Online Program Book

This co-sponsored session will be an interactive, skills-based offering tailored to address the needs, experiences, questions, and hopes of graduate students, some of whom are already teaching and looking ahead toward careers as teachers in classrooms and communities. The topics to be addressed include: equity-minded and trauma-informed course design, crafting an effective cover letter, teaching religion in independent high schools, developing courses outside of religious studies (such as first-year seminars), and alternatives to final papers that can boost student engagement (and potentially thwart ChatGPT). Unlike a traditional session, panelists will be asked to offer brief presentations on their topics so that the remainder of the session can be used for in-depth breakout conversations and networking. Attendees will have the chance to ask questions, explore additional materials provided by the presenters, and otherwise dive deeper into one or more of these topics. This interactive session is open to all members of the AAR who would find it useful, regardless of career status.

These papers explore racial and theological hybridity and contested notions of ethnic purity and impurity as it relates to Christian theology, human bodies, and Afro-Judaism.  Ten years ago, Mulatto theologizing was hailed as the “New” Black theology that constituted a significant theological shift in its development. This panel will explore the impact of this “shift” ten years later. 

This panel compares logics of ritual efficacy that guide the hands-on practices of Buddhist craftspeople and ritual experts. In a clash of interdisciplinary perspectives, regions, and historical eras, these papers eschew the symbolic and the performative in favor of the procedural, the substantive, and the “becoming-with” of ritual. This panel is specifically motivated by Tim Ingold’s (2013) call to abandon abstracted notions of “materiality” in favor of bounded practices of making use of particular materials. Accordingly, each paper engages a specific material or object—the Gobi Desert, a rare Green Tārā image, ritual cloths, salt, mercury, milk, medicinal herbs, living rooms, and ritual implements. Attending to what each does (not just represents)—and does not do— “sensory forms” (Meyer 2009) and “material affordances” (Keane 2003) emerge as vastly understudied models of causation and agency in Buddhist rituals, societies, and histories.

This panel explores the role of Daoist- and Buddhist-based movements in contemporary China in providing resources for spiritual seekers concerned about a loss of authenticity in contemporary social life. From popular films to restorative health classes to organized religious institutions, an increasing array of groups and activities aim to help contemporary Chinese persons develop a healthy inner self amid what many perceive as the superficiality of contemporary Chinese social life and the potential bodily and psychological harm engendered by a one-sided drive for money and success. Drawing on multi-disciplinary perspectives, the panelists critically explore these new movements, their potential to transform contemporary Chinese life, their ambivalent relationship to the market, and their precarious existence under the watchful eye of the state.