Scholars of Black Music will engage in a discussion of how the term “theomusicology,” originally coined by Jahya Jongintaba (formerly Jon Michael Spencer), serves as a meaningful framework today. Drawing from their expertise in sociology, ethnomusicology, musicology, history, and theology, panelists will offer a wide range of methodological insights as they focus on the connection between spiritual values and musical expression in Black Music. A goal of the panel is to review contemporary iterations and uses of the term theomusicology while redefining it for modern use. A range of Black music experiences spanning Reconstruction era bush meetings in Baltimore to George Floyd’s funeral will be examined in the light of theomusicology and explored by the panel. Looking at the interchange between Black Music, Spirit and culture, panelists will bring to light the valuable framework theomusicology offers when talking about Black experience, Black identity, and Black resistance.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book
All time are listed in Eastern Time Zone.
Scholars of Black Music will engage in a discussion of how the term “theomusicology,” originally coined by Jahya Jongintaba (formerly Jon Michael Spencer), serves as a meaningful framework today. Drawing from their expertise in sociology, ethnomusicology, musicology, history, and theology, panelists will offer a wide range of methodological insights as they focus on the connection between spiritual values and musical expression in Black Music. A goal of the panel is to review contemporary iterations and uses of the term theomusicology while redefining it for modern use. A range of Black music experiences spanning Reconstruction era bush meetings in Baltimore to George Floyd’s funeral will be examined in the light of theomusicology and explored by the panel. Looking at the interchange between Black Music, Spirit and culture, panelists will bring to light the valuable framework theomusicology offers when talking about Black experience, Black identity, and Black resistance.
This panel examines the remarkable range of Tibetan receptions of the Buddhist law of causation, Interdependent Arising (pratītyasamutpāda; Tib. rten ‘brel, “dendrel”). While this classic Indic Buddhist model of how things emerge describes a process by which living beings are caught in a cycle of ignorance, in Tibet it became a dynamic of flourishing. The first paper will look at a switch in emphasis in the Tibetan philosophical examination of dendrel. The second paper will explore how good interdependence can be created, rather than passively received. The third paper examines the deep appreciation of dendrel in terms of the way that thef land itself acts as an agent of education. The fourth paper explores dendrel in certain Indian Buddhist doctrinal texts and then modified in Tibetan astrology and divination. The final paper will draw on New Materialisms and multispecies ethnographers to lend new language to characterize Tibetan ways of dendrel.
Papers
This paper explores the connections between dependent arising (rten ‘brel) and ignorance (ma rig pa), particularly in the work of the 15th century philosopher Je Tsongkhapa. Three distinct philosophical claims are often made about dependent arising and ignorance: (1) dependent arising is a framework for explaining the connection between ignorance and suffering, (2) dependent arising is an object of ignorance, and (3) dependent arising is a remedy for ignorance. I will draw on the work of Tsongkhapa, particularly in his “In Praise of Dependent Arising” and The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, to work out how these three claims about dependent arising and ignorance hang together. I conclude with some reflections on the deceiving simplicity of dependent arising: why is dependent arising so predictably ignored even as it is so seemingly obvious?
The ways of recognizing, witnessing, and celebrating moments of dendrel in Tibetan everyday life can be understood as a process of Land education, which entails active engagement with the natural world and being deeply informed by systems of intergenerational place-based relationships and knowledge. The natural or the more- than-human world, including animals, plants, stars, and rainbows, participates in delivering the signs of dendrel, while Indigenous knowledge teaches us the ways to attend to and understand such moments of tendrel alignment. In this paper, I explore examples of everyday Tibetan practices (songs and ceremonies) of dendrel to argue how such ways make for a process of critical Indigenous education. This can refocus Tibetan attention to their Land and traditions as active and dynamic encounters with the living world. I understand such ways of observing dendrel and living by its logics as contributing to educational freedom and community empowerment.
The hyper-individualism and ecocidal anthropocentrism that have characterized dominant strains of modernity are rapidly becoming failed epistemologies according to a broad swath of contemporary academic disciplines. New Materialists, multispecies ethnographers, and others inspired by “the ontological turn” in anthropology have coined new vocabularies to articulate their insights into interdependence, featuring words like symbiosis, assemblage, kinship, relatedness, entanglement, co-presence, and more. For all the critical and creative dynamism of these varied inquiries into interdependence, few Euro-American critical theorists seem to realize the overlap of their ideas with elements of Buddhist philosophy, most notably dependent origination (Skt. pratītyasamutpāda; Tib. tendrelརྟེན་འབྲེལ།). This paper proposes that we rectify that omission by inviting the full range of meanings of tendrel into the English language in hopes that we can reconsider human freedom as interdependent, generated through the tendrel of auspicious connections between the human and more-than-human facets of our world.
This paper illustrates the concept of dendrel (rten ‘brel) in Tibetan ecological thought, broadly construed. It will focus on the role of dendrel in native astrology and geomancy. I will argue that dendrel is understood as a bridge between objects and consciousness, and facilitates mind-matter mutual influence and transformation. The paper also explores how a sense of dendrel is deliberately cultivated for worldly purposes by applying a “substance” said to be derived from the “secret bodies” of holy mountains and rivers. Finally, I investigate instances where human consciousness seems to change physical objects or nature itself, particularly through the dendrel-connected Buddhist concepts of “the force of merit” and “waves of blessing”. I draw on both Indian Buddhist writings and their adaptation in Tibetan folk texts on astrology and geomancy.
This paper will show how the key skill for good dendrel to confer freedom is the capacity to spot moments and circumstances where auspicious factors are beginning to converge, and can be encouraged to converge further. In order for an auspicious dendrel to come together, one needs to cultivate a creative and in many ways artistic skill first of all to recognize that auspicious ingredients are available, and then to act to nudge them to “click” (sgrig) together. A classic example in Tibetan society would be the offering of a pure white scarf (kha btags) at the exact right moment. This paper will explore a few cases of this phenomenon, ranging from philosophical accounts of “pure dendrel,” an innovative category in Tibetan Buddhism, to narratives where dendrel is essential in order for an elevated revelation to occur, to personal experiences and conversations on a recent visit to the Tibetan plateau.
This panel examines the remarkable range of Tibetan receptions of the Buddhist law of causation, Interdependent Arising (pratītyasamutpāda; Tib. rten ‘brel, “dendrel”). While this classic Indic Buddhist model of how things emerge describes a process by which living beings are caught in a cycle of ignorance, in Tibet it became a dynamic of flourishing. The first paper will look at a switch in emphasis in the Tibetan philosophical examination of dendrel. The second paper will explore how good interdependence can be created, rather than passively received. The third paper examines the deep appreciation of dendrel in terms of the way that thef land itself acts as an agent of education. The fourth paper explores dendrel in certain Indian Buddhist doctrinal texts and then modified in Tibetan astrology and divination. The final paper will draw on New Materialisms and multispecies ethnographers to lend new language to characterize Tibetan ways of dendrel.
Papers
This paper explores the connections between dependent arising (rten ‘brel) and ignorance (ma rig pa), particularly in the work of the 15th century philosopher Je Tsongkhapa. Three distinct philosophical claims are often made about dependent arising and ignorance: (1) dependent arising is a framework for explaining the connection between ignorance and suffering, (2) dependent arising is an object of ignorance, and (3) dependent arising is a remedy for ignorance. I will draw on the work of Tsongkhapa, particularly in his “In Praise of Dependent Arising” and The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, to work out how these three claims about dependent arising and ignorance hang together. I conclude with some reflections on the deceiving simplicity of dependent arising: why is dependent arising so predictably ignored even as it is so seemingly obvious?
The ways of recognizing, witnessing, and celebrating moments of dendrel in Tibetan everyday life can be understood as a process of Land education, which entails active engagement with the natural world and being deeply informed by systems of intergenerational place-based relationships and knowledge. The natural or the more- than-human world, including animals, plants, stars, and rainbows, participates in delivering the signs of dendrel, while Indigenous knowledge teaches us the ways to attend to and understand such moments of tendrel alignment. In this paper, I explore examples of everyday Tibetan practices (songs and ceremonies) of dendrel to argue how such ways make for a process of critical Indigenous education. This can refocus Tibetan attention to their Land and traditions as active and dynamic encounters with the living world. I understand such ways of observing dendrel and living by its logics as contributing to educational freedom and community empowerment.
The hyper-individualism and ecocidal anthropocentrism that have characterized dominant strains of modernity are rapidly becoming failed epistemologies according to a broad swath of contemporary academic disciplines. New Materialists, multispecies ethnographers, and others inspired by “the ontological turn” in anthropology have coined new vocabularies to articulate their insights into interdependence, featuring words like symbiosis, assemblage, kinship, relatedness, entanglement, co-presence, and more. For all the critical and creative dynamism of these varied inquiries into interdependence, few Euro-American critical theorists seem to realize the overlap of their ideas with elements of Buddhist philosophy, most notably dependent origination (Skt. pratītyasamutpāda; Tib. tendrelརྟེན་འབྲེལ།). This paper proposes that we rectify that omission by inviting the full range of meanings of tendrel into the English language in hopes that we can reconsider human freedom as interdependent, generated through the tendrel of auspicious connections between the human and more-than-human facets of our world.
This paper illustrates the concept of dendrel (rten ‘brel) in Tibetan ecological thought, broadly construed. It will focus on the role of dendrel in native astrology and geomancy. I will argue that dendrel is understood as a bridge between objects and consciousness, and facilitates mind-matter mutual influence and transformation. The paper also explores how a sense of dendrel is deliberately cultivated for worldly purposes by applying a “substance” said to be derived from the “secret bodies” of holy mountains and rivers. Finally, I investigate instances where human consciousness seems to change physical objects or nature itself, particularly through the dendrel-connected Buddhist concepts of “the force of merit” and “waves of blessing”. I draw on both Indian Buddhist writings and their adaptation in Tibetan folk texts on astrology and geomancy.
This paper will show how the key skill for good dendrel to confer freedom is the capacity to spot moments and circumstances where auspicious factors are beginning to converge, and can be encouraged to converge further. In order for an auspicious dendrel to come together, one needs to cultivate a creative and in many ways artistic skill first of all to recognize that auspicious ingredients are available, and then to act to nudge them to “click” (sgrig) together. A classic example in Tibetan society would be the offering of a pure white scarf (kha btags) at the exact right moment. This paper will explore a few cases of this phenomenon, ranging from philosophical accounts of “pure dendrel,” an innovative category in Tibetan Buddhism, to narratives where dendrel is essential in order for an elevated revelation to occur, to personal experiences and conversations on a recent visit to the Tibetan plateau.
Religious freedom is recognized as an essential human right. Yet claims of religious liberty are also used to justify discrimination against women, lgbtq+ individuals, religious minorities, and others. We sometimes see interfaith alliances collaborating to undermine civil rights protections. High-profile disputes over insurance coverage of contraceptives and abortion raise questions about the individuals' liberties, often sacrificed to the claims of religious institutions or even private companies.
Lawmakers wield "religious liberty" to impose their own religious beliefs, both explicitly and unacknowledged, restricting the lives and freedoms of others. We have also witnessed concerns about religious bigotry being used as a shield against criticism and a challenge to freedom of speech and assembly. How do we guard individual liberties and group practices while resisting the increasing weaponization of religious freedom?
We will explore topics that address these with a particular focus on the impact on our multifaith context and encounters across religious difference.
Papers
This paper examines the contested categorization of Mexican spiritual practices, particularly in relation to the term Brujería, within both academic discourse and lived experience. By analyzing the historical, epistemological, and social forces that shape these classifications, this study explores the ways in which Western religious frameworks classify these traditions as “folk religion" rather than an entire religious system in and of itself. Drawing from decolonial theory and Religious Rtudies, the paper interrogates how Brujería has been both a stigmatizing label and a reclaimed identity, reflecting broader tensions in religious hybridity and cultural identity. This study highlights how these traditions embody a syncretic spirituality that defies rigid religious binaries. By situating these practices within the broader shifts in religious affiliation, identity, and interfaith engagement, this paper challenges the necessity of categorization itself and calls for a more nuanced, decolonial approach to understanding Mexican spiritualities.
At a rally in Ferguson, Missouri six months after the killing of Michael Brown, a seminarian took the bullhorn. Offering a twist on the then-popular chant, “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!” she called out: “Show me what theology looks like.” And the crowd responded, “This is what theology looks like!”
This paper looks at the ways in which the public-facing work of one broad-based, interfaith community organizing project in Philadelphia, POWER Interfaith, functions to not only “show us what theology looks like,” but suggests two things. First, that race-centered, interfaith organizing can be seen not only as a religious practice, but as a form of public theology. Second, in a departure from traditional faith-based organizing practice, being differently-religious together in urban space is not just a means to the end of winning organizing campaigns, but can also be an end in itself.
In 1967, Saul Colbi wrote that “the mere existence and operation of a Ministry of Religious Affairs [in Israel] underlies the importance which the state attaches to the spiritual aspect of the life in the land that is called Holy.” While non-Jewish religious communities had to adapt to this new framework of governance, the ‘Missionary Question’—whether Christians could continue proselytization efforts in the Jewish State—became a central concern.
Using the controversy surrounding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ (LDS) establishment of a campus in Jerusalem in the 1980s as a case study, this paper explores Israeli efforts to legislate against Christian missionary activities. It will focus on the legal, religious, and political justifications used to enforce such restrictions, and examine how the concept of ‘religious liberty’ can be mobilized as a political tool of governance to both protect religious identity and limit individual freedoms.
Respondent
Panelists will discuss a variety of locations where religion has been weaponized in the context of Israel/Palestine: African American Christian Zionist tours of the State of Israel, Holocaust memory, trauma, and teshuva, the self-exile of Israelis, and in claims about ‘Jewish indigeneity’ to Palestine.
Papers
In response to the seminar’s call on the theme of “Remember Amalek,” this paper offers a critical analysis of the ways that religion is used on African American Christian Zionist tours of the State of Israel towards the goal of bringing African American Christians and Black churches into the religious/political project of Christian Zionism. It draws on participant observation and interview data from two trips to Israel and Palestine with groups of Black clergy and lay leaders to show how a range of stakeholders invoke, deploy, and weaponize religion in the service of Christian Zionism. These stakeholders include Jewish and Christians trip coordinators, clergy, denominational leaders, tour guides, and others. More broadly, the paper considers the implications how race and religion overlap for African American Christians who get involved in Israel and Palestine and how the stakes of position-taking on that issue have changed since October 7, 2023.
This presentation explores the intersections of Holocaust memory, trauma, and teshuva—the Jewish concept of return and repair—focusing on the impact of Holocaust memory in the context of Israeli settler-colonialism. Drawing on the works of Marianne Hirsch, Naomi Klein, Abdaljawad Omar, and Maimonides, the presentation examines how Holocaust memory has been weaponized to justify violence against Palestinians, perpetuating cycles of trauma rather than facilitating healing. Hirsch’s concept of postmemory shows how the trauma of the Holocaust is transmitted through generations, distorting collective identity and preventing growth. Klein highlights how re-traumatization traps communities in perpetual victimhood, hindering transformation. Omar’s work on settler-colonialism demonstrates how Palestinian suffering is erasure within global narratives, further entrenching injustice. Teshuva—as a process of self-reflection, return, and repair—offers a framework for Jewish communities to confront the weaponization of Holocaust memory and engage in ethical solidarity with Palestinians, creating space for justice, empathy, and healing.
The state of Israel was purportedly founded to ensure the safety of Jews whose lives had become precarious in Diaspora. Zionism claims that the state’s establishment signals the end of Jewish exile. How, then, do we explain the increasing numbers of Israeli Jews leaving the country? Some of them speak about being abandoned by the state and choose instead a form of self-exile. Jewish emigration rose following recent Israeli elections of a far-right governing coalition and the extreme violence of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath. Their departures mirror the state’s withdrawal of support from historically secular ways of being Jewish and the imaginary of a negotiated peace, in favor of alliances with political factions which envision the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The paper builds on preliminary fieldwork in conversation with the extensive scholarship on exile to consider the limits of nationalist ideology and the precarity of national sovereignty.
This paper examines the rise of contemporary public discourse in the English-speaking world that makes claims about ‘Jewish indigeneity’ to Palestine. Focusing on online sources, such as newspapers, articles, blogs, materials published by organizations, and social media content, this paper analyzes how authors define indigeneity, the evidence they use to support claims of ‘Jewish indigeneity,’ and whether these claims intersect with other articulations of indigeneity. Ultimately, this paper investigates how the category of indigeneity and the language of universal indigenous rights are appropriated to justify the existence and actions of the settler-colonial nation-state of Israel and deployed to legitimize the possession of Palestine. It analyzes how Zionist ideas of indigeneity reproduce settler ideas about land as possession and function within the framework of the nation-state that fundamentally conflict with critical Indigenous approaches to land as relational, an interconnected web of obligations and responsibilities, in opposition to colonialism and the nation-state.
This panel addresses questions of freedom and unfreedom in BDSM, kink, sex work, and other minoritized sexual practices. The first paper offers a transfeminist critique of entanglement and intimacies to show how violent and bloody trans women’s entanglements with religion and the state can be. This paper highlights the religious sensations of rendering and being rendered into meat. The second paper examines Jean Paulhan’s Histoire d’O, arguing Christian mystical ascent is central to O and to other texts of erotic self-abasement written by women that make art that fragments the freedom/unfreedom dichotomy. The final paper reflects on the merging of queer and subversive sexuality and holiness, speaking to the experience of spiritual strippers and sex workers. This paper contributes to a queer and sapphic theology unapologetically committed to the work strippers do at the pole to bring irreducible objects of desire and forms of healing into theirs and others' lives.
Papers
This paper explores sadomasochism as a methodological entry point for studying trans/queer life and religion under its present oppressive policing by the United States government. Namely, it seeks to reposition the “more-than-human” turn away from “queer ecology” and the inherent queerness of the body towards, instead, the religious sensations of rendering and being rendered into meat. Centering BDSM and kink as methods exposes the pleasure in the pain of studying that which hurts, especially as a trans woman studying my own subjugation. If BDSM explores the perforated boundaries between pain and pleasure, a safe avenue for embracing pain and trauma felt as uncontrollable sexual ecstasy, I similarly position religious studies as a sensational reenactment of my own control by the state, my rendering as meat, and the economies of un/freedom that both harm me and make up the genuine pleasure I feel from studying religion.
This paper interrogates self-subjugation and the putative dichotomy of freedom/unfreedom in works by Dominique Aury, Emily Dickinson, and Chris Kraus, opening the door to new considerations of relations between the erotic and the mystical. Histoire d’O (1954) has frequently been compared to works of Christian mysticism, predicated on the assumption that both the subjected erotic heroine and the mystic abnegates her ‘self’ in relation to an all-powerful Other. Drawing from Kant, Hegel, and Lacan, I argue that the relation between the protagonists of these erotic texts and Christian writers such as Teresa of Avila is rather that both assume the role of the bride in the Song of Songs: by addressing themselves entirely to absent masters, they fragment hierarchized distinctions of self/Other and freedom/unfreedom, thus laying bare the inextricability of lover and beloved, and standing in hungry, desirous relationality to artmaking, to others, and to language itself.
Being promiscuous lovers and praying to an irreducible God can be talked about more, and especially as theology itself. The work of Rowan Williams on theological integrity, the anti-capitalist theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid, and the vast, eclectic, transdisciplinary archive of psychosocial and critical religious theorists can bring together compelling evidence of this hopeful turn in theological anthropology. This paper will reflect on the merging of queer and subversive sexuality and holiness by speaking to the experience of spiritual strippers and sex workers. This paper hopes to contribute to the furthering of a queer and sapphic theology unapologetic and radically committed to the work strippers do at the pole to bring irreducible objects of desire and forms of healing into theirs and others' lives.
This author meets critics panel centers Leela Prasad's 2020 monograph The Audacious Raconteur published by Cornell University Press. By presenting detailed yet always riveting accounts of four fascinating nineteenth century Southern Indian figures and their discursive and literary acts that poach at the hegemony of British colonial power, Prasad theorizes sovereignty as a quality that is not restricted to the modern state or its sites of exception, but that finds expression and sustenance through modes of storytelling that populate and inhabit the thicket of everyday life. Sovereignty represents an aspiration that can never be conclusively colonized, Prasad argues, in this thoroughly interdisciplinary monograph situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and South Asian Studies. This panel engages some pressing themes of sovereignty, narrative, and colonial power highlighted in The Audacious Raconteur.
Kecia Ali’s The Woman Question in Islamic Studies is a bold appraisal of citational politics in Islamic Studies, offering an incisive look into the pervasive ways that the citation and inclusion of women as scholars, historical influences, and active participants in the constitution of Islam have routinely been diminished, disregarded, or erased entirely. A group of six speakers from different institutional homes, disciplinary trainings, backgrounds, and at different points of their academic careers will reflect on The Woman Question and its implications for Islamic Studies and the study of religion at large. They will offer comments assessing citational diversity across anthropology, philosophy, history, Black studies, ethnic studies, and digital humanities while sharing the insights and challenges that The Woman Question poses for their own work. Dr. Ali will respond to speaker comments before turning to an audience Q/A.
Kecia Ali’s The Woman Question in Islamic Studies is a bold appraisal of citational politics in Islamic Studies, offering an incisive look into the pervasive ways that the citation and inclusion of women as scholars, historical influences, and active participants in the constitution of Islam have routinely been diminished, disregarded, or erased entirely. A group of six speakers from different institutional homes, disciplinary trainings, backgrounds, and at different points of their academic careers will reflect on The Woman Question and its implications for Islamic Studies and the study of religion at large. They will offer comments assessing citational diversity across anthropology, philosophy, history, Black studies, ethnic studies, and digital humanities while sharing the insights and challenges that The Woman Question poses for their own work. Dr. Ali will respond to speaker comments before turning to an audience Q/A.