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Theme: Interpreting and Translating the Qur’an
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
This panel includes papers from a range of perspectives on translating and interpreting the Qur'an.
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Theme: Reformed Confessions and the Nature of Church
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Reformed Christianity have written, debated, confessed, and even divided over confessions and creeds for hundreds of years. In this session, the Reformed Theology and History Unit considers the complex and contested nature of confessions in the ecclesiology, theology, and history of Reformed Christianity. The first paper examines Karl Barth's lectures on the Reformed confessions during his formational tenure at Göttingen, considering how his own views on confessions was shaped by his study of both Lutheran and Reformed history within his German speaking academic context. The second paper turns to the American context and offers a ciritcal analysis of the Presbyterian concept of the church's spiritual nature. The final paper offers a constructive reading of Reformed Confessions within a global and plural context through a theology of confessional hospitality.
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Theme: Spirituality and Morality: Struggle, Agency, and Imagination from Disability Contexts
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Papers in this session will explore spirituality and morality as it emerges from specific disability locations and contexts: 1) Humanistic Deaf spirituality emerges in fiction and role playing games, and Deaf players create meaning in the midst of the struggle for self-determination and autonomy in the face of continued encroachment on Deaf communities, languages, identities, and bodies. 2) Black disabled men bring wisdom to the struggle towards thriving, esp. in the spirituality arising in the lives of Black disabled men, spirituality that is a profound source of strength and inspiration marked by softness and an ethics of care. 3) Nineteenth-century epileptic colonies highlight how epileptics were positioned on the borderline between madness and sanity, and how religious ideals and practices linked with medical authority, valorizing eugenic biopolitics and positioning religion as a moral good and disciplinary strategy.
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Theme: Dwelling with Pedagogy: Religion, Ecology, and the Craft of Teaching
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
This roundtable on the pedagogy of Religion and Ecology reflects on how and why—not just what—we teach in this area. Teaching in Religion and Ecology (and related courses) requires meaningful reflection and continual revision as both the natural world and our students’ relationships with it continue to change. Panelists will share methodological opportunities and challenges in this area as well as resources for teaching (community based, alternative media, online) that they have had success with or are developing. They will each conclude with remarks on their curiosities or hopes for ongoing pedagogical development within Religion and Ecology. A respondent with pedagogical experience will offer a response as well as discussion questions, opening the conversation with session attendees and facilitating the further exchange of perspectives and information between all participants.
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Theme: Systems, Circulation, and Management of Devotion and Dissent
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Six panelists consider the systems, circulations, and managerial practices of devotion and dissent in a hybrid panel of short paper presentations and roundtable-inspired conversation. Case studies vary across geography, tradition, race, gender, and other markers of human distinction and social difference-making. Panelists consider the impacts of highway construction on black spiritual landscapes and remembrance practices, mail-order fundraising networks and shadow economies among the Pallotine Fathers, the entrepreneural practices at a Shinto shrine and among evangelical homemakers, and the un/waged labor embedded in Hindu standardized testing systems and as central to the genre of "speaking bitterness" among Catholic nuns in China. A formal response and Q&A to follow short presentations with a business meeting held immediately after.
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Theme: God & Guns: Exploring the Intersection of Faith and Firearms in the United States
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
White American evangelicals own firearms at the highest rate in the country, while Jewish Americans own them at the lowest rate. What accounts for such a disparity? This interdisciplinary paper panel proposal utilizes historical, sociological, and digital methodologies to answer this and related questions, such as: What doctrines or communities contributed to the formation of the American Christian gun culture? As mass shootings proliferate, do Jews and Christians respond in different ways? The scholars of this panel provide a first step in exploring this scholarly lacuna, beginning with the mid-nineteenth century with an examination of the mythmaking of Samuel Colt, before examining how fundamentalists and evangelicals went from supporting limited regulation of firearms to bundling them into their religious identities. Finally, this panel examines how different congregations and synagogues react to mass shooting tragedies, contextualizing the responses according to congregants' religious identities.
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Theme: Author Meets Critics: Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Jonathan Laurence's 2021 book, *Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Modern State*, traces the surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Sunni Islamic and Roman Catholic empires in the face of the modern state and considers how centralized religions make peace with the loss of prestige. Author Jonathan Laurence and a prestigious cast of scholar-critics will reflect on this rich and multi-dimensional book, offering responses to, critiques of, and engagements with *Coping with Defeat*.
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Theme: Decolonial Strategies: Indigenous Healing Justice Reform
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
This roundtable addresses the urgent matter of decolonizing health care practices and advancing Indigenous methods of healing justice reform. This interdisciplinary discussion brings together the fields of Indigenous Studies, Africana Studies, and Women's Studies by employing historical, sociology, and theological methods of study. Presenters examine Rastafari women's ritual work and healing justice initiatives, Indigenous spiritual practices to address the historic trauma of white supremacy, Indigenous youth's religious engagement as a measure of health outcomes, Mujerista Theology to advocate for Latina women facing Covid-19, Pagan theology of relational-hedonism to better hospital health care, and a Theology of Powers in safety-net hospitals. Ultimately, this roundtable illuminates Indigenous methods as an ongoing decolonial practice to fight for marginalized religious communities, which propose their own solutions for global health inequities.
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Theme: After “After Science and Religion”: Do Science and Religion Have a Future Together?
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Each of the papers in this session responds to the Templeton-funded “After Science and Religion” project, which sought “to rethink the foundations of Science–Religion Discourse” in the wake of Peter Harrison’s landmark historical study, The Territories of Science and Religion (2015). Harrison urges us not to think of science and religion as natural kinds, but rather as historical “territories” with shifting, overlapping boundaries. His anti-essentialist thesis puts the very existence of a field of science and religion in question—hence, “After Science and Religion.” This session brings a discussion of the “afterlife” of Science and Religion to the AAR. Attending to the overlap between the territories of science and religion suggests some relationship, wherein science is always situated within some broader worldview. The question is whether this worldview is compatible with religious worldviews—whether Science and Religion have a future together—or whether alternative categories are necessary.
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Theme: Sacred Objects and Embodied Faiths: Identity, Power, and Meaning across Religious and Global Contexts
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
This panel explores how religion is embodied and materialized across diverse contexts and faith traditions. The first paper presents a novel denotative using participant-produced photographs approach to understand lived religion in three Latin American cities. The second paper examines how members of two Sikh communities in the US and England negotiate their religious and racial identities. The third paper analyzes the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi as a case study for how religion is materialized and theorized in the Arab world. The fourth paper takes a historical sociological approach to investigate how women in the African Methodist Episcopal Church have acquired and exercised power to resist patriarchal social structures and white supremacy. Overall, the panel offers a nuanced understanding of the materialization and embodiment of religion across diverse contexts and highlights the need for a more comprehensive understanding of religious identity, power, and meaning.
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Theme: Committee Meeting
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
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Theme: The Mysticism of Ordinary Life and Critiques of Normativity
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
In this roundtable discussion of Andrew Prevot’s *The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism* (Oxford, 2023), panelists will discuss mystical means of critiquing normativity, an intersectional turn in feminist studies of Christian mysticism drawing on Latina and Black/womanist traditions, and the relationship between theological and philosophical (or secular) interpretations of mysticism.
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Theme: Walking Through the Valley: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Marking the fifth anniversary of noted social ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon’s untimely death, the panelists, who are also the co-editors of this volume, explore how Cannon’s conception of womanism can be used in moral thought through four themes that were important in Cannon’s work: sacred texts, structural poverty and communal solidarity, leadership, and embodied ethics. Cannon argued that dominant (normative) ethics was designed, however unintentionally, to mark those of darker hues as morally deficient if not bankrupt because of its understanding of what constitutes virtue, value, identity, and theological standpoint. Cannon’s writings and lectures and classes ushered in other persistent voices that disputed this methodological and moral valley.
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Theme: Boundaryless Christianity
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
This panel considers the concept of boundarylessness in World Christianity, both as a phenomenon and as an academic field. The first paper highlights the impact of online church opportunities among Northeast Indian Christians living in New Delhi in the COVID-19 era. The second paper, calling attention to the experiences of Adivasi Christians in India, questions the likelihood of a truly boundaryless Christianity, emphasizing the ways in which boundaries reflect attachments to specific spaces, individuals, and objects, even in the age of digital media. The third paper attests to a boundaryless Christianity expressed through Nigerian female gospel artists’ expansion of boundaries within global ecumenism. The fourth paper makes the case that boundarylessness should be considered not merely a characteristic of World Christianity, but in fact as a guiding methodology for the field, opening up new avenues analysis regarding the national, continental, linguistic, and religious boundaries that so often go unquestioned.
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Theme: Climate Fiction, Literature, Religion, and the Anthropocene
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM
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Theme: Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Committee Working Group Luncheon with Open Discussion
Saturday, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Anyone interested in academic labor is welcome to join us. Hosted by the Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Working Group, this annual gathering and business meeting brings together those concerned about changes in academic labor for discussion and a place to brainstorm ways to advocate and support contingent faculty and sustainable employment for all faculty. We will also have discussion tables on various topics, including the gig economy, contingent faculty scholarship, publishing, burnout, best practices, and more.
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Theme: Plenary Address: I
Saturday, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
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Theme: Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Post-Lunch Discussion
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Immediately following the Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Lunch, linger for conversation, connection, and support.
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Theme: Mulatto Theologizing: Exploring Hybridity at the Intersection of Race, Ethnicity and Religion
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
These papers explore racial and theological hybridity and contested notions of ethnic purity and impurity as it relates to Christian theology, human bodies, and Afro-Judaism. Ten years ago, Mulatto theologizing was hailed as the “New” Black theology that constituted a significant theological shift in its development. This panel will explore the impact of this “shift” ten years later.
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Theme: Bonhoeffer and "La Labor de Nuestras Manos"
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
The papers in this session take up the 2023 presidential theme: “La Labor de Nuestras Manos.” Two of the papers do so through critical engagement with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s critiques of Bonhoeffer’s “theology from the underside” and the limitations of his “modern settler theology.” The other two turn from this focus on economic-oriented critiques to politics, considering the potential of Bonhoeffer’s theology as a resource for truth-telling and humanitarian interventions.
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