Online Program Book


	A21-114 Theology and Religious Reflection Unit Theme: Kenosis, Humility, and Suffering: Theological Reflection's Chastened Futures Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221B (Meeting Room Level) Marc Colbourne, University of Toronto, Presiding Silence, secrecy, unknowingness, humility, and failure: these may not be the theological virtues with which we are most familiar, but they are, these three papers argue, the theological virtues we need. In thinking about the futures of theological reflection, the presenters consider the aesthetic and virtuous dimensions of theological work, but without investing in fantasies of performative virtuosity. Instead, they argue for an openness to humility, failure, and suffering as essential dimensions of theological reflection in the current time. Jee Hyun Baek, Boston University Haunting Secrets: Intergenerational Trauma in Korean American Diaspora Communities and its Challenge on Theological Understanding of Human Suffering Abstract Engaging with a contemporary Korean American literary work, Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, this paper will show the Korean American diaspora’s aesthetic mode of witnessing the hidden historical trauma, the haunting family secrets, and ongoing secrecy forced upon Korean diaspora communities within U.S. culture via the violence of assimilation to demonstrate the subtle but dynamic relationship between unclaimed past traumatic wounds and lives of the current generation. While analyzing the phenomena of intergenerational trauma registered in the aesthetic form via the lens of trauma studies, this paper will present how trauma’s haunting representation in the Korean American diaspora literary work led theologians to the territory of silence, secrecy, and unknowingness—the very reality of traumatic wounds and survival, thereby challenging traditional theological approaches to human suffering, especially the conventional sin-guilt-redemption paradigm and the concept of a single victim. Stephen Waldron, Boston University Intellectual Humility and Negative Theology as a Connection-Making Task Abstract Philosophers and psychologists have recently developed accounts of intellectual humility as a virtue. This paper argues that theologians ought to respond to these accounts by conceiving of the task of theology as inherently apophatic or negative. It describes the major definitions of intellectual humility offered by philosophers and psychologists, noting limited theological engagements with this work so far. It then notes modern varieties of negative theology in thinking influenced by Kantian and pragmatic philosophical critiques, feminist and political theological approaches, and mystical theologies rooted in spiritual practices. This leads to a brief account of how some theologians attempt to evade the limitations that such intellectual and socio-political critiques necessitate. Constructively, the paper then offers an account of theology as an intellectually humble attempt to make connections among diverse people and ideas. While limited in its aspirations, this remains a challenging task that requires historically, geographically, culturally, and socially broad knowledge. Benjamin Menghini, Emmanuel College The Failure of Method: Kenotic Queering in Recent Theology Abstract Christian theologians have recently begun to adopt failure as a theological virtue, particularly in regard to practice and method. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson in Transgressive Devotion, and Hanna Reichel in After Method both pursue a (re)constructive approach to theological normativity through queer subversions of patriarchal heteronormative paradigms. Each results in a different methodological consideration of theological (un)knowing and practice of (un)becoming. This paper use Jack Halberstam’s “low theory” as a method to read between Wigg-Stevenson’s performance theology and Reichel’s conceptual design and argue for theological kenosis in the failures of Christian life.
	A21-115 Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit Theme: Modern Poetry and Religion Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 225C (Meeting Room Level) Akhil Thomas, Harvard University, Presiding The papers discuss modern poetry and its relationship with religion. The first paper looks at the role of Islam in the contemporary poetry of Fatimah Asghar and Kaveh Akbar arguing that religion shapes bodies, and these bodies sit uncomfortably with American secularism. The second paper draws attention to the work of the renowned poet monk Taixu 太虚 by analyzing his use of the classical Chinese image of the "lamp and candle," incorporating elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism into his verse. The third paper uses Anna Margolin’s poem “Mary’s Prayer [Maris tfile]” and asks about the theological valence of the Jewish literary secular through a reading of absence, negativity, and relationality. The fourth paper observes the religious and ethical significance of San Antonio-based Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetics of the small and ordinary in conversation with Latino Catholic theologian Alejandro García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics of “lifting up the lowly.” Matthew Hotham, Ball State University “A Memory Lurking in Our Blood”: Religion, the Muslim Body, and Contemporary American Poetry Abstract According to Tracy Fessenden, religion in American literature has been hidden behind the secular. Good religion is transparent and good literature is non-religious. The aspiration of non-Protestant religions seeking acceptance in America was to make themselves transparent and leave their religious views out of their writing. For Muslim American poets, it would be best not to talk about one's Muslimness and to keep one's beliefs to themselves for the sake of literary acceptance. This paper looks at the role of Islam in the poetry of Fatimah Asghar and Kaveh Akbar, who challenge this view of the relationship between religion and literature, even as they situate themselves much differently in relation to Islam. What these poets have in common is that their work reveals the inextricability of religion from bodies. Religion shapes bodies and is marked on bodies in ways that cannot be neatly incorporated into American secularism as currently constructed. Xiaoxiao Xu, Ghent University The Poet Monk Taixu: An Image Analysis of “Lamp and Candle” Abstract The poetry of the renowned poet monk Taixu 太虚 (1890-1947) offers a unique perspective on the classical Chinese image of the "lamp and candle", exploring its Buddhist meanings and literary characteristics. Through his continuous writing, Taixu draws upon a rich cultural heritage, incorporating elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism into his verse. His poetry is characterized by evocative imagery and philosophical depth, reflecting Taixu's expression of personal emotions. This article offers a hitherto unexplored assessment of Taixu's literary achievements as a poet, focusing on his use of the classical Chinese image "lamp and candle". Through a detailed analysis of this image in his poetry, this study sheds new light on the role of classical Chinese imagery in the development of modern Buddhist poetry. The article contributes to the fields of Chinese literature, Buddhist studies, and comparative religion, providing insight into the intersection of artistic expression and spiritual practice. Evan Goldstein, Yale University “From Silence, a Temple”: Anna Margolin’s Theological Poetics Abstract A consensus in the field of Jewish Studies holds that modern Jewish literature is a secular phenomenon. While religion per se is undoubtedly a muted theme in the literary production of Jews, this does not exhaust how Jewish writers have engaged with theological idioms. This paper asks about the theological valence of the Jewish literary secular through a reading of absence, negativity, and relationality in the writings of philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) and poet Anna Margolin (1887-1952). Focusing on the poem “Mary’s Prayer [Maris tfile]” alongside her broader use of the rhetorical figure of apostrophe, I show how Margolin fashions a poetic subjectivity that leverages theological tropes to blur boundaries between Jew and Christian, absence and presence, silence and speech. In so doing, I ask how poetics, for Margolin, becomes a practice of relational subjectivity and its ruptures, one that critically departs from predominant modes of modern Jewish identity. Callie Tabor, Sacred Heart University “Lifting up the lowly” in the Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye Abstract In this paper, I explore the religious and ethical significance of contemporary San Antonio-based Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetics of the small and ordinary in conversation with Latino Catholic theologian Alejandro García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics of “lifting up the lowly.” First, I offer a description of Nye’s poetics of smallness in the context of American-led wars in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, I utilize García-Rivera’s concept of poetic “foregrounding,” or “lifting up the lowly,” wherein the poetic violates the aesthetic norm by “lifting up” something that had been in the background of attention. I argue that in Nye’s poetry, this act of “lifting up the lowly” reveals the sacredness of those overlooked by logics of military and religious violence. Finally, I illustrate this poetic “foregrounding” in the poem “Holy Land,” which contrasts the ideas of holiness amongst religious patriarchs with that of Nye’s Palestinian grandmother, Sitti Khadra.
	A21-116 Buddhist Philosophy Unit and Yogacara Studies Unit Theme: Avidyā: the Problem of Truth and Reality Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 207A (Meeting Room Level) Joy Brennan, Kenyon College, Presiding As the first element in the twelve links of dependent origination, the importance of ignorance, avidyā, in Buddhist thought is undeniable. It is one of the issues that almost all Buddhist thinkers/treatises/traditions have to address, since it is that which binds sentient beings in the cycle of rebirth and the elimination thereof is the key to the ultimate awakening. But what exactly is avidyā? In what sense is it the root of unsatisfactory conditioning of life? This panel will explore the nature of ignorance, its function and way(s) to its elimination from Buddhist traditions, which, despite the differences in their metaphysical assumptions, form a continuous line of (re-)thinking and (re-)positioning ignorance in Buddhist intellectual systems. Emily McRae, University of New Mexico Understanding Moral Ignorance with Vasubandhu Abstract In this paper, I draw from Vasubandhu’s account of ignorance (avidyā) in his Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya to begin to model an account of moral ignorance. Arguing that ignorance is neither a negation of knowledge nor its absence, Vasubandhu instead claims that ignorance is an activity of opposing knowledge (Abk. III 28cd). By conceiving ignorance as an activity, Vasubandhu’s account allows us to explain the mechanisms of moral ignorance (both psychological and socially), the evasiveness and tenacity of moral ignorance, as well as its relationship to false beliefs. I argue that this account of moral ignorance as activity is better suited to explain the nature and function of moral ignorance than competing accounts. Chihying Wu, University of California, Berkeley The Elemental Ignorance (āveṇikī-avidyā) and Its Relation to the Afflicted Mentation (kliṣṭaṁ manas) Abstract This paper aims at clarifying the nature of the elemental ignorance (āveṇikī-avidyā) and its relation to the afflicted mentation (kliṣṭaṁ manas). In the eight-cognition (vijñāna) model of the Yogācāra system, the afflicted mentation has been considered a synonym of self-consciousness—the view of one’s own temporospatial continuum as real, everlasting existence—and hence an ultimate target of elimination. According to the Mahāyānasaṁgraha, this wrong view of self is bred through something more fundamental, that is, through ignorance. A concept originated from the Sarvāstivādin tradition, the elemental ignorance should not be viewed as an elemental entity independent of ignorance; rather, it is the aspect/modality of ignorance that captures and represent collectively its dharmic characteristics. By rejecting the possibility of its presence in the first six cognitions, the Mahāyānasaṁgraha argues for an additional cognition to accommodate ignorance which constitutes the cause of suffering and rebirth. Ching Keng, National Taiwan University How Can There Be Avidyā Given the Originally Pure Mind? Responses from a Few Tathāgatagarbha Texts Abstract This paper investigates the issue of how sentient beings come to be ignorant or non-awakening (bujue 不覺) according to the Tathāgatagarbha tradition by asking three questions: (1) If the mind is originally pure, then how could there arise ignorance that veils the mind? (2) If the mind is originally pure and somehow becomes veiled by ignorance, then what would be the first symptom of the mind’s mixture with ignorance? (3) What would be the state where ignorance has been totally removed? This paper suggests that (1) Neither the Śrīmālādevīsaṃhanāda-sūtra nor the Awakening of Faith identify the origin of ignorance; (2) Following the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, the Awakening of Faith identifies the function of mind, mentation and consciousnesses (including the arising of mental representations) as the first symptom of ignorance; (3) After the elimination of mind, mentation and consciousnesses, what remains is the reflexive noble awareness.
	A21-117 Cognitive Science of Religion Unit and Contemplative Studies Unit Theme: Heart Openings: The use of micro-phenomenology in the study of religious and contemplative experience of love and associated states Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 301A (Ballroom Level) Anne C. Klein, Rice University, Presiding All four participants on this panel are part of the five-year Heart Openings project, commenced in Fall 2022 under the auspices of the European Research Council. This project inquires into the experience and cultivation of love in religious and contemplative practice. Methodologically, it gathers information through interviews and participant observation conducted in collaboration with Buddhists, Christians and Muslims in Denmark, United Kingdom, USA, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Egypt. Using audiovisual and micro-phenomenological methods, Heart Openings seeks to examine in detail the sensory and emotional structures of concrete and specific experiences of love. Through focused interviews, participant observation and life history ] interviews, the project examines and compares how the cultivation and experiences of love impact and emerge from people’s everyday lives across different contemplative and religious traditions. Claire Petitmengin, l'Institut Mines-Télécom Business School Veiling and unveiling processes in Buddhist meditation and Micro-phenomenology Abstract Meditation as practiced in Buddhist traditions and contemporary Micro-phenomenology are two methods for the empirical investigation of lived experience. Even if their goals are different (respectively soteriological and pragmatic), both practices start from a disturbing observation: our lived experience, which is what is most intimate and closest to us, escapes us. We do not see it as it is, we need training and apprenticeship to learn to recognize what, nevertheless, is there. Both practices offer various "skillful means" to elicit this recognition, to unveil what is hidden. However, surprisingly, neither of these, offer much by way of precise procedural descriptions of the veiling and unveiling processes. From written and oral meditation teachings on the one hand, and microphenomenological interviews applied to meditative experience and to the interviews themselves on the other, we tried to collect procedural descriptions of the veiling micro-gestures, of the unveiling micro-gestures, that is, the gestures through which veils dissipate, and to compare the devices used by meditation and by microphenomenology to elicit this unveiling. I will present the most salient aspects of this study. Martijn Van Beek, Aarhus University On the Edge of Awareness: Micro-gestures and Effortlessness in Dzogchen Meditation Abstract In the Dzogchen traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, relinquishing effort is a central instruction when it comes to practices oriented toward discovering the nature of one’s own mind. What do meditation practitioners do, how do they respond and what do they experience as they seek to engage in this normative ideal of effortlessness? What, if any, phenomenological experience is reportable from states of consciousness said to transcend language and the subject-object structure of ordinary experience. This last is an open question. Nevertheless, micro-phenomenology produces fine-grained descriptions of microgestures of attention and embodied experience, offering rich nuance to the growing body of (neuro-) scientific research on nondual practices. Based on repeated interviews with twelve experienced practitioners and with teachers of Dzogchen, this study explores the edge of awareness - what happens just before and/or just after moments or stretches of contemplative deepening in the direction of nonduality. Taking a close look at these may help unpack the process, phenomenology and practices towards effortless meditation. That is the focus of this paper. Renee Ford, Rice University Languages of Love: Understanding Open-Hearted Experiences Across Cultures Abstract This paper focuses on micro-phenomenological interviews I collected in the United States and Nepal. The discussions in then address two points: 1. interview structures of practitioners and 2. how culture affects their perceptions, as disclosed in the interviews. In order to elicit specific experiences, the interview process uses prompts like “bring your teacher to mind,” or “recall a moment when you felt love for your teacher.” Questions I consider are: Can interviews across cultures be compared? What cautions or considerations apply, for example, in optimally understanding a Nepal/Tibetan cultural experience of tsewa (tenderness, intimacy) when compared with responses of an American participant? These micro-phenomenological interviews focus on very short moments of experience; another type of interview is the lifestory interview which provide additional background on how interviewees made meaning from the prompts. My interviewees are from different cultural and language backgrounds, and therefore my paper asks how to analyze data across language and cultural boundaries. A working hypothesis is that at least some micro-experiences may not be limited to particular cultural or language contexts. Christian Suhr, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University Light flowing from the heart: An analysis of how micro-phenomenological interviews and audiovisual media can be applied to describe religious experience Abstract Based on a film and fieldwork project with Sufis in Egypt, I reflect on how microphenomenological interviews and audio-visual media can be combined to describe religious experience. Micro-phenomenology provides a powerful tool to identify subtle and often unrecognized structures of lived experience. The interviewer helps the interviewee evoke a concrete experience by recounting the experience with the words of the interviewee, and then asking simple questions that allow the interviewee to retrieve further dimensions of the experience. The medium of film, as developed in the discipline of visual and multimodal anthropology, provides complimentary opportunities for enabling micro-level analyses of the verbal, bodily, and emotional interactions between research participants, researchers, and the environments in which particular kinds of experience emerge. By using film excerpts from everyday situations, ritual practices, and interviews as the basis for reflection and feedback, I suggest how a research project can be established as a joint collaboration between research participants and researchers. Furthermore, film can be used to communicate and assess the structures of lived experience that can be revealed through micro-phenomenology. Responding Christian Suhr, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
	A21-118 Comparative Theology Unit Theme: Jainism and Comparative Theology Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007D (River Level) Catherine Cornille, Boston College, Presiding The panel seeks to extend the approach of comparative theology to Jainism. Jainism is one of the oldest religions that are still practiced and has been called the world’s most peaceful religion. Jains apply their tradition to many contemporary challenges from religious plurality to animal rights. However, unlike Hinduism and Buddhism, the two major Indian-origin religions, Jainism has so far received almost no attention in comparative theology. This panel seeks to indicate some directions that could offer opportunities for comparative theological engagement with Jainism, ranging from philosophy to meditative practice to art and devotion. The first two speakers will connect anekāntavāda, the Jain teaching of non-one-sidedness, to Jewish and Hindu thought, respectively. The third paper will discuss human/non-human relationships in the context of Jain and Christian textual and artistic traditions. The fourth paper will read Jain and Cāraṇī devotional poetry on female goddesses in the light of each other. Alan Brill, Seton Hall University The Elephant and the Kabbalist: A comparison of Jain concepts of perspectives to Kabbalistic concepts Abstract This talk will engage in comparative theology to compare Jain conceptions of the non-one-sidedness of reality (anekāntavāda) to Jewish conceptions of pluralism. Often the comparison has been made in popular accounts but with insufficient knowledge of the actual Jain position. This paper will attempt to clear up various misreadings of the comparison to look for similarities. In addition, the Jewish concepts have often been read as literary indeterminacy, as textual infinites. We will explore how the anekāntavāda position generally does not use inference or textuality, but the Jewish pluralism creates a cognitive pluralism based on inference and texts. We will also look at the concept of omniscient beings as transcending the plurality. Finally, we will conclude with observations on how the comparison to Kabbalah can illuminate Jain doctrine. Jeffery D. Long, Elizabethtown College Anekāntavāda and Dharmasamanvaya: How Jain Philosophy and Vijñāna Vedānta Can Inform One Another Abstract The Jain teaching of the non-one-sidedness of reality (anekāntavāda) is of great interest to philosophers and theologians who seek to apply this concept to the diversity of worldviews, in the name of developing a pluralistic philosophy aimed at cultivating greater harmony amongst the adherents of the world’s religions and philosophies. Similarly, a central teaching of Vijñāna Vedānta, the worldview propounded by the modern Hindu teacher Sri Ramakrishna and his pre-eminent disciple, Swami Vivekananda, is dharmasamanvaya, or the harmony of religions, which claims that many religions can lead to the goal of the realization of humanity’s true, divine nature. This paper will seek to outline how each of these doctrines can be enhanced by the other. Melanie Barbato, University of Munster Human/Non-human relations in Jainism and Christianity Abstract The starting point for this paper is the discussion of passages from the Ācārāṅgasūtra, which instruct the renouncer on the appropriate relation to non-human life. Further lessons about the interaction between human and non-human life can be taken from Jain art, such as the statues of Bahubali or Parshvanatha, whose iconography combines the human figure with animal or plant life. The paper will relate these Jain attitudes to passages and artistic depictions from Christianity. I will focus on the painting “Saint Francis with the Animals” by Lambert de Hondt and Willem van Herp the Elder and discuss how this painting exemplifies Christian ideals of human/non-human relationships in ways that are comparable to the Jain statues. The claim of the paper will be that the human is in both traditions not decentered in favor of the non-human but to direct the human’s attention to a higher reality. Venu Mehta, Claremont School of Theology Śakti and Bhakti: Juxtaposing Goddess in the Gujarati Śākta Songs of Jain and Cāraṇī Literature Abstract By approaching with the lens of comparative theology, this paper aims at reading literary compositions on the Jain Goddess Padmāvatī in the light of Goddesses in Cāraṇī literature. While goddess worship is integral to the Cāraṇs' theological and religious life, it has arguably remained marginal and relegated in Jain tradition. By reflecting on the distinction as mentioned earlier and then by ways of juxtaposing the similarities in the literary style, language, and motif used in both Jain and Cāraṇī literature on goddesses, I explore and discuss that Padmāvatī, a non-liberated female deity of the Jain pantheon is elevated as an object of bhakti; and śakti, the divine feminine energy in the same manner as goddesses are being depicted in Cāraṇī literature. By doing so, I address the tension and creative solution Jain literature uses to negotiate Padmāvatī's identity in Jain theological setting.
	A21-119 North American Religions Unit Theme: Women’s Health and Religion Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Grand Hyatt-Bowie B (Second Floor) Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto, Presiding This roundtable explores religion and women’s health in the modern world, addressing an important gap in the scholarship at the intersection of religious studies and the growing field of health humanities. Inspired by feminist epistemologies of “partial perspectives” (Haraway 1988, 1997), Claire Wendland’s Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles (2022) brings together narratives about maternal mortality to reveal how knowledge and meaning are made across a range of traditions and forms of expertise. Though the scholars that will take part in this discussion do not work on the same material, our imperfect analog to Wendland’s approach nonetheless allows us to draw out how knowledge and meaning about “women,” “religion,” “health,” and “modernity” are constituted. What do the stories we tell through our research share? What do they occlude? What kinds of moral claims are we, as scholars of religion, producing or legitimating through our methodological and theoretical choices? Panelists Andrew Walker-Cornetta, Georgia State University Cara Rock-Singer, University of Wisconsin Kristy Slominski, University of Arizona Yasmine Singh, University of North Carolina At Charlotte Ashlyn Strozier, Georgia State University Kristine Wright, Princeton University Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Stanford University Philippa Koch, Missouri State University Florence Pasche Guignard, Other
	A21-120 Philosophy of Religion Unit Theme: Latour and New Materialism Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 008B (River Level) Stephen Bush, Brown University, Presiding This panel concerns Bruno Latour and other figures associated with "new materialism" in ecological ethics, an ontology that strives to undo various dualisms in Western thought (for example, matter and mind; matter and meaning; nature and culture). In the wake of his passing and 10 years after the publication of his lectures on natural religion, we pay special attention to Latour's legacy for the study of religion, ecology, and/or science. We put Latour in conversation with other ecological thinkers, but also with phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Buddhist philosophy. Another key figure in new materialism is Karen Barad, and one paper explores the relation between Barad's work and phenomenology. Seth Auster-Rosen, The Interface of Bruno Latour and Buddhist Madhyamaka: Potential Futures in Latourian Thought Abstract While work has been done on Buddhism and ecology, and a few studies have been devoted to bringing together Buddhist ideas and those of Bruno Latour, it is remarkable that there has been virtually no comparative work done on Latour’s thought and that of one of Buddhism’s most highly developed philosophical traditions, Middle Way (Madhyamaka). In this paper I compare Latour’s thought in Facing Gaia and Irreductions to that of the Tibetan Buddhist philosphers Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa and Karmapa VIII Mikyö Dorje. By putting their ideas into conversations, I offer new ways forward in the tradition of Latour’s philosophy. Timothy Harvie, St. Mary's University Relations and Revolutions: Latour and Merleau-Ponty on Eco-Politics Abstract This paper analyzes the potential for an eco-political theology that is inclusive of participants in both animal and plant communities. It examines the nature politics and network theory of Bruno Latour in dialogue with ontology of flesh developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These are then re-constructed through an examination of often neglected lectures series by Merleau-Ponty where a Marxist revolutionary framework is applied to the natural relations between the human and more-than-human worlds. The paper concludes with constructive proposals for the participation of religious communities within such an eco-political theology that examines the role of grief and green criminology within an ecocidal industrial-extractive politics. Jack Hanson, Yale University Speculative Thought in Catholic Modernity: Latour, Haraway, Stengers Abstract In their study of modern scientific self-narration, the philosophers of science Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers offer a novel approach to the question of how to think philosophically about and with religion. The unifying factor between these thinkers is an engagement with Catholicism both as a historical institution and the signature of a philosophical idiom. Focusing on how their work emerges out of the fraught dual-identity of Catholicism, far from binding the act of critique to a given religious doctrine, instead opens a field of inquiry, discourse, and even contestation, out of which may spring new possibilities for speculative thought. Wesley Barker, Mercer University A Phenomenology of Touching Abstract This paper, drawn from a larger book project, will consider the discrete depictions of phenomenology of touch in the work of two contemporary theorists: Luce Irigaray and Karen Barad. Specifically, I consider the importance of touch as elaborated in Irigaray’s self-proclaimed “phenomenology of desire” (Sharing the Fire, Palgrave, 2022) and in Barad’s agential realism. In their preservation of radical alterity and their anti-metaphysical approach to materiality, both thinkers might be read in relation to the tradition of transcendental phenomenology. I focus on both thinkers’ recent works in which they imagine the very constitution of being in terms of touching, and in this way, they establish a certain ontology of touching—a relationality in difference that could ground a phenomenology of perception that preserves radical alterity. Importantly, these thinkers reimagine touch itself in a way toward a post-metaphysical materiality and transcendence.
	A21-121 Study of Judaism Unit Theme: Beyond the Maternal Turn Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007C (River 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 Maternal Subjectivity And/As 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. With appreciation for this book’s substantial contributions to our field, this paper considers how a more capacious account of maternal subjectivity might refashion the sources of Jewish thought were we to revise Benjamin’s work by weaving together the purported binary between abstract thought and embodied ways of knowing, and were we to consider maternal care capable of generating, rather than merely mirroring, theological and philosophical reflections. Drawing on feminist theories of breastfeeding, I explore how Benjamin’s scholarship could be extended to recouple embodiment and abstraction, thereby allowing for critical re-readings, rather than replications, of the sources of Jewish thought. Sarah Zager, Yale University “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 Rachel 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.
	A21-122 Chinese Religions Unit Theme: New Voices in Tiantai Studies Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221B (Meeting Room Level) Rongdao Lai, McGill University, Presiding In this panel, a group of early-career scholars seek to expand and deepen the field of Tiantai Studies. Collectively, our research utilizes understudied materials and brings old questions into dialogue with new perspectives. Our panel aims to facilitate a renewal of broader efforts to reexamine and explore different aspects of Tiantai, a rich, multi-faceted tradition. We contend that the study of the history of traditional Buddhist “schools” like Tiantai will continue to be important for the field. Our papers demonstrate how scholars can still effectively engage with a so-called “school,” and we focus on various iterations and dimensions of pre-modern Chinese Tiantai addressing topics spanning issues of doctrine, practice, and institution with the goal of bringing new perspectives to historical narratives. Xiaoming Hou, University of California, Berkeley Teaching Meditation, Constructing a Meditation System, or Teaching “How” to Expound Meditation Teachings Abstract This paper analyzes Zhiyi's 智顗 (538-597) “Shi chan boluomi cidi famen” 釋禪波羅蜜次第法門 (T1916) as an edited record of oral preaching on the subject of meditation rather than only a system for teaching the theory or the practice of meditation. By examining Zhiyi's characteristic methods of expounding individual meditation teachings, the paper argues that Zhiyi intended to teach his audience a systematic method to perform exegesis on meditation texts, rather than teaching meditation practice per se. The result of its application, achieved through the repetitive overlaying of exegetical structures and timely prescription of “homework”, serves this pedagogical goal. Furthermore, it shows that Zhiyi’s originality lies not just in his synthesis of “meditation theory”, but also in his dynamic way of preaching, which provides exegetical formulas capable of turning every transmitted teaching into his own teaching. Patrick Magoffin, Brown University An Alternative Tiantai Vision: Buddha-Nature in the Heretical Writings of Qiantang Tiantai Monks Abstract Vigorous debate arose in early Song (960-1279) Tiantai Buddhism during a period of institutional and intellectual flourishing. The “Home Mountain-Off Mountain” controversy, as this event came to be known, refers to the Song Tiantai schism and the initial doctrinal disputes from which it emerged. Each side offered competing interpretations of a fundamental ambiguity inherent in the writings of the Tang master Zhanran 湛然 (711-782). I focus on the development of the supposedly heretical Qiantang community’s soteriology which amalgamated “tathāgatagarbha” doctrine within their own vision of Tiantai orthodoxy. I explain how members sought to demonstrate Tiantai was capacious and flexible enough to accommodate “tathāgatagarbha” ideas through explanations grounded in the “Nirvana-sūtra” and Zhanran’s texts, as well as classical Tiantai thought. More broadly, I seek to illuminate the wider early Song embrace of “tathāgatagarbha” thought and its representative Chinese texts, a momentous shift towards buddha-nature in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Guttorm Gundersen, Harvard University Huiguang Ruone (1110-1191) and the Making of Upper Tianzhu Monastery in the Southern Song Abstract What became of the Tiantai school after the famous “Home Mountain-Off Mountain” debates of the early Northern Song? How did Tiantai monks assert their presence and relevance in a Buddhist landscape dominated by the Chan school? This paper is a step towards understanding the social-institutional history of the Tiantai school as it (re)emerged in the Buddhist world of the Song dynasty. It takes the career of Huiguang Ruone 慧光若訥 (1110-1191), abbot of the Upper Tianzhu Monastery (“Shang Tianzhu si” 上天竺寺) in Hangzhou, to argue for the elevation of the school to national importance in the early decades of the Southern Song (1127-1279). It explores how Ruone was made national Sangha Registrar (“senglu” 僧錄), thus situating his monastery at the political center of the Buddhist world for centuries to come. Jingyu Liu, Harvard University Negotiating Boundaries: A Comparative Study of the “Shuilu” (Water-Land) Ritual Traditions in Pre-Modern China Abstract During the 17th century, a Buddhist master called Zhixu智旭 (1599-1655) wrote a Memorial Statement in which he made a deliberate distinction between two “Shuilu” (“Water-and-Land”) ritual traditions known as the “Northern Shuilu” and “Southern Shuilu.” The “Southern Shuilu” is represented by a ritual manual compiled and redacted by two Tiantai Buddhist masters respectively in the 13th and 16th centuries, while the “Northern Shuilu,” with a murky origin, demonstrates a highly synthetic and esoteric feature. This paper compares these two “Shuilu” traditions with a particular focus on the sociopolitical contexts in which they were produced and practiced. It aims to explore the changing relationship between the Song Tiantai Buddhism and other religious traditions such as Esoteric Buddhism and Daoism by examining how the negotiations of sectarian boundaries and the doctrinal content of these rituals gave rise to the different ritual practices of the same soteriological goal of universal salvation. Responding Daniel B. Stevenson, University of Kansas
	A21-123 Christian Systematic Theology Unit Theme: Art and the Role of Human Making in Knowing the Divine Maker Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221A (Meeting Room Level) Lexi Eikelboom, Australian Catholic University, Presiding Among artists, art-making has been considered a form of knowing or thinking, which raises the question of whether engagement with art-making might influence the way we think about key theological ideas, particularly the idea of the divine maker and the role of human making in knowing this divine maker. The roundtable seeks to draw out the theological ideas that art-making might help illuminate and how it might do so by considering the relationship of making to action and contemplation, how art-making is distinctive as a kind of making, which theological concepts and doctrines might be especially served by approaching them in conversation with art-making, and how engaging with art-making illuminates the concept of God as maker. Thus, the panel offers a new way to engage art in the context of theology, not only in terms of imagery and narrative, but as an embodied practice that may generate new theological insights. Panelists Judith Wolfe, University of Saint Andrews Stephan Van Erp, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Ben DeSpain, Australian Catholic University Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto
	A21-124 Contemporary Islam Unit Theme: Representing, Performing, and Embodying Islam in Contemporary Contexts Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 210B (Meeting Room Level) Emma Thompson, Princeton University, Presiding This panel focuses on Muslims' engagement with the arts and aesthetic discourses, specifically literature, devotional music, and comedy. In the first paper, the author argues that modern literary criticism has reduced Urdu and Persian literature that depicts corporeal mannerisms of poets to hagiographical accounts, ignoring the important religious and ethical work that these pieces do in performing an “adab of remembrance” of elders. The second paper uses the concept of devotional interspace to explore how Bangladesh’s bicār gān (“songs of rumination”) can provide insights into Bengali Muslim modernity, arts transmission, and popular piety. The final paper highlights the history Muslim American comedy by focusing on the artistic origins of Preacher Moss, an early pioneer of Muslim clean comedy. Grounded in prophetic tradition Moss also cites the Black protest tradition and jazz musicians the as key influences on his career. Together, these papers challenge scholars to expand their understandings about how debates around devotional acts, ethics, authenticity play out in Muslims' every day lives. Abdul Manan Bhat, University of Pennsylvania Adoring Narrators: Islamic Adab of Remembrance and the Hagiographic Process in Modern Shā’ir-u Shakhṣiyat Texts across Persian and Urdu. Abstract The ‘Poet and Personality’ (shā’ir-u shakhṣiyat) exposition is a widely practiced mode of writing within twentieth century Urdu and Persian literary criticism that narrativizes the corporeal mannerisms of poets. Taking Faiz Ahmed and Khaliliullah Khalili as examples, I pay attention to how corporeal vocabulary like presence (huzūr), service (khidmat), and nearness (qurbat), turn Faiz and Khalili into "hagiographic subjects." Instead of disclaiming these texts for lack of literary rigor, as a number of modern critics have done, I see it more fruitful to highlight their engagement with a particular iteration of adab, a duty to publicly commit acts of remembrance for “one’s elders” (buzurgān). What are the “forms of expression and practice” that animate the ways in which the Islamic adab of remembrance is performed in the twentieth century, and how did newly emergent technologies, like cassettes and audio recordings, get conscripted as technologies of adab? Bertie Kibreah , University of South Florida Debate on the Dais: Shrine Performance and Interspaced Devotion in Bangladesh Abstract What does it mean for a stylized and shrine-based debate to be a devotional performance? Echoing recent works on contemporary Sufisms that highlight the intersectionality of communities, repertoires, and narratives, Bangladesh’s bicār gān (“songs of rumination”) is an extemporized wellspring for articulating concurrent devotional subjectivities. In this performance, a network of Sufi interlocutors engage in an aggregative musicality that combines versified, saintly, and polemical elements into a staged discourse on loss, alterity, and sometimes absurdism. Drawing attention to interlocking tropes in ritual theory, migration studies, and the anthropology of media, this discursive devotionalism can be understood as a series of interspaces that converge through pilgrimage routes, shrine committees, itinerant programming, stylized listening practices, and a popular folk music revival. Morgane Thonnart, University of California, Santa Barbara Preacher Moss Sets the Tone: The Hi-Story of American Muslim Comedy Abstract This paper addresses the "roots and routes" of American Muslim comedy by retracing the intentions of its pioneer, Preacher Moss, and considers how his narrative sets the tone for the articulation of so-called American Muslim comedy into the 21st century. This paper expands on the historical development of American Muslim comedy and situates ‘Muslim comedy’ within the traditions of both religious and charged humor, recognizing Islam as a praxis and marker of protest, identity and faith. Despite the centrality of 9/11 and its aftermath in the materials of American Muslim comedians, Preacher Moss’ early career and narrative complicate the systematic focus on 9/11 as the point of departure for the story of American Muslim comedy. Furthermore, the creedal and revolutionary expression of American Muslim comedy as defined by Preacher Moss complicates early conceptualizations of American Muslim comedy as ethnic comedy and expands our understanding of charged humor.
	A21-126 Religion and Politics Unit Theme: Authority and Autonomy in Contemporary Islam Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007B (River Level) Scott Culpepper, Dordt University, Presiding TBA Rachel M. Scott, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Transcending Modernity and the Centralized State: Ali Bulaç’s Reading of the Medina Document Abstract The so-called Constitution of Medina has often been used to buttress the idea that the centralized state is the principal medium through which an Islamic politics should be realized. Ali Bulaç, however, argues that the Document of Medina is a model for a radically decentralized and communitarian political system in which there is a considerable diffusion of legal authority. Such multi-faceted pluralism, which goes far beyond freedom of religion for Jews and Christians to encompass a variety of religious and ideological differences, puts considerable limits on the reach of the state. This paper argues that Bulaç goes much further than adopting a critical attitude against the state’s domination of religion or against the establishment of an Islamic state. It contends that Bulaç’s thought implies that a neutral state is not possible and, for this reason, seeks to limit the reach of any kind of state, thereby transcending “modernity itself.” Andrew Stone Porter, Bellarmine University Beyond the “Texas Taliban”: Islamic and Catholic Feminist Perspectives on Natural Law Abstract The SCOTUS conservative supermajority is dominated by Catholics, and the recent Dobbs decision discusses questions of human rights and ordered liberty which have their genesis in the tradition of Christian natural law theology. This paper urges against the temptation to conflate Dobbs and state abortion bans with conservative Islam (as critics do in referring to the “Texas Taliban” or “Christian Sharia”). Such slurs grossly misrepresent the diversity of Islamic jurisprudential views on abortion and of American Muslim opinion; they also prematurely foreclose Islamic and Christian feminist reappraisals of abortion. This paper undertakes an interfaith comparison of works by Zahra Ayubi and Cristina Traina, both of whom understand themselves to be recovering feminist natural law traditions as they reconsider women’s reproductive and other rights issues. Feminist commitments require focusing, not silencing the voices of those directly impacted. Ehsan Sheikholharam, University of North Carolina At Chapel Hill Devotional Labor and Philanthropy: The Political Theology of the Aga Khan Development Network Abstract Where are we to position the category of devotional labor within the panoply of capitalist economies of exchange? The Aga Khan Development Network is a multi-billion-dollar philanthropic network that provides aid to Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide. A large portion of the services provided by the Network is made possible through the devotional labor of the Ismailis—a minority Shi’a group who recognizes the Aga Khan IV (b. 1936) as their hereditary religious authority. What return comes from the gift of reverential service? This paper examines how the Aga Khan frames philanthropic work as an Islamic ethical virtue in balancing din, the mandates of religious life, with donya, the necessities of worldly life. This paper synthesizes Walter Mignolo’s notion of “salvation by development” and Max Weber’s “worldly politics” to argue that the Aga Khan Network rewrites devotional labor into a political theology that is aligned with the neoliberal “entrepreneurial philanthropy.”
	A21-127 Religions in the Latina/o Americas Unit Theme: Emerging Scholarship Workshop Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 212B (Meeting Room Level) Patrick Polk, University of California, Los Angeles, Presiding This format offers an opportunity for more substantive conversation about works in progress than the traditional panel presentation. This year, we will be discussing four exciting new projects exploring such thins as decoloniality, race, the environment, and popular devotion. The four authors will share a brief overview of their work for the benefit of the audience; and two respondents, who will have read the longer versions of the papers will share comments and questions designed to stimulate discussion and move the conversation forward. Audience questions and suggestions will follow. Stephen Di Trolio Coakley, Princeton Theological Seminary Steven Rizzo, Harvard University Emerging Scholarship -Enrique Dussel and the Legacy of Latin American Decolonial Christianity Abstract This paper seeks to engage with the literature of recent years of those theologians and theorists who are grappling with the manifold ways in which decolonial theory can be applied to the legacy of the Christian church, in its various expressions, across Latin America. The paper seeks to establish a historical tracing of the work of Enrique Dussel as a church historian and even “theologian”, in proposing new ways of situating the questions of decolonization to the complicated legacy of evangelization and missionization in the region. The paper then moves towards more contemporary iterations of decoloniality in working out this principle towards Christianity and theology broadly speaking. Sebastián Solarte-Caicedo, UCLA Analyzing Energy Evangelism in La Guajira, Colombia Abstract Based on a case study of a ranchería belonging to the Wayúu Indigenous community, this presentation will critically analyze the Colombian State’s historical omission of basic public services provision in rural communities of energy poverty (specifically, electricity) and how religious leaders (in this case, Catholic priests) supply this function as part of their work in these areas. The analysis will raise possible cultural impacts derived from connecting the provision of these public services with beliefs traditionally unfamiliar to these communities, including both how priests’ views have shifted over time (including what is adaptable to Christianity and what remains of particular Wayúu culture), as well as how the community’s beliefs have shifted about energy and the environment. Jeffrey Sanchez, Stanford University Deadly Futures: Santa Muerte and Her Many Temporalities (Emerging Scholarship Session) Abstract The cult of Santa Muerte (Saint Death/Holy Death) has had a spectacular rise in popularity across borders over the past ten years. It has also risen in popularity among scholars, who have focused on using archival accounts to prove or disprove a connection between the modern Santa Muerte movement and Indigenous religions. These historical approaches have ignored and obstructed the voices of devotees. I instead center Santa Muerte devotees' devotional materials, bodily practices, and voices. I argue that by taking these materials into account Santa Muerte becomes a space not only for critique of historical scholarship but also a saint that represents the endless possibilities of a Latinx past and future. Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch, University of Dayton EMERGING SCHOLARSHIP-People, Places, and Virtual Spaces: Communities Supported Through a Dialogue with the Digital-An Exploration of the Digital Spaces Bolstering the Cult of La Virgen de la Puerta Abstract This paper explores the promotion of the cult of La Virgen de la Puerta, in Otuzco, Peru through contemporary digital spaces. This cult, which has been variously celebrated in Peru for over 350 years, has a new medium for celebration, the virtual ‘space’ of FaceBook. Virtual media is controversial in the field of academic theology. I will explore various viewpoints surrounding this controversy. I will then examine two specific posts from FaceBook to see the ways in which this space promotes a particular kind of community. I argue that there is a kind of ‘space’ being engaged in this virtual format and that a form of embodiment is occurring for individuals engaging in devotional activities in this space. Both the features of the space and the ways in which individuals engage in embodiment are important for the Church to contemplate as virtual spaces become more ubiquitous across the world. Responding Daisy Vargas, University of Arizona Jessica Delgado, Ohio State University
	A21-128 South Asian Religions Unit Theme: Current crisis, longstanding difficulties: Religion and politics in Sri Lanka Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 214A (Meeting Room Level) Neena Mahadev, Yale-NUS College, Presiding This roundtable features five panelists working on the broad and timely topic of crisis in Sri Lanka. Their diverse research will highlight various aspects of political, social and economic entanglements with religion in modern Sri Lanka. This will shed a light on the ongoing political and economic crisis in Sri Lanka since March 2022 - a crisis that influenced the research and collaborative networks of scholars and activists working in Sri Lanka in various ways as well. Ranging from the 18th century (Sri Lankan-Thai entanglements), over late colonial times (Buddhist reformist movement and early feminism) to contemporary examples (the GotaGoHome movement and Ravana-interpretations), this roundtable unlikely brings together scholarship on Sri Lanka including historical, ethnographic, and literary approaches to illuminate the immense importance of religious actors and religious communalism in Sri Lankan politics by engaging in religious, linguistic, political, and identitarian disputes and moments of change. Panelists Jessica Albrecht, Heidelberg University Justin Henry, Georgia College & State University Tyler A. Lehrer, University of Wisconsin–Madison Bernardo Brown, International Christian University, Japan Anushka Kahandagama, University of Otago
	A21-129 Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit Theme: The Vicissitudes of Voluntas: Theology, Law, and the Terms of Modern Order Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 225D (Meeting Room Level) Timothy Snediker, University of California, Santa Barbara, Presiding Early modern jurisprudence was a site at which the Indian’s relationship to justice was decided, giving birth to new theological forms of law and legitimacy; but the African slave’s relationship to questions of justice and legitimacy remained undetermined. This panel investigates the relation between theology, philosophy, and law through the aperture of race and the construction of the difference between the voluntary and the involuntary. Panelists will explore how the rhetorical and philosophical conjunction “voluntary slavery” opens new genealogical lines of inquiry between freedom and unfreedom, will and coercion in Christian theology, early modern jurisprudence, and modern political philosophers from Hobbes to Spinoza. While critical theorists continue to engage the particular moral and political dimensions of a modern subjectivity produced through subjection, focusing on the peculiar voluntarism of the modern subject, this panel will shift emphasis, exposing how “voluntary slavery” is also productive of distinct forms of slavery. Sara-Maria Sorentino, University of Alabama Voluntary Enslavement: The Jesuit Voiding of Slavery’s Legitimacy Abstract This paper investigates a largely forgotten 1567 debate early between two Jesuit missionaries in Brazil as a cipher for growing anxieties around the enslavement of the wrong people. Influential Jesuit leader Manuel da Nóbrega’s argument against voluntary slavery sought to continue his reformist Aldeias, while relative newcomer Quirício Caxa, disinclined by his superior’s ardent belief in the redeeming power of persuasion and conversion, argued native peoples can sell themselves into slavery if they so choose. Following Sylvia Wynter, I identify another dimension of the encounter: the necessary suspension of the justice of African’s enslavement. Drawing attention to the Jesuit debate’s importance for emerging conceptions of subjective right, I argue that blackness is the point where all origin stories of slavery—war, debt, nature, will—condense and can be seen as legitimate without just cause, in ways that have profound consequence for secularizing narratives that reverberate through contract theory and political economy. Sean Capener, University of Toronto Kant’s Doubled Slave: Theological Jurisprudence and Law before Justice Abstract This paper tracks a doubling of the slave in Kant’s repudiation of ‘contractual slavery’ in the Metaphysics of Morals, placing it in the context of early modern theological and jurisprudential debates over the status of the voluntary slave in the Americas and the West Indies. I argue that Kant–in line with a long history of theological debate–positions the racial slave ‘outside’ the question of justice. But in line with the dictates of the critical philosophy, he also insists that whoever is rational must see all things, even those that fall outside the ambit of morality and right, as law-governed. The racial slave’s unspoken status in Kant’s philosophy is thus extrajudicial, but not extralegal; while the legitimate slave is ‘no longer’ a person in the eyes of justice, for the racial slave, justice–not only as achievement but as possibility and demand–is ‘not yet.’ Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Living Images of Redemption: The Salvational Promise of Slavery in the Political Legitimation of the Freedmen Abstract Black Emancipation marks a paradigm shift in the political and theological reproduction of the image of freedom. Under the call of the theological imitation of Christ and the political imitation of the free laborer, the formerly enslaved came to be known under the banner of the Freedmen. This image of freedom served to cultivate black and national political and social unity by reorienting the significance of blackness’ political theological and ontological status as slaveness. A near indelible mark of a social disinheritance, post-Emancipation writings see black people’s journey from slavery to Emancipation as living images that tell of God’s redemptive work. Through education and exhortation to take on the form of the Freedmen, they incarnate domestic and civic virtue and so legitimate the truth of Christian and national redemption. Read from the underside, we can see the figure of the Freedmen as an instrument for resolving the crisis of black political and theological illegitimacy. By redirecting the significance of blackness, the Freedmen aim to reproduce a redeemable form of black subjectivity by making willful agents in the narration of black subjection as incarnating the truth of Christian and national redemption. Marika Rose, University of Winchester The Father’s Fault: Sovereignty, Fraternity and Demonology Abstract The theological problem of evil is also a problem of sovereignty. Manicheanism - the possibility of two sovereign powers, rather than one - lurks in the background of Christian accounts of the devil. If power has been thought in divine terms, how are the ideas of sovereignty inherited from Christianity transposed into political philosophy so as to enable an account of politics which recognises the existence of multiple legitimate powers - multiple sovereign nations? How does this shift shape early modern political philosophers’ understanding of power - both divine and demonic? This paper will explore the role of demonology in Hobbes’ account of political sovereignty, suggesting that it is only by removing God from the sphere of history and demythologising demonology that Hobbes is able to effect a transition from the paternal patriarchy of the medieval world to the fraternal patriarchy of early modernity. Responding Taija Mars McDougall, University of California, Santa Cruz
	A21-130 Women and Religion Unit Theme: Contesting Patriarchy: Diverse Global Perspectives Then and Now Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM San Antonio Convention Center-Room 005 (River Level) Tracy McEwan, University of Newcastle, Australia, Presiding Women’s participation in religious institutions and movements continues to be limited by heteropatriarchal attitudes and cultures. Even in societies where women have made some gains towards equality, women's rights are still contested. This session critically engages with the notion of patriarchy across global contexts. It asks the questions: Have women fully gained equality? How does heteropatriarchy function to limit women's equality and agency? How do gender, race and class intersect with colonialism supported by heteropatriarchy even today? What strategies have women used "then and now" to challenge heteropatriarchal domination? In this session presenters from three different global contexts will engage with these questions. Some of the strategies that presenters propose include decolonising feminism and decolonising memory. Papers interrogate the ways in which intersectionality and predominantly white, male leadership structures perpetuate colonial legacy and how feminism can sometimes be co-opted to further the interests of heteropatriarchy rather than women themselves. Victoria Slabinski, University of Virginia Decolonial Feminism and the Imagination of the (Pre)Colonial Past: Gloria Anzaldúa and Marcella Althaus-Reid on Religion and Memory Abstract To what extent should heterosexist patriarchy be understood as a Western modern/colonial invention, as opposed to an oppressive system with origins that can be traced prior to Western colonization? This paper addresses this question through an interpretative-comparative account of Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Indecent Theology (2000), in which queer decolonial feminist scholars Gloria Anzaldúa and Marcella Althaus-Reid respond to histories of colonialism in Mesoamerican and Latin American contexts. Each offers a different way of framing the precolonial past: while Anzaldúa roots her mestiza consciousness in suppressed matriarchal and feminist histories, Althaus-Reid’s argument emphasizes the continuity of patriarchy across empires and always-structurally-marginal eruptions of resistance. This paper discusses the value and limitations of these contrasting images of pre-Spanish-colonial life, concluding by offering constructive proposals for a mode of decolonial memory that honors feminist and queer histories without dependence on a particular image of the past. Rosie Shorter, Western Sydney University Whiteness, Masculinity and Sydney Anglicanism: Reading the Sydney Anglican Diocese through the lens of intersectionality and critical menstruation studies. Abstract Intentional intersectional analysis has, until recently, been largely missing from the sociology of religion (Page and Yip 2021). This paper revisits Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) pioneering work on intersectionality as an analytical framework to understand structural oppression, combined with insights gained from critical menstruation studies, to explore how leadership and power in the Sydney Anglican Diocese is embodied, gendered and raced. This paper addresses a simple question, why are there (still) so many white men leading the Sydney Anglican church? I offer a feminist, sociological and intersectional discussion, which is illuminated by life-stories collected from Sydney Anglicans during the course of my PhD fieldwork. I present the overwhelmingly white and male diocesan leadership structure as a colonial legacy. This reading of the gendered and raced colonial legacies which persist in the diocese today can operate as a case study in broader discussions on evangelicalism, and on decolonizing the study of religion. Yanan Lu, Graduate Theological Union The Contributions of Chinese Christian Women to the Feminist Discourse in China From 1912 to 1949 Abstract In my research into male intellectuals who promoted feminist discourse in late Qing dynasty and early Republic of China , I have discovered that they were not primarily motivated by a desire to benefit women. Instead, their focus was on serving larger purposes such as their country, society, culture, and their own interests as male intellectuals. They saw women's emancipation as a means to achieve these larger goals, rather than as an end in itself. On the other hand, Chinese women who promoted feminism in China after the 1920s were more actively pursuing liberal women's rights. They explored the collective power of women and demonstrated a deep concern for other oppressed women. Notably, three Christian women, Ding Shujing(丁淑静), Wang Liming（王立明）, and Zeng Baosun（曾宝蓀）, made significant contributions to empowering women and advancing feminism in China.

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