Theme: Department Chair and Program Coordinator's Breakfast
Saturday, 7:30 AM - 8:45 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 222 (Meeting Room Level)
Breakfast for department chairs and program coordinators.
Theme: New Members Breakfast and Annual Meeting Orientation
Saturday, 7:30 AM - 8:45 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Hemisfair 2 (Ballroom Level)
New (first-time) AAR members in 2023 are cordially invited to a welcome breakfast hosted by the AAR Staff and Board of Directors, including a brief orientation to the AAR Annual Meeting.
Theme: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Morning Prayer and Gathering
Saturday, 7:30 AM - 8:45 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-217C (Meeting Room Level)
A time for connection of Presbyterians and friends committed to theological education and religious vocation across the PC(USA). We will join in morning prayer and conversation. A light breakfast will be provided. This event is sponsored by the PC(USA) Office of Theology and Worship, the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities, and the Committee on Theological Education.
Theme: Faith and Health Educator Network
Saturday, 7:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Marriott Riverwalk-Alamo Ballroom, Salon E
At Interfaith America, we’re building communities of practice committed to unlocking the positive potential of religion in health-related settings. From undergraduate and graduate health professions programs to health-focused faith-based organizations to health system and public health leaders, we’re inspiring, equipping, and connecting those who are poised to bridge the gap between religion and health to promote individual and community flourishing.
Interfaith America seeks to convene faculty involved in religious studies and are interested in working alongside health fields on their campuses to integrate religious diversity curriculum into pre-health programs. We will hear from faculty from select institutions who have developed successful models and how they can be implemented at your campus.
Theme: International Connections Committee Meeting
Saturday, 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Grand Hyatt-San Jacinto (Second Floor)
Theme: Wabash Center New Teacher Breakfast
Saturday, 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Marriott Rivercenter-Grand Ballroom, Salon J
By invitation only, new teachers will join together for breakfast and directed table conversations about the first three years of teaching. If you know of someone whom we should invite or you are in your first three years of teaching, please send us a name and email address. Include the academic discipline, institution, and the number of years teaching full-time. Send nominations by September 18th to: Sarah F. Farmer Associate Director of the Wabash Center farmers@wabash.edu
Theme: Preparing for Careers in Teaching Religion
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Stars 4 (Ballroom Level)
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.
Theme: Black Being, Comparative Religion, and Mortuary Rituals
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221A (Meeting Room Level)
The papers in this panel explore a comparative analysis of Chrisitian ideas on African Ancestral Traditions and Chinese Religions, Black being in the contexts of Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and Africana religions, and the meanings of burial rites in the Ivory Coast.
Theme: The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity by Rebekka King: Author Meets Respondents Session.
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221D (Meeting Room Level)
Rebekka King’s The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity (2023) is the culmination of a three-year ethnographic study of North American Christians who embrace their religious identities while simultaneously questioning the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, and the accuracy of the Bible. King proposes the concept of “lived secularity” as a category with which we can examine the ways in which religiosity is entangled with and subsumed by secular identities over and against religious ones. King’s theoretical framework provides insight into the study of contemporary religious and cultural hybridity, emergent groups such as “the nones,” atheism, religious apostasy, deconversion, the ethics of belief, and multi-religious identities. In this session, three respondents with ethnographic expertise and affiliation with the Anthropology of Christianity, Secularism Studies, and the Critical Theory for the Study of Religion will discuss The New Heretics, followed by a response from the author, Rebekka King.
Theme: Arts and Poetics of Sacred Scriptures
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221B (Meeting Room Level)
This panel explores works of art and texts inspired by sacred scriptures from different religious traditions. The first presentation features the work of Islam calligraphy masters from Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and China. As ambassadors, creators, and teachers of sacred scripture, these masters’ art engages with cultural and political challenges. The second presentation examines the poem Pater Noster by Marguerite of Navarre as a hospitable scene of composition that invites further Scriptural reflection and creative responses. The third paper pays attention to the revelatory capacity of sacred and fictional texts in short stories by Flannery O’Connor engaging with the Christian tradition. The fourth presentation analyses the classic Moby-Dick through the lens of Romantic irony to argue that Melville’s novel involved a re-writing of the Holy Bible. At large, questions explored in this panel will include how and why modern artists and writers reinstate, question, or renew the function of sacred scriptures.
Theme: Mulatto Theologizing: Exploring Hybridity at the Intersection of Race, Ethnicity and Religion
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 217A (Meeting Room Level)
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.
Theme: Disrupting and Disruptive Bodies
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007C (River Level)
The papers on this panel explore the limits of normative notions of the body.
Theme: Crafting Efficacy in Buddhist Ritual Worlds
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 005 (River Level)
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.
Theme: Roundtable on Jingjing Li's *Comparing Husserl's Phenomenology and Chinese Yogācāra in a Multicultural World*
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 214D (Meeting Room Level)
This roundtable on Jingjing Li's *Comparing Husserl's Phenomenology and Chinese Yogācāra in a Multicultural World* brings six Buddhist philosophy scholars together with the author to discuss and reflect on the book’s contributions to the fields of Yogācāra studies, Buddhist philosophy and comparative philosophy/philosophy of religion. We will discuss the book's comparative methodology, its comparative notions of intentionality, its advancement of the concept of non-conceptual yet intentional mental states, its sophisticated comparative treatment of essence, particularly in relationship to the later Yogācāra exposition of emptiness, and its innovative treatment of Yogācāra conceptions of intersubjectivity, agency, morality, and a socially oriented emancipatory path of practice.
Theme: Religion, Spirituality, and the Search for Authenticity in Contemporary China
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 225C (Meeting Room Level)
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.
Theme: Spirit Medicine toward Ethical and Decolonial Psychedelic Research and Praxis
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Grand Hyatt-Bowie B (Second Floor)
With private investment in psychedelic development, the FDA anticipating approving the first psychedelic medicine within the next years, U.S. cities decriminalizing enforcement, and corporate psychedelic retreats considered to stimulate employee creativity, in practice, unregulated psychedelic experimentation is becoming popular and more dangerous in the West. Ethical concerns exacerbate the need for safe understanding of these medicines and warn against its use without corresponding evidence and epistemic and material abuses and violations against the rights of Indigenous communities. This panel explores Indigenous Spirit medicines and their appropriation in Western psychedelic research and practice, encouraging scholars to explore frameworks for decolonizing psychedelic research. The session considers Indigenous Peoples’ experiences and perspectives, the trajectory of the psychedelic experience and its relation to psychotic events, warnings of drug development and clinical trials, and ethical considerations for research imperative to the resurgence of the therapeutic use of Spirit medicine (aka psychedelics) in the United States.
Theme: The Difference Nothing Makes? Creation, Christ Contemplation
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Marriott Rivercenter-Conference Room 3
This roundtable panel proposes to discuss Brian Robinette’s The Difference Nothing Makes: Creation, Christ, Contemplation (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023). This book explores the doctrine of "creation from nothing" in the Christian tradition, extends it into a number of theological topoi, engages a number of thinkers not normally grouped together, and develops a contemplative approach to the work of systematic theology.
Theme: De-Centering "the West" in Comparative Religious Ethics
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Grand Hyatt-Bonham E (3rd Floor)
This panel will address the relationship between non-Western categories of thought and ways of life, ecology, and comparative religious ethics as field of inquiry. Presentations will tackle ethnocentrism, the legacy of Christian influence on the development of the field, and chart possible paths forward.
Theme: Author Meets Critics: Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Grand Hyatt-Crockett A (4th Floor)
Author Meets Critic session for Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality published by Oxford University Press. In addition to the author, four respondents—Professor Juliane Hammer, Professor Niki Kasumi Clements, Professor Katie Merriman, and Professor Shehnaz Haqqani—will provide reflections on the book. The respondents will unpack the various threads of the book in relation to anthropology of Islam, ethics of care, and migrant/displaced peoples’ lifeworlds.
Theme: Agency, Affects and Imagination: Language, Chaplaincy and Conjuration in Pagan Practice
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 007B (River Level)
Religious language and practices do not exist in a vacuum. When new religions arise they exist in linguistic and conceptual relationships of concert and conflict with existing hegemonic regimes of religion, language, and cognition. Presenters engage how the language of Protestantism affects Wiccan discourse, how esoteric practice and personal revelation transform norms of chaplaincy and how the language of secular aesthetics and cognition structures sequential meditative schema to produce (or conjure) perceptual interactions with ‘other-than-human’ actants. In turn, each of these decenters assumptions about where greater hermeneutic and interpretative authority lies in language, revelation and practice.