Eschewing theories of religion that configure religions as tightly integrated systems, this panel emphasizes practices of construction that do not create an epistemically bounded space but rather an open-ended assemblage of practices that find coherence in specific contexts using particular methods. This panel thus approaches the formation of religion(s) as a poly-vectoral coming-together of multiple dimensions of doing, using the medieval Daoist Supreme Purity (Shangqing) movement as an example. Such an approach moves beyond, or reads through, textual canons to uncover implicit actions and performative dimensions inherent in text. Taken together as a comparative conversation, the discussion members will open up a pout-pourri of methods and techniques by which the sect was formed, known, and asserted over time, the processes that made the religion what it was.
Since the inception of Daoist Studies, scholars have examined the ways in which established Daoist lineages have interacted with local societies and their beliefs and customs. Pioneering studies have posited that aspects of canonical and institutional Daoist traditions provide an organizational framework for the formation of local pantheons and practices. While this analytical model has benefited our understanding of the transmission of texts and teachings from the top down, from the imperial to the local, questions remain as to how local society has shaped and reshaped religious practices and identities from the bottom up. This panel examines precisely these inquiries across several specific localities in both historical and modern contexts. Its participants explore a diverse range of materials, including liturgical manuals, ordination documents, esoteric talismans, temple stelae, regional maps, and ritual performances, aiming to introduce new perspectives and methodologies for understanding local expressions and adaptations of Daoist practice.
Daoist sources contain abundant material for the study of Daoist verse, from the more well-known Supreme Purity (Shangqing ) scriptures to the profusion of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen ) verse to later poetry produced through spirit-writing. Moreover, literati writers, who observed and participated in Daoist rites, wrote poems on the ubiquitous presence of Daoist ritual, priests, practices, sites, and texts for centuries of Chinese history. This panel focuses on poetic expressions that were informed by Daoist contexts and turns our attention to the ways writers of verse engaged more specifically with Daoist cultivation practices. The papers address a range of materials from different time periods, but all seek to explore central questions: How do writers use poetic forms to capture, imagine, reflect or imagine various kinds of Daoist bodily cultivation? How do socio-historical conditions and conventions shape such poetry? How does such poetry function rhetorically?
This panel probes diverse aspects of non-human animal mortality. Participants examine models for mourning the extinction of species (Ryan Darr); the ways humans mourn the deaths of beloved pets (Chris Miller); and the preservation of non-human remains as sacred relics in museums (Natalia Schwien). Jamie L. Brummitt provides feedback, followed by audience Q&A. Join us for the business meeting immediately after the panel.
In this panel we explore the ways that different Jewish sources, from different times and places in Jewish history, demonstrate what it means to be in community with the dead. Our papers discuss stories from the Talmud Bavli, burial rituals in medieval Ashkenaz, and a painting cycle from 18th c. Prague to show that across these diverse times and places Jews were concerned with how to be in relationship with the dead, as well as their Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors. In the sources we present it becomes clear that the dead are not simply absent, but rather continue to have an emotional, ethical, religious, or even conscious presence. In these sources the dead are owed some kind of relationship with the living, whether it is with those who care for the body, visit the cemetery, or the larger Jewish and non-Jewish society who observe these various rites and rituals.
This panel examines the connections between cross-cultural contact and representations of psychedelic use by yoga practitioners.
The first paper questions the identification of _soma_ with various psychedelic materials and explores the problematic implications of assuming that psychedelics lead to the same mystical states found in South Asian religious literature.
The second paper considers the impact of using a psychedelic on language and vocal patterning, arguing that scholars should move beyond botany and vague mystical experiences to explore how the _soma_ sacrifice shaped the ritual itself.
Our third paper calls into question what premodern South Asian texts meant by “intoxication.” The authors explore the various distinctions between types of _unmatta/mada_ and examine the employment of various intoxicants.
Finally, the fourth paper calls into question the historical linkages between yoga and psychoactive substances as well as the notion of yoga itself being a substitute for those substances.
The contributors on this panel look at a wide range of examples from many traditions with varying approaches to alcohol studies to supply the discourse on religion and alcohol with a religious studies perspective. The contributors look to many places we can see “religion” and “alcohol” intersect. The panel includes contributions on a variety of religious traditions as well as the “not-religion”. The panel is based on the forthcoming (Routledge) volume that spans historical and geospatial contexts from Ancient Israel to contemporary Nigeria, topics from the uses of alcohol in cultural festivals to the uses of religious imagery in modern marketing of alcoholic products, and methodologies from ethnography to scriptural analysis. The panel will demonstrate the ways religion and alcohol are used to create boundaries that form group identities, reject and subvert dominant imperial powers, and other ways religion and alcohol are used to construct social formations and identities.
Drugs and rituals often form a pair. Some religious rituals use drugs to induce altered states, while drug use and recovery often take place in ritualized contexts. The papers in this panel examine the interaction between drugs and rituals through case studies that analyze the creation of rituals for psychedelic-assisted therapy, ritualized practices used in Alcoholics Anonymous, and the hypothetical smoking of marijuana in the First Church of Cannabis.
This session includes four papers spanning different time periods, cultures, and methodologies to explore new understandings within Orthodoxy. From hermeneutical reframings, to phenomenological interpretations, and theological insights to cultural heritage, this panel provides space for diverse topics to be brought into conversation around understandings of Orthodoxy and the types of thinking that can be applied to gain new insights around topics within Orthodox Christianity.
This session will explore the relationship between vulnerability and agency in Orthodox Christianity, topics that intersect in important and urgent ways in contemporary Orthodox Christian theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. Papers will address the potential of the works of Maximus the Confessor to respond to abuse and trauma in the Orthodox Church; the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor as the foundation for a disability-positive virtue ethic; and an analysis of Irenaeus of Lyon’s trinitarian image of the Son and Holy Spirit as “the Father’s Two Hands” as received by Sergei Bulgakov, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Sarah Coakley, and Shelly Rambo, that uncovers the role of the Spirit as freely entering into a “vulnerability” in solidarity with the world that is analogous to the suffering Christ’s.
Practical Theology and qualitative research methodologies presents a rich terrain for exploration and discovery. We invite scholars, researchers, and practitioners to participate in a dynamic session focused on creative qualitative research methodologies, including in contexts of teaching and learning, and creative ways of combining/integrating/interpreting theological perspectives with social scientific research methods in Practical Theology. This session includes eight 10-minute interactive presentations and discussion that include digital media, qualitative and quantitative research methods, cooperative narrative approaches, participatory action research, artistic production, decolonial practices, community displacement, womanist theology, trauma-sensitive theology, theological education, and homiletics.
This session features the co-edited volume by Cristina Lledo Gomez, Agnes Brazal and Ma. Marilou Ibita , “500 Years of Christianity in the Philippines and the Global Filipino/a: Postcolonial Perspectives” published in February, 2024. Panelists will discuss issues around indigeneity, being Filipino/a, and Christian colonialism.
This session explores the idea of violence and nonviolence in relation to borders and global migration. Borders are spaces of death and life. Established identities are stretched, at times inciting conflict and at other times transformation. New identities emerge. The papers in this session will cross the issues of migration and Catholic Social Teaching, as well as indigenous peoples and ecclesial membership.
This session explores the idea of violence and nonviolence in relation to borders, global migration and Christianity. Borders are spaces of death and life. Established identities are stretched, at times inciting conflict and at other times transformation. New identities emerge. The papers in this session will cross the issues of migration and Catholic Social Teaching, as well as indigenous peoples and ecclesial membership.
Recognizing the coastal location of the 2024 AAR Annual Meeting, this session features papers on water, extractivism, and anti- or de-colonial approaches to knowing and relating to waters. In keeping with the annual meeting theme, the confluence of military violence and oceanic topics will be front of mind in a conference center mere kilometers from the second largest US naval base and an influential institution of oceanography with a military history. Following the insights of scholars such as Gilo-Whitaker, Liboiron, Ballestero, and more, the papers in this session attend to slippages and flows among culturally particular epistemologies, ontologies, and ethics of water. With foci on ritual in the context of privatized waters of the Sundarbans, multi-religious tensions around extraction at sites of melting glaciers in Bolivia’s Milluni Valley, and contesting the evangelical ferver of mainstream fresh water futurisms, these papers pay particular attention to the coloniality of practices of assessing and measuring waters while confronting the contemporary narrowing of paradigms for resistance.
The term “fetish” originated in the 16th century when Portuguese merchants sought to describe the purported misvaluation of material goods by West African peoples they encountered on the Gold Coast. The fetish, then, has historically bound the religious with the economic, conjoining racialized ideas about value and sacrality with practices of exchange and ritual. Such religio-economic entanglements have often emerged in the context of colonial and imperial aims where justifications for resource extraction have produced and been produced by religious narratives.
This panel features three papers that span geographic contexts, resource imaginaries, and extractive practices. However, they are joined in analyzing the imbrications of religious systems and colonial-imperial-economic power associated with energy and extractivism: a paper on the “colonial myth” of clean energy, one on commodity fetishism and petroleum extractivism, and another on the history of Buddhist imperial power and gemstone mining in Southeast Asia.
If esoteric religious practices are, by definition, "hidden," then who exactly do they exclude, and what are the social consequences of such exclusions? This panel examines the relationship between esoteric practice and violent ideology in three diverse historical and cultural circumstances. From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, these panelists explore the interconnections between esotericism and discourses of universalism and traditionalism. These panelists demonstrate some of the ways in which esoteric discourses of prisca theologica and secrecy can and have led to intolerant and violent cultural formations.
This panel challenges commonly held notions of esotericism as a necessarily elite, exclusive, or even private form of the religious practice. The authors examine a diverse range of examples of esoteric religious practice as an artistic, activist, and thoroughly public form of religious expression. From pacificist American poetry, to the integration of Swedish Spiritualism and Christianity, to popular comic book as a form of esoteric art, these papers show how modern esotericism has been a socially engaged and vividly public form of religious belief and practice.
The late 19th- and early 20th centuries saw a boom in what might today be considered “spiritual but not religious” movements. Spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, to name only a few, synthesized – often uncritically – post-Protestant Christianity with imported traditions from Central and South Asian yoga and tantric traditions, along with a vast array of symbolic and mythological themes drawing from Gnosticism to medieval alchemy to astrology. How might contemporary scholars locate much less “define” the boundaries between “mysticism” and “esotericism” – and, are these terms even useful in organizing and categorizing these areas? This panel invites papers that address issues of hybridization in mysticism and esotericism, particularly from outside of European traditions, as well as challenge methodological and definitional assumptions, particularly a too rigid separation of “the esoteric” from “the mystic.”
This panel examines a number of broadly “yogic” (or “yoga-adjacent”) concepts and practices that have served as vehicles for the globalization of Indian esotericism and consequent negotiations of translation and hybridization, personal meaning, and cultural ownership. The esoteric, whether concepts or practices, is often regarded as by definition “hidden”—relying on networks of specialized knowledge and social belonging. Yet when it comes to modern transnational yoga, such concepts and practices are not only understood as universal but necessarily exoteric, as they enter into a global marketplace of spiritual consumption. The panelists foreground a historically diverse range of such examples, ranging from 19th-century translations of yogic texts, to 20th-century reinterpretations of kundalini , to contemporary workshops popularizing jyotish (astrology) as part of a “yogic lifestyle.”
