Online Program Book

The three papers in this panel discuss the presidential theme for 2023 AAR, La Labor de Nuestras Mano (The work of our hands). The first paper on a handsewn prayer book from 20th-century Hungary explores questions of devotion, agency, and subjectivity through a single object: suggesting the study of devotion needs not to be a study of the devoted and arguing that through conscious, intentional practice, a space comes into being where the devotee encounters the divine and in so doing displaces the self. The second paper on the Palkaran Textiles community and their narratives in contemporary Tamil Nadu, India, examines how the Palkaran community embraces the theology of their textiles, utilizing the language and labor to divinize their art practice, as a response to growing violence garment laborers experience in South Asia. Finally, the third paper explores the metalworks of blacksmiths and sculptors who re-purpose weapons by transforming objects of destruction into objects with creative purpose, generating possibilities within the intransigent reality of interlocking systems that produce and distribute guns, and illustrating metalwork to provide a context for critical reflection on the dangers of normalizing the constraint and romanticizing the moral agent.

Until recently, most scholarship on Buddhism in North America privileged the study of institutionalized Buddhist organizations. For example, few attempts have been made to study the lived experiences of North American Asian Buddhists and their lived religious practices in digital environments. Scholars have highlighted the idea of “global Buddhism” in the past decade, arguing that Buddhism in the West must be viewed as part of a worldwide transformational process. With the exponential development of digital technology, a global Buddhism approach has expanded and now encompasses the digital world, along with many issues such as digital Buddhist community and identity formation, digital rituals, digital Buddhist education, and the authenticity of digital Buddhist practices. Was the digital Buddhist community just a short-lived necessity, or is this the general direction of the future of Buddhist communities in North America? What does it mean to be globally networked Buddhist communities in a digital world?

How might Catholic theology inform or transform ostensibly secular professions? This session explores this and related questions with an eye on three distinct arenas of work: higher education, industrial farming, and social work.

In response to this year's Presidential theme, CARV seeks to foment a generative dialogue about how the "work of our hands" as religion scholars is descended from, complicit with, or otherwise appropriated to amplify any form of violence. The scholars featured on this panel, as well as the group discussion to follow, will engage with difficult questions about the historical legacies of violence; the fear of violence; active campaigns of violence; and/or the desire to use scholarship as a vehicle to either incite or resist violent actors. This panel’s ultimate purpose is thus to develop a discussion that assists religion scholars in reckoning with the ways in which their work knowingly or unknowingly contributes to discursive iterations of myriad species of violence. This session works intentionally from the margins to disrupt traditional systems of authority and ways of learning, knowing, and being in the world. 

Orthodox-majority contexts, communities, and leaders often cause terrible harm to LGBTQ+ persons through homophobic violence, discourse, and policy. Sexual diversity is perhaps the most polarizing issue facing the modern Orthodox world—from the ecclesial discourse surrounding Pride parades and the conflict in Ukraine, to the Orthodox Church in America’s statement against discussing sexuality—and its real-life effects cannot be understated. Yet, international initiatives over the past decade as well as recent publications (Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality (Fordham, 2022) and Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy: Beyond Male and Female (Fordham, 2023)) have argued Orthodox tradition has resources within it to address issues of gender and sexuality with greater openness and theological consistency. This session features three papers that engage traditional patristic sources to explore what a queering of Orthodoxy and an Orthodox engagement with Queer Studies might look like.

Secular "Saints":

Saints are often recognized by dynamics of veneration, emulation, and mediation of power. But the same dynamics can be seen in contemporary, secular society with the relationship between celebrity and fandom. Are celebrity and sanctity broadly analogous? This session asks how we might use the hagiological categories and approaches to better understand the phenomenon of “secular saints” and how this eventually informs the comparative study of the rhetoric of “sainthood.”

Some questions to consider:

• How do celebrities, politicians, scientists, athletes, and activists embody holiness by another name?
• How do secular “saints” mediate power to their devotees and to what end?
• What (if any) is the analytical purchase of mapping celebrities as saints and celebrity as sanctity?