Theme: Three Chaplains: The Work of Muslim Chaplains in the US Armed Forces
Saturday, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Texas Ballroom, Salon AB (4th Floor)
Three Chaplains is a documentary film that looks at Islam and religious freedom in America through the lens of military service. David Washburn, the filmmaker, will introduce and screen the film. This will be followed by a discussion that includes Muslim chaplains, as well as a former naval officer who worked with chaplains during her time in the Navy and is currently working on her PhD dissertation on a Catholic-Muslim comparative theological framework of hope and fear. The panel will be moderated by Feryal Salem, who has worked on training many Muslim chaplains.
Three Muslim Chaplains, USAF Maj. Rafael Lantigua, US Army Col. Khallid Shabazz, and USAF Capt. Saleha Jabeen, will be on the panel.
Theme: DANAM Annual Book Review Panel: Contemplative Studies in Jainism: Meditation, Prayer, and Veneration; Rita Sherma, Purushottama Bilimoria and Cogen Bohanec, editors, Routledge Press, 2023.
Saturday, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Marriott Riverwalk-Alamo Ballroom, Salon C
Theme: Emerging Voices in the Study of Chinese Religions
Saturday, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Marriott Riverwalk-Alamo Ballroom, Salon F
Theme: Jot Blog Writers Luncheon
Saturday, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Marriott Rivercenter-Grand Ballroom, Salon J
For those hoping to broaden the reach and creativity of their scholarship, this luncheon will be an opportunity to learn more about blogging as a scholarly genre and practice! Join us as we share approaches, techniques, and generative writing exercises. This will be an interactive gathering intended to widen academic settings.
Theme: New Approaches to Chinese Religions
Saturday, 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Marriott Riverwalk-Bowie
Theme: Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Post-Lunch Discussion
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 217C (Meeting Room Level)
Immediately following the Academic Labor and Contingent Faculty Lunch, linger for conversation, connection, and support.
Theme: Effecting Institutional Change with and for Minoritized Communities
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 210B (Meeting Room Level)
In this session panelists will discuss the opportunities and challenges of working to create more inclusive and just institutions. Panelists will narrate their own experiences of justice work, including barriers they have experienced, coalitions they have built, and strategies for making this (often unpaid) work “count” for career advancement. The session will be interactive and participatory. Attendees will be invited to tell their own stories, find allies and co-conspirators, and strategize about how to do the work of effecting institutional change while not burning out in the process.
Theme: Black Women’s Faith: Reflections on Modern African American Literature
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Bonham E (3rd Floor)
This panel harnesses the works of such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Elizabeth Wright to reflect, respond and critique the characterization and embodiment of the spiritual practice of Black women in modern literature. How does language, storytelling and the choreosonic murmurings in modern African-American literature centered around women signal joy, despair, hope, and trauma wedded to flight, freedom, wailing, mothering, transgressive acts, personal intimacies and the ongoing survival of Black women? How do we as writers and readers interrogate situations where faith that provides uplift or challenges the identity of characters in a narrative? From various registers these papers explore power dynamics, meditations on the provenance and purpose of one’s life, agency, opportunities and threats. And, they ask us as readers, writers and educators to consider the benefits and challenges of working with these kinds of sources as teaching tools, and sources of knowledge formation.
Theme: Bonhoeffer and "La Labor de Nuestras Manos"
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 207A (Meeting Room Level)
The papers in this session take up the 2023 presidential theme: “La Labor de Nuestras Manos.” Two of the papers do so through critical engagement with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s critiques of Bonhoeffer’s “theology from the underside” and the limitations of his “modern settler theology.” The other two turn from this focus on economic-oriented critiques to politics, considering the potential of Bonhoeffer’s theology as a resource for truth-telling and humanitarian interventions.
Theme: Debt and the Family Across Buddhist Communities
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 217A (Meeting Room Level)
The idea of filial debts calls attention to enduring tensions in studies of Buddhist social institutions, their ritual maintenance, and their literary representations. Across Buddhist traditions, the doctrinal articulation, narrative representation, and ritual expression of filial debts, filial piety, and filial gratitude have occupied the core of religious motivation and practice for centuries. Ranging from medieval China to premodern and contemporary Southeast Asia, this panel identifies key terms and resources for the study of filial debts, and traces their shifting significance and development over time and across various textual and ethnographic contexts. A decade on from the publication of such landmark works as Shayne Clarke's Family Matters and Liz Wilson's Family in Buddhism , this panel returns to the status of the family in Buddhism, taking filial debts as a core frame and focus for the study of Buddhist personhood, affect, ritual, literature, and belonging.
Theme: Buddhist Ethics in a More-Than-Human World
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221B (Meeting Room Level)
This panel will examine novel Buddhist responses to the more-than-human world. Over the course of five papers, the critical and constructive sides of both animal and environmental ethics will be explored to demonstrate the breadth of positions in these contemporary Buddhist ethical fields. First, Paul Fuller and William Edelglass approach questions of Buddhist environmental ethics from distinct angles. Fuller explores the ecological relevance of mett ā meditation while Edelglass addresses some of the methodological issues present in both critical and constructive eco-Buddhisms. Jeffrey Nicolaisen and Barbra Clayton then look at nonhuman animals in contemporary Buddhisms and assess how Taiwanese nuns and the Indian textual-philosophical tradition navigate some of the barriers to animal rights in Buddhism. Finally, Colin Simonds argues that environmental ethics emerges out of animal ethics in Tibetan Buddhist contexts and investigates how this Buddhist approach can alleviate the usual tension between individualistic animal ethics and holistic environmental ethics.
Theme: Spirituality and the Erotic: Resources Within the Christian Traditions to Frame the Erotic as a Positive Life-giving Influence
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 301A (Ballroom Level)
Human sexuality has been decried within a range of Christian traditions as something to be controlled and subdued. Repeatedly over the centuries Christians have been taught to “conquer the flesh” and “exalt the spirit” as a way of entering into intimacy with the Divine. In some traditions, celibacy was extolled as advantageous to spiritual maturity while marriage and child-bearing was tolerated as a social necessity. Yet many of the Christian witnesses describe their relationship with the Divine in sensual and strong affective terms. Indeed, for many Christian writers, the Divine-human relationship is framed as primarily erotic in nature. This session is a step forward to reclaim and reframe the erotic within the Christian traditions not only as expressive of the nature of the Divine-human relationship but also as fundamental to its core.
Theme: Finitude, Ambiguity, Loss: Theologies of Creation between Alienation and Incarnation
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 221A (Meeting Room Level)
This session engages theological spaces between alienation and incarnation, with attention to racism, slavery, and the environmental catastrophe, and within frameworks that explore creaturely finitude, disability, sabbath, ambiguities, uncertainty, exile, and loss. The session also considers the themes of hope, providence, and eschatology.
Theme: Comparative Theology and the Islamic Traditions: Muslim and Christian Perspectives
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Bonham C (3rd Floor)
This panel is a collection of four exercises in comparative theology that engage the Islamic and Hindu traditions from both Muslim and Christian perspectives. The discipline of comparative theology has typically remained a Christian project. However, recently comparative theology has been employed by non-Christian scholar-practitioners and theologians and this panel, in part, seeks to continue this trend. Additionally, most exercises in Christian comparative theology have predominantly engaged Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, but this panel, in part, seeks to explore Christian engagement with Islamic traditions.
Theme: Asad's Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular Two and Three Decades Later
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Bonham D (3rd Floor)
To mark the 30th anniversary of Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion and the 20th anniversary of his Formations of the Secular , a panel of scholars will reflect critically on the impact of these influential works on the study of religion, to reengage with them in light of subsequent works addressing the secular or post-secular, or to delineate new lines of inquiry in studies of the secular.
Theme: Embodied Death: Understanding Death from an Intersectional Lens
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Bowie B (Second Floor)
The Death, Dying, and Beyond Unit invites papers on the topic of “Embodied Death: Understanding Death from an Intersectional Lens” Our primary session will be a selection of papers on the intersection of death and embodied experience, ranging from thinking about how embodied experiences shape the dying narrative, the ways in which disability is or isn’t accounted for in the dying experience, an examination of the dominant able-bodied and primarily white, male narrative on death as one of decline rather than gain, alongside topics interrogating the understanding of death and from an intersectional and layered lens.
Theme: Religions and Nationalisms: The State of the Field
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Republic B (4th Floor)
With this exploratory panel, our aim is to gather a select group of six to seven scholars to reflect on the religious-nationalism phenomena and the normative and analytic stakes in their study. We want to ask: When considering the various phenomena included under a rubric of “religious nationalisms,” how do we approach, understand, and theorize the individual expressions of the religious nationalism phenomenology? What are the normative assumptions and analytic gains in the use of this notion and, further, in the still dominant distinctions we draw between ethnoreligious nationalisms and civic religion? What are the ways in which postcolonial and decolonial perspectives complicate the considerations of these categories and the realities that they purport to explain? What are some possible future trajectories in the study of religions and nationalisms, and what is the role that religious studies ought to play in those future trajectories?
Theme: Who Speaks for Hinduism Now?
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 214D (Meeting Room Level)
In 2000, JAAR published a special issue titled, “Who Speaks for Hinduism?”, which included a set of ten articles focused on issues, questions, and conflicts seminal to Hindu studies at the turn of the millennium. More than twenty years after JAAR 68.4, as racialized scholars in the field of Hindu studies, we find that while many of the key players in the debate have remained the same, the pressing question of our field is quite different. Our driving question today is not “Who speaks for Hinduism?” but rather: What are the stakes of speaking for, to, and through Hinduism? Our proposed roundtable uses the framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Asian American studies, and Feminist Critical Hindu studies to begin a conversation about our experiences as researchers, teachers, and colleagues of color in Hindu studies.
Theme: Pathways to Professions: Chaplaincy
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Grand Hyatt-Crockett B (4th Floor)
This roundtable session features representatives from the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC) and the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab alongside chaplains in training and chaplains working in a variety of institutional settings (military, prisons, hospice, hospitals) in conversation about what chaplaincy is, what chaplains do, and how to become a chaplain. Graduates holding a MDiv or a MA in Religious Studies are eligible for board certification as chaplains through APC.
Theme: Spheres of Mystical Influence: Powers of Interpretation in Islamic Thought
Saturday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
San Antonio Convention Center-Room 303A (Ballroom Level)
These four papers consider various but related technologies in Islamic thought: lettrism, translation, sound, and astrology. Each paper explores the means by which Muslim thinkers sought to channel the power of interpretation, whether in the societies around them or in the cosmos. The first paper considers Ibn al-ʿArabī’s use of the science of letters, making comparisons to the Muslim philosopher Ibn Masarra and the Jewish exegete Saʿadia Gaon. The second paper studies translations of ʿUmar Khayyām’s Rubāʿiyāt into Telugu and the varying social and interpretive objectives of these translations. The third paper examines sound and silence in M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen’s The Resonance of Allah . Finally, the fourth paper investigates the influx of the occult sciences into Ismaili theology, through a study of The Book of Interim Times and Planetary Conjunctions attributed to Ja‘far b. Manṣūr al-Yaman.