In a world of violent, traumatic, and tragic rituals, objects, and histories, three authors reckon with the ethics of moving forward. On this panel, Molly Farneth, Laura Levitt, and Karen Guth respond to one another's recent books. Each author has analyzed examples of dominating power and its effects in contemporary society. Each has found ways of describing a positive vision for communities responding to the tragedies and violent circumstances in which they are caught up. Drawing on work in feminist theory and religious studies on care, practice, and performance, Farneth, Levitt, and Guth will discuss the vivid examples that sparked their books, the similarities and differences in their disciplinary motives, and their answers to a pressing contemporary question: what will we—and what should we—bring with us from the past to a present in which tragedy, violence, and trauma remain?
David W. Congdon’s book Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024) critiques orthodoxy as a violent form of religious identity. By providing a thorough intellectual history of modern Christian boundary-making from the Reformation to today’s MAGA evangelicals, he shows that conservative defenders of so-called “historic Christianity” are just as modern as the mainline liberals whom they oppose. Congdon proposes “polydoxy” as a pluralistic and liberating alternative. Four scholars will discuss his book and its relevance for Christian theology and understanding evangelicalism in today’s political environment: Jill Hicks-Keeton (University of Southern California), Cambria Kaltwasser (Northwestern College), Evan Kuehn (North Park University), and John J. Thatamanil (Union Theological Seminary, NYC).
This session examines the dangerous intersection of evangelicalism, politics, and violence. Paper topics range from the wedding of evangelicalism with Christian nationalism and organized campaigns of spiritual violence culminating in January 6th to the explorations of the ideational logic of “conspiritualism" and the correlations of atonement theory and gender complementarianism to violence. Drawing on historical, theoretical, and theological resources, these papers promise to deepen our understanding of evangelicalism's power to both foster and restrain violent political engagement.
This roundtable explores maternal agency, choice, and children’s upbringing within or against religious frameworks. Although maternal agency (mothers’ ability to make autonomous decisions that shape their children’s lives) is a crucial aspect of parenting, it is significantly influenced by religious beliefs and practices on maternal agency. For many mothers, religion is a guiding force in shaping decisions regarding themselves and their children, from moral teachings to ritual participation and community engagement. For others, religion poses challenges, constrains their agency, and prompts questions about autonomy and freedom of choice. Contributors will share perspectives and empirical research on the dynamics of navigating the intersection of motherhood and religious norms within a framework centered on matricentric feminist approaches as they explore the experiences of mothers who grapple with the tensions between observing religious traditions and asserting autonomy in child-rearing in several religious contexts, past and present, including Antiquity, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Daoism.
Black Faith in the Rainbow: Becoming Bishop Troy Lavor Sanders
Welcome Space Brothers (2023) is a feature documentary that unveils the true story of The Unarius Academy of Science, a long-running extraterrestrial-channeling, self-healing spiritual school in El Cajon, California, whose students in the late 1970s became a wildly prolific filmmaking and art collective under the direction of outlandish spiritual leader and visionary filmmaker Ruth E. Norman, AKA “Archangel Uriel.” [https://jodiwille.com/films]
"What I Want You to Know" is a searing film about the moral consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, articulated by those who fought them. As the film's official synopsis states "the 13 veterans featured in this film trusted their leaders and believed what they were told about why they needed to go fight and possibly die: to protect America, defend American freedoms, and help the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. But what they found on the ground was shockingly different." In often harrowing detail, this film lifts up the truths these veterans feel are rarely told - the experience of betrayal, moral anguish, and the effects of witnessing and participating in wartime violence. This session will feature a screening of this powerful and courageous film, followed by a panel discussion between the film's director and two leading scholars working at the intersection of theology and moral injury.
Foucault’s 1978-79 interventions into the movements that coalesced into the Iranian revolution, his conversations with Iranian and regional intellectuals and figures, and the theoretical claims that both informed this work and emerged from it – perhaps especially the vexed notion of “political spirituality – are among the most misunderstood and controversial aspects of Foucault’s career. However, new scholarship in Foucault’s late project and the revolution itself, including richer understandings of the context and conditions of its emergence, have deeply complicated this picture. This panel will re-approach Foucault on Iran and Islam more broadly, in order to more clearly wrestle with his engagements with Islam and the Islamic world. Further, we will investigate the ways that Islamic traditions, contemporary movements, and intellectual currents challenge and complicate Foucault’s work within and beyond these specific interventions. Finally, we will ask how these particular conversations intersect with historic and emerging scholarship within all of these areas.
Michel Foucault’s work focuses on Christianity and the West, but his conception of the subject cannot be defined without the Others that mark its boundaries. This panel brings together work on the racialized and gendered subjects that remain unacknowledged within Foucault’s concept of Western Christian subjectivity, and work that applies Foucault’s analytic of power to subjects beyond his consideration. The papers examine his work in light of topics such as the anti-Blackness in his conceptions of religion and race, martyrdom accounts and their gendered representation of the Christian subject, and construction of socially and economically indebted bodies through religious rhetoric, and apply Foucauldian frameworks to the colonial inflection of confession among Indigenous Mexican Christians, and early Dalit Buddhist resistance to Brahmanical power structures. Exploring Foucault’s continuing importance for examining raced, gendered and religious subjectivities across centuries and continents, this conversation reflects on Foucault’s framework through the figures marginalized within it.
For this June session, we have invited scholars to share their works in progress in a workshop that delves into the interplay of embodied experiences and advocacy for social justice in religious contexts. Spanning philosophical, cultural, and theological terrains, the papers unravel the complexities of desire, sexuality, and the pursuit of equality. From Plato to Heidegger to M. Shawn Copeland, we explore the link between desire and physicality, contemplating both affirmations of physical intimacy and reckonings with violence against marginalized bodies. We confront normative constructs perpetuated by white Christian nationalism and navigate the complexities of LGBTQIA+ advocacy within the Black Church, dissecting the mechanisms of reinforcement and resistance.
This session explores the violence done upon gay men by Christian norms and related ecclesiological structures and the correlating effects they have on the internalized homophobia that challenges both the individual as well as the communal experiences of gay and queer men. This conversation draws on systematic review of anti-gay moral norms perpetuated by Christian churches and other major community influencers, along with case studies of gay theologians impacted by the AIDS crisis in the United States and the life and work of Bayard Rustin within and without the Black Church in healing the wounds of racism and homophobia. Collectively, the discussion aims to unravel the violence ecclesiological and civil structures perpetuate upon and within the gay community while positing the notion of fraternity as a source of countering such violence and presenting a new norm of queer-male inclusivity and relationality. The presentations and discussion will be followed by the business meeting of the GMaR.
This panel delves into the intricate interplay between queer existence and religion, examining intersections of identity, influence, and resistance within diverse cultural contexts. The panel discussion will be preceded by the screening of short clips from three queer-affirming African movies or a full movie from one of the options: "Inxeba" (John Trengove, South Africa, 2017), "Walking with Shadows" (Aoife O’Kelly, Nigeria, 2019), and "The Blue Caftan" (Maryam Touzani, Morocco, 2022). These clips will prepare the audience for a paper by Stefanie Knauss on the recent development of positive representations of queerness in African cinema, with particular attention to resistance both to anti-queer Christian and Islamic discourses as well as some of the assumptions implicit in Western models of queerness and sexuality. Questions and discussion to follow.
This roundtable will discuss Brian Blackmore's new monograph *To Hear and to Respond: The Quakers' Groundbreaking Push for Gay Liberation, 1946-1973*, which examines the contributions of Quakers, specifically from the liberal tradition of the Religious Society of Friends, to the advancement of lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights in the United States between 1946-1973. Scholars of American sexual politics, sexuality, and Quaker history will situate Blackmore’s interdisciplinary study across their respective disciplines. The conversation among the panelists will prove stimulating not only to historians of gay rights, but to anyone seeking to imagine a relationship of mutual flourishing between religious and LGBT+ communities.
Ancestors form a class of entities central to peoples' lived experiences of religions worldwide. These experiences include reverence for ancestors, communication with ancestors, and conceptions of ancestral afterlives. Despite its centrality, this topic receives little to no attention within the philosophy of religion. To start addressing this important area of inquiry in a more systematic way, the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion Unit therefore invited three papers to reappraise the role of ancestors in different religous traditions, here North American Indigenous cultures and East Asian modern societies, as well as to assess the potentials of the category of “ancestors” in the field of philosophy of religion.
Extraordinary individuals (saints, sages, heroes, etc.) are often transgressors. They cross boundaries (actual and imagined), they break rules (sacred and profane), and they challenge norms (about sex, gender, class, etc.). How does the extraordinary status (or sanctity) of these individuals endow them with the power to transgress, for better and/or worse? How do those who honor such personages make sense of their transgressive power? What can this power tell us about the role of the extraordinary individual for the community that gathers in their wake?
In keeping with the collaborative ethos of the Hagiology Seminar, this roundtable will involve participation in three virtual conversations leading up to an in-person session at the 2024 AAR Annual Meeting.
Media about extraordinary individuals (saints, sages, heroes, etc.) often entails the work of translation. The lives of such personages translate the values of their community; disciples translate and transmit their story; sometimes devotees even translate the body from one place to another. Moreover, those studying such media are frequently faced with the need to translate ideas from one linguistic and conceptual world to another. But do these acts of translation entail violence? Do devotees and/or scholars disfigure the extraordinary individual when they carry (compel?) them across cultures, traditions, moral frameworks, and contemporary understandings of identity (race, sex, gender, religion, secularity, etc.)? As scholars, what are our ethical responsibilities in the face of such (alleged) violence? In keeping with the collaborative ethos of the Hagiology Seminar, this roundtable will involve participation in three virtual conversations leading up to an in-person session at the 2024 AAR Annual Meeting. The roundtable will be headed by Reyhan Durmaz (University of Pennsylvania).
The Mīmāṃsā author Kumārila was one of the most formidable and determined critics of the Yogācāra philosophy and of the tradition of Buddhist epistemology that emerged within it. This session explores several aspects of his biting and brilliant critique and discusses what we can learn from it, both for our understanding of South Asian intellectual history and for philosophy today. Key topics to be discussed include the Buddhist concept of conventional truth, idealism, the dream argument, the "self-awareness" (svasaṃvedana ) doctrine of Yogācāra and the memory argument for it, and whether an anti-realist, non-referential view of language can be internally consistent.
