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Theme: Religious Studies and Catastrophe - Past, Present, and Future(s)
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
Inspired by this year’s Presidential Theme - Religion and Catastrophe - the GSC Special Topics Forum reflects on the topic of catastrophe, as well as how this concept is utilized in the academy. Through this forum, we hope to launch a conversation that shines a light on the diverse topics, times, and contexts that scholars research, while also reflecting on how terms are used. How, when, and why do religious communities, popular media, or scholars invoke the term catastrophe? By classifying incidents as catastrophes, what power structures are challenged or reinforced? What solutions or idyllic alternatives can be proposed or imagined? We also seek to explore the unique ways in which scholars of religion are equipped to explain or untangle these complex issues.
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Theme: Martyrdom and the Sensory Turn
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This panel brings together five historians of Christianity to consider what “the sensory turn” in the humanities brings to the study of martyrdom in the Christian tradition. An outgrowth of interest in embodiment, the turn to the senses as media of knowing and experience has left an impression on the study of religion, and has fostered a range of productive questions. What does attention to the full range of the body’s sensory capacities add to our understanding of martyrdom? How did martyrdom and its diverse literary, material, and ritual representations engage and construct religious difference (pagan, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Indigineous, or otherwise), and how did the senses shape or problematize these processes of difference making? The five papers on this panel explore the role of smell, touch, hearing, and taste in narratives of martyrdom from the fourth to the eighteenth century, from late antique Persia to early modern Canada.
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Theme: Mapping Catastrophes: Vulnerability, Exclusion, and Hope for Liberation
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
Catastrophes on a local, regional, and global scale are not new phenomena, especially for the most vulnerable, the impoverished, and the excluded by those who benefit greatly from the status quo and the systems they support and participate in. New to this time is the rapidly increasing impact of climate change, the rise of governments and political leaders that continue to pursue policies that are extractive of natural resources, exclusivist of peoples on the move and peoples on the margins, and the continued manufacturing of untruth at the service of nationalistic power and market progress. All of this makes it difficult to hear the voices of the excluded and marginalized as they identify sources and places for liberation and hope. This session gathers five papers exploring intersections of these themes in a variety of contexts.
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Theme: Visibility/Invisibility: Native American Recognition and Sovereignty
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This panel considers ritual engagement with land as means of becoming visible, and achieving political recognition and cultural sovereignty. We consider how Indigenous communities (re)take space in National Parks, create mechanisms for negotiating agreements with the NPS and challenge accepted notions of what constitutes “religion.” Another piece explores Indigenous, land-based diplomacy and political philosophy from a Cree perspective, where land is not terrain to be acted upon but an agent that recognizes those who properly engage with it. A third considers notions of visibility and invisibility in (re)gaining recognition, through a consideration of strategic ways that going underground—becoming temporarily invisible—can a tool for survival. Finally, another project continues by considering how Southern non-federally recognized tribes push back against erasure, claiming visibility through women’s sacred work. The panel asks what it means to be recognized, and the role that engagement with sacred lands has in becoming visible.
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Theme: Race and National Identity in Developing a Pentecostal Practice
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This panel consists of papers that look at pentecostal movements and draws conclusions about how their identities and practices have formed in light of national or ethnic identities.
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Theme: Specters of Marx, Theological and Political
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
In April 1993, Jacques Derrida gave a lecture published later that year as Spectres de Marx, which quickly became one of his most celebrated texts. Thirty years later, how might a return to Specters challenge hegemonic culture and contribute to decolonization? This panel poses philosophical, theological, and political questions by attending to Marx and the specters of Marx. We begin by asking whether and how Derrida’s discourse in Specters might be understood to be “materialist.” Observing the uncanny appearance of Enrique Dussel’s Las metáforas teológicas de Marx in the same year as Derrida’s text, we reexamine the specters and theological metaphors of Marx, tracking his conjuration of the revenants of Christianity and asking what “unproductive labor” might accomplish “beyond man.” By returning to the theological and political specters of Marx, we aim to promote decolonization inside and outside of the philosophy of religions and the study of political theology today.
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Theme: Practical Theology and Aesthetics
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
Aesthetics and theopoetics continue to evoke imaginative intersections with practical theology for they have the power to change the way we understand and embody reality. The Practical Theology Unit invites proposals for presentations that engage any dimension of the intersection of aesthetics and/or theopoetics and practical theology. These can be regarding theological language, method, modes of knowing and knowledge creation, and social transformation, as well as any intersections with sub-disciplines of practical theology. We welcome proposals that not only advance the research and discourse on practical theology and aesthetics, but also--and especially--those that attend to presentational modalities that highlight the role that aesthetics play in practical theological construction.
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Theme: 2022 AAR Journalism Awards
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This session will feature recipients of this year's AAR Journalism Awards, which for the first time includes two separate categories: Best In-Depth Newswriting and Best In-Depth Multimedia Journalism.
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Theme: Tafsīr Between Intersecting Genres and Disciplinary Boundaries
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
In recent years, tafsīr has increasingly been studied in its own right as an emerging area of research, rather than simply as an extension of Qurʾānic Studies. However, it has become evident that the relationship of tafsīr with other genres in pre-modern Muslim discourse is a complicated one. The papers in this session help reveal the ways in which the intersection of tafsīr with other genres was a central tool in the making of Islamic knowledge. We seek to analyze the relationship between tafsīr and law, ḥadīths and companion reports, history and historiography, grammar and rhetoric, and stories of the prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ) and the Israelite traditions (isrāʾīliyyāt). Our purpose is to underscore both the intersections and disciplinary boundaries between tafsīr and these genres in order to understand the legal, theological, and social genealogies that have authorized various beliefs as authentically Islamic and limited the formation of Muslim exegetical authority.
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Theme: Engaging Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity (Fortress Press, 2020)
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This panel engages with Katherine Sonderegger’s *Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons* (2020). After panelists’ critical analysis and reflection on the recent developments in her work, Sonderegger will respond, and a discussion will follow.
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Theme: Freedom and Religion in the United States
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
Bill of Rights protections of speech, religion, and gun ownership continue to shift in definition and applicability. This session explores the limits of and appeals to freedom by religious individuals in our politically fractured society. The first paper explores appeals to free exercise rights in attempts to claim exemption to Covid-19 vaccine, testing, and mask policies and the ways in which this debate broadens the boundaries of religious experience and expression. The second paper presents a theological approach to hate speech and the limits of free speech protections. The third paper explores women's religious perspectives on mass shootings, public violence, and gun rights. The last examines Conservative Christian appeals to the legacy of the Civil Rights era in contemporary debates over free exercise of religion.
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Theme: Revivals, Loss, and the Challenge of Meaning-Making: Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
Midnight Mass is a Netflix mini-series that explores mystery, mysterium and the magisterium in an isolated island community. Both papers in this session dive deep into how this small community wrestles with faith, horror, and the sacred through the lenses of theology, secular studies, and cultural theory.
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Theme: Roundtable on Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics Volume II (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
When volume one of Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics was published in 2011, qualitative fieldwork was still a novel, sometimes suspect, idea in these disciplines. Just eleven years later, the incorporation of qualitative research is a popular and accepted method of inquiry for theology and ethics, and the methodologies employed have become more varied and sophisticated. Recent work expands modes of collaboration and draws out new questions through participatory action research, auto-ethnography, participant co-authorship, and virtual ethnography. Leading and emerging scholars have much to share about how they approach this kind of work, what they are learning, and what sorts of change is possible. This panel features several of these scholars, each who have contributed a chapter to the volume. Panelists will offer some comments about their chapters, followed by a moderated discussion on new directions for qualitative fieldwork in theology and religious ethics.
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Theme: Rethinking Center and Margin: Perspectives from Southeast Asia
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
How do concepts of spatial thought and practice of Southeast Asian religious communities draw on meanings assigned to center and periphery? How do these communities consider their own positionality in relation to this binary? What are the theoretical implications of Southeast Asian place-making for how the study of religion is constituted? These are some of the compelling questions undertaken by five panelists, who analyze the interplay between the center and the margin from diverse perspectives within Southeast Asia. Two papers focus on Muslim communities in island Southeast Asia, while two panelists highlight issues for Buddhist communities in mainland Southeast Asia, and the last illustrates unique features of centrality for a Cambodian Buddhist diaspora in America. Together, this panel reveals how Muslim and Buddhist communities have conceptualized their own positionality vis-à-vis the historical centers of their religions, complicating the center-periphery binary, and demonstrating their active and creative participation in global traditions.
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Theme: eBay Method and the Study of Religion
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This roundtable proposes to make visible a practice that scholars of Christianity across disciplines regularly employ – acquiring objects of study through eBay. Roundtable panelists will each speak briefly about their experiences of searching, bidding on and buying materials for research projects, as well as bring sourced objects for the audience’s sensory engagement. These short provocations will then turn to a broader conversation about the methodological implications of engaging the digital marketplace as a research source. This panel aims to reveal eBay searching, bidding, acquisition, and messaging as something of a phantom method in the critical study of religion, widely practiced but not systematically examined. We will also explore the intersections between eBay and other methodologies (e.g., ethnography, formal archives), its value in building teaching collections, and its potential as an online method in the context of a global pandemic.
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Theme: Migration, Creativity, and Labor: New Books in Religions in the Latina/o Americas
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This panel puts three recent works on the religious lives of Latinx migrants in conversation: Lloyd Barba’s 2022 Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California, Tony Tian-Ren Lin’s 2020 Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream, and João Chaves’s 2022 Migrational Religion: Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora. These books center acts of architectural, theological, and ritual creativity and allow us to explore how migration and labor trajectories shape religious realities. From farmworkers, to business owners, to pastors and religious leaders, these authors illuminate how Latinx Christians manage the conditions and contingencies of labor, family, and politics and how they creatively work within these conditions to cultivate optimism, build new spaces of worship and ritual, and create hospitable institutions and theologies.
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Theme: Carrying, Marrying? And Not Burying
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This is a session of case studies about ritual practices. The session includes four short paper presentations and two respondents, in order to increase interactivity.
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Theme: New Directions in the South Asian Religions
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
The New Directions panel introduces new research in the study of language and religion in South Asia by recently-graduated Ph.D. students and doctoral candidates. From studies of devotional lyrics and performance genres to grammatical oddities and theories of translation, the papers in this panel show that the language of religion matters as much as its content. Panelists also demonstrate that religious concepts themselves can create new forms in both transregional and regional languages, from Sanskrit and Persian to Tamil and Telugu.
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Theme: Minoritized Leaders Faithfully Guiding Grassroots Organizations in Catastrophic Times
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
This conversational interview-style panel highlights a variety of issues tied to the religious complexities in catastrophic times. The first interview with members of the Soul to Soul Sister organization, conducted by CREM Chair Angela N. Parker, emphasizes the study of religion and the issue of abortion in a post-Roe world along with its effects on African American woman. Soul to Soul Sister is a grassroots organization in the Denver area that is dealing with the many pandemics in which we find ourselves, particularly around reproductive rights and wellbeing. The second interview, conducted by CREM Committee Member, Arun Jones, is with Adrian Miller (or a representative) of the Colorado Council of Churches. They explore the huge problems and incredible opportunities that the multiple catastrophes have opened up for faith communities. Specifically, we learn how the Colorado Council of Churches are serving areas that are ignored in the context of our multiple health, racial, and economic catastrophes. What does it mean to go virtual when many areas of Colorado are rural and lack internet access? Finally, participants ponder next steps take forward in their own communities during these catastrophic times.
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Theme: Pandemic Pedagogy
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM (In Person)
Presenters in this session will analyze some of the core dilemmas that religion instructors have faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. How do we go about our work in ways that are compassionate to our students and ourselves? What new possibilities for immersive and experiential learning might we imagine due to remote teaching? And, what strategies might we use to center relationships in times of catastrophe and suffering? The last portion of this session will include the business meeting for the Teaching Religion Unit; all AAR members are welcome to attend the meeting.
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