Online Program Book

This is the preliminary program for the 2024 in-person Annual Meeting, hosted with the Society for Biblical Literature in San Diego, CA - November 23-26. Pre-conference workshops and many committee meetings will be held November 22. If you have questions about the program, contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org. All times are listed in local/Pacific Time.


	A25-218 Qur'an Unit Theme: Teaching the Qur'an: A Pedagogy Roundtable Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Sapphire 400A (Fourth Level) Lauren Osborne, Whitman College, Presiding This roundtable features specialists of Qur’anic and Islamic Studies who teach the Qur’an in a variety of institutional contexts. They will address key questions surrounding the Qur’an and pedagogy through a conversational format. Some planned topics of discussion include: curricular considerations for an introductory course on the Qur’an, strategies for making the Qur’an accessible to undergraduate students, favorite assignments, navigating faith commitments in the classroom, and the place of the Qur’an in a Liberal Arts education. Panelists Samuel Ross, Texas Christian University Walid Saleh, University of Toronto Lauren Osborne, Whitman College Jawad Qureshi, Zaytuna College Stephanie Yep, Appalachian State University Business Meeting Lauren Osborne, Whitman College, Presiding Samuel Ross, Texas Christian University, Presiding
	A25-219 Reformed Theology and History Unit Theme: Eschatology 2 Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-30C (Upper Level East) Christina Larsen,, Presiding Eschatological themes have long been discussed in Reformed theology. This session is centered largely in the thought of key figures in the Reformed Orthodoxy of the 17th and 18th centuries, exploring their significance for today. Sister Macrina’s views on death and dying are put in conversation with those of John Owen; Petrus van Mastricht’s 17th-century rejection of the idea of deification earns a revision; and the strengths and weaknesses of Jonathan Edwards’ approach to eschatology are examined, both in his evaluation of non-human creation and in his rejection of purgatory. Ty Kieser, Wheaton College, Illinois Kelly Kapic, Covenant College Not Like Those Who Have No Faith, Hope, or Love: Sister Macrina and John Owen on Christian Dying Abstract This paper places the Reformed theologian John Owen and the fourth Capadocian, Sister Macrina, in conversation to sketch a Reformed account of dying well. Specifically, through resourcing the thought of these two theologians, we present the virtues of faith, hope, and love in the process of dying as a "testimony" to the value of Jesus. The paper begins by examining the theme of "hope" in the thought of Macrina, focusing on its role in her account of the nature of death and in her own death. The second section looks at John Owen's understanding of "faith" through an examining of three sermons that he preaches toward the end of his life on dying well. Finally, we draw on the thinking of Macrina and Owen to briefly construct an account of "love" in the face of death and the validity of grief in the process of dying. Daniel Hill, Baylor University Union with Distinction: The Promise and Perils of Petrus van Mastricht’s Rejection of Deification Abstract The doctrine of deification or theosis has experienced something of a resurgence within theological circles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This paper seeks to make a modest contribution to Protestant and Reformed theological consideration of the doctrine of theosis. In it, I retrieve and critically engage Petrus Van Mastricht’s rejection of this doctrine, articulating the theological and Christological impetuses that are at play in his writing. In it, I articulate that van Mastricht’s work helpfully highlights the felt need within Reformed theology to emphasize the creator/creature distinction and the goodness of human, creaturely predicates. Yet his project also risks insofar as his identification and articulation of human, creaturely predicates is disassociated from consideration of the human flesh of God in Christ. Laura Cerbus, University of Divinity, Australia The Redemption of Secondary Beauty: Jonathan Edwards's Eschatology and Creation's Telos Abstract Recent literature has assessed Jonathan Edwards’s theology of creation, particularly of creation’s beauty, as one that provides the resources for environmental ethics. Understood as a communication of God’s glory, creation in all its beauty becomes a crucial means of human knowledge and sense of divine beauty. However, these accounts neglect Edwards’s eschatology in its exclusion of the non-human creation from redemption, an exclusion that results from Edwards’s definition of secondary beauty. The telos of the creation as a whole becomes subservient to the telos of humanity, and thus, once humanity’s goal of union with God is achieved, the creation serves no other purpose. This paper explores these weaknesses of Edwards’s eschatology and offers a revision of Edwards that seeks to be faithful to his Reformed emphasis on both the effects of sin in the world and the orientation of all creation towards divine glory. Jeremy Wynne, Whitworth University “Only Four Last Things: Jonathan Edwards, the Dynamism of Heaven, and One More Reason Purgatory is Unnecessary” Abstract Reformed critiques of the doctrine of purgatory have typically leaned upon close exegesis of scripture; restrained reception of patristic thought; and the sufficiency of God’s prevenient grace. This direct approach is necessary, but the debate itself has grown stale. In hopes of reinvigorating discussion, this paper takes the indirect route of addressing one ancillary concern, often cited in support of the doctrine of purgatory. A universe without purgatory, it is said, leaves us in a morally intolerable situation. Those who lived lives of sacrifice and those who did not will simultaneously ‘wake up in heaven’ to the equal enjoyment of heaven's rewards. Drawing broadly from the work of Jonathan Edwards, I argue that it is not purgatory which completes earthly human life and upholds God’s justice. Rather earthly life anticipates the unending growth of God’s self-gift and the soul’s capacity to receive it. Business Meeting Christina Larsen,, Presiding Arnold Huijgen, Protestant Theological University, Presiding
	A25-220 Religion and Ecology Unit Theme: The Role of Violence/Non-violence in Religion and Ecology: Slow Violence, Radical Environmental Activism, and Theological Visions for Our Shared Future Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-28D (Upper Level East) Kimberly Carfore, University of San Francisco, Presiding This panel offers insights into human’s violent/non-violent role as members and stewards of the Earth community. We begin our panel by considering the slow violence committed against our Earth. This panel continues by highlighting radical environmental activist movements including Earth First!, Extinction Rebellion, and Just Stop Oil, which tow the line between violence and nonviolent resistance. While organizations can justify their radical environmentalism through adherence to nature spiritualities, some outsiders consider their behavior to be terrorism. Nuances in the violent/non-violent discourse of religion and ecology and Dark Green Religion will be explored, considering questions like: When does violence become a tool for non-violence, and what kinds of strategic violence are necessary to honor the sacredness of Earth? When can peacemaking and constructing cultural imaginaries further climate justice? What can we learn from fundamentalism and Cold War ecotheology as conflicts continue as a result of climate change? Frederick Simmons, University of Cambridge Slow Violence, Religious Peacemaking, and Climate Justice Abstract Although peacemaking has concentrated on resolving armed conflict, it can further climate justice when appropriately amended. For example, Glen Stassen’s religious version of just peacemaking prioritizes efforts to realign economic incentives—now climate justice’s foremost obstacle—by reforming regulatory regimes. Such reform is crucial to redressing climate change because the slow violence of this change can only be remedied through long-term coordination. Nevertheless, Stassen’s reliance on mutual self-interest and economic interdependence for such regulatory reform leads him to emphasize prudence. This emphasis compromises his peacemaking’s ability to mitigate climate change, since as conventionally understood prudence intensifies the intergenerational conflicts of interest that accelerate such change. However, religious traditions have resources to broaden conventional understandings of prudence and render interests unrelated to one’s own worthy of consideration. Religious peacemaking that harnesses these resources may thereby moderate the slow violence of these intergenerational conflicts and so advance climate justice. Bron Taylor, University of Florida The Eruption, Implosion, and Future of Radical Environmentalism: From Earth First! to Extinction Rebellion Abstract Drawing on over three decades of in-depth ethnographic and archival research, in this presentation I will review the main watersheds in the history of radical environmentalism, focusing especially on Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front, but also illuminating continuities between these radical environmental forms (including their nature spiritualities and apocalyptic expectations) and the more recent emergence of Extinction Rebellion. I will analyze the factors that precipitated the eruption and implosion of Earth First! and the ELF, including the critically important role of the 'dark green' nature spiritualities that animate most of its activists, consider the movement’s current forms and future prospects, and whether Extinction Rebellion represents a new, and possibly more effective chapter, in the history of radical environmentalism. Rosemary Hancock, The University of Notre Dame Australia Climate Fundamentalisms? Social fault lines and reactionary forces in a time of climate crisis. Abstract The apocalyptic future of the climate crisis looms large in the cultural imagination: news reports, opinion pieces, dystopian fictions - all project to a not-too-distant future where human civilisation collapses, or the world-as-we-know-it ends. Yet there is another concept, also drawn from the study of religion, relevant to the climate crisis: one that points us not towards the future - but rather the past. This paper will explore the utility of the concept ‘fundamentalism’ in understanding the social effects of climate change. Whilst acknowledging its limitations as a descriptive category, scholarship on ‘fundamentalism’ nonetheless identified a key fault line in 20th century society - reaction against the destabilising trends of modernity. In the 21st century, climate change is fast displacing modernity as the destabilising force. This paper considers what we can learn from fundamentalism about identifying emerging social fault lines and conflicts in the era of climate change. Beatrice Marovich, Hanover College Speculative Fiction for a Nuclear-Ecological Life: Remembering Cold War Era Ecotheology Abstract This paper offers a brief intellectual history of a Cold War era classic of ecotheology: Sallie McFague’s 1987 Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. I argue that it provides an imaginative portal to a moment of recent history that may have some lessons for us, as we live differently into similar forms of possible danger: world obliterating violence, and environmental crisis. I focus on McFague’s suggestion that these dangers threaten to end the idea of the future, and her argument that theology is a form of fiction that creates imaginative pictures. Cold War era ecotheology can be read as a form of speculative fiction offering speculative visions of a thriving future earth life. One lesson scholars of religion and ecology might learn from this Cold War era ecotheology is the importance of imagining (and re-imagining) our relationship to power, and to the future (which does not yet exist but can be imagined). Business Meeting Joseph Wiebe, University of Alberta, Augustana, Presiding Kimberly Carfore, University of San Francisco, Presiding
	A25-221 Religion and Politics Unit Theme: On Helping One’s Neighbor: Severe Poverty and the Religious Ethics of Obligation by Bharat Ranganathan Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Aqua Salon AB (Third Level) Jamie Pitts, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Presiding Severe poverty is arguably the most pervasive yet overlooked form of contemporary violence. The nearly one billion people who live under conditions of severe poverty are subject to widespread exploitation, chronic malnutrition, and lack of access to safe water, sanitation, adequate shelter, and basic preventive healthcare. For religious ethicists, severe poverty raises several pressing moral questions: what sorts of obligations (if any) do affluent people have to severely poor people? On which terms? And to what extent? Drawing from religious ethics and moral and political philosophy, Bharat Ranganathan’s On Helping One’s Neighbor answers these questions, arguing that affluent people have demanding institutional and interpersonal obligations to severely poor people. This Roundtable Session brings together scholars from across the methodological spectrum whose work focuses on different dimensions of human rights and religious ethics to assess Ranganathan’s argument and the contributions religious ethics makes to debates about severe poverty. Panelists Shannon Dunn, Gonzaga University Nichole Flores, University of Virginia Simeon O. Ilesanmi, Wake Forest University Howard Pickett, Washington and Lee University Responding Bharat Ranganathan, Case Western Reserve University
	A25-222 Religion and Popular Culture Unit Theme: From the Cold War to Country Music: Popular Religions and Politicized Publics Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-32A (Upper Level East) Talia Burnside, Florida State University, Presiding From Cold War spies to electoral spectacles, conspiracy theories to country singers, the papers on this panel all examine explosive phenomena unfolding at the intersection of religion, politics and popular culture. Each author diagnoses the polarized present through cases that explore the entanglement of political ritual, state power, and religious anxiety. Shelby King, Kalamazoo College 'The Black Art’ of Brainwashing: A Cold War Maleficium Abstract This paper will explore the religious dynamics of the Cold War geo-political construction of “brainwashing.” Its analysis centers on two cultural texts—one public, one classified—whose juxtaposition suggests an underexplored religious dimension in apparently secular sites of American geo-political strategy during the Cold War. This paper will examine journalist Edward Hunter’s highly influential exposé, Brain-Washing in Red China (1951) alongside a previously classified script of a CIA training film on hypnosis entitled The Black Art (1953). These two cultural texts rely on Orientalist tropes to articulate mind-control as a secret, mysterious technique of enemy influence akin to malevolent magic. Comparing these two texts thus presents an opportunity to redeploy the ancient concept of maleficium, the magic art of “evil-doing,” as an analytical framework. In so doing, I will argue that reconceptualizing brainwashing as a Cold War maleficium reveals unexamined religious dimensions animating the enduring image of mind-control. Elizabeth Gish, Kettering Foundation The Gospel of Tyler Childers: Gay Coal Miners, Sobriety, and Way of the Triune God Abstract This paper is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the theology of the Appalachian singer and songwriter Tyler Childers and to explore how Childers' music and biography both reflects, and contributes to, constructing contemporary religious, regional, and political identities in the United States. Childers' music and popularity are significant to religious studies because attention to his music, videos, biography, and fan base can help us better understand the complex interplay between religious, regional, class, and political identities at a time when democratic backsliding and authoritarian creep is a significant threat. Childers' theology consistently engages complex religious themes at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, addiction, church, and the afterlife, but does so in a way that is compelling both with the rural white southerners and also embraced by a diverse group of listeners that do not fit the typical country music consumer demographics. Ruben Rosario Rodriguez, Saint Louis University "Politics as Spectacle: The Electoral Process as Populist Civil Religion" Abstract Employing the analysis of professional wresting developed by Roland Barthes in his influential essay, “The World of Wrestling” (1972), this paper contends that American voters, like a professional wrestling audience, are not interested in facts, but desire a public spectacle in which good triumphs over evil. Given the vagaries of the Electoral College, the influence of dark money in elections, and the increasing role of the Supreme Court plays in validating or determining election outcomes, many Americans believe the electoral process, like a professional wrestling match, is rigged. An analysis of the symbols and rituals of professional wresting provides a lens through which we can analyze the American electoral process as a rigged public spectacle intended to reinforce cultural and national narratives of American triumphalism embodied in images of masculinity, violence, and power. Responding Finbarr Curtis, Georgia Southern University
	A25-223 Religion and the Social Sciences Unit Theme: Engaging Spirituality: A Conversation about Methods and Stakes Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-28B (Upper Level East) Terry Shoemaker, Arizona State University, Presiding "This roundtable session will generate a conversation in thinking about the spiritual and spirituality. Composed of a panel of diverse scholars, this roundtable provides a needed and honest evaluation of the spiritual and spirituality in contemporary life. Specifically, the roundtable will focus on several methodological questions: What are the social conditions prompting a spiritual emergence, forming a spiritual marketplace, and generational differences as it relates to spiritual and religious categories? Because of the individualized nature of spirituality in the United States, do studies of spirituality require interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches? What are the successes and problems encountered in studying spirituality? What does spirituality tell us about the current state of the United States? What theoretical, methodological, and empirical stakes are raised by the category and/or the concept of spirituality?" Panelists Xochitl Alvizo, California State University, Northridge Cody Musselman, John C. Danforth Center for Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis Morgan Shipley, Michigan State University Rachel Schneider, Rice University Terry Shoemaker, Arizona State University
	A25-224 Religion, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism Unit Theme: Toward the Critique of Historicism Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-29B (Upper Level East) Jason Stephens, Loyola University Chicago, Presiding Is the critique of historicism the continuation of historicism by other means? Beginning with contemporary debates about the critique of historicism, this panel will address three concepts central to the historicist tradition: context, origin, and archive. The conversation will explore these elements through a comparative engagement with the question of history across Sikh studies, Black studies, and settler-colonial studies. In doing so, it will bring together two related but often separated strands in the critique of historicism: the colonial/racial dimension and the theological dimension. Rajbir Judge, California State University, Long Beach A Critique of Contextual Reason: A Parallax View in Punjab Abstract This paper grapples with the problem of contextual reasoning by examining a central Sikh institution, Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, in the late 19th Century and its relation to colonial law. This paper explores the colonial state’s violent attempt to produce a proper context for Sikh sites and institutions. But Harmandir Sahib caused much trouble for the colonial state, as officials noted that it refused effective management and functioned as the threshold of colonial law. Colonial officials therefore continually suspended the law at the site and explicitly produced Harmandir Sahib as an exception. A focus on the exception, I argue, allows Darbar Sahib to emerge within a parallax view, both in law and not, woven into context while ripping apart those very threads. In this parallax view, I focus on both colonial law, but, in the disruption of context, also hukam [Divine Command]. Sara-Maria Sorentino, University of Alabama With What Must Slavery Begin? Abstract This talk draws from an essay that opens Hegel’s Science of Logic. “With What Must the Science Begin?” is preoccupied with how to ground critical theory in ways that neither take its starting point for granted nor smuggle in uninterrogated dogmas. My talk highlights resonances between presuppositionless philosophy and the historical processes of enslavement, the latter of which can be understood as erasing the contingencies of capture. The more distant the slave was found from their point of origin the more one could assert the slave appears as a slave, in their simple immediacy, in a way that defies any standard for legitimation. The more slavery and blackness become practically and conceptually inseparable, that is, the more the slave appears on the world stage as presuppositionless, absent meaningful structures for political-familial belonging. The Hegel-Marxist logical reconstruction of slavery exposes both the limits of historicism and available resources for critical thought. Adam Stern, University of Wisconsin, Madison The Tomb of History Abstract In this paper, I approach the broader conversation on the silences of the archive through a comparison of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “silent witness” (1993) with the silent a of Jacques Derrida’s différance. The first part of the paper will explore the continuity by situating both in relation to the figure of Christ’s empty tomb. In the second part of the paper, I follow out this proposal through a rereading of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I locate the empty tomb as both a specific scene in Hegel’s narrative as well as a general organizing element in his discursive production of the modern European subject. Emerging between two vanishing moments of the unhistorical past (Africa) and the posthistorical future (settler-colonial America), Hegel’s empty tomb underscores the theological-political emergence of the modern European subject in the figure of the crusader. Samaah Jaffer, Yale University From Karbala to Gaza: Shahada as Methodology in the Age of Catastrophe Abstract Parallels have been drawn between Karbala—“an unyielding site of alterity, a contestation of various forms of hegemony”—and the situation of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation long before October 2023. Yet, the scale and particularities of the genocide in Gaza—the inevitability of martyrdom, the imperative to bear witness, and the imagery circulated and evoked in spaces of memorial—have made the metaphor difficult to ignore. Drawing on Karbala as “an Islamic lieu de mémoire,” this paper will present a meditation on shahada as methodology amid the ongoing nakba. Acts of shahada—the testimony of faith, witnessing of injustice, and martyrdom—in the contemporary movement for Palestinian liberation, illustrate an undoing of the secularization of Palestine and an imperative to take action. Responding Amy M. Hollywood, Harvard University Business Meeting Kathy Chow, Yale University, Presiding Adam Stern, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Presiding
	A25-225 Religion, Media, and Culture Unit Theme: Masculine Religious Conflict in Christianity and Islam Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Sapphire 400B (Fourth Level) Sana Patel, University of Ottawa, Presiding This papers session investigates the media construction of masculine religious conflict, with presentations that range across regional contexts in South Korea, Somalia, the United Kingdom, and United States. Christians and Muslims circulate a diverse range of media as emergent institutional domains for the expression of religious discourse – masculine in either focus or presentation. Such media includes popular music and memes, warzone photographs, alter egos developed through alternative “free speech” social media platforms, niche market evangelical films, and peripheral comedy-drama television series. The stakes and implications of this session, a study of “lived religion” through media, include the following: popular critiques of established institutions, demonization of political opponents, historical distortions online, plasticity of social media identity formation, moral sensationalism, and subsidiary status of women. Eunjin Jeon, University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology Meme, Mediatization, and Lived Religion: Case Study of Zior Park’s ‘Christian' in K-Pop Culture Abstract K-pop singer Zior Park's "Christian" song, reaching 11 million views in 2023, critiques religious hypocrisy within Christianity. This paper examines the impact of related religious memes on understanding religion in South Korea and fostering religious dialogue. Situated within the framework of memes, mediatization, and lived religion, the study analyzes how "Christian" sparks discussions on Korean religious piety, gender norms, and materialism, challenging both believers and non-believers. Through exploration of diverse memes, from Buddhist interpretations to critiques of North Korea, it reveals the multifaceted nature of religious discourse on South Korean social media. Moreover, it highlights the role of religious memes in promoting open discourse, blurring sacred and profane boundaries, and inspiring creative memetic expressions on religious matters. By studying Zior Park's "Christian" and its associated memes, this research offers insights into the evolving dynamics between memes, mediatization, and lived religion. Christopher Glen White, Vassar College “This is your Enemy”: Spiritual Warfare against Muslim Demons in Mogadishu and Beyond Abstract In this presentation I examine how American evangelicals reproduce and mediate the demonic supernatural and link it to non-Christians and political opponents. I examine one case in particular—the case of US Army Lt. General Jerry Boykin, who fought in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu and brought home supernatural photographs of the conflict. Boykin took photographs from a helicopter that seemed to show a shadowy figure in the sky over the city. Back home in the U.S., he spoke at several churches about this. In this presentation I will talk about how Boykin and other evangelicals produce visual evidence of the demonic, how they (then and now) sometimes link this kind of visual evidence to Islam, and how related media (such as the film Black Hawk Down) all combine to create a representational regime that buttresses evangelical identity, rationalizes Christian missionary failures in Muslim-majority countries, and justifies ongoing western spiritual and political intervention. Spencer Kunz, Florida State University Popular Medievalism, Sacred Hierarchy, and the "Crusader Persona" in Twenty-First-Century Christian Nationalism Abstract In the twenty-first century, online media help U.S. Christian nationalists to divorce eye-catching, quasi-medieval imagery from its historical narrative. The internet’s relative anonymity encourages U.S. Christian nationalists to remake themselves in the (fictionalized) image of the crusader. By portraying themselves and their political ideals as the direct descendants of the Western ordo militaris (e.g., Knights Templar), Christian nationalist crusaders imbue their cause with a sense of historical authenticity, and themselves with the chivalric splendor of the martial aristocracy. This paper observes alternative “free speech” social media platforms (e.g., Gab, Truth Social) to analyze the role of medieval ethos in U.S. Christian nationalism. In conclusion, the paper suggests that popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, combined with the plasticity of social media identity formation, foster an environment in which U.S. Christian nationalists construe themselves as continuing a cultural struggle that dates back to medieval Europe. Matthew Konerth, Independent Scholar The Gazeless Male Gaze: Maintaining Misogyny in Evangelical Anti-Pornographic Media Abstract The proposed essay will utilize textual analysis of several of the more successful examples of Evangelical anti-pornographic media, as well as a brief exploration of the fundamentals of porn studies and feminist film theory. Through the combination of these fields the essay will use the proliferation of Evangelical anti-pornographic media to define and analyze the ‘Gazeless Male Gaze’, emphasizing on the importance of women’s agency and the dangers of symbolic annihilation. In 1975, Laura Mulvey defined the Male Gaze as the voyeuristic objectification of women within cinema for a perceived all male audience by male filmmakers. (Mulvey, 58-69) The Gazeless Male Gaze maintains the same patriarchy and the same objectification within cinema as Mulvey’s Male Gaze with the voyeurism removed. Evangelical Anti-Pornographic films may not be literally gazing upon women, yet by patronizingly removing their voices from the subject of porn studies these films continue in women’s objectification. Tazeen Ali, Washington University, Saint Louis Narratives of Islamophobia on American and British TV: The Specter of the Violent Muslim Man in Hulu’s Ramy & Netflix’s Man Like Mobeen Abstract This paper investigates how narratives of Islamophobia, specifically the trope of the violent Muslim man, appear in two comedy-drama series created by Muslim producers: Ramy (2019) and Man Like Mobeen (2016). Previous scholarship has attended to anti-Muslim bias in entertainment media by situating them within discourses of sympathy. These analyses have attested to how show producers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, uphold multiculturalism and inclusivity as Western liberal values, and present instances of racism as exceptions rather than the norm (Shaheen 2006, Alsultany 2012, Conway 2017). I argue in this paper that performances of Islamophobia in Ramy and Man Like Mobeen, function as a critique of the limits of liberal inclusion for Muslims and lay bare racism as endemic, rather than exceptional, to American and British societies. Moreover, these series demonstrate how Muslim masculinity is necessarily formed in tandem with the image of the violent Muslim terrorist.
	A25-226 South Asian Religions Unit Theme: Life Stories in the Lives of Texts: Reconsidering Biography and Hagiography in South Asian Religions Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-33A (Upper Level East) Jack Hawley, Barnard College, Columbia University, Presiding The genre categories of biography and hagiography have generally, albeit not always uncritically, been adopted in South Asian religious studies circles. Given the propensity of scholarship and religious traditions themselves to focus on the life stories of central individuals, this panel argues that a reconsideration of biography and hagiography is in order with a concern towards genre. Counter to the common after-the-fact use of genre terms, this panel focuses on the process of genre: of establishing narrative norms, of the competing interests of participating parties, and of the vagaries of literary and social history. We draw our examples from Hinduism, Islam, and Jainism in specific historic and linguistic contexts to reconsider these genres more broadly. All papers situate specific life stories in the production of authority within their respective communities, in the process of remembering past individuals, and in the construction of an individual to perpetuate "future memory" and authority. Steven Lindquist, Southern Methodist University Lifestyles of the Ṛṣi and Famous: Proto-Biographical Narrative in Late Vedic Literature Abstract This presentation examines the "proto-biographical roots" of Late-Vedic life stories in the brāhmaṇas and argues how these serve as a basis for narrative expansions into "life scenes" (i.e., stray references taking on greater and greater narrative context). The paper examines the references of several individuals named in these texts, where the references serve as kernels for expansion, both within these texts, but then into later literature where "life scene" may become "life story." Producers of such ritual manuals, of course, did not see their project as "biographical" or "hagiographical," but the paper suggests how a shifting model of textual and ritual authority produced a "biographical impulse" towards teacher-sage life stories in later literature. Adil Mawani, University of Toronto Rejuvenating Muhammad in Memory: Exploring the Impact of a Nineteenth-Century Urdu Sacred Biography Abstract This presentation examines genre in sacred life stories through a close study of al-Khutb̤ āt al-Aḥmadīyah (1870), a sīra (biography of the Prophet Muhammad) by Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān. Sir Sayyid directly engages questions about the types of writing that ought to be employed for a sīra, concluding that it should mirror styles resembling the facticity and objectivity of historical writing. This paper historically situates this argument by contrasting it with the writing types and the objectives that sīra have traditionally sought to employ and fulfill. The presentation focuses on two questions. First, how did South Asian scholars read and respond to the conception of sacred biography laid out by Sir Sayyid; second, what impact did this proposal for sacred biography have on three early twentieth-century compositions. Steven Vose, University of Colorado, Denver The Work of Hagiography in the Age of Social Media Gurus: On the Grammar and Purpose of a Multiplatform Life Story Unfolding in Real Time Abstract This paper examines the hagiographical structures in social media posts about Rakesh Jhavery (b. 1966), the guru of the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission in Dharampur, Gujarat. The mission boasts the largest online presence of any Jain organization, appealing mainly to upper-class Gujarati Śvetāmbar youth in India and the diaspora. Jhavery’s persona is constructed on two types of posts: (1) YouTube videos and his Wikipedia page, which portray him as a “spiritual prodigy” closely modeled on twentieth-century biographies of Śrīmad Rājacandra (1867-1901); and (2) on Instagram and Facebook using the hashtag #sadguruwhispers. The first employs empiricist language to establish Jhavery’s divine status, while the second uses aphorisms and images to assert his divinity. I will examine three key elements of hagiographical writing in both and show how SRMD's social media posts construct a dynamic archive, contributing to an ongoing hagiographical campaign. Sahaj Patel, Vanderbilt University Smṛti Practices in Nineteenth-Century Gujarat Abstract This presentation analyzes the practices and discourses concerning smṛti surrounding experiences with and life stories of Swaminarayan in the nineteenth century. He argues that smṛti, which generally translates to remembering, is the central operating factor in the processes of biography and hagiography production and reception. Examining texts from the community, which include recorded discourses of Swaminarayan elaborating on the topic and several texts by monks who demonstrate the practice, presenter #4 proposes the concept of (re)experiencing to explain smṛti practices in the context of life stories. (Re)experiencing is a generative framework that situates biography/hagiography as a category in a more complex web of material and cognitive practices by which Swaminarayan followers actively engaged with episodes they experienced personally or through some other medium. Responding Martha Ann Selby, Harvard University
	A25-227 Space, Place, and Religion Unit Theme: Marginal Geographies in Space Place and Religion Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Indigo D (Second Level) Matthew Mitchell, High Point University, Presiding This session explores the unequal and unjust power dynamics and violence inherent in American imperialism, nation building projects, and capital-driven forces. Papers analyze how such regimes produce chronic precarity and “sacrifice zones” through practices of surveillance and carceral governance, gentrification and displacement, and ecological extractivism. Presenters will introduce case studies of survival and meaning-making, shifting intimacies and solidarities, and challenges to secular spatial order. In doing so, they each address distinct racial and socio-economic forms of marginalization across a range of urban geographies. KB Dennis-Meade, Northwestern University Black Religious Placemaking in the Postcolony: A Case Study of Kingston, Jamaica Abstract This paper centers Black religious placemaking as a strategy of survival and meaning-making on the part of members of a Holiness/Pentecostal church in Tivoli Gardens, an inner city community in Kingston Jamaica. It examines the boundaries of belonging and identity amongst the seven subdivisions that constitute Tivoli Gardens, as Tivoli Gardens itself has largely functioned as an extralegal economy governed by a local don, or enforcer supported by the neoliberal Jamaica Labor Party. The process of Black religious placemaking, I argue, is a fraught and agonistic process that entails shifting solidarities within a postcolonial milieu deeply shaped by underdevelopment and American imperialism. These global processes simultaneously create economic and political instability, enacting chronic precarity and heightened stakes of survival. Employment and religious language, framed by evangelical Christian theology authorizes claims to political and spiritual sovereignty. Religious placemaking, then, is an embodied and ideological act of claiming space and authority to secure human flourishing. Nicole Carroll, Stanford University Long Stand the House John Africa Built: Secular Spatial Order and Insurgent Sacred Space in 1978 Philadelphia Abstract This paper examines the 1978 police raid of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black radical religious organization, as a clash of competing spatial imaginations. Tracing the conflict between the secular spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s carceral governance and MOVE’s insurgent approach to cultivating sacred space, I demonstrate the secular spatial logic encoded in zoning laws and their carceral enforcement by analyzing MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of urban space as a direct challenge to secular spatial order. Max Dugan, University of Pennsylvania Margins and Centers of Halal Consumption in Philadelphia Abstract Drawing on geographic approaches to urban consumption, this paper analyzes the margins and centers of halal consumption in Philadelphia. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research and digital mapping of halal businesses, I make two central claims: (1) there are multiple concentrations of halal consumption in the city that are racially, socio-economically, and devotionally distinctive; (2) in addition to Islamic institutions, these concentrations of halal consumption take shape in relation to gentrification, infrastructure, and urban renewal. I focus on two geographies of consumption in Philadelphia—one in West Philadelphia and one in North Philadelphia—as case studies of infrastructure's and urban renewal's effects on halal consumption. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that attention to the everyday urban process that shape Islamic tradition clarifies the anti-Black and capital-driven forces that marginalize enactment of Islamic tradition in Philadelphia, as well as the ways that Muslim sustain devotional practices and forge convivialities across difference. Maxwell Greenberg, Goucher College Jewish Pioneer Cemeteries and Zionist Geographies at the US Mexico Border Abstract As organizers and scholars explore the intimacies between Israeli and US nation-building projects, the phrase, “Palestine-Mexico Border” has emerged to capture the way that US and Israel collaborate through militarized surveillance and ecological extractivism to reassert their national borders. Overlooked, particularly in the US context, is how religion and religious space are important technologies and processes that justify and entangle national borders in global context / imperial borders. This paper explores the relationship between Jewish sacred spaces in Southern Arizona, and the intimacies of racio-religious geographies across and between US and Israel border zones. Business Meeting Katie Oxx, Saint Joseph's University, Presiding Brooke Schedneck, Rhodes College, Presiding
	A25-236 Special Session Theme: The Prophetic: The Life and Legacy of Marc H. Ellis (1953 – 2024) Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Sapphire AEI (Fourth Level) Santiago H. Slabodsky, Hofstra University, Presiding Marc H. Ellis, Jewish liberation theologian and former professor of history and Jewish studies at the Maryknoll School of Theology and Baylor University, was one of the most critical liberation theologians of our time. Influenced by the Jewish prophetic and ethical tradition and the dissonance of post-Holocaust Jewish life, Ellis reconstructed Jewish diaspora and exile theology, which was critical of Jewishness tethered to the relations of imperial ruling in the United States and Israel and the mass suffering of Palestinians. Ellis facilitated Jewish and Christian ethical engagements with the violent political and economic crises. The panel will critically engage with Marc H. Ellis’s scholarship, discussing how Ellis’s life and work will shed new light on religious understanding of violence, the praxis of non-violence, the liberation of margins, and the diaspora. Panelists Claudio Carvalhaes, Union Theological Seminary Jessica Wong, Azusa Pacific University Pui Lan Kwok, Candler School of Theology SimonMary Aihiokhai, University of Portland Iskander Abbasi, University of Johannesburg Carolina Ellis, Independent Scholar
	A25-229 Study of Islam Unit Theme: New Books in Global Islam: Education, State, and Society in Egypt, France, and Tanzania Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Convention Center-31B (Upper Level East) Iman AbdoulKarim, Yale University, Presiding This roundtable introduces three brand new studies of contemporary Islam, from Egypt, France, and Tanzania, all published in 2024 or early 2025. The three authors will be in dialogue with one another, as well as with two respondents, themselves ethnographers of Islam who work in different regions. The works offer fresh understandings of contested Muslim social and political organizing, while remaining attentive to how Muslims navigate issues of identity, community formation and preservation, and relations with states and wider society. Each book draws on historical materials and rich qualitative research to explore complex dynamics of Islamic education, culture, and community politics. The authors and respondents will engage in a lively conversation that draws together regions of the world too rarely put into conversation. The roundtable format promises a refreshing structure for creative collaboration, introducing cutting-edge work in Islamic studies that will shape emerging directions in contemporary global Islam. Panelists Nermeen Mouftah, University of Illinois, Chicago Kirsten Wesselhoeft, Vassar College Kimberly Wortmann, Wake Forest University Responding Justine Howe, Case Western Reserve University Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Georgetown University
	A25-230 Study of Judaism Unit Theme: Beyond the Maternal Turn Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Sapphire 411B (Fourth Level) Charlotte Fonrobert, Stanford University, Presiding The last few years have yielded a body of work in Jewish and Christian thought calling for a (re)turn to the maternal as a rich but marginalized source for thinking about these traditions’ central philosophical, theological, and ethical preoccupations, including obligation, love, vulnerability, embodiment, and care. While this panel shares concern for exclusion and inattention to questions of care, domesticity, vulnerability, and embodiment, it details the ways that the unacknowledged normative starting point informing much of this work, in which maternality is a privileged, paradigmatic lens, precludes the realization of this scholarships' stated goals of challenging dominant categories structuring collective life through the consideration of minoritized subject positions. This panel poses a series of methodological critiques that refigure the possibilities and limits of thinking with “the maternal turn.” Fannie Bialek, Washington University in St. Louis Parents as Paradigms: Recasting the Problems of Individualism in a New Mold? Abstract Feminist turns to maternal experience have emphasized its asymmetries of power, capability, vulnerability, and need against traditional philosophical paradigms of individual subjectivity as ideally invulnerable, self-sufficient, and self-controlled. This paper considers how mother-child relationships have been used in recent feminist thought to develop accounts of obligation from asymmetries of power, vulnerability, and need. It argues that taking maternal experience as an ethical paradigm obscures important questions about domination in care, both because maternal experience might be relatively exceptional, instead of exemplary, with respect to domination and because of the way these projects focus on the immediacy of care, fixing the mother-child relationship as a dyadic encounter. Where these accounts depend on a paradigm of encounter, they recreate some of the problems they seek to resist by fixing complex power relationships in time. Alexandra Zirkle, University of Chicago Temple Breasts, Parental Pleasure, and Jewish Thought Abstract Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (2018) reclaims parental caregiving as a way to rethink relationality in concert with the sources of biblical, rabbinic, and modern Jewish thought. The perceptive reader of Jewish texts, she suggests, may apprehend through the silver traceries of child-rearing deeper insight into the ways that biblical and rabbinic texts think about obligation, love, power, teaching, and kinship. By scoring maternal subjectivity into the catalog of Jewish thought, Benjamin sonorously interrupts “a cavernous intellectual silence [reigning] where centuries-long, voluble conversation ought to have been” (xvi). This paper takes up Benjamin’s invitation to plumb “the constructive possibilities latent within [midrash]” by weaving together the purported binary between abstract thought and embodied ways of knowing, exploring what becomes knowable about rabbinic conceptions of the Torah when we read rabbinic texts through the lens of chestfeeding parental pleasure. Sarah Zager, St. Olaf College “Did I Conceive This People?”: Experiences of Infertility in the Maternal Turn Abstract This paper takes experiences of infertility as a methodological provocation, asking scholars to consider what methodological tools need to be developed to theorize the full range of parental experience (in all of its diversely gendered forms). This paper suggests that neither the phenomenological nor ethnographic methodologies used in existing scholarship on the maternal turn have lived up to their promise to make Jewish thought genuinely attentive to the complex relationship between a range of embodied experiences and philosophical reflection. Larisa Reznik, University of Chicago Rafael Neis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Otherwise than Birthing Abstract This paper is an experiment in collaborative authorship and presentation. We utilize the resources of queer theory to stage the problem of reproductive futurism—namely, whether the normalization of reproduction forecloses upon the possibility of radical change. This will be done through a discussion of two distinct case studies. The first reads Hannah Arendt’s conception of natality against some of its invocations by the maternal turn. It offers the natality of abortion—the newness and possibilities opened up by the refusal to reproduce—as a counter-paradigm for the newness and transformative possibilities imputed to birth. The second turns to rabbinic literature to explore figures and categories for birth, reproduction, etc. that emphasize not only important discontinuities between rabbinic categories and our own but also allow us to see the investments in heteronormative reproductive futurity as strange to the rabbinic sources as (many claim is) authorized by them. Business Meeting Andrea Dara Cooper, University of North Carolina, Presiding Shari Rabin, Oberlin College and Conservatory, Presiding
	A25-231 Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Unit Theme: Poetics and Persona in Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist Autobiography Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Aqua 314 (Third Level) Andrew Quintman, Wesleyan University, Presiding This two-hour roundtable session includes 8 presenters who draw on examples of Tibetan-language poetry in different styles and periods of autobiographical writing from across the Tibetan Buddhist cultural sphere including Mongolia. Scholarship over the past several decades has investigated ways that Buddhist ideas of personhood are bound with first-person life writing, but less attention has been paid to the role of poetry and poetics in autobiography, or to how poets use "persona"—whereby the poet speaks through an assumed voice. Prior to the roundtable, all presenters will have precirculated their own original translations. These examples show how in Tibet and Mongolia, as elsewhere, poetics can be used to negotiate various modes of self-expression. The diverse group of presenters will limit their remarks to 10 minutes each to investigate ways that Buddhist ideas of personhood are expressed through poetry. Panelists Nicole Willock, Old Dominion University Gendun Rabsal, Indiana University, Bloomington Sarah Harding, Tsadra Foundation Kurtis Schaeffer, University of Virginia Sangseraima Ujeed, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Andrew Quintman, Wesleyan University Pema Bhum, Independent Scholar Joie Szu-Chiao Chen, Harvard University
	A25-232 Wesleyan and Methodist Studies Unit Theme: The Reception History of the Wesleys Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Indigo 204A (Second Level) Steven Hoskins, Trevecca Nazarene University, Presiding The papers and response of this session explore how ministries and writings of John and Charles Wesley have been received in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions and beyond. In considering how the Wesleys have been received in different parts of the world and different denominations and how different traditions, Pan-Methodists and Non-Methodists, have interpreted and employed the Wesleys' practical theology. Presenters have been encouraged to use multiple disciplinary and methodological approaches to this topic and provide global perspectives, including postcolonial and anti-colonial emphases. This session is linked to our unit’s session on “Methodism before the Wesleys,” which explores examples of Methodism in the global history of the church before the eighteenth century, even if no direct genealogical connection can be drawn. Crystal DesVignes, Duke University WITHDRAWN: Wesley & Womanism: John Wesley's Practical Theology and Womanist Tenets Converse Abstract The enduring legacy of Wesleyan principles and theology within the Black Church tradition and Womanist Theology in particular, is not often named and celebrated. The connection of the budding Methodist church in the United States at the same time African American Folk Religion was established are paralleled. The Great Awakening in the United States with its Methodist and Baptist roots saw numerous African Americans adherents. Germane to the descendants of Africans was the Wesleyan understanding of acts of mercy and personal piety, along with a diversity in scriptural interpretation that have been guiding practical theological values for the Black Church traditions. As Womanist Theology and Theological ethics took form and continues throughout different waves, this Pan-Methodist employment can be seen in the tenets of womanist principles and scholarship that undergird the field to this day. Emily Nelms Chastain, Boston University Reviving the Radical: The Legacy of the Methodist Student Movement within Wesleyan Tradition Abstract This paper investigates the Methodist Student Movement (MSM), a significant yet often overlooked chapter in Methodist history, which replicated the original Wesleyan movement’s zeal for social holiness. Emerging in the late 1930s, the MSM mobilized young Methodists through innovative campus ministry, leadership development, and social activism. By understanding the historical context and legacies of the MSM, this research seeks to identify how students received Wesleyan theology and formation and activated it into advocacy for the racial integration of The Methodist Church. Martin Wellings, Independent Scholar Reception and Reunion: The Place of the Wesleys in the Journey to British Methodist Union, 1886-1938 Abstract After almost a century of division, the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century saw the gradual achievement of ‘home reunion’ in British Methodism, as sundered denominations came together in the Methodist Union of 1932. The legend and legacy of the Wesley brothers mattered to all the branches of divided Methodism, but the journey to reunion showed how differently the Wesleys were received and understood by the negotiating groups. This paper will explore the theology, narratives, pedagogy, and practices of the Methodist denominations, using the journey towards and on from the 1932 Union as a case study for the reception history of the Wesleys. Philip Wingeier-Rayo, Wesley Theological Seminary Better Late Than Never: An Assessment of the Reception of 'Las Obras de Wesley' in Latin America Abstract Justo Gonzalez launched the first volumes of the Spanish translation of the Works of John Wesley into Spanish in October of 1997—more than one hundred years since the arrival of Methodism in Latin America. Early Methodist missionaries had evangelized, planted churches, social ministries, educational institutions and trained native-born pastors without access to the founder’s writings in the vernacular. This paper examines three main questions: 1) What were the theological sources consulted by Latin American Methodism prior to the translation of Las Obras into Spanish? 2) Now a quarter of century has passed since the launching of Las Obras and this paper assesses the reception. How has the availability of Wesley’s writings impacted seminary training for Methodist pastors? 3) The paper concludes with unanswered questions and future opportunities for Methodist Studies in the Spanish-speaking world. Responding Priscilla Pope-Levison, Southern Methodist University
	A25-233 Women and Religion Unit Theme: Gender-based violence in Jewish and Christian religious traditions Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Indigo 202B (Second Level) Tracy McEwan, University of Newcastle, Australia, Presiding Evidence from research studies and public inquiries have drawn attention to historical and current practices of gender-based violence (GBV) in religious institutions, particularly Christianity. Research findings indicate the harm such violence is causing to victims and communities, but as yet stronger links between the ways in which sacred texts and religious law are implicated in the generation and legitimation of gendered violence is limited. This panel will bring together four scholars to discuss their research into gender-based religious and spiritual harm in Jewish and Christian traditions. Different methodological approaches are utilized and aim to examine the ways that religious law, biblical texts and theological discourse function to produce, sustain and compound gendered violence across religious communities, and how feminist discourse can be used to disrupt dominant paradigms. Examples from religious traditions in the US, UK, Africa and Australia include Catholicism, Anglicanism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and orthodox Jewish communities. Naomi R. Goldenberg, University of Ottawa Metzitzah B’eh and The Magic of Religion: How the category of religion transforms a criminal practice endangering Jewish male infants into legalized ritual. Abstract This paper will argue that when a sovereign state recognizes a group as a religion, the laws and customs of the group acquire a special status. This status can enable the ‘religious’ group to escape prosecution for behaviour that would otherwise be deemed criminal. Metzitzah B’peh, or oral suction, provides a dramatic example. Efforts to forbid this act that has caused the death of some babies and inflicted brain damage on others, met with failure in New York City. Orthodox Jewish communities effectively argued that former Mayor Bloomberg, who wanted the practice banned, had to respect religious freedom even though oral suction can be considered a form of high-risk sexual assault on male infants by adult men. Presently, the practice continues with no required restrictions beyond tepid warnings to Jewish parents. This paper examines how such a practice is legitimated by local authorities. Kathleen McPhillips, University of Newcastle, Australia The uses of biblical texts in the sexual abuse of children in Jehovah’s Witnesses: how gendered violence operated to protect male authority. Abstract Over the last 20 years, multiple public inquiries across the world have investigated the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults in religious institutions. Two inquiries – the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual abuse and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual abuse in England and Wales - examined smaller religious groups including the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Findings indicate that biblical texts were used extensively in managing complaints of abuse and of perpetrators, compliance with silence and safeguarding policy. The gendered base of this process, from the interpretation of scripture by male leaders, to the management by men of the investigation processes indicate that gendered violence against women and girls was significant. This presentation will examine the gendered use of biblical texts in managing abuse and implementing the recommendations from both inquiries and ascertain the ways in which biblical texts are currently being employed with regard to gender equity. David Tombs, University of Otago, New Zealand ‘Shut up till the day of their death’: Sacred Text as Secondary Victimisation in 2 Samuel 20:3. Abstract 2 Samuel 20:3 is a devastating denouement to a biblical story of sexual and gender-based violence. It states the fate of the ten concubines David left to ‘look after the house’ in Jerusalem when David and the rest of his household fled to escape his son Absalom (2 Sam. 15.16). Absalom then captured Jerusalem and publicly raped the ten women to demonstrate his power (2 Sam. 16.21-22). When David returned to Jerusalem, he ordered that the women be ‘shut up until the day of their death, living as if in widowhood’ (2 Sam. 20:3). This presentation (1) critically examines the troubling assumptions behind David’s response; (2) describes a contextual bible study that explores 2 Sam. 20:3 as secondary victimisation, and (3) discusses some of the responses and insights on the bible study from the Kuibuka (Arise) workshop for religious sisters in Ghana in 2024. Rocio Figueroa, Te Kupenga – Catholic Theological College Kuibuka: A program for religious sisters in Africa to become agents of change against violence Abstract Sexual and spiritual abuse of and by Catholic religious sisters has been documented since the 1990s but has received only minimal response from the Church, and little attention in the media or in academic research. Kuibuka Africa is an initiative that responds to the harm inflicted, enabled, and silenced in many religious women’s congregations. Kuibika runs workshops on trauma and abuse, and the need for effective pastoral response. Women religious share their experiences of abuse and interrogate the patriarchal narratives and theological foundations that enable violence and silence women’s voices. A pilot workshop in January 2023 welcomed thirty sisters from Central Africa. A second workshop involved forty religious superiors from West Africa in January 2024. The workshops empower women religious to resist injustice and institutional violence and become agents of change. Many participants have used workshop material in their local communities to help in safeguarding their own sisters. Responding Boyung Lee, Iliff School of Theology Business Meeting Tracy McEwan, University of Newcastle, Australia, Presiding Boyung Lee, Iliff School of Theology, Presiding
	A25-237/S25-231 AAR's Queer Studies in Religion and Religion and Sexuality Units and SBL's Latino/a/e and Latin American Biblical Interpretation, Reading, Theory, and the Bible, Utopian Studies, Islands, Islanders, and Scriptures Theme: Reconsidering José Esteban Muñoz's Legacies on the Study of Religion Monday, 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM Hilton Bayfront-Cobalt 501B (Fifth Level) Peter Anthony Mena, University of San Diego, Presiding This year, two sessions consider the impact and influence of the work of the late queer performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz on the study of religion and sexuality, especially since 2024 is the 25th anniversary of the publication of Disidentifications. This session includes papers from both the study of religion and biblical studies. Kathryn Common, Desiring Utopia: Church as Queer Performance Abstract This paper explores how utilizing queer utopian and reparative reading practices provides a liberative hermeneutic to examine feminist, womanist, and queer theologies of church as resources for helping to reimagine church as queer performance space. Jose Muñoz names utopian imaginings and queer performativity as a way to conjure a new future. With Muñoz as a guide, I ask can church be imagined through the lens of queer utopian performance, that is, church as a community that enacts and embodies a more just futurity? This question guides my current book project, Desiring Utopia: Church as Queer Performance. This paper explores the queer hermeneutical methods guiding the project that includes bringing together Muñoz’s emphasis on the utopian nature of queerness and queer performative spaces that function as an ephemeral place for doing futurity, along with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for a reparative hermeneutics and the production of generative knowledges. Elisaveta Dvorakk, Humboldt University of Berlin Performing Visual Knowledge after Disidentifications: On Photographic Agency and Agency of Photography Abstract This paper explores the Hashem el Madani Collection (1953-1982) within the Arab Image Foundation, focusing on exhibitions curated by Akram Zaatari. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentifications, the study examines visual knowledge performance in this epistemological field, exploring agency within photographic practices and photography as a medium. It critiques normative secular-liberal views through Saba Mahmood’s work on agency in the women’s mosque movement. Ulrike E. Auga’s notion of agency photography is discussed as a means to overcome colonial photographic canons. By integrating Muñoz’s, Mahmood’s, and Auga’s frameworks, the paper outlines new modalities of agency, emphasizing the transformative potential of piety in reshaping visual discourses on the 'Middle East'. This interdisciplinary approach offers insights into subject formation, human flourishing, and the politics of representation within both religious and secular-based historical and contemporary discourses on gender and sexuality in Lebanon. Monica Rey, Boston University Feeling Brown Feeling Down: Latina Affective Performance(s) in the Normative Whiteness also Known as Biblical Studies Scholarship Abstract In this paper I wrestle with Muñoz's work on ethnicity, affect, and performance in helping me to understand the existence and presence of latinidad and brownness in academia¬– specifically as it manifests in Latina affective particularity. Muñoz explains “brown feeling” as “a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.” “Feeling brown, feeling down,” then, is “a modality of recognizing the racial performativity generated by an affective particularity that is coded to specific historical subjects who can provisionally be recognized by the term Latina.” What then does it mean to be “feeling brown, feeling down” in biblical studies scholarship as a Latina? This paper offers a few personal anecdotes of how I’ve navigated “feeling brown, feeling down” in the field and theorizes with Muñoz toward a more liberative frame from which to emancipate oneself from the hegemony of White biblical... cont. Megan Robertson, University of Leeds Parodic Performance as a Site of Queer African Struggle: Religion and Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa Abstract Known as Africa’s gay capital, Cape Town is characterised by its colonial and apartheid legacies which have divided the urban centre and periphery in numerous ways. Most notably, the predominantly white city centre remains circled by a predominantly black periphery, known as the Cape Flats. While the city centre boasts a pink-friendly social hub, queer people of colour endure heightened levels of violence and marginalization. Further, the periphery is characterised by more conservative religious ideals, reminiscent of apartheid-era attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, Cape Town also harbours a tradition of subversive performance, dating back to the era of colonial slavery, when slaves temporarily challenged racial and gender norms in the Kaapse Klopse carnival. By drawing on performance theories by Muñoz and African feminists, this paper examines how contemporary theatre in Cape Town continues this legacy, potentially reshaping cultural paradigms to (re)imagine a utopia grounded in queer black consciousness. Victoria Slabinski, University of Virginia Decolonial Memory, Queer Utopianism, and the Art of Lee Paje: Alternative Histories as Eschatological Interventions Abstract This paper draws from decolonial Christian theology and queer of color critique to explore the work of Philippines-based artist Lee Paje, focusing on her 2021 painting “Escape from the Ceremony of Wearing Skin” in which primordial Philippine beings encounter European colonizers who compel them to don gendered “skin.” In doing so, this paper attends to the theological insights provided by artwork that produces alternative histories and engages the past through a mythological register. Interpreted through the lenses of María Lugones’s decolonial feminism and José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopianism, Paje’s painting represents a critique of the colonial/modern gender system and an assertion that the world might have been – and might yet be – otherwise than the rigidities and hierarchies of this system. Paje’s alternative mythologies actively intervene in theological discourses by offering a means of envisioning eschatological realities beyond the constraints of unjust systems and bringing them into being. Responding Althea Spencer Miller, Drew University
	A25-120 Tours Theme: Historic Houses of Worship Monday, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Offsite-Offsite This tour requires pre-registration. If you pre-registered for this tour please see this important information. Meet your tour guides and bus outside of the convention center in front of Hall F (city side of the convention center) at 12:45 p.m. The tour will depart promptly at 1:00 p.m. Remember to wear comfortable shoes. This tour is rain or shine. Because one of our stops on this tour will be at the Islamic Center of San Diego, tour attendees have been asked to dress modestly. If possible, women should wear a headscarf or bring a scarf to cover their hair while there. Please also note that in the Islamic tradition *it is discouraged for individuals from different genders to shake hands when introduced to each other.*
	A25-300 AAR Status Committees Theme: Violence and Non-violence in the Academy: A View from the Margins Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Convention Center-3 (Upper Level West) Thelathia Young, Haverford College, Presiding Representatives from the AAR’s Status Committees briefly present some of their past work addressing structural inequity and violence against women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTIQ+, and persons with disabilities; then address some current and future challenges; and open up discussion to attendees to discuss strategies to effectively engage structural violence in the academy. Panelists Nicholas Shrubsole, University of Central Florida Melissa M. Wilcox, University of California, Riverside Maria T. Davila, Merrimack College Yara Gonzalez-Justiniano, Vanderbilt University
	A25-301 Artificial Intelligence and Religion Exploratory Session Theme: Experiments in Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Societies and Religious Simulations Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Convention Center-29B (Upper Level East) Randall Reed, Appalachian State University, Presiding This session presents cutting-edge research on the use of artificial intelligence to simulate religious societies and explore dynamics of belief, practice, conflict, and cooperation. It will showcase projects employing multi-agent systems and other AI models to understand complex religious phenomena, from the evolution of religious practices to the mechanisms of interfaith dialogue and conflict resolution. By creating virtual environments where religious behaviors and social dynamics can be studied in detail, these projects offer new perspectives on the study of religion as a human creative act. Speakers will discuss the theoretical underpinnings, methodological challenges, and potential insights gained from simulating religious life in artificial societies, highlighting the contribution of AI to the academic study of religion. Taylor Thomas, Boston University School of Theology Pixels and Parables: A Gaming Approach to Virtue Cultivation Abstract This project investigates the role of generative AI in fostering ethical development through video games, focusing on the design of non-playable characters (NPCs) to influence players' moral reasoning. Utilizing GPT-4 for both Ethical Assessment AI (EAAI) and Narrative Guidance AI (NGAI), this study aims to evaluate and guide players' decisions within a text-based game, rooted in theological ethical frameworks. By integrating complex ethical dilemmas that mirror moral complexities from religious traditions, the research explores AI's potential in virtue cultivation. The methodology includes developing a simple game interface, employing AI for ethical assessment and narrative adaptation, and integrating theological ethics into game design. Expected outcomes include insights into AI's capability for moral reasoning enhancement and recommendations for incorporating ethical principles into AI-driven designs. This approach signifies a paradigm shift in technology's role, envisioning AI as a tool for personal and moral development. Claire Kennedy, Appalachian State University S[ai]nts - Exploring the Use of GPTs for Spiritual Conversation in Catholicism Abstract Using Open.AI’s ChatGPT, I am creating three separate chatbots with three unique specializations and personalities: one St. Francis of Assisi, one St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and one St. Thomas More. I am training these GPTs on information about their respective saint's lives, works, and beliefs using a mix of primary and secondary academic sources. The s[ai]nts will be made accessible through a web app for users to engage in conversation with the chatbot and hopefully find the dialogue meaningful to their religious experience. My paper will detail the development of the s[ai]nts, investigation of their reception within religious communities, and explanation of the results of this project. F. LeRon Shults, University of Agder Simulating Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding through Multi-Agent Artificial Intelligence Modeling Abstract The utilization of multi-agent artificial intelligence (MAAI) in modeling religious dynamics, social conflicts, and pathways to peace represents a significant advancement in computational social sciences and humanities. This presentation outlines an MAAI approach used in several international, interdisciplinary research projects, focusing on the integrative process and empirical insights that have emerged in the author's work with the United Nations Development Program in Palestine and Bosnia & Herzegovina, as well as Northern Ireland and South Sudan. Each model was constructed with the help of religious studies subject matter experts, incorporating religious factors and variables into the cognitive architectures and social network interactions of the simulated agents that populate the ‘artificial societies.’ Such AI models provide scholars and stakeholders with a digital laboratory in which they can run simulation experiments to discover the conditions under which – and the processes by which – intergroup religious conflict can be mitigated and peaceful cooperation can be promoted. Business Meeting Tracy J. Trothen, Queen's University, Presiding

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