting on this question of valid cognition upon telic knowledge or truth, this panel focuses on Buddhist epistemology and virtue epistemology. Its objectives are to explore these two areas through different Buddhist philosophical perspectives, foster dialogue across various Buddhist contexts, and engage Buddhist epistemology with its contemporary relevance.
This panel on “Karma and Sociopolitical Theory” brings together diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to explore the resonances or tensions between Buddhist concepts and human societies. The four papers are united by an interest in fostering conversation across areas and traditions about the implications of doctrinal theory on everyday life, and vice versa, the potential for social and political practices to illuminate Buddhist thought. They address evidence from royal ceremonial in contemporary Ladakh, philosophical theories of action, early modern Tibetan religio-political discourse, and contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist society. Together, these papers call attention to key questions that overlap philosophical, historical, and anthropological approaches to Buddhism, including the individual and social dimensions of karma, the relationship of human society to the larger cosmos, the intersection of cosmological or philosophical discourses with everyday articulations of karma, and the general relevance of this Buddhist concept as both object and source of theory.
This panel brings together presentations by five early-career scholars of Buddhist philosophy. Some presentations offer new perspectives on well-established problems, exploring Nāgārjuna’s tetralemma, Vasubandhu’s idealism, and omniscience in Abhidharma. Other presentations bring Buddhist philosophy into contemporary contexts, exploring Buddhist philosophy through the lens of quantum physics, or the philosophical pedagogy of the Tibetan monastic Geshe curriculum in the United States.
This panel will be the inaugural panel at the American Academy of Religion (and perhaps anywhere) introducing a new program for Buddhist philosophy: a program of Buddhist critical phenomenology. The overarching goal of such a program is to be intellectually responsive to burgeoning and reinvigorated movements— across the globe, across humanistic and social scientific disciplines, as well as within Buddhist practice communities—that are attentive to the kinds of topics thematized by critical phenomenology, namely the ways that conditioned, historically contingent identity structures and subjectivities shape perception, cognition, and experience for individual people and collectives of people in shared social spaces and lifeworlds.
The Mahāyāna path is aimed at a buddha’s complete awakening. But what is the awakened mind of a buddha like? Is a buddha conscious—and, if so, of what is a buddha conscious? A buddha appears to act, but does any thought precede that action? Some Buddhist philosophers argue that a buddha’s awakening consists in a complete cessation of thought, a state of unconscious automaticity that Mark Siderits has characterized as “robo-Buddha.” At the other end of the spectrum, some say that a buddha’s awakening consists in total omniscience, the simultaneous awareness of every knowable object in the universe, past, present, and future, together with the capacity to respond appropriately to every situation. There are many other positions in between. This panel will explore some of the different positions on this spectrum in an effort to better understand how a buddha’s mind works.
Translation Workshop: Akalaṅka's Aṣṭaśatī and Its Non-Jain Interlocutors
A set of esteemed critics engage the award-winning Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians (Notre Dame 2022), by Jeroen Dewulf (Berkeley: Dept. of German, the Folklore Program, and the Center for Portuguese Studies). This book's bold and consequential argument explores the pre-tridentine Luso-African Catholic origins of a variety of Black Christian forms in the United States and beyond. Dewulf will be on hand to respond and then conversation will open to the audience.
This panel foreground three distinct critical perspectives that deploy queer theory to study Catholic sacramentality. Drawing also from gender studies, theology, and ethnography theses paper work 1) to analyze the ways in which queer and sacramental performativity actualize the eschatological ends of the human body and the Catholic Church; 2) to interrogate how the Catholic priest is singled out as occupying a particularly ambiguous position whose “categorical shiftiness” has functioned in Catholic studies to normativize oddity through the admixture of religious and scholarly authority, and 3) to approach the queering of sacramentality as an issue of sacramental justice that enacts a counterpublic that demands unrestricted access to the Eucharist that is built upon nondiscriminatory ordination, radical hospitality, and promiscuous ecumenism.
Abstract under construction
In Falling in Love with Nature: The Values of Latinx Catholic Environmentalism, Amanda Baugh tells the story of American environmentalism through a focus on Spanish-speaking Catholics, and in doing so uncovers a range of environmental actors who have been hidden in plain sight. She offers the concept of la tierra environmentalism to describe an embodied ethic of living lightly on the earth that is rooted in a sense of love and respect for God, fellow humans, and all of God’s creation. Its primary locus is in the home, but its concerns radiate outward and include awareness of human struggles and global ecological issues. This session brings together scholars from Catholic studies, the study of Latinx religions, and other fields, to discuss Baugh’s work in the context of broader themes in the study of Catholicism, environmental ethics, Latinx religions, and religion in public life. The session will include a response from the author, and time for audience engagement.
Critical Mission Studies offers a radical revision of the history of the California missions and their legacies in the present from a California Indigenous perspective. Our use of the word “critical” makes transparent that colonialism, genocide, and historical trauma are central to the California missions, both in the past and in the present. The field of critical mission studies intervenes in conventional accounts of California Indian-Spanish relations during the mission period by foregrounding the perspectives and epistemologies of Native peoples. The objective is not simply to counterbalance conventional accounts with an Indigenous epistemological alternative, but also to correct the historical record and to dismantle the triumphalist narrative—both of which “continue to undermine the real and present consequences of the colonization and genocide” of Native peoples and cultures. Our panelists are Kumeyaay, Iipay, and Amah Mutsun California Indian scholars, tribal leaders, and allied scholars/collaborators.
Taking place less than a month after the Synod's expected closing, our session will represent an early-stage reflection on the process as well as any final reports and documents available. It will draw on the expertise of historians, theologians, and ethicists, all of whom will offer context and perspective on the process and its textual results (such as they are at this early stage). Some of our panelists were directly involved in the process itself, including crafting documents and voting. Others sit one step removed from the process, but have expertise in the histories and theologies it summoned. They will discuss the Synod's relationship to church history, its controversies and tensions, as well as its possible significance for the future of the church.
This panel considers how representations of the past in Jewish girls' novels shape religious orientations and practices in the present. We consider the lineage and inheritance of girls’ stories, both within families and broader communities, in order to parse often unstated but deeply replicated assumptions about girls’ and women’s responsibilities as the memory bearers, sustainers, and mediators of traditional knowledge. The panel is designed to address these questions through two papers, one addressing the trope of girls reading grandmothers’ letters in popular fiction and one addressing gendered differences in Haredi historical fiction novels. The papers will be followed by a response from Dr. Jodi Eichler-Levine to bring together ideas about American Jewish children’s literature, community, and memory. By looking to girls’ literature, we see specific examples in which these traditional roles are not only conveyed, but also possibly subverted by treating girls as textual authorities and purveyors of communal knowledge, or by centering them as mediators between two worlds, in a nexus of Jewish relationships across time.
This book panel engages the recent text After the Worst Day Ever: What Sick Kids Know About Sustaining Hope in Chronic Illness , offering opportunities to re-imagine hope, eschatology, chronic illness, and healthcare from the perspectives of children. The book's guiding question asks, "What do sick children know about hope that the rest of us have forgotten?" Illustrating how children articulate hope amid chronic illness, a distinct type of trauma and adversity, the book allows their voices to contribute to the constructive work of theologies of childhood. It offers readers an opportunity to engage and reimagine doctrine and practice from children's perspectives, in light of their lived realities. The children in the text shift hope from a future-oriented expectation of assurance from God to a lived experience of abundance in the moment--as much a social resource as a feeling, thought, or virtue. Five scholars respond to the text, which identifies five practices that children with end-stage renal disease use to nurture hope: realizing community, claiming power, attending to Spirit, choosing trust, and maintaining identity. Panelists discuss significant themes and questions raised by the book.
In this session, the Chinese Christianities Unit features papers that explore exchanges and hybridities in Chinese Christianities. The papers in this session each explore the way that various Chinese Christian organizations, institutions, urban sites, political leaders, and writers have articulated their sense of 'Chinese Christianities' through the processes of dialogue and migration. In this way, they each also describe Chinese Christianities as a hybrid term that goes beyond a sense of blending 'Chinesenesss' with 'Christianities' toward other possible exchanges that have gone into the making of the term. Our paper topics include the transnationalism of the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelization, hybridity in a Jakarta Chinatown, the Christian roots of Kao Chun-ming's practices of democratization in Taiwan, and the Buddhist Master Taixu's engagements with Christianity.
