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.


	A26-113 Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit Theme: Art and Literation as Intervention Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Convention Center-30C (Upper Level East) M. Cooper Harriss, Indiana University, Bloomington, Presiding Work in the study of Arts, Literature, and Religion has tended most often to read and reflect on cultural expression through ideas, themes, and texts deemed religious, theological, spiritual, secular, philosophical, and ethical (to name a few). What would it mean to reverse this course, effectively understanding expressive texts, artifacts, repertoire, and phenomena to intervene actively in (rather than to respond to) discourses understood to be religious, theological, secular, philosophical, or ethical? What difference does this reversal of readings make? What aspects, functions, and significances of artistic expression, broadly construed, illuminate the condition or experience of being human, of living and working in community? Is art uniquely capable of doing this? How and why does this matter—both generally and within the particularities that generate identity and other social and political aspects of human experience? These papers take up this series of questions, turning their attention to a diverse array of interventions—ranging from neuroaesthetics, liturgical sign language, and theopoetical practice to expressions of indigeneity and combatting the dehumanization of incarceration—situated in a variety of religious contexts. Jessica Wong, Azusa Pacific University Art of Racial Reconciliation: The Pneumatological Potential of Aesthetic Encounter in Reimagining Race, Reshaping the Brain, and Realizing the Kingdom Abstract Art has long been utilized by people of color to express and even bring healing to the wounds inflicted by racism. But what of art as a tool of reconciliation? What role might aesthetic experiences, including the act of creating, play in challenging the dominant racial imaginary that shapes how we see the world? And how might these encounters be understood pneumatologically? Art can rewire our brains, reshaping the weight or meaning given to people, places, and things. It can prime pathways for new meaning making. Drawing upon research in neuroaesthetics, this paper considers more than the potential of art to address the negative effects of racial trauma, but, pushing beyond current literature, it entertains the possibility of art’s intervention into how prejudicial ways of thinking shape the brain. Delightfully improvisational and often messy, meaningful aesthetic experiences, like the Spirit, have a way of moving us beyond ourselves, beyond our expectations and comfortable boundaries, and toward significant encounter that can then give rise to something new – to a new narrative, to a new conception of family, to a new way of seeing that moves us beyond our given racial imaginary. Grant Showalter-Swanson, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary Theopoetics and Praxis: Imagination and Poetic Expression as God-Talk Abstract Contemporary conversations around theopoetics tend to define it as a critical method for theologizing and engaging God-talk that is attentive to the limitations of language. Given the mysterious and creative nature of the divine, creative arts generally, and poetry specifically, provide an imaginative framework to engage the divine. I argue that the field of theopoetics must be more attentive to the dynamic of praxis through the practice of art and poetry creation amidst analysis and theological God talk, lest theopoetics confine artistic expression and imaginative creation to professionalism and expertise. This presentation challenges current understandings of theopoetics by centering praxis, names theologians and theorists who craft poetry amidst their theoretical work, and invites participants to a time of imaginative reflection and artistic creation. How might God meet you here? In your own creative wisdom and response? Paloma Sanchez, Harvard Divinity School The sacred presences in Taoltsin to nemilis a series created by Mixteyot Vázquez Abstract On the evening of the 28th of September of 2023, Mixteyot Vázquez inagurated his first solo exhibition with the painting series Taoltsin to Nemilis. Mixteyot Vázquez is a Maseual artist from San Miguel Tzinacapan, an indigenous community in central Mexico. His exhibition featured six oleo paintings, five of them depicting scenes from the liturgical dance Danza de los Tejoneros. The last painting is a portrait of the sculpture of Tzinacapan’s patron saint, St. Michael Archangel. In this paper, I examine Taoltsin to nemilis as an actor that allows us to understand how Mesoamerican Religious traditions and Catholicism are intertwined in a contemporary indigenous community. Furthermore, I argue that the paintings encapsulate divine presences from the two religious’ worldviews. Imbued by these divine presences, the paintings were welcomed in the main religious feast of Tzinacapan, as an offering to maintain the balance of the universe and guarantee human and non-human life. Kimberly Veney, Black American Sign Language As Liturgy Abstract Black American Sign Language (BASL) is an embodied language expressing language, emotion, culture, and spirituality. It is often seen as a poetic expression and invoking a dancer's narration. Black Church Liturgy, often expressed in song, word, and dance, disproportionately recognizes BASL as an equal function. This paper invites the Black Deaf Community, Black interpreters, faith leaders, and interested Hearing community members to embrace Black ASL as a worship praxis. Peter Dickson, New Hampshire Public Defenders How Art Resists: Creative Expressions of Incarcerated Artists at Maximum-Security Prison for Women Abstract This paper reflects on an art class at a women's maximum-security prison. Here, art stands as a defiant counterpoint to the system's dehumanization. Prisons reduce individuals to numbers and enforce singular narratives. Philosopher Merleau-Ponty argues that our bodies are central to how we experience the world, but prisons, a site of bodily confinement, disrupt this. Art becomes a "second layer of flesh," offering two key insights: 1) Reclaiming Subjectivity: incarcerated artists express their inner selves through art, defying the prison's narrative. Paintings become a window into their complexities and experiences. 2) Social Connection: The act of creation fosters connection. It's not just about the physical act of creating, but the web of experiences and relationships woven into the art. This reminded the incarcerated artists that they were part of a larger social fabric, not isolated units. While art doesn't offer simple solutions, it challenges the prison's one-dimensional view. Art pushes us to re-imagine systems that value the whole person.
	A26-115 Body and Religion Unit Theme: Violent Bodies, Beautiful Bodies, Othered Bodies Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Convention Center-30E (Upper Level East) Gwendolyn Gillson, Illinois College, Presiding Bodies can be envisioned in a multitude of ways that simultaneously help and hinder the religious imagination and experience: the flesh of a fat body reimagined as absently thin in the afterlife, the digital and simultaneously enfleshed body in the Zoom box, the malleable yet rigid embodiment of transness. This panel brings together five papers to think through the interconnection between bodies considered to be “other” and the associations of both violence and beauty that attend othered bodies. Based in theories of the body, this panel strives to envision bodies within religious spaces and identities that work through both positive and negative processes of enfleshment. Phil Davis, Northwestern University Future Bodies Now: Dead-raising and Immortality in Modern Christianity Abstract Since the first century, some Christians have brought dead bodies back to life through prayer. While hardly ubiquitous, dead-raising is part of the supernatural landscape of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. According to William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival, Jesus commanded it. This paper explores dead-raising around Bethel Church, a charismatic evangelical California megachurch with international influence. I argue that dead-raising offers scholars a rich, albeit unnerving opportunity to examine our frameworks for studying time, death, and religious bodies. When the dead rise, the forward march of time is reversed. Moreover, dead-raisers argue that the imperishable resurrection bodies of the distant future—the “eschaton”—become available now such that nobody has to die, full stop. To examine dead-raising is to pursue the breadth of Christian supernatural practice and Christians’ always shifting engagement with death. It is to resist burying the sources of our discomfort in the religious worlds we study. Hannah Bacon, University of Chester A Future without Fat? Christian Eschatology and the Violence of Fat Phobia Abstract According to Euro-American discourse, fat people, and fat women in particular, lack a future. Not only are fat persons more likely to die prematurely, fatness presents as a threat to the future of the nation comparable with Covid and the climate crisis. Within this narrative, fatness emerges as a ‘biopolitical problem’ (Evans, 2009) that takes shape in the present through the futurizing of fatness. Lurking behind such dreams of a fat-free future is a set of misogynist and racist assumptions as well as the entrenched fat phobic belief that fat people, especially women, are disposable. However, such a futurizing of fat is also resourced by Western Christian ideas about eschatological bodies. Through an engagement with Augustine’s presentation of fatness and future heavenly bodies, I explore how the theological futurizing of fat can incentivise a hearty celebration of fatness, opening up history to alternative possibilities to the fat-shaming present. Maja Whitaker, Laidlaw College Perfectly beautiful, slim, and able?: Confounding expectations of eschatological embodiment Abstract The Christian hope for the future body is of perfection on the other side of resurrection—but what does embodied perfection entail? Many people in Christian faith communities share the assumptions of modern Western culture, uncritically absorbing and reproducing its stigmatising assumptions and body-shaming practices. This shapes their expectations of what the perfected resurrection body might look: slim, beautiful, and non-disabled. I will use a multi-layered account of identity to propose that the continuity of identity-forming embodied features is required to safeguard the continuity of identity through the transformation of resurrection. While we must admit a modest agnosticism regarding the actual outcome, the possibility of persons with disabilities and bodies of all sizes, shapes, and colours flourishing in the new creationchallenges our underlying assumptions about what bodies are good bodies. I will argue that human flourishing lies not in aesthetic flawlessness but in the fulfillment of the body’s telos. Adriana Rivera, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary More Than a Zoom Box on Legs: Locating Women of Color in Virtual Learning Landscapes of Theological Education Abstract This paper explores how racialized and gendered meaning-making occurs online by engaging feminist theorists in phenomenology, digital anthropology and biotechnology. This paper then considers the pedagogical implications of how the virtual bodies of women of color are located, perceived, and acted upon in the virtual learning landscape of theological education. These understandings are crucial to the application of engaged pedagogy in the virtual leaning landscape. Recognizing that to show up as one’s full self is to become vulnerable to violence, this paper concludes with an invitation to pedagogical promiscuity, an embodied learning approach that aims toward liberation for all learners. Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Mount Royal University “Flesh of my Flesh:” Trans Bodies, Biological Family, and Interdependent Flesh Abstract In Alberta, Canada, current Premier Danielle Smith banned bottom surgery for transgender youth, despite the fact that no kids have received bottom surgery. Smith’s policies create the trans youth body as a site of panic and of parental control. “Body” and “flesh” are laden with Christian history, which marks some bodies as sinful and claims flesh as the defining characteristic of family bonds. Read through Hortense Spillers and the incarnation, flesh becomes a site of generative possibility, of interdependence. Interdependent flesh persists where the legal and normative family fails, allowing the wild creativity of gender diverse children to flourish as part of queer community.
	A26-116 Christian Systematic Theology Unit Theme: Spirit, Violence, and the Transformation of Context Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Convention Center-29D (Upper Level East) Andre Price, Villanova University, Presiding . Eugene Schlesinger, Santa Clara University Love Shed Abroad: The Holy Spirit, Charity, and the Sacrifice of Christ’s Body Abstract This paper considers at least some of the pneumatological dimensions of redemption through a particular focus on what Bernard Lonergan called “the just and mysterious law of the cross,” with an eye towards the subversion of notions of redemptive violence. Elements of Lonergan's trinitarian theology, and particularly the way in which the missions of the Word and Holy Spirit elevate human beings to share in the life of the Trinity through charity — the same charity that informed Christ's redemptive act, and which is given to the redeemed in and as the Holy Spirit — provide the fundamental theological basis. This is further refined by M. Shawn Copeland's womanist appropriation of these categories, calling for a eucharistic solidarity, which keeps alife the dangerous memory of the lynched Jesus, thereby undercutting any recourse to sacral violence, while also recognizing the reality of violence within history and the redemption enacted in history. Patrick Haley, Princeton Theological Seminary Mourning the Scapegoated Christ: An Incarnational Political Theology of the Persecuted Savior Abstract The last months have witnessed a worldwide spike in antisemitic and Islamophobic violence as communities are scapegoated for events thousands of miles away. This reality demands a response from theologians, especially given our historical complicity in such violence. Queer and political theologians have begun addressing scapegoating violence, but their proposals do not explain theology’s significance beyond the ecclesial community. I argue for a political theology that deploys practices of mourning to position the church (as Christ’s body) against the political powers responsible for victimization. The goal is twofold: first, that religious communities liberate themselves from the privilege enabling them to enact scapegoating violence; and, second, that believers would be formed into people who stand in solidarity with, or even in front of and in defense of, other victims. Normed by Christ and trained by the eucharist, Christians “complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” by suffering for others’ sake. Elsa Marty, Institute for Vaishnava Studies Critical Engagement with Context: A Pneumatological Approach to Context’s Capacity for Revelation Abstract Contextual theology, by drawing attention to the ways in which context affects theology, has critically reshaped the way we do and think about theology. From a contextual perspective, theology is merely speculative or naively subjective unless theologians acknowledge the contextual underpinnings of their work. But the concept of “context” itself warrants critical examination as well. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with Adivasi (indigenous) Christians in India, this paper offers a critique of the way context functions in contextual theology and proposes a new way of understanding the revelatory capacity of our contexts. Building upon the work of Kathryn Tanner and Kevin Hector on the mediation of the Spirit, I argue that the Spirit works through our negotiation of diverse perspectives on context. My emphasis is on the disruptive potential of the Spirit, who draws us into relationship with others who interpret and engage with our contexts in different ways. Christopher Whyte, University of St. Andrews The Spirit Moves: An Ethical Pneumatology of Upheaval Abstract In conversation with Amos Yong, Ashon T. Crawley, Keri Day, and J. Kameron Carter, I present my own account of an ethical pneumatology describing the Spirit's work to bring upheaval to communities suffering under injustice. In support of that account, I trace the pneumatologies at play in the Azusa Street Revival. Yong notes that phenomenological pneumatologies were utilized to sanction white supremacist attacks against Azusa, while ethical pneumatologies were cited by Azusa’s leaders to justify the countercultural character of their worship. Crawley contends that where Azusa did affirm aesthetics, it was in the privileging of incoherence— through the gift of glossolalia—so that persons and communities might be liberated from the settler colonial logics developed to justify white supremacist dominance. By engaging these analyses, I consider the ongoing entanglement of aesthetic pneumatologies with white supremacy and articulate how ethical pneumatologies can better resist the same.
	A26-118 Religion and Politics Unit Theme: The Theopolitics of Martyrdom Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Convention Center-28B (Upper Level East) Adam Stern, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Presiding The figure of the martyr simultaneously inspires awe and reverence, anxiety and suspicion. Various religious traditions interpret and sanction the martyr as a divine model of witness, sacrifice, and love. In secular translations, the martyr is read as a sacrificial figure of social/political cause. In this way, martyrdom has a highly variegated grammar, with religious and secular iterations, but ultimately pertains to a question of relation to truth, in speech and at times, in dying. The martyr bears witness and testifies to truth, in preparation to struggle and give up one’s life for it. While the idea of martyrdom translates suffering and death into a particular grammar, it also holds within it affective frames of collective memory and movement. This roundtable seeks to think through the sociopolitical figure of the martyr between life/death by way of the theological and anthropological—using poetic, visual, and creative variations of language and grammar. Panelists Sarah Bakker Kellogg, San Francisco State University Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley Candace Lukasik, Mississippi State University Basit Iqbal, University of California, Berkeley Randeep Hothi, University of Michigan Shahla Talebi, Arizona State University
	A26-129 South Asian Religions Unit Theme: Can You Believe the Mess? Confusion and Method in the Study of Nepalese Religion Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Hilton Bayfront-Indigo D (Second Level) Rachelle Saruya, University of Toronto, Presiding Inspired by the seminal 1989 ethnography by Bruce McCoy Owens about an annual Nepalese festival which pays particular attention to the power unleashed by its “messiness,” this panel has scholars confront “the mess” they deal with in their current research and explore ways in which we can divert the field from its persistence on the ordering forces at work in concepts like caste, ritual, asceticism, cosmology, colonialism, knowledge systems, and institutional history, paradigmatic of a fixation on the containment of “mess” that holds the danger to be mimetic onto its object and to reproduce the stereotype of a intrinsically chaotic South Asia persistently called to order by itself and by others. This panel asks whether there is a way to stay with “the mess” (in the sense of “staying with the trouble”) in South Asian religion without either teleologically subordinating it to or purposefully excluding it from the production of order. Christoph Emmrich, University of Toronto Finding and Making a Mess. Illegible Fieldnotes, Wayward Translations, and the Undecided Archive of Newar Religion Abstract This talk is about what happens when those who are involved in Newar religion co-produce an environment that is neither ordered nor disordered, yet as if both calling for order and accepting what may seem like the absence of order, its inhabitants being both troubled by it and yet willing to go with the flow. Sharing moments in which it remains undecided when and how the mess happed and who caused it, only knowing that both my research partner and I are involved in it, I will talk about the relation between conversation and note-taking (interview), the suspension of understanding in the heterolingual (translation), and the interruption of the textual by the material (manuscripts). I want to talk about how in the period of engagement something else emerges that is neither order nor its other, but which may be better understood as a situation that is suspended and still open. Monalisa Maharjan, Social Science Baha “Even if we have COVID We Want Our Chariot Procession!” Understanding the Importance of Public Sentiment in Heritage Through the Conflict During the COVID-19 Chariot Procession Abstract The chariot procession of Karunamaya – the god of compassion is one of the major festivals in the city of Patan and Bungamati which is five kilometers from Patan. Every year the chariot goes through the ancient city of Patan and every twelve years from Bungamati to Patan with the belief of good rain for a good harvest. Communities carry out the procession with fanfare, even people from other cities and villages participate during the procession. In 2020, during the time of COVID-19, the chariot was stranded on the street for several months without any certainty of procession. So one ordinary day local people started pulling chariots which led to conflict. This paper focusing on that event will try to understand the reasons and factors behind the conflict as well as underlying issues and the solutions brought by the mess. Alana Sá Leitão Sá Leitão, University of Toronto In Between The Everyday and The Extraordinary of a New Fieldwork: How Christians in Nepal Defy Multiple Classifications Abstract To research Christianity in Nepal is to fall in-between, in-between the scope of research on Nepal and the scope of research on Christianity, where concepts and classifications do not seem prepared to grasp what is happening in the everyday lives of my interlocutors. However, the messiness goes far beyond my own struggles to find the proper theoretical and methodological tools to reach the field. Christianity is still quite new for most Nepalis. For my interlocutors, ordinary life is permeated by the extraordinary as they first encounter Christian teachings and technologies for creating their lives anew. This means that consensus around practices, abstinences, or even the numbers of faithful are difficult to find. This presentation is about the messiness of researching a field that is new to me, that is new for its two parent disciplines, and most of all that is being newly formed by the people who take part in its projects. Austin Simoes-Gomes, University of Toronto It’s a Bloody Mess! Newar Buddhist Sacrifice in Nepal Abstract A sacrificial arena, initially tidy with carefully arranged paraphernalia in straight lines, is now a bloody mess. The body of a goat to one side, blood splattered everywhere, and rigor mortis slowly setting in to the quivering sheep’s body. Parallelly, ask any ethnographer to tell you stories from their research period and you will elicit a stream of tales regarding the mess of it all. However, in academia, the tendency to write out the messy dynamics of these processes remains. In thinking intersubjectively about ethnographic data related to the performance of the sacrificial ritual to the Buddhist goddess Hāratī called chāhāyekegu, this paper argues that mess is an everyday reality not something out of the ordinary. Mess is an integral part of social research that seeks to portray more accurately and sensitively the everyday. Ian Turner, University of Toronto "Where Is it Still Dirty?" A Day of Ghost Hunting for Gathāṃ Mugaḥ Abstract On gathāṃ mugaḥ, one cleans the house. Of what? The dirt of the rice planting season, certainly, but what hitches a ride with that dirt? Or who? Ghosts, bhut, pret. There are elaborate rites for this kind of house cleaning, from the individual residence to the neighborhood. Bundles of thorns are carried burning through each room of the house, top to bottom. Six-foot-tall strawmen with explicit male genitalia of round fruits and cotton are paraded burning through the streets by young men shouting sexualized phrases. But not everywhere. Not everywhere is it still dirty enough. For who still plants rice in June and July? The ground floor is now a garage, home office, reception room, not a barn. This paper recreates a single day spent in search of a 'proper' gathāṃ mugaḥ, and of the forms of life we negate when all the mess becomes yecu picu, neat and clean. Responding Bruce Owens, Wheaton College, MA
	A26-119 Study of Islam Unit Theme: A Contested and Imagined Muslim World: Twentieth Century Islamic Revival Movements Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Convention Center-29B (Upper Level East) Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Presiding In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century poor colonial conditions led Muslims to theorize their own decline and subsequently, antidotes to this perceived decline, including notions of pan-Islamic solidarity and the invocation of an imagined Muslim world, a world beyond the borders and dictates of nation-states. Islamic revival movements flourished in this period, as Muslims used Islam to articulate resistance to systems of domination, from British colonial rule in India, to Jim Crow in the United States. Together these papers present a complex portrait of Islamic twentieth century revival movements, which were both intensely local in their stakes and articulation, but also connected to larger global networks and trends. The twentieth century was a time of vast diversity in Islamic theological expression. At the same time as these distinct movements proliferated, appeals to an imagined, unified Muslim world and an idealized, all-encompassing Muslim identity increased. Yasmine Flodin-Ali, University of North Carolina At Chapel Hill The Sacred Geographies of Twentieth Century Muslim Americans Abstract This paper examines conceptions of sacred geography invoked by two Muslim groups in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA). Geographic touchstones for both groups included Chicago, the American South, India, Asia, and Africa. This seemingly eclectic mix of locations, ranging from cities to regions to continents, were consecrated and stitched together through repeated invocations in community newspapers and periodicals. The idea of a Muslim world provided the Ahmadiyya and MSTA with a vision in which their small burgeoning groups in the United States could be understood as integral components of much larger global forces. Categorization is a means of establishing mastery of knowledge, and in mapping out these geographic assemblages, the Ahmadiyya and MSTA groups presented different visions of racialized understandings of Muslim identity that would eliminate racial inequality. Aala Abdelgadir, University of Pittsburgh Conservative Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa: Examining the role of Arab Education Abstract Over the last fifty years, Islamic fundamentalism, marked by scripturalism and an emphasis on purification of Islamic customs, has emerged in sub-Saharan Africa. Motivated by this seismic transformation, this chapter examines how and why Islamic fundamentalism emerged in African countries. I trace the role of educational exchange with Islamic institutions in Arab countries in serving as a key channel for the diffusion of conservative ideas from the Arab world into African countries. I particularly focus on al-Azhar University in Egypt and the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia as two prominent educational institutions where reformist ideas were dominant during the mid- and late-twentieth century. Through case studies from East and West Africa, I show that beneficiaries of educational exchange played a key role in founding reformist Islamic organizations that facilitate the diffusion of conservative ideas in African countries. Mafaz Al-Suwaidan, Harvard University Muslim Movements & the Rise of a New World Order Abstract From 1928-1930, three Muslim movements emerged that would garner mass followings: the Muslim Brothers in Egypt; the Tijani Fayḍah in Senegal; and the Nation of Islam in the U.S. Each led large-scale social mobilization efforts and attempted participation in local politics. All three challenged the societies in which they functioned, as well as the twin pillars of the emerging postwar world order: secularization and political liberalism. These movements are often differentiated from one another through their respective classifications as Islamist and Arab, Sufi and African, and Black Nationalist and American. However, these designations can obscure more than they reveal. In a mid-century setting when alliances among global powers were being torn apart and reassembled toward variant grand visions of how the world ought to be arranged, I argue that these groups’ attempts to fashion assemblies and visions of their own can help us broaden our understandings of these movements and the mid-20th century. Rasul Miller, University of California, Irvine An Islamic Revival in the Cause of Black Survival: The Influences and Impact of the Darul Islam Movement Abstract The Darul Islam Movement (1962 to 1983) was arguably the most successful Islamic revivalist movement in U.S. At its height, it consisted of a network of about 40 affiliated mosques throughout the country, as well as its own magazine, printing press, businesses, and schools. Formed during the 1960s, the Dar shared many concerns in common with contemporary groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party. Yet the Dar also deeply engaged the ideas of Islamic reformists like Abul A'la al-Maududi, Hassan Al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb. This paper considers the diverse ideological influences that characterized the Dar and the impact of the movement on subsequent Muslim communities in the US. I argue that the Dar crafted a version of Islamic Internationalism that appropriated global Islamist discourses, while simultaneously contending with the ideals of Black self-determination, Black nationalism, and working-class consciousness that animated radical organizing in the urban U.S.
	A26-120 Study of Judaism Unit Theme: Jewish Texts, Affects, and Politics Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Hilton Bayfront-Sapphire 400B (Fourth Level) Sam Shuman, University of VIrginia, Presiding This panel investigates multiple sites of meaning-making in Jewish thought, politics, and culture, from rituals and ceremonies in late antiquity to modern mystical discourses. The first paper views rabbinic literature within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine to ask how we might apply the “bio-looping” model of therapeutic intervention to rabbinic conceptions of embodiment. The second paper attends to midrash as an expressive practice of speech that affectively forms both public rhetorical culture and the individual political subjects within it. The third paper addresses medieval kabbalistic approaches to historical misfortune as cosmological attempts to position Jews as proactive agents of world-historical events. The fourth paper views the politics of mysticism through the lens of Jewish cultural history to consider the complexities of modern liberal political discourses. Taken together, these papers illuminate Jewish textual, affective, and political entanglements in order to shed new light on existing cultural and religious categories. Shulamit Shinnar, Florida State University Rabbinic Bio-looping: Mind, Body, and Meaning-Making in Late Antique Rabbinic Conceptions of Embodiment Abstract Religious healing has long been a subject of interest in both the sciences and humanities disciplines. How do rituals, prayers, and ceremonies—meaning-making experiences without an obvious western biomedical intervention—lead to real therapeutic results including pain relief, remission, and recovery from illness? This paper draws on the "bio-looping"model of embodiment to examine the connection between meaning-making activities and health in late antique Palestinian rabbinic literature. Situation these texts within the context of late antique Greco-Roman medicine, this paper will explore the rabbinic conception of embodiment developed in these texts. Jennifer Greenberg, Brown University Midrashic Rhetoric and the Problem of Passion in Public Life Abstract While scholarship in Jewish thought and beyond has attended to the literary aspects of midrash, midrash as a practice of speech which forms a public rhetorical culture and individual subjects within it has not been thoroughly explored. This paper approaches the topic through the lens of democratic theory on public discourse, with specific attention to critical scholarship on affect. By analyzing the phenomenology of midrashic interpretation through the writings of Avivah Zornberg and Michael Fishbane, this paper argues that performing midrash allows a subject to be indulgent regarding desires and passions—to imagine particular narratives and publicize them expressively—while still developing the humility required for a collective discursive project. In this way, midrashic rhetoric offers a model for rethinking current conversations around the ethics of citizenship in political speech, as they struggle to square the liberal demands of accountability to a public and the demands of the affective subject. Hartley Lachter, Lehigh University Terrors of History: Medieval Kabbalah and the Lachrymose Reading of Jewish Experience Abstract Medieval kabbalists devoted significant energy to explaining historical misfortunes. This paper will describe how medieval kabbalists used the image of the sarim, or heavenly archons of the nations, to explain Jewish subjugation to Christian and Muslim nations, and how they understood gilgul, or reincarnation, as the hidden mechanism whereby Jewish souls carry out their secret mission over the course of multiple lifetimes across the long arc of Israel’s exile. And finally, mention will be made of the ways that kabbalistic texts situated these strategies for reading Jewish history within a macro-historical concept of multiple successive worlds, according to which the present world is the most difficult of all possible manifestations of the cosmos. This paper will argue that the strategies evident in these discourses, despite their focus on negative historical events, suggest that medieval kabbalists sought to imagine Jews as the proactive agents of world history. Sam Shonkoff, Graduate Theological Union Assimilation, Sovereignty, Diaspora: The Politics of Mysticism from a Jewish Perspective Abstract In recent decades, Leigh Eric Schmidt and others have demonstrated the extent to which modern mystical discourse has reflected not only Protestant sensibilities but also the modern project of liberalism. In this paper, I examine the politics of mysticism through a lens of Jewish cultural history in order to shed new light on both the category of mysticism and modern liberal politics, including different formations of modern Jewish politics. While scholars such as Leora Batnitzky, Aamir Mufti, and Sarah Hammerschlag have shown how attention to the “Jewish question” illuminates foundational blind spots, complexities, and dangers of liberalism, this study builds upon that scholarship through demonstrating how representations of Judaism among the architects of modern mysticism reveals a great deal about that very category and its entanglements with liberalism. My study refracts these materials through the prism of three different pathways in modern Jewish politics: assimilation, nationalism, and diaspora.
	A26-121 Buddhist Philosophy Unit Theme: Karma and Sociopolitical Theory Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Convention Center-32A (Upper Level East) Elizabeth Angowski, Earlham College, Presiding This panel on “Karma and Sociopolitical Theory” brings together diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to explore the resonances or tensions between Buddhist concepts and human societies. The four papers are united by an interest in fostering conversation across areas and traditions about the implications of doctrinal theory on everyday life, and vice versa, the potential for social and political practices to illuminate Buddhist thought. They address evidence from royal ceremonial in contemporary Ladakh, philosophical theories of action, early modern Tibetan religio-political discourse, and contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist society. Together, these papers call attention to key questions that overlap philosophical, historical, and anthropological approaches to Buddhism, including the individual and social dimensions of karma, the relationship of human society to the larger cosmos, the intersection of cosmological or philosophical discourses with everyday articulations of karma, and the general relevance of this Buddhist concept as both object and source of theory. Rohit Singh, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Karmic Astrology, Kingship, and the Democratization of Merit-Making in Ladakh Abstract Concepts of karma shape cultural views on ritual efficacy, social order, and political stability in Asian societies. They constitute a collective force for organizing communities and legitimating social hierarchies. In my paper, I first draw on historical data and my own ethnographic data to explore the connection between karma, astrology, and kingship in Ladakh through the lens of the royal ceremony of Dosmoche. Focusing on tantric rituals conducting during Leh’s Royal New Year ceremony, such as the production of thread-crosses (mdos) and ransom effigies (glud) based on principles of karmic astrology, I explore how a public ceremony in Ladakh traditionally affirmed views of collective karma as tied to royal authority. Next, drawing on ethnographic data, I examine how and why Ladakhis increasingly reject royal authority in modern contexts. I argue that shifting views on kingship reflect broader shifts in how Ladakhis articulate Buddhist moral agency in relation to karma. Oren Hanner, New York University, Abu Dhabi Towards a Buddhist Theory of Shared Agency Abstract Contemporary scholarship on Buddhist ethics has made various attempts at reconstructing Buddhist answers to modern ethical problems, some of which are collective and political in nature. The present talk will introduce a theoretical framework for Buddhist ethics in a social context by considering the question of shared responsibility, that is, the responsibility that individual agents bear for actions undertaken together with other individuals. This account of shared agency will be reconstructed based on three vignettes from Vasubandhu’s work on action and its results in his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya and Vimśatikā. The paper will consider the motivations of Buddhist authors for contemplating the problem of shared agency and present an analysis of the conditions for shared actions according to Vasubandhu. I will propose that his theory offers contemporary philosophical debates on shared agency new perspectives on this issue, including a more elaborate notion of shared agency and an internalist standard of moral evaluation. Ian MacCormack, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Between cosmos and karma: metaphysics and sociopolitical theory in a Tibetan regime Abstract This paper treats the relationship of metaphysical and cosmological discourses to notions of state and ruler in early modern Tibet. It asks how the values and aims of the central Tibetan regime were articulated against the background of a larger cosmos and, ultimately, some transcendental vision of the fundamental ground or highest aims of reality. In particular, the paper explores the relevance of tantric metaphysical principles of primordial perfection for the prospect of a humanist politics of world-transformation. In other words, it will argue for a relationship of karmically conditioned activity to ontological and soteriological ideals that can indicate new possibilities for thinking about Buddhist rule, and in turn, for speaking to larger conversations about human and more-than-human agencies. Sara Swenson, Dartmouth College Buddhist Interventions in Cancer, Covid, and Domestic Violence: Understanding Karma as Ontoethics Abstract In this presentation, I introduce three cases of Buddhists who used interventions in karma to manage cancer, Covid, and domestic violence. These practitioners understood their suffering as caused by karma, so turned to karmic interventions for resolutions. I analyze these interventions as a form of “Buddhist ontoethics.” I argue that Buddhist ontoethics may be especially appealing for followers who lack recourse to political and economic resources when seeking to improve their lives. However, such interventions should not be reductively dismissed as purely psychological coping mechanisms. Instead, I advocate for appreciation of the ways an ontoethics of karma enables people to imagine and actualize positive social change in their lives and the lives of others.
	A26-122 Chinese Religions Unit Theme: Modern Chinese Religions at the Intersections Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Hilton Bayfront-Sapphire L (Fourth Level) Susan Andrews, Mount Allison University, Presiding This session brings together five papers exploring 20th and 21st century Chinese religions at the "intersections" where different forms of practice (unofficial and state-sanctioned, religious and non-religious, traditional and modern, for instance) meet. Haoran Ke, University of Hong Kong Confinement and Stabilization: A Case of a Local Ritual Master Helped a Spirit Medium with His Re-consecration Abstract This text discusses the interaction and relationship between a local ritual master and a spirit medium. It includes a case study of a spirit medium named Hu Guanglin, who turned to a local ritual master (fashi 法師) for a solution when he was having trouble maintaining a stable connection with his deceased patriarchs (yinshi 陰師). Master Wu proposed a ritual known as Consecration, Confinement, and Stabilization (kaiguang fengding 開光封定) to stabilize Guanglin’s connection. Master Wu showed his autonomy from Daoism and authority over spirit mediums. However, using Daoist characters and bureaucratic communication methods in their talismans and documents suggests a Daoist influence. The masters of the Mount Mao Divine Arts (maoshan shengong 茅山神功) exhibit their power over low-ranking spirits and spirit mediums, demonstrating a continuation of the “master of gods” phenomenon within Schipper’s hierarchy of gods, ritual masters, and Daoism. Marc Lagace, McMaster University Islands of Others and the Secular Sea: Outreach Among China’s Unofficial Religions Abstract Recent studies suggest that evangelism beyond social networks is more important for spreading religion in China than previously thought. Drawing upon neglected English- and Chinese-language sources and the author’s own interviews, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of how outreach to strangers in China occurs by examining the methods used by Hare Krishnas since 1977. It argues that the proselytization strategies employed by members of unofficial religions, like the Hare Krishnas, often differ significantly from those utilized by practitioners of state-sanctioned ones. While the latter rely on “strategies of attraction”—techniques designed to lure individuals to sacred sites where they can be engaged legally, the former actively seek out potential converts in secular spaces and at sites belonging to other religious institutions. It is difficult to generalize about religion in China as a whole, but comparing official and unofficial religions shows promise for making discussions more manageable and productive. Hongyu Wu, Ohio Northern University Building the Road to Modernity within Tradition: The Construction and Consecration of Vajra-bodhi Stupa in Chongqing in 1931 Abstract Building the Road to Modernity within Tradition: The Construction and Consecration of Vajra-bodhi Stupa in Chongqing in 1931 By focusing on the case of the Vajra-bodhi Stupa constructed in Chongqing in 1931, this research examines how Buddhism navigated its way between tradition and modernity to reconstruct its identity in Republican China (1911-1949). The stupa was built under the patronage and supervision of Pan Wenhua (1886-1950), a lay Buddhist and the mayor of Chongqing. To modernize the city, Pan ordered the relocation of thousands of tombs in order to build roads and improve transportation in the city. In response to the local residents’ tradition of ancestor worship and fear of dislocated haunting ghosts, the stupa was built. This paper will discuss how Buddhists creatively intergrated traditional views and practices into their conception of modernity in Republican China through the construction and consecration of the stupa. Alexander Atkins, Duke University Chinese Buddhists Abroad: Japanese Buddhism and the Chinese Esoteric Buddhist Revival Abstract This project follows Chinese Buddhists who traveled to Japan studying Esoteric Buddhism from 1910 to the 1930s, returning to China spreading their teachings among monastics and laity. It will start with Gui Bohua’s (桂伯華 1861-1915) turn to Esoteric Buddhism to deal with the death of his family and then consider a series of monks and laypersons who sought ought initiation at the Shingon headquarters of Koyasan 高野山. These Buddhists sought not only to study a lost part of Chinese Buddhism but also to develop a potential alternative to western modernity. They spread Esoteric Buddhism throughout the Chinese Buddhist landscape while simultaneously improving Sino-Japanese relations during the spread of Japanese colonies throughout the Sinosphere. Finally, a case study of Taixu’s 太虚 Wuchang Buddhist Studies Academy foxueyuan 武昌佛学院 highlights its lay community’s shift from academic to Esoteric Buddhism. Yang Wang, University of Hong Kong Paradoxical Postsecularity in the Making: A Methodological Experiment in the Study of China’s Temple-Centered Urban Redevelopment Abstract The incorporation of Buddhist temples into urban redevelopment within China’s market transition became phenomenal after the 2000s. Domestic and international real estate developers collaborated with local governments and state-owned-enterprises in the construction of commercial complexes by converting under-used spaces around renowned Buddhist temples. Among these scattered projects of temple-centered redevelopment across China, this article identifies two during which the Hong Kong-based developer, Swire Properties, consecutively built open, low-density shopping centres in Chengdu and Xi’an around the Daci temple and Jianfu temple respectively since 2010. Named as the “Taikoo Li”, these two projects attest to unique logics of planning and operation, while nurturing discursive, cultural, and material practices, religious as well as non-religious, in people’s everyday life. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic study in urban contemporary China, this article bridges a dialogue with postsecularist debates in Euro-American contexts, and proposes a methodological experiment that reinvents "postsecularity" as plural, contextual, and subjective.
	A26-123 North American Religions Unit Theme: Repping Religious Studies at our Institutions: A Panel Discussion Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Convention Center-25A (Upper Level East) Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa, Presiding In this moment of anxiety about Religious Studies departments and the future of our field, we are interested in discussing the broader issue of what Religious Studies has to offer the Humanities and our institutions. We will share how our interdisciplinary training in Religious Studies has equipped and prepared us to amplify and support the Humanities at our institutions. We will share our perspectives on how our training has helped prepare us for our upper-level administrative roles, and we will share strategies for positioning Religious Studies in the broader Humanities and the dominant STEM-focus of our institutions. We intend for this session to be focused, generative, and future-oriented, and we look forward to a broader conversation with our colleagues in San Diego. Panelists Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa Heather D. Curtis, Tufts University Amy DeRogatis, Michigan State University Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge Rachel Wheeler, Indiana University Indianapolis Adrienne Krone, University of Calgary Felipe Hinojosa, Baylor University
	A26-124 Religion and Ecology Unit Theme: The Religious Roots of Resistance: Exploring Ecological Violence and Non-Violent Resistance Movements Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Convention Center-30A (Upper Level East) Victoria Machado, Rollins College, Presiding This panel presents three distinct case studies that explore the religious and spiritual dimensions of non-violent resistance to colonial, military, and ecological violence. Engaging questions about how violence is embedded in and perpetuated through institutions and colonial and capitalist systems, the panelists show how violence can be understood as both visible and active, and insidious and obscured. They underscore the importance of understanding the detrimental impacts of forms of slow violence, including transgenerational and evolutionary violence that impact human and non-human organisms and environmental systems. These contributions address questions about boundaries, including where we draw the line between violent and non-violent forms of activism and what counts as sacred and worthy of protections and why. Together, these panelists examine how religious and spiritual beliefs inform social and environmental justice concerns and inspire religious and ecological resistance in the form of direct action protest, civil disobedience, and regulation and policy reform. Panelists Jacques Linder, Villanova University Lisa Sideris, University of California, Santa Barbara Amanda Nichols, University of Florida
	A26-125 Religion and the Social Sciences Unit Theme: The Constructive Value of the Social Sciences for Theological and Moral Analysis of Violence Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Convention Center-24B (Upper Level East) Xochitl Alvizo, California State University, Northridge, Presiding The papers in this panel highlight the constructive value of the social sciences to illuminate theological and moral analysis in and of contexts marked by violence and structural inequality. Authors explore a variety of social scientific theories and a diverse set of contexts. These include how religion’s imbrication with schema development can help explain the existence of radically conflicting visions for the common good; how psychological accounts of global and local traits can inform theological reflection on the relationship between implicit racial bias and virtue formation; and how sociological work on collective trauma can further our thinking on the role of theology and religious doctrine in traumatization. Joseph Lim, University of Notre Dame Rehabilitating a Concept of Implicit Racial Bias Abstract Even as Americans’ racial attitudes grow increasingly egalitarian, racial injustices persist. One recent attempt to address this attitude-act gap has been to posit the existence of implicit racial bias (IRB), that is, an attitude that operates outside conscious attentional focus and disposes individuals toward discriminatory behavior. The Race Implicit Association Test (RIAT) is most often used to measure IRB. Yet studies of the RIAT reveal that it is too inconsistent, too susceptible to irrelevant factors to gauge IRB. Situations attempt to salvage the notion of IRB by alleging that it is a feature of situations rather than persons. But this is question-begging. This presentation aims to preserve the concept of IRB by positing IRB as a local trait—that is, as a trait that activates in very particular contexts. This in-between position preserves the importance of both structural analyses of social ills and theologies that emphasize individual moral formation. Sandra Lee Dixon, University of Denver Schemas, Complex Knowledge and Feeling in Moral Concern for the Common Good Abstract This paper argues from research on cognitive social psychology and cognitive sociology that some of the difficulties of explicating and achieving the common good emerge from the relationship of individual people’s schemas to widely held positions of moral concern. Challenges to common understanding and enactment of the social good occur, in part, because individuals’ schemas, their mental constructs of perceptions and knowledge, develop through individualized yet partially shared experience of social norms and multi-dimensional experiences of feeling, perception, knowledge, and practice. Hence when we speak to one another about the common good, or make efforts to enact it, one person’s multi-dimensional schemas intersect with another’s similarly concatenated ideas. To highlight this, the paper highlights how schemas are not two-dimensional like the images that represent them in textbooks. The common good turns out to be less a tidy picture than a creative collision and ongoing mixing and shifting of schemas. Samuel Youngs, Bryan College The Gift of Fear: Jesus, Torture, and Collective Trauma in Medieval Christianity Abstract The enactment of violence on a collective scale requires that coercive power be structured in both referred and direct ways. While religiously hued authority is often implicated in mass violence, it is not always well-understood how theology itself—highly specific doctrinal reasoning particular to a given religious expression—can serve as a crucial structuring force in coercive violence. Taking the recently theorized notion of “theologized trauma” as a starting point, this study engages the medieval Christian inquisitions through the lens of christology. When inquisitors engaged in Christianized acts of torture, what was their operative view of Jesus Christ and his seemingly irenic message? In exploring this difficult question, fresh dimensions of theologized trauma and communal violence are unearthed. In dialogue with ongoing work on collective trauma and the social construction of meaning, a threefold relation between religious doctrine and structured violence is documented and defended.
	A26-126 Religions in the Latina/o Americas Unit Theme: Emerging Scholarship Workshop Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Hilton Bayfront-Indigo C (Second Level) Justin Doran, Middlebury College, Presiding This format offers an opportunity for more substantive conversation about works in progress than the traditional panel presentation. The three 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. Maria Luiza Dieguez Reynaud, University of South Florida Spiritism, a feminist religion. Abstract The Spiritist Movement, organized by Allan Kardec in the second half of the 19th century, has seen remarkable involvement of women, both historically and in contemporary Brazil. This article addresses Spiritism's absence of hierarchy, emphasis on charity work, and mediumship nature, which align closely with traits traditionally associated with femininity, making it a feminist religion. Furthermore, millions of women throughout Brazil, victims of all types of violence, are assisted by Spiritist Societies through massive charity work organized mainly through women. Danielle Bermudez, Independent scholar Ancestral Ceremony: El Salvador, La Matanza of 1932, and Monseñor Romero Abstract In January of 1932, the military government of El Salvador systematically killed around 30,000 people, mainly Nahua-Pipil, in the Western region of the country over several weeks in massacre called “La Matanza”, or “The Killing/Slaughter.” As El Salvador reckons with violences past and present, Nahua-Pipil communities resist state oppression and call attention to ancestral meanings of justice and dignity for Indigenous communities. In this paper, I highlight the connections between decades of state-sponsored violence including the 1980 assassination of Monseñor Romero. I will also discuss ceremony as an embodied and sacred memory praxis for both liberation theologists and Nahua-Pipil communities in honoring ancestors in the aftermath of massacre, and across space and time. What will be shared about La Matanza of 1932 in this talk details a public commemoration ceremony in Izalco, El Salvador as well as observations from the beatification and canonization of Monseñor Romero. Fernando Berwig Silva, Southern Methodist University Indigenismo and Church Music: Retracing Vatican Second's Latin American Influences Abstract Some church music scholars have recorded the effervescence of interdenominational, nationalistic, and ecumenical liturgical projects between the 1960s and 1970s (Hawn 2003; Silva Steuernagel 2021). Most trace the influences of the Vatican Second’s liturgical reformation to Latin American liberation theologians (Elias 2021). Few scholars, though, have considered if indigenismo—an early twentieth-century Latin American political and ideological movement that utilized essentialized notions of indigeneity (Nielsen 2020)—plays a role in the theological and musicological debates that led to the Sacrosanctum Concilium. This paper investigates how early Latin American twentieth-century indigenista musical projects influenced projects of Latin American liberation theologians. By providing a historical account of Indigenismo and cross-referencing hymnological literature on early twentieth-century church music, I argue that broader cultural, socio-economical, and political trends, as well as indigenismo, are imbricated with the theological projects articulated in the Sacrosanctum Concilium. Responding Jessica Delgado, Ohio State University Michael Amoruso, Occidental College
	A26-128 Theology and Religious Reflection Unit Theme: If Not This, Then What? Possibilities of Otherwise beyond Incarceration and the Dominance of Man Tuesday, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Convention Center-24A (Upper Level East) Haruka Umetsu Cho, Santa Clara University, Presiding What does it mean to think the human otherwise, beyond practices of captivity and carcereality and the dominance of Man? Looking at women and flesh in Blackpentecostalism, at theories of the hu/Man that contribute to the maintenance of carceral logics, and at Fanon and King's legacies of Black radicalism, these three papers push religious and theological reflection to consider how enclosure is maintained, and what it will take to undo it. Michael Yorke, Yale University Captive Body Sanctified: Protest, Enclosure, and the Possibility of Otherwise Abstract In this paper, I seek to illuminate the relationship between the doctrine of sanctification and the community of the sanctified, giving particular attention to the role of the Black woman within scholarship on the sanctified church. At least since Zora Neale Hurston, scholars of Black pentecostalism have understood the sanctified church as an identity-in-protest to one or more of the forces inimical to Black life—whether patriarchy, antiblackness, capitalism, or homophobia. However, given the biblical-historical-theological contours of the doctrine of sanctification, as well as the socio-political realities facing Black women, I argue that the doctrine/identity of “sanctification/sanctified” forms a grammatical enclosure within which the flesh/body must abide. In light of the stronger associations of Black pentecostalism with conservatism (relative to progressivism), I question whether the grammar of sanctification forecloses the Black pentecostal church’s ability to escape the enclosures of colonial modernity. Seth Gaiters, Ohio State University New Visions & Political Theology: The Unnoticed Convergence of King “the apostle of nonviolence” & Fanon “the apostle of violence” Abstract I comparatively analyze two contemporaneous freedom fighters: the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. radical Civil Right’s activist—also known as, *“the apostle of nonviolence”* —and Frantz Fanon radical Algerian anti-colonial activist—also known as, *“the apostle of violence”. In popular historical memory, the former is invoked as formally religious and the latter officially secular, but each are mislabeled as conventionally operative within the religion-secular binary that subtends the terms of order. Through examining their significance to the Black Freedom Struggle, their considerations of anti-Black racism and colonialism as a theological problem, and visions of the radical Black sacrality of their theorizing/praxis, I consider a significant convergence they carry, even with vast ideological divergences in tactics, which pushes forward the discussion of religion/politics, and sheds light upon alternatives to move beyond impoverished binary views of alterity, of policing and governance: religion/politics, sacred/secular, violence/non-violence, and so on. Hunter Bragg, Drew University Apophatic Anthropology in an Age of Carceral Fragmentation: Abolitionist Possibilities* Abstract The American carceral system–from policing and plea bargaining to probation and parole–is a system of personal and communal fragmentation. The paper argues, first, that this is the product of an essentialist carceral anthropology that disproportionately condemns race, gender, and class minorities to preserve the American neoliberal social order. The paper then argues that a Christian apophatic, non-essentialist anthropology destabilizes this carceral system. Apophatic theologians from antiquity to the present insist that humans must be figured with reference to their relation to an infinite divinity. If God is the ground of all things, one's relation to God opens the human to infinite relations to divine, human, and non-human others. This infinite relationality creates abolitionist possibilities, rejecting final decisions about one’s raced, gendered, and classed essence, resisting the neoliberal reduction of infinitely relational beings to self-interested individuals, and challenging attempts to punish wrongdoing through forced removal from communities.

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