Video: Stendahl Symposium 2024: New Horizons, New Resistance (2024)

A yearly tradition at HDS, the Stendahl Symposium honors the memory of former professor Krister Stendahl, who tirelessly sought to repair fractions between Jews and Christians, supported the ordination of women, and pushed for the full inclusion and participation of women and minority voices in academia and interfaith work.

Opening Remarks: Given by Samirah Jaigirdar, HDSSA Academics

Chair Panel 1: Conversations Across Religious Boundaries

• "Christian Zen: Innovative Syncretism or Cultural Appropriation?" by Jeffrey Ng
• "Are You My Mother: Redefining Adoptive Relationships Through a Comparative Study of Western-Christian and Neo-Confucian Ethics" by Grace Sill
• "They said that he was the image of Tezcatlipoca: Dress and iconography in technologies of ritual remembrance in 1500s Texcoco" by Marisol Andrade Muñoz
• "Humanism in the Eastern and Western Philosophy and Religion: Concerning Confucius/Mencius and Kant" by Juye Han

Panel 2: Religion and the Digital Age

• "Meme-ing Making: Our Newest Testament" by Maddison Tenney
• "Religion’s On Her Lips: Exploring the “Good Girl Faith” of Taylor Swift’s Lyricism" by Olivia Hastie and Anna Guterman
• "New Media, New Narratives, New Nuns: Catholic Nuns Making a Habit of Social Media" by Lauren Tassone
• "The Spiritual Value of Slasher Films: Watching Horror Movies as a Sacred Practice" by Kristen Maples

Panel 3: Religion and Current Affairs

• "From Haven to Hazard: Examining the Role of Family as Sanctuary in Mormon Discourse" by Perlei Toor
• "We Are Both First Responders and Vulnerable": Religious Actors as Implementing Partners for Climate Adaptation in Kenya" by Miriam Israel "Vacation to Auschwitzland: The Commodification of Grief and Fear in Auschwitz Dark Tourism and its Implications for the Divine" by Hannah Eliason
• "Is QAnon a Cult? An Analysis of Religious Rhetoric in Q Drops" by Brady W Schuh
• "The Transformative Power of Humility: The Irony of American History and a Reorientation of American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century" by Ailih Weeldreyer

Panel 4: Studying Religion

• “Christian Writers on Judaism” at Harvard: Who Studies Whom in the Academic Study of Religion?" by Rachel Florman
• "Rassenfrage, Judenfrage, Schwarzen-frage: Liminal Identities in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Prayers for Dark People" by Becca Leviss
• "Reimagining Religious Studies: Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s Revolutionary Legacy" by Yanchen Liu Panel 5: Religion and Identity
• "Thus Spoke the Child " by Micah Rensunberg "Coming Out as Evangelical, Converting to Queerness" by Karina Yum
• "Heritage Judaism, Race Science, and the Embodied Past: Searching for the Anti-Zionist Jewish Body" by Shir Lovett-Graff
• "Building a Theological Home for Korean Queers: The Possibilities for Korean Queer Theology through the Eyes of Korean Christian Queers" by Jihyun Son

This event took place on April 19, 2024.

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Stendahl Symposium 2024. New horizons, new resistance. April 19, 2024.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: This is an annual tradition at HDS, the Stendahl Symposium honors the memory of former professor and former HDS Dean Krister Stendahl who was a Swedish theologian and New Testament scholar. He tirelessly sought to repair frictions between Jews and Christians, supported the ordination of women, and pushed for the full inclusion and participation of women and minority voices in academia, which we love.

And he was also a big supporter of interfaith work. And while I was poking around in his biography yesterday, I found out that he was HDS' first chaplain, yeah. Yesterday I read one of the last articles Professor Stendahl wrote for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin in 2007, and I actually highly recommend it. But there was a line he said that really resonated with me, which was, "A theologian is someone who sees problems where no one else sees problems and sees no problems where other people see problems."

And I'm aware that most of us are not theologians, per se, however, that is the line that resonated the most with me because when I was reading the proposals for this symposium, I was blown away by the curiosity, the moral courage, the moral imagination, and just the sheer amount of intellectual curiosity that all of you have. And it's been heartening and inspiring. And I'm very excited to see all of you speak throughout the day. And with that being said, I'm going to hand it off to Ahmaad who is our spiritual chair.

AHMAAD J. EDMUND: Well, good afternoon, everybody. How are you? We're having fun?

PARTICIPANTS: Yes.

AHMAAD J. EDMUND: How was that?

PARTICIPANTS: It was great.

AHMAAD J. EDMUND: Great Well, it is a pleasure to be here. On behalf of our Student Association here at the Divinity School we want to say a big welcome to each and every one of you. With our student reps just wave their hands so folks can see that you are here and present. Excellent. Thank you all so much for joining us. Huge thanks to Samirah for her hard work and putting this together.

[APPLAUSE]

Incredible job, incredible job. Well, without further ado, let's get things started.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: So before I give you all the rundown of the day, I want to give a quick, quick shout out to our IT department who is here and recording everything. Thank you. Big shout out to Katie Caponera and the OSL office for literally keeping us fed and making sure we are doing things. And that being said, I will hand it off to Maddie Tenney who was the moderator for our first panel.

[APPLAUSE]

MADDISON TENNEY: All right, can we just give Samirah one last, like, big round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

It takes a lot of work to put on a symposium, and we thank you. So for our first panel we'll hear from Marisol Andrade Munoz, Jeffrey Ng-- and incredible-- Grace Sill, and Juye Han. So if you all want to get up here, we'll get started.

[APPLAUSE]

All right, and then-- Marison, are you the only one that has-- you have slides? Does anyone else have slides? Perfect, OK. We also have a clicker, great. Marison, do you want to present sitting down or do you want to present up here? Whatever you want. OK, and then here's your clicker.

MARISOL ANDRADE MUNOZ: Good. Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here.

[APPLAUSE]

I want to be presenting, "They said he was the image of Tezcatlipoca," dress and iconography in technologies of ritual remembrance in 1500s Texcoco. I start. They would place a necklace made of precious stones around his neck.

They would hang a jewel consisting of white precious stone on him, which hung down to his chest. They would put a long lip plug made of seashell on him. He would wear on his back a bag like ornament, one square span in size, made of white cloth with its tassels and fringe. Such was the dress worn by the young man whom they would kill.

In 16th century Texcoco in the rights to honor this Tezcatlipoca and, indeed man, of the deities observed by the Mexica, the gods would be represented through human actors and created likenesses like amaranth figures in the time bound practices of remembrance.

These likenesses were called ixiptla or teixiptla when they belonged to a deity. Through Saba Mahmood's religious reason and secular affect, a critique of secular dogma that condescends devout Muslims' mode of relationship to the Prophet Muhammad, we may understand the relationship of believer to God as one of intimate proximity to describe the defining characteristics of religious images she invokes W.T Mitchell.

Mitchell argues that such images are distinct in that they're transparently and immediately linked to what they represent. The image possesses a kind of vital living character that makes it capable of feeling what's done to it. It's not merely a transparent medium for communicating a message, but something like an animated living thing, an object with feelings, intention, desires, and agency.

It's implied, if not explicitly stated, that the feeling, intentions, desires, and agency of the representation and the represented have a porosity between them that if not one and the same, operate as extensions of one another.

Turning to the iconic, Mahmood writes, "My use of the term icon refers not simply to an image, but to a cluster of meanings that might suggest a persona, an authoritative presence, or a shared imagination. In this view, the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual to find themselves in a structure that has bearing on how one conducts oneself in the world.

The term icon in my discussion, therefore, pertains not just to images, but to a form of relationality that binds a subject to an object or an imaginary." This last part bears repeating. "Icon pertains not just to images, but to a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or an imaginary."

In other words, Mahmood is arguing that an icon is any form, mechanism, or technology that creates a continuity between a subject and object. As Mahmood in conversation with Mitchell helps us to imagine that the images of deities take on the characteristics of the deities themselves, I propose that there is an assimilation of the effect of energetic power between Tezcatlipoca and the young men chosen to embody his image in the practices of ritual remembrance in 1500s Texcoco.

In Anderson and Dibble's translation done in 1953, [NON-ENGLISH] is often translated as impersonator. For example, a translation of [INAUDIBLE] passage describing a young man's parade through the road reads as follows. "He was indeed honored when he appeared. For when he was already an impersonator since he impersonated [NON-ENGLISH] he was indeed regarded as our Lord."

There was an assigning of lordship. The Nahuatl speaking author or authors of this passage took pains to offer a clarification that being [NON-ENGLISH] meant that he was assigned to the category of Lord. It's the power of this clarification that acts on this reader. There's a sense of a recognition of misunderstanding by the people who were committing this to the archive.

In the same way that I or any of my contemporaries would suffer to have our words misconstructed and offer a rectification, I posit that the scribes held a recognition of Sahagún's misunderstanding of their relationship to the young man, and thus to Tezcatlipoca. They wanted it to be understood for posterity that the relationship between the townspeople and the ixiptla was not merely of an audience to a play actor, but that of a believer to their God.

Drawing on Mahmud's definition of the iconic as a technology of relationality that binds a subject to an object, the community at Texcoco understood the young man who was to embody, performed the ritual, and be sacrificed as Tezcatlipoca, not merely as an impersonator of the God in the contemporary sense, but as one whose identity was assimilated with that of Tezcatlipoca himself. Thank you, everyone.

[APPLAUSE]

JEFFREY NG: As I'm a consistent procrastinator and also majored in business and accounting in college, believe me, the last thing I want to do is a five-minute elevator pitch. But let's start. Historically speaking, crossing religious boundaries has always existed as seen in early Christian monastics incorporation of Greek philosophy and practices and the blending of Buddhism and Taoism, Confucianism and folk religions in East Asia.

Christian Zen refers to the Christian's adoption of Zen Buddhist practices, commingling with Christian prayer and contemplation, is not only a private practice, but also organized form of religion. Zen Buddhism emphasizes lineage transmission through Dharma and from masters to students.

Originating in 1940s, Christian Zen began when Hugo Lassalle, a German Jesuit, engaged with the Japanese zen school, Sanbo Kyodan. Yamada Roshi, the lineage holder at that time, transmitted Dharma to that German Jesuit and other Catholic missionaries in Japan. Today, some Catholic clergy are recognized as zen masters, continuing to spread these practices across Europe and the Americas.

Human beings look for pattern and coherence so being a zen Christian can be painful. Whether it is successful syncretism depends on how subjectively compatible and integrated the doctrines and practices are. So religion 101, Christianity is centered on the belief in the existence of a creator and emphasizes the source and content loving union with the God.

Zen is typically avius and non dualistic. So doing some practice is experience sunyata emptiness to realize the true nature of our own minds. This transmutation of Eastern techniques into Western spirituality highlights the tension between the self and non-self and whether there is authenticity in between non-dualism and neoliberal individualism.

Taking a hand, Vietnamese zen master and founder of Plum Village believed it is possible and took zen as a secular spiritual experience shared by all humanity. He thought zen or, more broadly, truths are universal. Boundaries between traditions are artificial. And inner shared spiritual realm, be it the God's Kingdom or the Nirvana, is within our hearts.

But why do some Christians want to go into this tortured theologian department? In Hong Kong, where I came from, some Christians are hesitant to do the mindfulness because it is considered as demonic practices. Some advocates say consider zen is a valuable gift from Buddhism to Christianity and the church.

Zen helps them to feel closer to God, to be better Christian. They build zen not only as practices pass from historical Buddha through lineages, but essentializing zen as a universal technique that are adapted for Christian use, for experiencing silence, stillness, and union with God.

Yamada Roshi shared the same view. There should be no theological conflicts. He conceptualized there are two types of zen-- one with Buddha statues and rituals, and other one is called pure zen as a natural or trans religious method to experience reality immediately beyond the confines of dogma and allows Christians to deepen instead of weakening their faith.

Appropriation occurs when a practice of value is taken from its original context causing harm. So this ethical claim leads us to question whether zen has been instrumentalized to fill the self-perceived insufficiency in [? Christianity, ?] in particular, the Christian-embodied practices, despite the fact that contemplative practices exist within Christian mysticism already.

Moreover, the God is dead, and [? Christianity ?] truth may not be observable in the outer world, in particular, in the face of war, conflict and human suffering. Has Buddhism been appropriated to reconcile human perception with the reality of the material realm, acting as a quote-unquote "more scientific way" to resurrect the God just like what mindfulness has been instrumentalized to restore the mental health of poor soul suffering from the oppression of neoliberalism and modernity?

But why do East Asian master, quote-unquote, "voluntarily" take out the contest by themselves? I don't have time. And could somebody please ask me in Q&A? I will answer that. And at FDS, left religion and left spiritualities have become a cliché. Are we allowed to say depending on context, or does that subjective pick 'n' mix approach permit universalizing or essentializing comtemplative practices for their own use?

I just leave the audience with two questions. What do you fullness and authenticity mean to Zen questions? While some traditions have embraced Catholic priests, recognizing them as a lineage master Dharma teachers, could this inclusivity ever be reciprocated? Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

GRACE SILL: Hello, my name is Grace, and this is my presentation titled are you my mother redefining Christian ethics of adoption through the Neo-Confucian concept of Chi. So my interest in this project came from my own observations as an international adoptee and from hearing the stories of other adoptees.

I observed how people in Western Christian churches often had different perceptions about adoptive relationships compared to biological ones. And so I found that adoptive relationships are often discussed in terms of economics or religious convictions. And these arguments are often used to support current Christian, international adoptions, especially. And they often imply that adoptive relationships are inferior or a little unnatural.

So to rethink Christian ethics of adoption, I turned to comparative theology. So first, we'll look at adoption in the Christian tradition. So in the Christian tradition, there were two well known men who have written on adoption in the family.

First, we have Thomas Aquinas, who was a Catholic, Italian, Dominican, and he wrote in the summa theologiae and commentary on the sentences that adoption is more of a-- it's kind of described as an economic transaction where it's intended to meet the needs of adoptive parents. So he places many restrictions on who is allowed to adopt and believes that adoption is primarily for passing down inheritance and replacing biological children who have passed away, much like Roman law.

And then we have Karl Barth, a Swiss Protestant in the reformed tradition who wrote in his church dogmatics that adoption is a spiritual connection between parents and children. And parenthood, in general, is a spiritual responsibility. So this refers to the idea that parents and children have an obligation to nurture or honor the other respectively.

And this seems harmless, but it has been used and continues to be used by evangelical Christianity to make adoption more of a mission field. And it also implies that adoptive relationships are the same as biological ones. But pretending that adoption is identical to giving birth in all ways is assimilationist and implies that adoption is something to be ashamed of.

So turning to Neo-Confucianism, why did I choose Neo-Confucianism? Well, Neo-Confucianism is characterized by its ethical and metaphysical systems. And [? Jeongjo ?] Kim, in particular, is a contemporary scholar who describes this one particular notion of Chi, purported by Zhang Zai. And he describes it as an organic unity of correlative polarities. So basically that these two opposites, you could say, naturally come together.

And so the basic idea under this is that Qi, under Qi, humanity is naturally unified through differences, and unity comes from our differences. Unity does not precede it. And this is illustrated by Yin and Yang. So they are complementary opposites of the other, but they still unite. And their existence depends on the other, and they are also part of one another.

And this is not a quest to discover the one singular element that all things ultimately are ontologically. Rather, it acknowledges the plurality and the unity of Qi without saying that everything in the world can be whittled down to a single essence. And so one place where he talks about this and enumerates this idea of Qi is in the Western inscription, which you can read on the slide. So he frames the world as a family to encourage familial relationships outside of biological ones. And the harmonious relationships in the Western inscription are made possible by the Qi and everything.

So for adoption, this means that adoptive relationships cannot be discussed without nuance. Adoptive relationships cannot ignore their economic nature or in that transactional quality to make it seem as if adoptees were begotten by their adoptive parents. But biology also should not be the basis for what determines who your real parents are.

So in conclusion, there are two primary goals I had in rethinking Christian ethics of adoption Qi, and there, one, to accept differences and adoptive relationships for what they are, not what they can assimilate to. And then secondly, to pursue the first goal, I wanted to do so with the belief that Christianity has the potential to change its ways of understanding. And likewise, I don't want to condemn or devalue the loving relationships that have been created by adoption because every child does deserve a loving family. And I do understand the power of that.

So Zhang Zai's philosophy of Qi provides a new foundation for how we think about who a real family is and resist uncritically likening adoptive relationships to biological ones. And, thus, we can find a new foundation for Christian ethics that seeks to liberate adoptive relationships from purporting white saviorism and prevent Christians from distorting God's love for self-serving purposes. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JUYE HAN: When I start, you-- OK. So you've noticed that everyone talked fast, and I will talk fast as well so pay attention. So I will talk about humanism in the Eastern and Western philosophy concerning Confucius, Mencius, and Kant.

East and West are the opposite side of the globe. BCE and CE are almost 2,000 years apart. This is the spatial temporal gap between Confucius, Mencius, and Kant, whose philosophies immensely shaped and grounded the contemporary world of the West and the East. Despite their distinct and far origins, the threat that holds them together is the idea of humanism. This presentation undertakes a comparative analysis of the humanistic ethics articulated by Confucius, Mencius, and Kant exploring their commonalities and differences.

This is the table of contents. The first two sections are about commonalities, and the last deals with the difference. Now, I'll begin with the first commonality, the beginning of humanism. Humanism understands the world without God and gives a sense to the world without God. Confucius, Mencius, and Kant epitomize humanistic thought, departing from supernatural beliefs to foreground human agency and moral consciousness.

Confucius repudiated supernatural beliefs and emphasizing the importance of human affairs over divine matters. This rejection is evident in the analect, where Confucius prioritizes earthly concerns and ethical conduct over questions about the afterlife or transcendence.

According to Kant, religion is only cognized by the moral law and for the sake of it. In other words, the highest good and the object of our will or desire, which results in true contentment, is the sole reason we comprehend religious concepts and religion per se. Therefore, religion for Kant is moral and as well as rational religion.

Now, let's turn to the second commonality. Central to both humanism is the belief in the inherent goodness of human nature of which underlying desire is the achievement of salvation through human efforts. This is an inevitable project in a worldview without God or transcendentals which is a source of goodness and righteousness that grants meaning to the world.

The fundamental conception of humans in the teaching of Confucianism is that one is born into the world with the potential to be shaped into a genuinely human form. Yet, Confucius and Mencius were not naive enough to recognize the fight between good and evil in the inner world of human beings. Therefore, practicing and learning self-discipline in progress over time was crucial for everyone regardless of social status until one's desire does not direct to any evil.

Do what is right, though the world may perish. This process is coined as a categorical imperative, which is an unconditional and obligated law that needs to be unrelated to any condition and consequence. Being human for Kant is fulfilled when following the moral law with an exceedingly pure intention to comply and for a highly pure and through liking to fulfill moral law. I will now discuss the difference between them.

Confucianism and Kantianism diverge in their conceptualization of the self. Confucianism views every situation, relationship, and object, including a person as relational. The family relationship, the first and core human interaction developed as rural ethics, became a moral community for Confucianism, which then expanded to the nation and became, and still is, the center of the East Asian sociopolitical order.

Kantianism believes in one's rationality, which enables one to act according to one's pure practical reason, deviating from the crowd. This autonomous individual is free of public opinion and conformity, which foreshadows the birth of the modern self world and self consciousness. The society full of autonomous individuals is referred to kingdom of ends which represents a moral community based on universal moral laws and mutual respect.

This kind of endeavor to relate Western and Eastern philosophy with the same theme will open a new horizon to communicate and understand each other. Further, since each is still impacting the 21st century, this kind of communication will also make some progress in understanding the current global world. This is the bibliography, and thanks for listening.

[APPLAUSE]

MADDISON TENNEY: Where am I? Great. [INAUDIBLE] 15? 15. All righty. Let's give another big round of applause for our presenters.

[APPLAUSE]

That was such an incredibly strong start. And I'm so excited to hear all your questions. I'm going to pull up just the names of their presentations back on the board. But if anyone has any questions, feel free to raise your hand and speak loudly.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: [INAUDIBLE]. I have a question.

MADDISON TENNEY: Yeah, Samirah?

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Jeffrey, there was something that you wanted to expand up on bu you couldn't before.

JEFFREY NG: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]. Great, I have another five minutes. No, the issue is, why do those East Asian masters voluntarily take out the contest, the religious contest by themselves? So I think, I mean, apart from thinking zen is for the common good, Zen Buddhism actually was declining in Japan due to modernization.

So most Japanese are actually Pure Land Buddhism instead of a Zen Buddhist. So the zen practitioners felt there's a need to adapt and modernize their practices in order to survive and preserve their traditions. So they kind of modified the zen practices and also construe it to be more scientific and modern. And also, they are self stripping of the so-called religious contest, the cultural oriental packages.

So first, to be more Western, and at the second, I mean secondly, to differentiate from their local counterparts so that ensure their survival in this changing landscape.

MADDISON TENNEY: Thank you. All right. Any other questions? Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Grace. So I'm curious If you have any examples of how church members maybe are having these kinds of conversations with the Neo-Confucian [INAUDIBLE] is more of-- I guess I'm just thinking in terms of practice in the religious communities. Do you have any examples of the dialogue happening?

GRACE SILL: I do not have any examples of dialogue happening because quite frankly, churches aren't having these discussions. They're not critiquing the way that adoptive relationships are thought about. And that's part of the problem. And looking at the Christian tradition, I don't think that turning to what we have and turning to, which is systematic theology and necessarily Bible verses even, and the Eurocentric tradition is the way that we can go about these traditions because they are the reason why these vocabularies have come about.

So, in practice, this would be something that's worth exploring, but it's something that I have not dealt with yet. But it would be an interesting project, an experiment in the future.

AUDIENCE: I have questions for both Jeffrey and Grace.

MADDISON TENNEY: I would ask Jeffrey first, and then ask Grace.

AUDIENCE: OK, Jeffrey, I like that at the end of your presentation, there was this call for inclusivity that was not just directed from Zen Buddhists to Christians, but from Christians to Zen Buddhists, [INAUDIBLE] I understand correctly. What do you envision when you [INAUDIBLE]?

JEFFREY NG: I do think religion in our daily conversation is more like individual private practices. But we cannot ignore that as social factors, social determinants, and cultural factors behind that. What I envision is I'm looking for a more progressive Catholicism. I mean, more embracing and engage in interfaith dialogues and exchanges.

I do think authenticity or fullness play a very important role in this conversation. So whether a person can be truthful to themselves when they practice zen and also being a Catholic, I think that's the question I want to ask those Christians and practitioners. Yeah, I just want to say organized institutions, I envision that they could be more progressive.

AUDIENCE: OK. And Grace, I was curious about your decision to focus on Neo-Confucianism or Neo-Confucian ideas of Qi rather than any other particular time period. Was there a reason for that or was that just to give yourself an anchor [INAUDIBLE]?

GRACE SILL: I mean, I don't think there was a particular reason for sticking myself in that time period or the specific Neo-Confucian tradition. It just happened that way. I actually started off not knowing, was looking at more Confucianism like the classical Confucian canon. And naturally, that was very problematic and unhelpful.

But, then, I started turning more to the later developments in Confucianism, and I found-- the person I'm studying, Zhang Zai, is not one of the more Orthodox voices in Neo-Confucianism. So I stumbled upon him by accident, and I also stumbled upon this particular scholar's interpretation of Qi on accident.

And so I let the research take me. It wasn't so much so that I had an idea of what tradition I was going to be in when I started this research. But I after doing reading and reading, reading lots, it was just where I ended up. And this was the way that Zhang Zai and the contemporary scholar [? Jeongjo ?] Kim talk about Qi was a way that I thought would be a viable way for Christianity to rethink how we think about our relationships and our relationships between parents and children and how families constructed, so.

MADDISON TENNEY: Thanks for your question. Yeah, at the back?

AUDIENCE: Marisol, I was wondering if you had thought any-- or what you see when you think about image bearing in a very different way and how that might impact spiritual or just community practices in Texcoco or the [INAUDIBLE] now? If you see [INAUDIBLE].

MARISOL ANDRADE MUNOZ: Can you rephrase that for me?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, because there's such an emphasis on embodiment in what you're examining. Do you see that still kind of lingering in the region today?

MARISOL ANDRADE MUNOZ: I would say so because I think there's this kind of play between what is like a visual embodiment, like the way that somebody is dressed, the kind of things that they're carrying in their arms, how somebody looks. I mean, we know from a lot of these archives that these people who were taking on the image of a deity, that was taken very seriously. They would have particular diets and particular, like, materials that would be associated with that identity.

But then, there's also this performance piece to it. It's in the sense that like one does the same thing that the person that they're representing or the deity they're representing is doing. And so, I mean, yeah, certainly that is very like a material tie to someone's own body. And a lot of that is also present in the Catholic tradition. So there's this really interesting play between Cosmologies, yeah, [? 16th century. ?]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] thank you for your fantastic introduction to the [INAUDIBLE] in the Confucian philosophy also [INAUDIBLE]? I'm just wondering [INAUDIBLE] How does your work approach to that key [INAUDIBLE] on the textural plates throughout or [INAUDIBLE]?

SPEAKER 1: OK, let's just use--

GRACE SILL: The approach is-- well, actually, this paper that I just presented was for a class last year. So, basically, my first approach was to do my assignment. But I wanted to-- so as an international student from Korea studying Christianity which is from Western culture, I always encountered so many different Western philosophies while studying Christianity.

So I wanted to have some relational discourse around something random or something of a common theme with Eastern and Western philosophy or religion. And I had a basis from Confucianism and also Christianity so I was thinking about those two ideas. And then I first approached Confucianism because in that class, Confucianism was introduced as the most basis idea of East Asian society so I wanted to start from that.

And then as I was looking into it, in Confucianism, I found the great idea of humanism, and I wanted to approach to the Western philosophy because I've had so many different candidates from what I learned. So I tried to navigate which one has the most humanistic idea. And then Kant showed up to me when I was reading his religion boundaries-- religion within the boundaries of mere reason. So yes, this is it, and I'm going to do this assignment with Kant and Confucianism. So that's how I approached this.

MADDISON TENNEY: Thank you. One more [INAUDIBLE].

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: OK, yeah.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I have a question for Juye Han. I think as an international student, I think everybody might start there's a difference between Eastern and Western philosophy. For me, what is interesting is there is similarity based on which looking at the difference, which is interesting to.

My question is, how can this kind of comparison, comparative analysis lead to your conclusion? Your conclusion is like improvement on [INAUDIBLE]. How can we learn from this comparison that leads to improvement [INAUDIBLE] between two [INAUDIBLE]?

JUYE HAN: Yeah, as you mentioned, that was what I was grappling with. And in the class that I-- in the class last semester, the professor was always mentioning there are this greatest gap between East and Western philosophy, and there is no way to make a complete or perfect consensus.

But nonetheless, what we have to do is to make the gap narrow as possible, to make the conversation possible, and also to make both sides understand each other. So despite that the last section was about the difference, we still had two commonalities. So I think we can start off from those commonalities even though we have the difference.

AUDIENCE: Can I have one last question? OK, now, I have a last one. Marisol, I am so fascinated. I feel like here at Divinity school, we don't often get to see much research done on Mexico and the cultures that came before Spanish [INAUDIBLE].

I was just wondering if you could tell us a bit more about how your process was. Like, how did you get access to these archives? Where are they coming from, and where do you want to go as a scholar?

MARISOL ANDRADE MUNOZ: Thank you for asking. That's really thoughtful. The main archive that I'm engaging here is actually there's a very exciting and interesting project that the Getty Research Institute has released, this digital Florentine Codex.

It's also called the Historia General de Nueva Español make that. That's this like 15th-- sorry, 16th century early ethnographic work done by this Franciscan friar. And it's available online. And that's what was projected up here. And it's searchable, and it's really, really a fascinating digital humanities project. So that's really exciting.

And then there's, I think, also an impetus for me and for the field of Mesoamerican religions, like as a field, that is to take really seriously the language of Nahuatl and to take very seriously the role of translation and language in World building. I am looking for more opportunities to take that up as a part of my scholarship. And I think what we consider a critical language for the study of religion is a really important question as based [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

MADDISON TENNEY: All right. Can we get a big hand for our scholars?

[APPLAUSE]

[INAUDIBLE]

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: I'm going to do some logistical announcements. The first of which, panel one, thank you so much. Please take your waters with you because we are not about that cross-contamination life. The second part is everyone should follow me on Instagram so I can tag you in a post. And the third is someone will have to help me figure out how to dim the lights so people at the back can see the slides.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Great. And the fourth thing is, panel two people, can you come get your little name tags? Thank you, panel one.

[APPLAUSE]

LIZZY LINCOLN: Hello, everybody. If we can start settling in. Thank you so much. Not a minute too soon. Hi, my name is Lizzy Lincoln. I'm an MDiv, too, she/her pronouns. And I am also on the Student Association with Samirah. If I could take a minute. Thank you so much, Samirah, for getting this organized. Thank you, Katie Carpenter, for hosting. Can we give it up for all the people who made this possible, please?

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. Let's get to it really quickly. We have our panelists' permission to do so. So if you take photos, be kind, be generous, and tag them. This is like the fruition of a lot of hard work on everybody's part. And this is a very fun panel. So without further ado, we're going to start here and go down towards the end of the line, name, pronouns, program. And anything else you want to share in a quick 30 seconds? Go down the line. Maddie Tenney first.

MADDISON TENNEY: Hi, y'all. I'm Maddie Tenney, she/her, and I have a little handout. So before I start, I'll just pass that out.

KRISTEN MAPLES: Hi, I'm Kristen Maples, she/her, I'm in the MDiv program.

LAUREN TASSONE: Hi, I'm Lauren Tassone, she/her, I'm graduating from the MTS this spring.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: I'm Anna, she/her, an MTS in South Asian religion, and I'm also graduating this semester.

OLIVIA HASTIE: I'm Olivia or Liv Hastie, most people call me, MTS, too, graduating this spring. And that was everything that I was supposed to say.

LIZZY LINCOLN: Thank you so much. While Maddie gets up here, one more round for our panelists. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

MADDISON TENNEY: All right. If you all want to hand these out. They're kind of fun.

SPEAKER: Material culture.

MADDISON TENNEY: [SIGHS] All right. I'm here to talk about the love of my life, which is memes. I'm at HDS, but I also love to just make religion relevant. So let's talk about how we can use memes as a way to understand contemporary religion. So I'm just going to go through this. Number one, what is a commonplace book-- the Bible is a commonplace book-- online, common place spaces, contemporary religious engagement, and how do we make sacred texts?

So just to start off with, commonplace books are a technology that may feel far from us but are actually very relevant to our day to day life. Commonplace books were a practice starting with ancient peoples, where individuals would have a book or sometimes a tablet where they would inscribe. It could be quotations, images, and an assortment of things grouped by theme. And you can go and most famous philosophers and thinkers and artists all have these commonplace books.

I was taught the practice, first as an artist in a ceramics class, is a space to create dialogue about the projects I was working on and my ideas. And then later, I was given the opportunity to make my first commonplace book as an English major in my undergrad.

So what is commonplacing? The practice of common placing is super useful, and it helps us to understand better our digital archives and contemporary religious engagement. What it is, is that the act of gathering like or related ideas, images, texts, posts, letters to create a convincing body of work that is a deeply religious practice. And I would argue, even a biblical one.

So let's think about the Bible in itself as a commonplace book. So if we view the Bible through the commonplace lens, it can be a helpful way to approach the text as a contemporary audience. There are some examples. First, the creation in Genesis. We have two contradicting examples of how the creation happened. However, instead of needing to align the text or make them as one, by viewing it as a commonplacing activity, we can understand it as the way of multiple peoples trying to engage with the same topic of creation stories and the myth beginning of humankind.

We can also look at the old and the new testament this way. Instead of trying to force these two accounts together, how can we view them then as a similar argument or text that are working together under a common goal?

And last, and my favorite, the Pauline corpus. Now, we all love Paul, but we know that his letters are just stolen, right? Like someone was like, I love these, make them a sacred text. But to me, that's like the ideal act of common placing, of gathering things that we feel like are important, putting them together. And it's through ritual and rote repetition that we make them sacred.

So what does commonplacing look like today? You all may be familiar with my ride or die, Pinterest. And then we also have things like our Instagram saved folders as well as people are still making commonplace books for us academics. Zotero may be a commonplacing technique that's familiar to us as well as one that I just recently learned, which is called obsidian, which is more of into tech. It's also a commonplacing idea.

So what does this have to do with contemporary religion? Y'all, let's talk about AO3. So for those of you who are not aware, AO3 or Archive of Our Own is a fan fiction website where people write extremely long and detailed books. They can be anywhere from a paragraph to thousands and thousands of pages. Currently, the longest book in existence is a fan fiction written about Super Mario that expands over, I think it's like 120,000 pages at this point. OK, this is serious. People are for real.

So when we think about-- I think there's an argument currently that people aren't in the pews, and so they're not engaging with religion. And I just think that's false. People are engaging with religion. It just looks different. If you look at the AO3 tags I just went and looked at some familiar ones here, religious imagery and symbolism had almost 20,000 individual works on AO3-- 20,000.

A similar with Judaism, religious, guilt, and philosophy all had well over 10,000 texts. And it was just incredible. People are engaging with religion. I just think we forget where they're doing it at.

So now, let's talk about our HDS experience. The HDS main page is a foundational experience for all HDS students. We love meaning-making, but what's the point and what's a better example than our own meme page? You guys, the girlies are in it. It might look different than the discourses of early Christian church writers, but meme and fan fiction communities in their devotional practices feel related to the lives of saints and their hagiographers.

It's time we seriously take the spaces online as novel forms of serious, sustained, and religious engagement. Look at Fleabag, Good Omens, Hazbin Hotel, Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno-- this has been a practice that we've always done, and let's take it seriously as religious scholars.

So how do we make sacred texts? As a Mormon, I propose a few options for my own faith tradition. One and first, we have an open and expanding canon. And that we make the canon sacred by our engagement with it. The second is a multimedia approach. How do we use art and other methods as a way to engage? And lastly, let's make religion fun.

So I created my own commonplace book, which I handed out, and you all can view. But my plea is that as religious scholars, we get creative and excited about the way we make meaning in order to engage with nontraditional audiences that are not in our academic discourse. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

LIZZY LINCOLN: Thank you so much. If you're still circulating those commonplace books, Maddie, could they place them over there when we're done?

MADDISON TENNEY: Yeah, feel free to check them out as long as you want.

LIZZY LINCOLN: Check them out as long as you want. You heard it here. Amazing. Do we have a second slide show? Amazing.

KRISTEN MAPLES: Good. Thank you. OK. Hello, everybody. This is my master's thesis here at Harvard Divinity School.

[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

Thank you. I didn't realize when I first started doing this work, but this project is partially a reaction to the phenomenon of the rise of the religious nones in the United States. And that's something we talk about a lot in Divinity School, and that's people that don't identify with having a faith tradition. So as a member of this community myself, I'm interested in how we make sense of the world.

And this is sort of similar to what the last presentation was doing. It's engaging with secular texts as a sacred practice. We move to the next slide here. So the secular activity as sacred practice is something that's been around for a while. I'm not the first one to do it.

I have some models here that was partially inspiration for me were this is a podcast and an author that wrote a book about reading as a sacred practice. And it's important to note that the texts aren't sacred themselves, but they become so through the act of repeated engagement in community with others. So I thought it would be interesting to take this idea and apply it to the medium of film and see what happens.

And then why horror? Why did I choose horror for this project? There's a couple of reasons. One is that horror has always been my favorite film genre for longer. I don't even know how it came to be. And I also think that horror offers a really interesting social commentary.

If you look at the literature, you can see how the monster is at the center of horror films change in response to what's happening in society. And you see these shifts in sub-genres and new sub-genres arise and change during times of social upheaval and war. So I think horror offers a really unique social commentary and opportunity for discovery in that vein.

And what I did was I-- it will take me 10 minutes to explain why I picked slasher films so you all can just talk about that later. But I picked four slasher films that I thought you could trace the evolution of the sub-genre through time over. So we have the first Black Christmas, the original Halloween, the first Scream movie, which was '96. And the Cabin in the Woods was 2011. The first two were from the '70s.

I had 13 participants, and I watched each film multiple times with the different participants. Some watched one movie with me, some watched two, some watched all four, and I had 13 participants. And then I watched, let's see, Scream, five times, Halloween, five times, Black Christmas, five times, and Cabin in the Woods, seven, for a total of 22 film viewings between last September and this coming March.

And we don't really have time to get into all the findings. I made some little bullet points of some of the things that people saw that kind of went across all four films. But what I was interested mainly is, like, the wealth of things that people saw in these films is beyond what I ever could have expected. Like my document of notes is 27 single spaced pages. So if I included everything people saw in these films, it would be longer than the body of my paper itself.

And then my conclusions and suggestions for further research is one is I felt like in doing this project, I became sort of a secular religious practitioner, if there is such a thing. And I put together this sort of asynchronous, unique kind of congregation of people that never interacted with each other. But through the interactions with me, we found this almost boundless opportunity for discovery in these movies.

And all of these things that people found, I feel like this communal engagement was so important because I wouldn't have been able to find these things in these movies without the engagement with other people. And it did develop a new relationship with the sacred. There's something interesting to add to my paper about, like the nature of engaging with a violent text.

And what that means for sacred practices, something I'm still kind of grappling with. But that violence itself is something that our culture is surrounded by, different kinds of violence. So I do think violence offers a unique kind of commentary on our world.

I also was interesting to find that horror is not accessible in a way that I was kind of surprised by. A number of people couldn't participate because horror is too scary for them or it causes nightmares. There's not much research done on those phenomenons so that's something I would suggest.

The last thing is the affective experience of fear. I discovered that my experience of experiencing fear or watching these films was contingent upon the people that I was watching with. So I don't typically feel scared when I watch a horror movie by myself. But I could even-- I'll say, I watched Halloween yesterday, and I'm watching it again today. I know exactly what's going to happen when she gets up those stairs. But if the person I was with was screaming about it or anxious, I would kind of match that. So that's another thing. Suggestion for further research.

And then lastly, I'll say that my relationship with these films changed over time. And the conversations about them also became richer over time. The conversations built upon each other as I was able to bring, the last person said this or someone else saw this. So I was able to see what different people thought about what everybody had to say. And yeah, that's it.

[APPLAUSE]

LAUREN TASSONE: OK, so Kristen just talked about nones, N-O-N-E-S. I'm talking about nuns, N-U-N-S. Before I begin, I just want to say thanks to HDSSA, in particular, Samirah for organizing today. Also, I want to thank Professor Catherine Brekus, who advised this research that emerged from a course I took with her last spring. This is going to be the five-minute version of a 35-page paper.

And finally, I just want to say a shout out to all Catholic nuns and sisters. The labor and love that they give to the Catholic Church deserves the utmost acknowledgment and respect. And I choose to study Catholic women religious because they inspire me. And I hope that today you will also be inspired.

So, today, I'm discussing the Roman Catholic sisters known as the Daughters of Saint Paul and their use of social media as part of their mission to use the media to evangelize. Excuse me. So, before I begin, I want to just do a little quick overview. Catholic nuns throughout history have been known for their role as educators, nurses, and providers of charity. They've also long played a role in the American imagination.

In a society known for its overconsumption, individualism, and sexualization of women, some find it difficult to understand what could motivate a woman to live in a community and take vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. As the population of women entering religious orders continues to decrease, women may also question the value of religious life. As stories are written about the Catholic nun, she also has opportunities to author new narratives about herself. Digital media provides a suitable outlet.

If the Catholic Church and its religious orders want to survive in America, their options involve either revitalizing idle members or converting new members. The American Catholic Church has used media throughout history to either strengthen the faith of existing Catholics or influence Catholic prospects. Whether spreading the gospel through televangelism or political advocacy, Catholic nuns have made themselves known through the media they produce and the media attention they generate.

In recent years, the #MediaNuns, the Daughters of Saint Paul have succeeded in both. Founded in 1915, in Italy, the Daughters of Saint Paul's mission is to use various forms of media to spread the Gospel of Jesus. Today, the Daughters mission calls them to use social media to spread the gospel.

For this research, when I refer to the daughters of Saint Paul, I'm referring to those located in the United States and Canada. While the 120 sisters based in the Americas make up just 6.3% of the global population of the Daughters of Saint Paul. They are leading the vast majority of their social media efforts. With nearly 160,000 TikTok followers, 31,000 YouTube subscribers, and 22,000 Instagram followers, they prove they are modern, media savvy millennials.

First, I want to explore the Daughters of Saint Paul's use of quote "new media" end quote. I interact with the work of Heidi Campbell and her definition of new media as socially networked technologies that bring people together. And our review, official Vatican statements and decrees on Catholic media use.

LIZZY LINCOLN: Well, a complete presentation went out. If you want to keep presenting.

LAUREN TASSONE: Oh, my gosh, yeah. OK, great. I'm going to keep talking. So I review inter mirifica, which is a decree that emerged from the Second Vatican Council. I suggest that the Daughters of Saint Paul emerge as leaders in Catholic media use following closely to the Catholic doctrine. And in particular, I explore the example of-- it's fine. I explored the example of their YouTube. My notebook did that. That's hilarious. Can I have an extra 15 seconds? OK, thank you. Are you able to get it up. I can't.

LIZZY LINCOLN: We can give you an extra 30 seconds.

LAUREN TASSONE: Amazing.

SPEAKER 2: Or an extra minute.

LAUREN TASSONE: Hi, YouTube.

[LAUGHTER]

Thank you so much, dear. OK, perfect. So, and particularly, I explore their YouTube series called Nuns React, where they highlight religious themes and seemingly secular spaces such as the Disney film, Moana. Next, I talk about stereotypes about Catholic nuns. And I talk about how they challenge stereotypes and author new narratives about nuns while also revealing the internal diversity present in their sisterhood.

Through their institutional social media accounts and the individual accounts that certain sisters maintain, the daughters demystify their lives and the sisterhood and share their unique stories and interests with their followers. This is sister Bethany, and she identifies as a goofball for Jesus.

Next, I explore the Daughters of Saint Paul's use of social media as a recruitment effort. I analyze their content and argue that their attempts to evangelize through the media also serves to promote vocations to women's religious orders, particularly in light of their own need to close some of their locations. And this is a direct quote from their website, #OnTheMove.

Finally, I interact with the work of Amy Collinger and her use of the term new nuns. Also, borrowing from documents from the Second Vatican about encouraging members of religious orders to experiment with their ways of living and dressing. The post Vatican II new nun emerged into the public sphere by engaging in political activism and asserted their authoritative voices in the public sphere. The #MediaNuns, however, are not part of that trend of being new nuns.

In conclusion, in an effort to evangelize and address the decline in membership to religious orders, the Daughters are committed to using new media to spread the gospel and show that they're relatable and fun. They're challenging stereotypes through their dynamic professionalism and highlighting their personal stories as individuals within a collective. However, they're doing this while committing to a shared agenda that communicates that they're cool and modern. Their shell script seems to be part of a larger recruitment strategy.

As the church membership declines, one way for popular Catholic nuns to increase their relevance of Catholicism in America is by remaining attuned to relevant issues. Nonetheless, it's possible that the Media Nuns just want to have fun.

[APPLAUSE]

LIZZY LINCOLN: Thank you so much. And while we're transitioning, that's a really good note that there's never enough time to discuss the nuance of all of these papers. Please find people afterwards. Please hit them up on the internet. This is a lot of research, and five minutes is not enough. And now, without further ado, it's time.

OLIVIA HASTIE: Yep.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: OK. Hi, everyone. Happy Taylor Swift release day. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Anna Gutterman.

OLIVIA HASTIE: And I'm Olivia Hastie, she/her. I forgot to say that in the intros.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: And our presentation is titled religions on her lips exploring the good girl faith of Taylor Swift's lyricism. As huge Swifties, were so excited for the opportunity to speak today. Due to her level of fame, Taylor Swift's lyricism has become one of her primary modes of communication with fans, making her written lyrics a necessary text to consider when examining the relationship between pop culture and religion.

OLIVIA HASTIE: Throughout her career, Taylor has included religious symbolism, declarations of faith, and descriptions of her relationship with God in her lyrics. For the purpose of this brief presentation, we'll focus on analyzing Swift's rhetorical narrative of her spiritual disposition from her debut album until today-- well, until her album Midnights. We'll, ultimately, argue that Swift transitions from identifying as a good girl country singer to an emotionally weathered woman reckoning with God.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: Beginning with her self-titled debut album and Fearless, we find lyrics that express themes of prayer, gratitude, sweetness, and stereotypically country music good girl faith. For example, in "Tim McGraw," one of my favorite songs, she says "September saw a month of tears and thanking God that you weren't here to see me like that."

And in "Our Song," she talks about praying to God and saying, "Amen," asking if he could play their song again. And for "Fearless" and "The Best Day," she says, "God smiles on my little brother inside and out. He's better than I am." In "Change," she says, "We'll sing hallelujah, we'll sing hallelujah." and in "Come in With the Rain," she gestures towards God saying, "Talk to the wind, talk to the sky, talk to the man with the reasons why."

OLIVIA HASTIE: Mid-career, Taylor detaches her religious identity from her lyric writing while still including religious symbolism. So on Red, in songs like "State of Grace" and "Holy Ground," she's beginning to call her relationships as religious relationships. Then in 1989 and Lover, there is a characterization of idolatry. So on "Style," "Long drive could end up in burning flames or paradise, and I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt."

And then on Lover, in the song "False God," she captures a relationship as blind faith. "Religion's in your lips, even if it's a false god, we'd still worship this love. The altar is my hips. I know heaven's a thing. I go there when you touch me, honey hell is when I fight with you. In "Cornelia Street," "Sacred new beginnings that became my religion." And on "Soon You'll Get Better," "Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus, too.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: In her most recent album until today, Midnights, Taylor writes about several sleepless nights where she grapples with difficult life issues, questions, and experiences. In one of her most heart wrenching songs on the album and one that has received particular recognition for its brilliant and vulnerable lyricism, she retaliates against the good Christian girl identity she began with embracing brokenness, desperation and righteous anger. This song is would have, could have, should have. And it confronts one of her most public relationships and breakups embodying the juxtaposition between young Taylor's optimism toward the sacred and current Taylor's protest of God.

OLIVIA HASTIE: The language used in this particular song is language of retaliation and rage. Lines like, "All I used to do was pray, I would have stayed on my knees, and I damn sure never would have danced with the devil at 19, and the God's honest truth is that the pain was heaven." The list goes on as you can see on this slide. "You're crisis of my faith, God rest my soul." She's reflecting on her reckoning with how her identity as a good Christian girl interacted with an ex-partner's abusive behavior.

Now older and wiser, Taylor is comfortable publicly showing her anger toward God and the frustration with how good girl Christian faith hurts women. From the debut era to Midnights, religious musings and grappling with God permeate Taylor's lyrical canon. Even though what she has said about religion has changed over the course of her life and career, every album includes mention of religious symbolism and/or her own spirituality.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: In a five-minute presentation, we're not able to address all aspects of religion included in her lyrical canon. But we hope that this presentation invites religious studies scholars to consider the impact of pop culture and music on our religious sensibilities. Further work could examine the culture of fandoms operating as religious communities with their own sets of values. It's not insignificant that Swifties who are listening to these lyrics are naming their experiences at the Eras Tour as religious and church-like. With no signs of stopping, we can continue to track how religions on her lips with each new release. Thank you so much.

OLIVIA HASTIE: Stream [INAUDIBLE].

[APPLAUSE]

LIZZY LINCOLN: I was considering leaving it up. But I am going to take us back to a very glamorous slide of the other presentations. Hi, y'all. Thank you so much to our panelists. Can we hear it one more time?

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you. So let's start out. Are there any questions from y'all. Start it out. Back corner. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Hi. These are all amazing. I think there's something really interesting going on with the gender makeup of this panel and also the content of the presentations. And this is a question for anyone who wants to answer it, but I'm wondering how you see the gender aspect of all of these like, sort of subversive, countercultural, alternative modes of meaning-making coming up in your work?

LIZZY LINCOLN: Anyone has a first go at that.

MADDISON TENNEY: I'll have a first go. OK. Thank you for asking. Yeah, I had a similar thought. I think I can just speak for myself as a queer Mormon woman that my relationship to religion and the divine has always been sort of roundabout and maybe confusing to other people, which I feel like other women can identify with. And I think that there's something to be said about the power in the pews of the people that are actually sitting in the church or who are thinking about religion outside of just positions of authority and traditional patriarchal settings and the ways we make meaning because of that. Yeah Thank you.

LAUREN TASSONE: I can share a bit about my decision to study Catholic women religious. So I recently received a question like, why don't you study priests on social media? And I thought, that's cool that they're doing that. But they've gotten enough attention, right?

So I find that Catholic women-- the church wouldn't exist without them. They've done the bulk of the labor. And like I describe it as labor and love to support people, institutions, charities, et cetera, and create political action in the United States. And so I want to highlight the work that they're doing because I feel they're misunderstood, underappreciated, and overlooked.

LIZZY LINCOLN: Any other responses about gender and genre or area of research before we move on? All right. Find them after the panel. Next question from someone out in the audience. Hannah, please.

AUDIENCE: I have a question for the Swifties. I'm wondering-- well, so the new album dropped last night. That's why, yeah. And I'm wondering, there's quite a few religious references in the songs. And I know you two probably have listened to them, so I was wondering if that has impacted your pieces at all.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: It actually confirmed what we had thought and even amplified what we had seen in Midnights. She literally says-- she's kind of following this theme of anger that we were talking about and retaliation against God. She says, "Now, I want to sell my house and set fire to all my clothes and hire a priest to come and exorcise my demons." As well, we have a few other things that you want to read.

OLIVIA HASTIE: Yeah, sure. So this is from the song "Guilty as Sin," and she writes or sings, "What if I roll the stone away, they're going to crucify me anyway." That's directly like a connection to, like, Jesus. And-- what am I looking at?

ANNA GUTTERMAN: She also--

OLIVIA HASTIE: And then she says, "I choose you and me religiously." So that also speaks to that in the middle of her career when she was characterizing relationships as idolatry, so.

ANNA GUTTERMAN: Yeah, also just quickly, one more. I found that the song "The Prophecy" was really interesting to this whole theme because she's literally asking for the force in the world that can undo what has happened in her life. And she's like really reckoning with the universe and is just like begging for the prophecy to change and for her to be able to rewrite history. So, yeah, it's a pretty emotional we think.

LIZZY LINCOLN: Other questions from the audience? [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Kristen. I wanted to see if you ever found a parallel or if you noticed the parallel besides these disclosed other movies. If there is a parallel people, just like in a moment of fear always opting to like there's [INAUDIBLE] prayer. Is that something that you notice amongst a lot of the war movies?

KRISTEN MAPLES: No, I mostly was-- I was just watching slasher movies for this one, and there were very little religious references throughout, at least the slasher films that I watched. Although horror itself, there's a lot of films that do have that in it. It's just not really present in slasher movies.

LIZZY LINCOLN: Any other questions from out there? Yes, right here, [? Miriam. ?]

AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you all so much. Also, Kristen, you said that these films are not sacred on their own, but through this process of watching them together, they become sacred. And I'm curious to everyone, dealing with media that is not inherently sacred texts, at what point sort of in the process of your work or do you see that sort of shift happen to become something that is a platform for sacred or [INAUDIBLE] experience?

OLIVIA HASTIE: I can answer this. I think that we bring as individuals to whatever kind of spiritual engagement we're having with the world, our entire body and being. And so I think, at least in the context of the research on Taylor Swift's lyrics, this culture of experience and what she's been through and whether or not she's directly talking to God or if she intends to be religious, I think for me-- music is one way that I feel like I connect with spirituality the most-- is that even if I feel seen by her lyrics or known by her in some capacity, I feel a spiritual connection not necessarily to her, but just to the music or what is moving, what is kind of moving in the world.

So, yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. And I think it's like for me, at least, it rests in that experience piece of like I bring my body to my connection with God, as does Taylor Swift bring her body to her connection with spirituality. And so that's something that the two of us can agree on. I'm talking about her like she and I are friends. We're not. But, yeah, I hope that answers your question.

KRISTEN MAPLES: Yeah, and I can say, for me, I think it started with each movie around the second viewing. So after the first viewing, I don't have to pay attention to the plot anymore. I can notice a little background things. I lost what I was going to say. There's also this knowledge of the fandom out there.

So as I started watching the movies more and more and started to become obsessed with them and thinking about them more, I recognized that there is a global fandom for these movies. So I felt like I became part of this huge cultural thing even though I have no connection to these people physically or even personally at all. I know they're out there. And that just feeling of connection and fandom I think is really just this beautiful kind of connective thing.

And there's also this-- I forgot to mention in my presentation. But a couple of the people that I watched films with, we were acquaintances at the start. And it felt like-- and they also mentioned this, too-- watching the film together and sometimes the second film together, transition that acquaintance to friendship moment. So there's also this beautiful physical relationship that you can make with other people through these movies. That was a part of the sacred experience for me.

LAUREN TASSONE: Real quickly. Yeah, I'm interested in religious media because it's this site where sacred meets profane, traditional meets innovative, old meets new. And I think that a couple of questions that I will continue to have with this work is in what ways does-- especially with members of religious orders, their interaction and creation of social media undermine values of vows of poverty and also traditional values.

What does it mean when someone's taking a 2000-year tradition and turning it into a 60 second sound bite? And so moving forward, I want to explore that further. And I think similar questions might emerge with meme culture, too.

MADDISON TENNEY: Yeah, I mean--

LIZZY LINCOLN: Go for it.

MADDISON TENNEY: I have one final thought. Just from an abstract art-- So with the emergence of abstract art as spiritual art, there's this idea that I, as the artist, make meaning to the art. I'm creating it, and then it goes on a wall or is in a gallery space. And then an individual will view the art, and the art will impart a meaning onto the viewer. And then there's a third transition of the viewer putting meaning back onto the art.

And I think that, to me, it speaks like y'all were saying like with the Taylor Swift and with the movies. The thing itself is important, but it's more about what we put onto the thing that that's what makes it sacred. It's that third movement of returning to the meaning. And I think as an artist, everything holds inherent sacred meaning. And it's up to us as people with how we choose to engage with different artifacts.

LIZZY LINCOLN: And unfortunately, that is our time. So please come find these panelists afterward. We have about 15 minutes. Here one more time for all of our panelists. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: I think all our panelists are here, so we might as well get started. Hi, everyone. My name is Samirah. I will be the moderator of this very exciting panel. This is our largest panel. And it is the Religion on Current Affairs, which I'm very excited about. So we're going to quickly go down the table from Brady to Miriam. Please say your name, your pronouns, and which year of HDS you are in. So, yeah.

BRADY SCUH: Howdy, I'm Brady. I use the he series, and I'm an MTS student, second year.

PERLEI TOOR: Hi, I'm Perlei, she/her pronouns, and I'm a first year MTS.

HANNAH ELIASON: Hi, I'm-- Hello? Hello, I'm Hannah Eliason. I am a second year MTS student here at the Divinity School.

AILIH WEELDREYER: Hi, I am Ailih Weeldreyer. I'm a second year MTS.

MIRIAM ISRAEL: Hi, everyone. My name is Miriam Silverman Israel. I use she/her pronouns, and I'm in my third year of a dual degree program as an MTS here at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Great, thank you. So we're going to get started starting with Brady. And everyone has five minutes.

BRADY: All right. Following the riot at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, media outlets became fascinated with one Jacob Chansley, also called the QAnon Shaman. The use of the term shaman to describe his relationship with the Q movement belies a religious or spiritual connection. He is not the only figure of the Q movement known for his spirituality. OK, known for his spirituality.

Chansley exists alongside figures like Dave Hayes, a.k.a. the praying medic, and Michael Protzman, a.k.a. Negative 48. All of whom have forged connections between QAnon and different brands of spirituality. Such figures have been part of the reason that the movement as a whole has been characterized as religious by some scholars like Candida Moss and Chase Andre, as well as journalists Sean Illing, Andrew Marantz, and Mike Rothschild.

This religious characterization, though, is difficult to substantiate. As Rothschild has stated, the QAnon movement is often called a cult but has no real leader. A new prophetic religion, but it has no clergy. It relies on New Testament scripture as much as it does classified intelligence. Additionally, the presence of nonreligious influencers like Austin Steinbart, a.k.a. Baby Q, and Tom Bushnell, a.k.a. Tommy Numbers, show that the influence of this movement need not be wielded through spirituality.

Additionally, the occasional rejection of Q, as with the persistent belief in the faked death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., demonstrates the critical communal eye trained toward its originator. Despite this dichotomy, the originators own perspective regarding religiosity remains unstudied. As such, I am instead interested in examining the literature that inspires the Q movement, the degree and ends to which such literature engages with religious and spiritual matters.

In order to do this, I will first review the history of the QAnon movement and the corpus of literature created by Q. In this corpus, I have identified two types of religious references using topic modeling, frequency analysis, and close reading strategies. By analyzing the frequency and kind of such references, I have been able to reveal that although a minority of Q drops actually reference religion, those that do reveal the attitudes that the Q poster has about divinity, identification of community, and sources of authority.

To begin, it's important to clarify and establish some background. The Q movement, also called QAnon is a sociopolitical movement oriented around a big tent conspiracy theory that hinges very generally on the idea that all is not right in the world, especially in the United States, and that the political right wing is working behind the scenes to restore justice. It originated from an anonymous internet poster called Q, purportedly had access to insider political knowledge.

The post by Q called Drops were popularized by conspiratorially-minded political right wing influencers and flourished due to the author's active engagement with their audience. Q posted regularly from 2017 through 2020. But beliefs inspired by Q's posts spread in the wake of the sociopolitical events of 2020 reaching beyond its niche origins.

Q stopped posting on December 8, 2020. Although the posts are briefly reemerged in the mid to late 2022. These posts were largely ignored by the previous community that had been mobilized by them. There are 4,966 recognized official Q drops in the Q corpus containing text posts, media links and reposts. However, the final 13 are largely not considered canonical by the movement and will thus be excluded from this analysis. This is basically what a Q post looks like.

So, when I examined the corpus, I use several methods. My initial topic modeling identified a high presence of acronyms and non-text elements, but extremely little religious language. In fact, the only obvious religious term employed is the word God. Next, I conducted a frequency analysis, which identified many but infrequent repeated terms with religious meanings and obvious connotations. Many of such words coming directly from religiously authoritative sources. I'm going to speed up a little bit.

This method generated a list of 328 unique posts. So as you can see, this is a minority around 7% of the Q corpus. In order to better understand the kinds of references being made in that very small number of ones that are religious, I then conducted a close reading of the mini corpus of Q drops that pertain to religion and identified some patterns and references. I specifically noticed three trends. I noted earlier.

[VOCALIZING] So with regard to divinity, one of the big ones is that the phrase God bless is frequently used and paired with a communal reference. This includes phrases like "God wins later on," as well as the patriotic phrase "For God and country," as well as the entirety of the Pledge of Allegiance. The most interesting, though, is the use of the term godfather three, which is used as a signal against corruption, in this case, specifically the Catholic Church.

Later on, and so this shows that Q's concept of God is some specific concerns for Americans in his anti-catholic. In terms of community, Q views religion as a tool used to control people and directly rejects the idea of being identified as a religion or religious in any way. However, the main active antagonist is Islam.

OK, I am out of time, so I will just briefly go through and say even though religion is bad to Q, faith is great. In terms of authority, these are the only scriptural quotes I've been able to find. They're all repeated. There's this weird thing where he starts hybridizing religious texts and non-religious texts. And in my view, this indicates these things about Q.

And that's what I've got. Thank you very much. So sorry about the time.

[APPLAUSE]

PERLEI TOOR: The Latin etymology of sanctuary is a container in which to place something sacred. Discussions around sanctuary revolve around space, the sacred, and an expression of need. That the sacred thing has a need to be contained.

Historian James Chapel argues that sanctuary, secularization, and space are all intimately linked. Where is religion or the sacred allowed to exist? And how can it or should it be contained? Chapel argues that Christians, facing an increasingly secular society, adapted by projecting the idea of sanctuary onto family, defining it as a sphere of sexual morality and family affairs.

This transformation aimed to safeguard Christian values from the threats of secularization. Sacred Christian values, morals, and community were placed in a private, confined container of the family and the home. The existence of this sanctuary signals a moral judgment about the values that exist outside of the container and an unwillingness to abide by them.

For Mormons, the family holds theological significance as the focus of eternal relationships. Yet, its role as sanctuary is deeply influenced by historical persecution. Early LDS communities were right to believe that their families were a legitimate site of persecution and violence. America's genuine horror at early Mormon practices of polygamy led to persecution and the legal dismantling of Mormon families.

The idea of families as sanctuary where faith can be practiced freely, therefore has not been historically true for Mormons, for whom the violence unto their faith was focused around the family. This has led to a Mormon obsession with the family as a sanctuary of faith. Simultaneously, abiding by American values of the happy nuclear family was meant to prove to a wider American culture that Mormons are quintessentially American and worth omitting from persecution.

Through the family, Mormons achieved a form of Americanism that disproved the perception of the Mormon as a religious other. The sanctuary is therefore not only a site of internal protection and preservation, but also an outward projection of values.

The idea of the family as a sanctuary is overtly expressed in Mormon discourse, including general conference talks. Notably, an elder calls general conference talk, the home, a refuge, and a sanctuary, where he portrays the home as a refuge from societal threats like infidelity and divorce.

My research analyzed the language of this talk by framing these threats as external. Elder call underscores the necessity of the family as a sanctuary to protect against the moral decay of secularization. My research analyzed the language in this talk where he pinpoints the threats of secular society as infidelity, divorce, abortion and abandoned homes, citing frightening statistics about the increasing rise of threats and linking them to changing gender roles. To protect one's self from these secular threats, one must follow the duty of marriage and training one's children, a duty which is of central importance to the preservation of moral values of the LDS church as a whole.

So why is all of this important? If the LDS church feels the need to protect itself from the threats of secular society through enforcing the family unit, who does that actually harm? I argue through my research that projecting the family as a sanctuary of faith sets the stage for pro-family politics, which simplifies complex moral values into binary ones. You are either against the family or for it.

Studies show that reducing the complexity of one's moral values makes it more difficult to come to a compromise about them. The emphasis on the family simplifies complex moral conflict to an attack on the church through the family unit. This includes abortion, p*rnography, masturbation, divorce, single parenting, alcohol or drug consumption. And as my research focuses on specifically, LGBTQIA topics.

The struggle between the queer community and the LDS Church is intensive violence and has been dramatically escalating in past years. The perception that the queer community harms the Mormon family sets queer identities up as an attack on sanctuary, grouping them in with the secular evils of the world that Mormon families must have their guard up against.

But it's not all bad. Using the sanctuary framework may help us generate a joint language of compassion and understanding in a time when the forces of the external world are frequently frightening, we can universally recognize the need for sanctuary, the need for a container to place something sacred in. Particularly within the queer community, there's a desperate search for safe spaces.

Applying the sanctuary framework to the LDS family can help us build compassion for the feeling of having your final defense threatened. It can help us understand the source of bigotry, hom*ophobia, and rejection and provide avenues for progress. While it does not justify the social violence the Mormon church projects unto the queer community, perhaps a shared language around the joint need for sanctuary can help us speak across divide and recognize one another humanity. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

HANNAH ELIASON: Hi, everyone. I'm going to be talking about a sensitive subject today, so I just wanted to preface my presentation with that. So if anyone needs to take a step out, feel free to. That's totally fine. So the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Auschwitzland, Poland is considered a pinnacle of the dark tourism industry, pulling over 2 million people to the site annually.

Worldwide, the dark tourism industry has successfully found ways to capitalize on the trauma and grief of the murdered and deceased and their descendants at sites like Chernobyl, the Paris Catacombs, and Alcatraz, also Holocaust sites. As someone with personal connections to Auschwitz and a vocational interest in Holocaust museum, memorialization, and research work, I wanted to explore the effects of high traffic tourism on a sacred site, the execution site of over 1.1 million Jews, Polish resisters and political prisoners, hom*osexuals, Romani and other positionalities.

Dark tourism is a complex interaction between education, remembrance, curiosity, tourism, and sometimes voyeurism. Dark tourism refers to the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering, and the seemingly macabre and visitations to places where tragedies or historically noteworthy death has occurred and continues to impact our lives. Within the dark tourism industry, Holocaust tourism is a popular sub-theme. This sub-vein of tourism has huge impacts on the Polish economy each year as 2 million visitors, often foreigners, need hotel, food, tours, transportation, et cetera during their trip to Auschwitz.

So the dark tourism industry, I put this map, this spectrum up because the dark tourism industry should be viewed as a spectrum rather than one group, one kind of solid group of tourism. So while you have something like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum would fall under dark exhibits being more on the lighter side of the spectrum, Auschwitz would fall in dark camps of genocide as it holds a key locational authority as a site of mass execution.

Today, Auschwitz functions as the largest symbol of the Holocaust in modern day, drawing visitors for a variety of reasons. But it is important to keep in mind that this site is simultaneously Poland's biggest graveyard and biggest tourist attraction. Thus, one of the greatest ethical concerns in the industry remains how to transmit educational experiences without trivializing the darkest sites for mass consumption.

Inherently, these darker sites will facilitate some commodification of fear and anxiety, as they have to do with topics that are usually high emotional or spiritual experiences. However, transcendence of these experiences is negatively affected by visitors defacing the site, posing for aesthetic pictures, and taking souvenirs like crematorium bricks, 16 feet of barbed wire, and parts of the [INAUDIBLE] sign. Through actions like this, the sanctity of the site is threatened through the exoticization and romanticization of Holocaust victims suffering.

So while the site has current security, it doesn't seem to be enough to deter inappropriate and sometimes illegal behavior. So I thought it'd be easier to show rather than tell. It's kind of hard to tell on this one. So I'll go to this one where you can see dating back to 2014, a wave of vandalism has led to defacing parts of the site with tourist names, initials, and even hearts in some places.

These names are on exterior walls in infamous cells within the women's barracks and also on the infamous death gate. Not only is this disrespectful, but it leads to a spiritual commodification and permanent ways prohibiting visitors after the vandals from experiencing the totality of the sanctity of [INAUDIBLE] large graveyard.

Lastly, the sanctity of the site is impacted by aesthetic photography. When visiting the site, it should be viewed as any place in the site as a potential death site, as death occurred all over the camp on a daily basis, not just in the crematorium or the gas chambers. However, this is not the case. As many tourists pose, balance, and even participate in the Nazi salute on the tracks. This might be because people try and put themselves in places to remember that place. But this can also lead to photography that attempts to resemble authentic Holocaust imagery, taking away from that experience of the victims themselves.

Thus, it is key to remember that when you are visiting, you are not entering a functioning concentration camp, rather a concentration camp graveyard, one that does not have tombstones. As we can all walk out of the gates, the imprisoned never got the chance to leave. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AILIH WEELDREYER: All right. Hello, everyone. I'm Ailih Weeldreyer, as I said. I didn't say that I use she/her pronouns. I will be speaking about the transformative power of humility in American foreign policy as proposed in the irony of American history by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a Christian theologian who had a deep impact on 20th and 21st century policymakers. His work has inspired Republicans and Democrats, Christians and atheists, and remains influential for many policymakers today. He wrote on the implications of Christianity in the political scene of his day from World War I through the Cold War. Scholars characterize his approach as ethical realism or realistic idealism because he reflected critically on the realities of the world while asserting that realistic understandings could help people create more just systems.

The core of the argument in irony is his call to fundamentally reorient the idealism at the heart of American foreign policy. He writes, "America's moral and spiritual success in relating itself creatively to a world community requires not so much a guard against the gross vices about which the idealists warn us as a reorientation of the whole structure of our idealism." And I believe, and I think that many others will find that this call still resonates deeply today.

It's worth briefly noting that Niebuhr himself was limited by his positionality and historical situation. He, too, perpetuated ideas of American exceptionalism, even as he saw the need to temper it. So from a modern perspective, his belief in the moral superiority of American ways of life can be analyzed by his own framework as ironic.

So Niebuhr defines irony, which is the central argument of his book, as "The pretension of individuals, groups, and especially states that their violent actions are in service of noble causes which justifies any harm caused by the actions that they take in service of those noble causes." The United States often violates humanitarian or human rights in the name of promoting freedom. But because these actions serve primarily to violently maintain hegemony, they are seen by neighbors framework as ironic. A reorientation of American foreign policy means unveiling that violence and halting its justification under ideals that claim to be in the interest of all humankind.

For Niebuhr, the best antidote to preventing the US from falling further into this irony was a foreign policy infused with humility. I don't have time to read this quote, but you can read it yourself. And he believed that humble discernment includes the recognition of the limits of one's own individual or national perspective. It is the appropriate foundation, I believe, to center policy on principles of justice and peace, recognizing that even sometimes our high ideals fall short or become clouded by other interests.

By opening conversations to perspectives beyond the standard narrative of the United States as the moral leader of the so-called free world, the irony of American interests veiled as noble promotion of democracy becomes clearer to those within the establishment of American foreign policy. Irony occurs when policymakers are convinced of the exclusive wisdom of their point of view. The wisdom inherent in humility, however, problematizes the tendency of American idealism to merge with exceptionalism and justify violence in the name of a flawed vision of Democratic society. This then enables a reorientation of ideals and policy for the future.

Accepting the limits of human capacity created by our own fallibility enables individuals to focus on change without attempting to create the perfect ideal of a moral world in one single act. With a sense of individual and national fallibility at its core, Niebuhr's postulation of humility can shape a paradigm of action and analysis for policymakers, regardless of their religion, seeking moral guidance.

A scholar of Niebuhr's work, Robin Lovin, writes that, "According to Niebuhr, tragedies committed by human actors in the name of high ideals can be mitigated by a political humility that is open to other points of view and alert to signs that approximate solution may be nearing its limits." To better understand how humility can reorient policy, I'd like to apply this theory to an example that is front of mind for many of us every day.

The US's continued support for Israel through its genocide in Gaza is an example of the worst consequences of our failure to reorient our idealism. Despite clear evidence of genocide from the International community and experts and calls from peers in the international community to take that evidence seriously, our government continues to send arms to Israel and to block action by the international community to add pressure to Israel. These actions are justified by the narrative of protecting democracy and supporting the US's strongest ally.

Our actions are steeped in American exceptionalism and a refusal to humbly look with clear eyes at the consequences of the violence we are supporting. Our support of genocide shows how deeply a reorientation of foreign policy is needed. It reveals that perhaps a humble discernment would find not only that reorientation is immediately necessary, but it is not enough to divest American foreign policy of imperialist violence.

As with most attempts to create a more just policy, however, this is only a proximate solution. And humility is only the first step to a reorientation of foreign policy for a more just and peaceful future. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

MIRIAM ISRAEL: Great. Hi, everyone. I'm Miriam. Thanks so much to this great panel and to the organizers. It's really great to be here. I'm going to shift gears a little bit. I'm going to be talking about some work that I did as part of my thesis at the Fletcher School. So it is where I study climate policy. So it's a little bit of a different tone. But hopefully, it resonates and is interesting. So just to start off this, I'm going to be talking about the role of religious institutions and religious actors in participating in climate adaptation, specifically in Kenya.

I just want to point out this quote, which is part of the title, "We are both first responders and vulnerable." This quote comes from a reverend based in Nairobi who works for the All African Conference of Churches, and I think really reflects the sentiment of a lot of religious actors in developing countries who both are deeply embedded in their own communities and, as such, are vulnerable and on the front lines of climate impacts, but also have sort of a role and an obligation to protect their communities as much as they can.

So just for a little bit of background, climate adaptation refers to the actions that are needed to address the impacts from climate change that are already going to be felt, things that we've already locked in. Even if we were to hit net zero tomorrow, we know that people around the world are already feeling devastating impacts of climate change and that these impacts are not equally distributed. So people in the global south or people who have contributed the least to the problem are now feeling the most severe effects.

And so this paper is examining how climate adaptation can work to address that inequality while utilizing the unique social, spiritual and financial capital that exists within religious institutions and networks to make sure that climate adaptation, which is really desperately needed but also is underfunded and is really complicated. So how do we make the most of the resources that we have by integrating climate or religious institutions into that process? I look at the case study of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in East Africa as a way to identify best practices for religious engagement in climate adaptation.

So climate adaptation is a new field since these are new problems that we're still trying to understand. But one of the agreed upon best practices is the idea of locally-led adaptation, the idea that decision making goes down to the lowest possible level with local actors. One idea behind this is that it allows for solutions that are locally relevant, better community buy in, and also culturally contextualized. And this relies on reliable local stakeholders who have the ability to translate the needs of their community to implementers or other funders or potentially at the regional, national, or even international level.

This is where religious institutions can come in, specifically in Kenya. I forgot to say this work also-- I was in Kenya over the summer, and these are all my photos, sort of a reflection of the landscape that I'm talking about. But religious institutions in Kenya have a long history of social legitimacy, resources, including physical resources, buildings, churches, houses of worship, as well as networks, internationally and nationally.

It's important to note here that the history of colonization and missionary activity has a really big influence on which religious institutions are able to play these roles. British colonization and British missionary activity means that there's a lot of Anglican churches in Kenya. And those churches, as well as other mainline Christian churches, have more of an ability to connect with international networks, leverage International funding, and are often the first go to partner rather than sort of African instituted churches, traditional African religions or even Muslim communities. And so those networks are not equally distributed.

But religious institutions also have a long experience with service delivery. Even today, nearly 40% of the health system in Kenya is run by religious institutions, as well as a large percentage of the education system. So this is something that religious institutions already know how to do, and they're trusted to do it by their communities.

Another reason that it's an important partnership to include religious institutions is the idea of prophetic advocacy. This is the obligation that religious leaders feel to advocate and act on behalf of their communities on the front lines. Going back to that first quote-- going back to that first quote, religious leaders are part of frontline communities so they themselves are vulnerable and have a very deep understanding of what the vulnerabilities of their communities are and can use their moral leadership and trust and spiritual advocacy to bring these issues to a wider range of actors, including government.

And so the case study that I was looking at is the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was devastating, specifically in East and South Africa. In Kenya, specifically, the infection rate was nearly 14% by 2000. And the government really did not know what to do.

This is a totally unprecedented public health crisis. There was not government infrastructure to solve it similar to the way that climate change is unprecedented today. And there were taboos around engaging with people with HIV/AIDS. And religious networks were really able to step in and provide a lot of the support that was needed, which then paved the way for government to follow along in their footsteps.

So just to conclude, as the need for transformative climate adaptation increases around the world, we need new innovative ideas for how to leverage existing funding, resources, and infrastructure. The work of religious actors can be really pivotal in this process to help us achieve faster, more enduring progress towards climate adaptation and ensure long term resilience. Targeting faith-based organizations can help supplement the capacity of national and local governments to help align national targets with local action and contribute to more effective and sustainable long term programming. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Can we give a big hand to our panelists?

[APPLAUSE]

So we did start this panel a couple of minutes early, so we are ahead of schedule. So I would love to start us off with a question for all our panelists. I was hoping if you could briefly touch upon what kind of future avenues of research you see with each of your topics. Anyone can go. You can popcorn it.

BRADY SCUH: So what I presented is a small part of a larger project I'm working on to try to explore what it means to label an extremist movement as religious rather than in some other domain and what that achieves geopolitically. With QAnon, I believe that labeling it as a conspiracy theory or a cult or a religion is often a way of dismissing its very real political impact and the way in which it can do real political harm. And I think, inevitably, when we have an FBI standoff with a QAnon community, and they pull out the playbook for cults, it's not going to work. They need to pull out the playbook for militias.

PERLEI TOOR: I think for my topic, I would love to see the sanctuary framework used to adapt how we can bridge moral conflict, specifically within Mormon families, just because there is a lot of conflict at the moment around queer bodies and how they fall into the Mormon family framework. And I would love to see how understanding sanctuaries and understanding this universal desire for sanctuaries and a universal need for safe spaces can help us both understand where other people are coming from and also help create a space within the Mormon family for the queer community. So I just would be interested to see how we can use this as an avenue in conversations.

HANNAH ELIASON: Yeah, for my research, I am more interested in how we preserve sites that have strong historical legitimacy and sacred value. So how do you keep these sites preserved in a way that people will be able to go and learn about this educational value in 10, 15 years from now and have a very similar experience to what one of us would have going through one of these sites given what the site is and what it's about?

And also, almost how religion is practiced on site. You have this almost like pilgrimage of young specific Israeli, but also lots of other diaspora Jews who go to Auschwitz and then go to other sites. And then they go to Israel. So I would love to dig into that and see how that impacts the education system in Israel.

AILIH WEELDREYER: Well, for me, I'm leaving academia once I graduate in May. So, for me, thinking about this concept, it's more about how I'm going to put it into practice. The paper that I presented on today was for a class last semester.

So it's a paper that I could theoretically publish in the future. But it's also just something that I hope to take into the world of American foreign policy once I enter it, hopefully, in my career after HDS. So I think it's something that I'll be thinking about as I advocate for certain policies and as I interact with other people in the foreign policy establishment as I think about the world that I want to be creating through my career, so.

MIRIAM ISRAEL: Yeah, I will also be leaving academia when I graduate in May. But I think my work is pretty specifically targeting practitioners and thinking about when we respond to climate impacts, how can we do that in a way that doesn't reproduce colonial patterns that have contributed to the problem. So I would be curious to continue thinking about how climate adaptation as a field could better consider colonial power dynamics.

A lot of funding for climate adaptation comes from Western institutions like the world Bank or the IMF or just foreign Western donors like the US. And the way that funding is sort of brought or makes its way to developing countries and vulnerable communities or other stakeholders like religious actors, I think, can really easily reproduce power dynamics that are really problematic. So I think I would, yeah, I would just love to see practitioners thinking more about how the way that they do their work, which is well intentioned and trying to bring resources and protection and resilience to the most vulnerable people in the world, how they could do that in a way that is more equitable.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Thanks, everyone. So could we open it up to questions from the audience?

AUDIENCE: My question is for Hannah, which is after doing your research and seeing a lot of the, quite frankly, disturbing ways that people are engaging with these sites of memorial, how would you, if you could institute actions to fix the problem, would you try to fix the problem?

HANNAH ELIASON: Big question. Yeah, so I think what I read a lot in research and experiences of people who have gone to Auschwitz and had a spiritual connection also in conversations just around school with this topic as well, I think there's a strong feeling there, strong feelings. This is a mass graveyard. It's a site of execution and should be treated as such.

So like graveyard customs, being respectful, being solemn, going, and like you wouldn't go and like deface a tombstone in a graveyard, and those things. And there's always nuances. You might have people who leave initials with the best intentions, and that's just not something like I personally would do. And that's not up to me to dictate anyone else's experience.

But I also think things like carving into stone, like carving into wood, it might be helpful if there was more of like, a small camera in our modern age. We have lots of different cameras just installed around the site so that people are much less likely to participate in harmful activities if they know people are watching. And then, I don't know, maybe just like something in the beginning of a tour like saying like this is a big graveyard, but also a tourist attraction so be respectful. Try and be respectful as you can with your experience. Something along those lines.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: More questions? Go for it.

AUDIENCE: This is also Hannah. [INAUDIBLE] you mentioned, like the Auschwitz is a big attraction for Poland. So I'm just curious what they do with that money. And if you feel comfortable with them using that money for their state prisons. So I guess like putting it towards those who survived Auschwitz.

HANNAH ELIASON: Yeah, so the Auschwitz Museum itself doesn't-- the only really sales they do is ticket sales. And that all goes to the preservation of the site. So there isn't much of-- it's more of a non-profit national park kind of system. But, yeah, the third party thing, it's huge.

I saw in my research instances of ice cream trucks parked across the street. So you have people really taking an opportunity of exploiting people's experience. Because there is nothing out there. There's no restaurants. There's no things to do out there. So by bringing it to people, I would say I have less comfortability with myself.

But I also think it's really hard to disconnect from the Polish economy now because you do have so many people from all around the world going there. And it is a very specific Poland contextual history. So I think it's a fine balance.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: More questions? Otherwise, I have a question for Miriam, if that's OK. I was wondering how you came about this, doing the interactions with the practitioners themselves. Did you do a field site visit? How did that work?

MIRIAM ISRAEL: Yeah, so this was primarily desk research. I didn't do interviews or anything. But as a student at Fletcher, I study international climate policy and adaptation, and I was in Kenya working with the UN Environment Program. So this kind of been my area of focus and then was in Kenya engaging with practitioners.

I use the term practitioner pretty broadly. I think just like anybody who works on climate, in some way, specifically, my focus is on adaptation. But I think in my sort of work and research up to this point, and especially being a dual degree student, I think I'm much more aware of the role of religious literacy and religious actors in all types of policy than people who just study policy might be.

So I'm trying to do some of that translation with this paper and really make it as obvious as possible why it might be advantageous for practitioners, be they people like overseeing grant funding or designing policy or doing other types of analysis. Why they should just consider the role of religious actors in their work and not only as like an inclusion value or a stakeholder engagement type of process, but actually like as a way to make your programming better and your efforts better.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Well, thank you. Can I have more questions from the audience. Go for it.

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Brady. So I know that you were specifically focused on analyzing the words that were used in the drops, and that specifically wasn't religious. But when you were kind of looking at the way that the community engaged with the drops, did you find that the engagement with the drops had more religious feelings than maybe like the drop language itself?

BRADY SCUH: So that's a great question. Multifaceted answer is the short way of doing it. My research isn't really touching on that, as you said. One of the scholars I mentioned, Chance Andre, has actually published some stuff about that. However, there have been no studies done to actually measure the degree to which the religious language in the drops is being utilized or the way in which the community is then religiously reinterpreting the text.

That being said, what I can say from observation, just speculating, from what I've seen, it's not the major community members who are doing the interpretation of Q as a religious set of documents or posts. It's the major interpreters of Q who have economic benefits from interpreting Q in a marketable fashion. And religion's a very marketable strategy.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Yes?

AUDIENCE: I have a question for everyone. Thinking a lot about how we're in the sphere of academia, if y'all had a couple of seconds, probably 30 or 15 to talk to laypeople about what you're trying to communicate, what are some of the things that you would take away from this space? All of the projects are so different but feel very vital, and I always want to figure out how I put this in the hands of humans who are not here with us.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Y'all can popcorn it.

AILIH WEELDREYER: So what I loved about reading this book by Reinhold Niebuhr and then diving into it for this paper was that the central concept of humility is so transferable. It doesn't matter what religion you are. It doesn't even matter if you are religious. Everyone understands humility, and pretty much everyone would agree that it's a pretty universal concept of something that we should be doing as human beings.

So I think the 15-, 30-second pitch of this to someone who's not in a religious space, who has no idea who Reinhold Niebuhr is, who isn't Christian, I would just talk about humility and the fact that we have to be able to admit our mistakes. We have to be able to know that we aren't always right to be making the world a better place. And I think that's what I loved about finding this theoretical framework was that it is so transferable across humanity.

MIRIAM ISRAEL: Yeah, I think I'm always trying to figure out how to explain climate change to people in a short amount of time. But I think from this work, one main takeaway that I hope people I guess leave with is the idea that although climate change is unprecedented and we do need unprecedented solutions, we also have faced as a society, unprecedented challenges before. And we do have resources already that can help us get to the place that we need. And I think that looking within the history of religious traditions, religious institutions and action is a really helpful model for understanding ways that people have really risen to challenges that they sort of had never faced before and hopefully that we can use that knowledge to help us adapt to climate change.

HANNAH ELIASON: Yeah, my 15-second pitch would probably be something along the lines of remembrance and memory is a collective effort, even though it is very individual. And sites that hold a symbol for humanity, it is among the international community's responsibility to make sure that we all treat these places with respect.

PERLEI TOOR: I literally did this morning because my sister is a stem girly who's non-religious, and she doesn't care about anything that I study. So when I have to tell her what I'm doing, she's always like, this makes no sense. So I had to reduce it. But essentially what I told her was what I was hoping to speak about today was the fact that in the Mormon church, families are sanctuaries.

And what a sanctuary essentially means is just a safe space to protect against external forces that you perceive as threatening your faith. And so Mormons have, as a result, developed the sanctuary of the family as a sort of coping mechanism or as a protection of their faith. And that develops binary thinking because it reduces all moral conflicts to either pro-family or anti-family. And that creates a lot of tension in the Mormon community around certain moral issues. And she understood that. So I guess it was OK.

BRADY SCUH: To an audience of individuals who are just regular folks who may have friends or family, who believe in things like QAnon, I would try to contextualize my work and say like the things that these people believe are neither niche, idiosyncratic, community-based ideas that are beyond criticism, like a nerdy fandom sort of thing, nor are they within the acceptable bounds of religious interpretation. Because that's not what these people are doing. These ideas are not above critique. They're not above intervention from community members who care about people who are slowly losing touch with reality.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Thank you. With that being said, I think we're going to call it a day for this panel. Thank you so much. Can we get a big round of applause?

[APPLAUSE]

The way that I will be emailing everyone of you and saying like, please send your paper to me. I would love to read it. Thank you so much. I am going to take a quick photo of you all.

SPEAKER 3: Can we get some [INAUDIBLE]? I'm sorry, [INAUDIBLE].

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Wait, am I even in the photo of this? OK.

SPEAKER 3: I know--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Great. Yeah.

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

OK. We will reconvene at 3:40 for panel number four.

AHMAAD EDMUND: Good afternoon, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Good afternoon.

AHMAAD EDMUND: Welcome back to panel four. Studying religion, we hope you have enjoyed yourself thus far. You have a great panel lined up for you with some incredible students that we are all eager to hear from. Without further ado, let's get everybody introduced, and then we'll begin. Let's start with Rachel.

RACHEL FLORMAN: Hi, I'm Rachel Florman. My pronouns are she/her. I'm a first year MTS studying religion, ethics and politics.

BECCA LEVISS: Hi, everyone. My name is Becca Leviss. I also use she/her pronouns. And I'm a first year studying religion, ethics and politics.

YANCHEN LIU: Hello, everyone. My name is Yanchen Liu. I'm a first year MTS student. My concentration is comparative theology. Thank you.

AHMAAD EDMUND: Excellent. Let's give them a warm round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

And my name is Ahmaad Edmond, and I have the distinct honor of serving as the moderator for this panel. And without further ado, let's get started. Rachel, welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

RACHEL FLORMAN: Thanks.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: Yeah.

RACHEL FLORMAN: OK. Hi, everyone. So my paper, my presentation titled after the essay I'll be talking about is called Christian writers on Judaism at Harvard who studies whom in the academic study of religion. So this is George Foot Moore, Presbyterian minister and professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School at the turn of the 20th century. He was an expert in Old Testament and rabbinic literature. He was so prolific and such an ardent scholar of Jewish history that he was actually awarded honorary degrees from two rabbinical schools.

And in 1921, he published an essay titled "Christian Writers on Judaism 19 Centuries of Apologetics and Polemics." And in it, he takes to task the entire history of Old Testament studies highlighting different Christian scholars, flawed arguments, and biased claims that had dominated the field until that point. His essay is still widely read today. And it brings me to this question, what are the effects and implications of studying across difference?

So Professor Moore was at Harvard. Here is a very brief overview of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Harvard starting in 1722, when Judah Monis was hired as the first Hebrew professor at the college, a position to which he was only accepted after publicly renouncing his Jewish faith and undergoing a conversion to Christianity. Following Monis's tenure, the Hanco*ck professorship of Hebrew and other oriental languages was endowed, including a stipulation that the professor must be a practicing Protestant Christian.

Almost 200 years later, Moore's essay was published in the Harvard theological review. At the end of the last that same century, 227 years after the Hanco*ck professorship was endowed, Peter Machinist was named to the position as the first Jewish scholar to ever be in that role. And then finally, this past fall, I enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. I'm Jewish, and I wrote in my application that I hope to study Christian nationalism so unintentionally providing a foil to Moore's essay over 100 years later.

So as I already said, this essay provided a comprehensive history of polemics and anti-Judaic apologetic literature from the time of Paul to the end of the 19th century. He really condemned the whole field as having studied Judaism as a way to understand Christianity rather than to understand Judaism in its own context.

His essay was groundbreaking, but I have two significant issues with it. The first is that in writing the essay, he's unable to zoom out and understand that his personal trajectory actually mimics both the Christian study of Judaism and the academic study of religion in America. So around the turn of the 20th century, this is when religious studies was being codified in academia.

Many seminarians saw it as too secular. Many academics saw it as too religious. And Moore himself was really caught in these crosshairs. The field was also dominated by white Christians like Moore himself, which brings me to my second issue was that by avoiding including himself in the lineage of thinkers he outlines, he actually obscures his positionality as literally a Christian writer on Judaism.

So in her 2003 convocation address to the Divinity school, Professor Janet Gyatso posed this question. She said, "How can one study a religion's history objectively if one's sympathies lie with its fortunes and truths?" And this is a question that Moore seems to answer in his essay. He quite compellingly makes the case that Christian writers invested in what Judaism's history mean means for Christianity's present, actually can't study it objectively. However, his positionality poses a challenge to his own answer.

So this brings me back to my question of who studies whom. Looking at three different scholars, starting with Peter Berger, a well-known scholar of religion, wrote in 1990 that scholars should bracket truth claims in order to study them. Shawn Wilson, on the other hand, an Indigenous scholar interested in challenging traditional paradigms, wrote that we can't remove ourselves from our world in order to examine it.

These two perspectives are exemplified by Donna Haraway's seminal essay situated knowledges, challenging what she claims-- and I agree-- is the falsehood of being able to study distinct from one's own identity. She refers to this as the God trick of seeing everything from nowhere, a trick that's historically been employed by white men to paint their perspectives as default or neutral. So where does this leave Moore?

I believe he was simultaneously removed from and entangled with the world he studied. He was neither seeing everything from nowhere nor adequately situated in his positionality. His pretense of objectivity was really just Christian hegemony masquerading as neutrality. But that's also complicated by his rigorous engagement with and attention to contemporary Jewish communities. So he was quite radical for his time and even now complicates our understanding of who studies whom and why.

In my last 30 seconds, I want to consider Moore's legacy and the contemporary implications of his work. Quoting Robert Orsi to say that, "The stakes of what appear to be simply academic debates are high." Moore never explicitly addressed anti-Semitism, but he clearly understood how certain narratives perpetuated harm against Jewish people. At Harvard Divinity School today, is Judaism studied in its own context, or is it still a foil and a supplement to Christianity? Are students of marginalized identities allowed to be in charge of their own research agenda? Are they allowed to study their own traditions?

And that as a Jew studying at Harvard Divinity School, I sometimes feel a sense of voyeurism, scrutinizing my own tradition through a Protestant lens. And at the same time, I feel empowered that I'm like messing with traditional disciplines of Christian knowledge formation. So Moore's legacy, I think, is that assumptions of any kind impede meaningful scholarship across difference, the implications of which we're still seeing at Harvard today. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

BECCA LEVISS: I'm not used to suits. So I forget that you have to button it when you stand up, and you unbutton it when you sit down. This is the clicker? Cool. Before I begin, I just want to give a huge thank you. He's not here, but he'll see us on YouTube.

Freeden Blume Oeur was my undergrad advisor at Tufts University and, fall of 2018, handed me a copy of Prayers for Dark People, which is a little known text by WEB Du Bois. And it has invariably shaped the trajectory of both my personal life and academic career. And now, six years later, this is happening. So at some point, thank you, Freeden. You're an incredible mentor and incredibly kind, talented human. And that means the world to me.

OK, so my research focuses on two particular points in WEB Du Bois's scholarship. First, his time spent at the University of Berlin, and second, the period of his life where he is teaching and doing research and studying at Atlanta University. At Atlanta University, he starts to write these prayers. So between 1909 and 1910, Du Bois writes 71 pieces of prayers on scraps of paper. He types a few of them. He shoves them into a Manila envelope, scrawls "Prayers for Dark People" on the front.

And when he leaves for Ghana in 1961, he plops the Manila envelope down on the desk of his biographer, Herbert Aptheker, and leaves the country. After Bois's death, Aptheker takes this envelope and publishes the prayers as a book called Prayers for Dark People. And my research is how we can actually understand the themes of these prayers through the lens of Du Bois's time in Berlin.

Because when Du Bois was sitting at the University of Berlin, he experiences this interesting juxtaposition. On one hand, he has this lack of perceived anti-Black racism. I think is an important caveat here is there was anti-Black racism alive and well in Germany at the time. But from Du Bois's own writings and diaries, he isn't experiencing it. He wonders what it's like to finally walk through the world not as a Black man, but simply as a man. And at the same time, he is experiencing both intellectually and personally the racialization of Jewish people through the emergence of anti-Semitism.

So the Jewish community in post-emancipation Europe is simultaneously being accepted into European society, but is still marginalized. And Du Bois is seeing this firsthand, both in intellectual spaces and personal spaces, and simultaneously is exposed to Jewish thinkers and scholars who are grappling with this same sense of being a part, yet, being of society at the same time.

So when we look at Prayers for Dark People, when we look at these themes, I find a pattern emerging of liminal identities, in particular, this idea of wandering and striving. And both wandering and striving are liminal because the value in each is not achieving the goal. It is the process in making your way towards the goal. In wandering, the value of wandering is not the homeland. It is getting to the Homeland. The value of striving is not achieving success. It is the process of reaching and persisting for success.

And both of these and other liminal identities, Du Bois is writing about and venerating really valorizing throughout Prayers for Dark People. And I think when we look at wandering and striving through the lens of Du Bois's time in Berlin, we see clear echoes of the Jewish experience in post-emancipation Europe.

I spend some time in my research teasing this out and what its implications are, but I think is really important is what I call the ouroboros tension between the two, which is very snooty academic way of saying that the relationship between wandering and striving is self perpetuating and self-destructive. So the ouroboros, which is the image of the snake eating its own tail, shows how wandering and striving both sustain each other and prevent the full final realization of each other. So Jewish striving for success within post-emancipation Europe contributes the Jewish community's own marginalization and isolation. Essentially, it prevents an end to their wandering.

Simultaneously, on the other hand, if you flip it and reverse Jewish wandering, so their unwillingness to fully abandon their Jewishness for their Germanness makes an end to striving full integration, full success, wealth and safety impossible.

So where does this leave us? I see three main questions that my research is hopefully trying to answer. One, how do we actually place this in a larger conversation about anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism? Understanding that we can put these frameworks and ideas into conversation with each other without entering what I call the doom loop of comparison. This is a collective endeavor. How do we use the lens of one to understand and tease out distinctions and similarities in the other?

Two, this is a very weird time in Du Bois's scholarship in his life. How do we place the conversation that is happening between his time in Berlin and the work he's doing at Atlanta University in the context of his larger body of scholarship, the formation of the NAACP, his ideas about the Talented Tenth, respectability politics, his ultimate turn towards Zionism and Pan-Africanism. This is part of a larger conversation across Du Bois's lifetime, and I think we need to figure out how this actually fits in.

And finally, what I actually think is most important and interesting to me as someone who's studying the role of religion and organizing, there's a meta-methodological question here about how Du Bois is using religion in what he's thinking about activism and community organizing. And that this is someone who, at this point in his life, famously disavows organized religion.

He's not a big fan of the Black church. And yet, at this point in his life when he's obsessed with the German empiricism and social science, he's simultaneously turning to religion as a form of moral instruction, as a form of communal solidarity. And I think that has deep, important implications for how we're thinking about organizing and movement building work today. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

YANCHEN LIU: Hello, everyone. My name is Yanchen Liu. The topic of my presentation today is reimagining religious studies, Wilfred Cantwell Smith's evolutionary legacy. As a student concentrating on comparative theology, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has influenced my understanding of the various faith traditions in the world. Smith is one of the past century's most influential contributors to the comparative study of religion and interface dialogue.

During his tenure at Harvard Divinity School, Smith played a key role in establishing the foundation for the comparative studies in Harvard college's Concentration and in the Harvard PhD program. The major concentration Smith has made is the shape of understanding how we should approach to diverse religious history of humankind. He contends that the term religio originally signifying an attitude towards the relationship between God and humanity has undergone a conceptual change.

In contrast to its initial denotation of personal piety, religion, in today's concept, implies the notion of a systematic religious entity. However, Smith believes that there are no religions conceived as sociotheological entities, and there is also an absence of a clearly definable essence of religion.

The religious texts we examine today often speak of such living matters as piety, worship, and faith, but not of religion as communally embodied systems of belief. By using the concept of transcendence as the origin of faith, Smith tries to seal the end of an idealistic concept of religion and to come to a personalized concept of faith. He uses the term transcendence in two senses.

First, it refers to an existential and personal awareness of the transcendental, non-religious value or reality. Through this lens, Smith proposes interpreting secularism, humanism, and rationalism as expressions of human spirit, engaging with transcendent ideals such as justice and truth.

Secondly, transcendence represents an embodiment of transcendental religious truth. It is symbolized by God concept. But we can also find such embodiment in different religious terms. By positioning faith at the core of existence, Smith argues that transcendence is whatever faith acting in its coherent fashion, is directed towards.

If we consider faith as a shared foundation, then articulating its nature can depend on either the entity it is placed on or on the shared humanity of those who possess it. As Smith writes, quote, "Faith is an individual's or many individuals' relationship with the divine transcendent whether the latter be known as personal, or as non-personal, as one or as many." Unquote.

In this context, faith can be seen as a holistic engagement that encompasses religious experiences. It includes the sense of the numinous, religious, emotions of love and fear, the disposition to worship, and the commitment of the well to service the higher reality and value. All this is an inner, immediate, personal, and living participation in an experienced relationship with the greater, perhaps, infinitely greater and mysterious, transcendent reality.

In conclusion, I argue that Wilfred Cantwell Smith's legacy continues to resonate in the field of religious studies. It challenges scholars and students to re-examine conventional definitions and approaches. His emphasis on faith as the focal point of religious inquiry underscores the deeply personal and existential dimensions of human experiences with transcendence.

As we continue to explore the complexities of religion, I believe Smith's insights serve as a guiding light, illuminating the path of academic study of religion towards to a more profound and inclusive understanding of faith. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AHMAAD EDMUND: Thank you. Can we give all of our presenters round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

At this time, we want to open up the floor for any questions from the audience. I think we have about 10 to 12 minutes to do so. So if you have a question, please raise your hand. And Samirah, can we give a mic to the audience so that they-- OK.

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: [INAUDIBLE].

AHMAAD EDMUND: Austin, please.

AUDIENCE: So this question is for Rachel. And Thank you all for your presentations. I love that Donna Haraway quote. I use it in my own thesis here at Harvard Divinity School. It's something that I'm constantly trying to unpack through my own line of work. And I'm wondering through your own scholarship, how do we do that? How do we avoid just kind of assuming that we're claiming the neutral ground whenever we're studying something or looking at something external to us?

RACHEL FLORMAN: Thank you for that extremely difficult question. Since that sounded sarcastic, truly, one could spend their whole career trying to answer that. I think in my experience thus far, I think the answer is to just be rigorously honest. Everyone sort of laughed when I put myself in the presentation.

But that's part of the-- not pedagogy. What's the word? I don't know. Pedagogy, the research paradigm? I don't know. And to say like, here is how I fit into this research. I'm not pretending I was at the Divinity School in 1920. But I am considering what the effects are on me today and when I show up to study it. And so, yeah, just starting from a place of honesty and not pretending that there's anything neutral about any of us, I think, is useful.

AHMAAD EDMUND: Excellent. I see yes, Fran.

AUDIENCE: Hi, just to follow up. I have a question for Rachel as well. I loved your timeline where you included yourself as an important data point. And I just think that you are an important data point.

And I was curious about just in general. But I was curious if your research has also looked at you are tracking the way faculty have come in Hebrew and Jewish studies and when first Jewish professors were hired and began to teach. But I was wondering if you have done any research on students and the change in the student body and how that might fit into your project thinking about what it spends like for Jewish students, but also how that shifts when Harvard becomes a non-denominational divinity school.

RACHEL FLORMAN: Yeah, so the quote from Professor Gyatso was actually from a larger speech about that shift in the late '90s, I believe, when Harvard Divinity School changed its categories of study from just being-- I'm going to butcher this. But it was like theology, scripture, and other religions. And it became broader and accommodated more than just Christianity. And so I am very much thinking about that.

Honestly, Professor Levinson, John Levinson, who did his PhD here and studied with some of the faculty members I write about in my longer paper, I would love to talk to him about this. It hasn't come up yet. But it is definitely worth investigating. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I'm curious since writing these papers, [INAUDIBLE] so that some time ago. But since [INAUDIBLE], I'm curious how your scholarship and your work in this past semester has been informed by your relationship with these various scholars that you studied.

YANCHEN LIU: And so Cantwell, yes, dismissed this scholar. He's actually the teacher of my supervisor, Diana Eck. And firstly, I read the Diana Eck's book, and I found the [INAUDIBLE]. This is her supervisor. And I was like, OK, I have to study himself. He's also the former director of Center for the Study of the World Religion, and I think it's very important.

And actually, he changed the way I approach study of religion because my concentration was textual studies and practices and philosophy. But I think during the time my study, Smith's work-- now my concentration is more on the living tradition, people and community.

BECCA LEVISS: I'm scared to admit this. But unfortunately, this is not my paper for theories and methods. So I endured theories and methods, and I enjoy Professor [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, I'm so sorry.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

BECCA LEVISS: Yeah. Though Du Bois did study here, right, so is actually would have been someone that you could have--

AUDIENCE: You could have heard of those.

BECCA LEVISS: Yeah, and famously had not a really great time here. I think one of the reasons-- actually, I talk about how Du Bois was really surprised by the lack of anti-Black racism in Berlin. I actually think one of the reasons he experiences it that way is he experienced so much anti-Black racism here at Harvard. And the juxtaposition of that I think made it feel like, Berlin, this is so much, so much better. That I think, actually, in some ways blinded him a little bit to the reality of what the Black experience was like in Europe at the time.

But for me, this is actually now almost like old. I'm not old in the sense. But in my scholarship, I've continued to build on this thinking about who Du Bois is being exposed to in terms of-- so this whole piece about Jewish thinkers, there are a lot of scholars, secular Jewish thinkers like Emile Durkheim, who you wouldn't think is a Jewish writer, but who's writing about anti-Semitism and marginal identity and diasporic identity at this moment in post-emancipation Europe.

And so what I'm trying to do now is to put Du Bois in conversation with all of these thinkers. And so all of those questions, I put at the end. Like how does this have us think about anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism, Black and Jewish solidarity, thinking about this as a collective endeavor and bringing these into conversation with each other without comparing them. This question of where this fits into Du Bois's larger scholarship.

And then also the role of religion and movement building. I think all of that is continuing to come from this research and also questions that I personally have about the role of the archive in all of this. When Du Bois is at Atlanta University, his main project is this massive, essentially an encyclopedia of the Black American experience. And his hypothesis of doing that was, if we can prove it, if you can use empiricism and social science to really detail this experience, it will have validity and people will start to take it seriously.

And I think there's merit in that simultaneously. There's also merit in using prayer as moral instruction. And I think the fact that he is doing both at the same time can also help me think about this moment in a different way and think about how to orient both my scholarship, my activism towards that.

RACHEL FLORMAN: I'll quickly say Moore did not really change my trajectory at all, but really accompanied me on it. The question of Christian scholarship of Judaism is something that I think about every single day and have since I got here. And if you've been in a Christian theology class with me, you know that I'm always asking questions about how it relates to my tradition. And Moore has been a useful companion on that journey.

AHMAAD EDMUND: Well, let's give all these presenters a big round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

We will now conclude with panel four and prepare ourselves at 4:20 to convene again for panel five, the final panel of the symposium today. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Hello, everyone.

AUDIENCE: Hello.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Hello. [INAUDIBLE]. Good afternoon. We're going to start with our fifth and final panel of the day. Thank you all for being here. My name is Shariah Anderson. Yes, come on, give it up. Let's go.

[APPLAUSE]

My name is Shariah Anderson. I have the opportunity to serve as our moderator, and we're going to give our panelists a time to introduce themselves.

MICAH RENSUNBERG: Hi, I'm Micah Rensunberg I'm a first year MTS studying the philosophy of religion.

KARINA YUM: Hi, I'm Karina. I use she/they pronouns, and I'm a first year MDiv.

SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: Hi, I'm Shir Lovett-Graff. I use they/them pronouns. And I completed my MTS in December.

JIHYUN SON: Hi, my name is Jihyun Son. I'm a first year MDiv, and I use she/her pronouns.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Awesome can we all give it round of applause to our panelists?

[APPLAUSE]

And we'll go ahead and get started with Micah.

MICAH RENSUNBERG: All right. So my paper topic is thus spoke the child. It's my examination of the sacred authority and agency of children and the existential fear they provoke in reminding us of our absolute dependence on one another. Being that I am no longer a child, though I'm not far from childhood, I've brought my childhood bear, Cap, as the sacred stand in for the children, not in the room.

We take ourselves too seriously and wonder why the children find their own ways forward. The future is not promised. Purpose is living in this weary, complex world with one another. Growing up is venerated. We learn a hidden curriculum for how to behave and who to be. Still, this conditioning makes us no better than we already are, learning to abolish wonder for certainty.

I propose the child as prophet, that we are privileged to be with the ones who still know how to cry when their needs are not met. It is a mutual reverence we are missing. The children who were who are here and those who may come to exist as the other. Each individual containing absolute alterity, unknowable and constantly arriving anew.

The pace of life frameworks for development and institutionalized works of child care have conditioned us to assume we know. The apologies that should be made in light of this are endless. Instead, we can try to learn a new way forward while loosening our grip on these projections, willing ourselves to be surprised. It is perhaps easy to make declarative statements about children.

Psychology has provided metrics for development when one should be a certain height or have certain skills of reading comprehension. This framework is not without value, but it can never account for the sum total of a child's worth, possibility, and difference from any other we have ever known. Children are people in the immediate for whom life is not a given.

Like Cormac McCarthy's The Road says, "If the boy is not the word of God, then God never spoke." If this is true, we must allow the child to speak with everything they might have to say, even and especially if it takes on a form we least expect. Despite the beautiful affirmation of the boy in Road, this fictional apocalyptic novel, as God, the novel often shows the child being refused any sense of agency as difference is forced towards an understanding of the world based on the man's past, a history, and a civilization no longer available to either of them. In this way, cycles of ownership and totality abound.

Derrida speaks two layers-- Jacques Derrida speaks two layers of owning from the perspective of genetics and what makes one a parent. He acknowledges that there is often something that ties family together around the event of a birth while naming this moment as a narcissistic fantasy. Identifying a gender quote, "Is not the same as designating a father. The janitor is not the father. The father is someone who recognizes his child. The mother recognizes her child." End quote.

As he says later, there is no absolute archive. The trace is not a proof. The parent is one who believes, in effect, that he or she is the authentic parent of what thus grows with them-- what thus grows with them. As in the child as the one who is becoming alongside the caretakers, subject to a similar growing, a family unit in motion.

There is an element of watching children develop that can induce grief. The child held today may be different tomorrow, can have a future beyond the recognizable. Our willingness to exist within this uncertainty-- our unwillingness to exist within this uncertainty is killing children. This much is practically certain.

Research shows that adults mitigate adolescent mental health crises by being people who affirm the questions, identity shifts, or experiences a young person is having. And I believe this research is teaching us that a so-called adults have even more work to do. We have forgotten wonder and radical possibility, the flexibility of change that is essential to youth.

The boy in The Road is willing to take chances on helping fellow travelers. He is unwilling to let the man's fear prevent him from attempting hospitality. And he refuses to be owned to consider their family a closed network.

The boy seems to say-- and this is my own addition to the narrative since the book is written from the man's point of view-- "There is no absolute archive. And our hearts still beating cannot be set as stone. If I was born in grief and ashes, then let me rise to greet everything still living. There's a new future for us in every face."

[APPLAUSE]

KARINA YUM: Beautiful. I do have a handout because my work is analyzing narratives, and I do not have time in this speed run of a presentation to really go through what those narratives say in complete detail. So feel free to reference the handout as I go.

As a person who has, at different points in my life, shared an evangelical conversion narrative and come out, I've known intuitively that the two genres are similar. However, given a recent technological innovation, you don't just have to take my word for it. I asked ChatGPT to write me evangelical conversion and coming-out narratives.

In both, the AI narrator describes an initial feeling of internal strife, a climactic moment of confession, followed by community acceptance. Both end by admitting that the process was not easy, but affirm that it was worth it. In my work, I investigate the implications of the shared conversion slash coming-out meta-narrative through an analysis of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, which publishes a testimony at the end of every issue, with special attention to ex-gay conversion narratives.

I also analyzed the opposite, autobiographical works by ex-evangelical LGBT authors. Specifically, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. Through comparing what happens when these two genres overlap in opposite directions, I articulate some of the ways in which the narrative genres of evangelical conversion and LGBT coming-out are altered when they become intertwined.

To understand what I mean by conversion, I employ the definition of William James, who describes conversion as "The gradual or sudden process by which a self hitherto divided and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy becomes unified and consciously right, superior, and happy in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities." It is also an internal process that is inevitably expressed through narrative.

Although not often perceived as a type of conversion, coming-out narratives fit into the same superstructure, complete with the positioning of the acquisition of a new identity label as the missing piece that makes one's life story and therefore one's identity coherent and complete. While the identities of evangelical and queer may seem contradictory, performances of both identities often involve or, in some cases, require participating in a specific narrative genre to authenticate one's identity.

In an evangelical conversion or coming-out narrative, the storyteller evidences their group membership by modeling the structure of their narrative after that of the group. In the process, they demonstrate a self that is socially and morally agreeable to their audience. Connecting James and Liang, both groups employ the language and framework of conversion.

I also employ Hayden White's conception of emplotment as a framework for understanding the implications in this narrative performance has on constructing both evangelical and LGBT identities along similar lines. Emplotment is the encoding of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, a.k.a. genre.

Conventions and genres are created over time through the reproduction of similar narratives. In turn, these narratives implicitly teach their audiences a certain manner of interpreting events. For example, stories that begin once upon a time are likely to be fairy tales. While they provide the audience with an entertaining and whimsical story, they implicitly construct a specific idea of what a happy ending means, oftentimes, including a royal soulmate and a conflict-free future.

In the case of conversion and coming-out narratives, these narratives carry a specific implication. These identity shifts are presented as drastic and most importantly, predetermined and predestined. So what happens when these narratives of identity overlap? We'll be looking at very short snippets of two examples of ex-gay conversion narratives from Christianity today.

One is from 2013 by a woman named Rosaria Butterfield, and the other is from 2018 by Jackie Hill Perry. I want to zoom in upon two moments-- pre-conversion and the process of conversion. In both examples, the narrators don't feel consciously divided, wrong, inferior and unhappy like we've come to expect in their pre-conversion.

Furthermore, during the moment of conversion, it's not fun and peaceful like we saw in the ChatGPT narrative. It's chaotic and painful. One narrator says it is as painful as a part of her body being torn out. These narratives subvert core expectations of the genre.

Now, for the evangelical coming out-- and I'm not doing something that shocking because I didn't have time. But if you want to ask me about that, please do. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson in 1985, which is an ex-evangelical coming-out narrative, notably has each chapter named after a book in the bible. And the events in each chapter are related to the chapter of the Bible they are referencing. However, there's a conscious, jarring, disorienting, and fractured oscillation between genre. In one moment, she'll be talking about her mother. And the next sentence, she'll launch into a fairy tale.

In Oranges, there is no neat overarching genre to plot the narrator's identity into. It doesn't exist. The story must be expressed kaleidoscopically. Ex-evangelical coming-out narratives break the concept of consistent, coherent genre wide open. While ex-evangelical conversion narratives, as in Christianity today, subvert the pre-imbued expectations of the genre, specifically the genre of identity formation, ex-evangelical coming out narratives question the very expectation that narrative genres can be a meaningful way of communicating identity.

By investigating the mechanisms of genre creation, I want to encourage all of us to reflect on the stories we tell about our own identities and the implications these stories carry whether you're a scholar, queer person, religious person or all three. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: Hi, my name is Shir. And today, I'll be reading from my paper heritage Judaism, race, science and embodied past searching for the anti-Zionist Jewish body. Before I begin, I want to say this is a topic I'm only beginning to explore. I'll provide a tiny bit of information about it, which is far beyond the scope of five minutes. I am condensing a lot.

So, as Zionism developed at the turn of the 20th century, it was fixated on defining Jewishness through a racial lens. Since its earliest years, Zionism has obsessed over defining who fits within the bounds of Jewish racial identity. But the decision to quantify Jewishness through racial constructs was not made in a historical vacuum.

Zionism was born alongside the race science and eugenics movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. The racialized system of Zionism mimicked the European societies from which it emerged. The racialization of Jewishness grew throughout Europe and then was codified by the Nuremberg laws. There was a growing anxiety about who construed the Jew, especially as the consequences of being defined as Jewish sharpened.

So within Europe, at the turn of the century, Zionists seized the race science being used against them to, quote, "Popularize a renewed meaning of Jewish identity among persecuted and humiliated German Jewry." End quote. In other words, they adopted these racialized categories of Jewishness as part of their political vision. Zionists used them as a strategic tool in building a sense of unified identity.

In early settlements in Palestine, Jewish settlers categorized themselves as biologically different from Palestinian natives. This meant that the question of Jewish entitlement to Palestinian land could go beyond religious or cultural identity into the very biology of the Jewish people. This racialized project created an identity that transcended language, skin color, ancestry, and swallowed these identifiers into the body of a perfect Zionist Jew.

In the 21st century, we clearly see the resonance of this politicized and racialized Jewish identity. Jews who distanced themselves from Zionism and criticized the state of Israel are not just seen as disloyal. Their Jewishness is called into question, threatened, and disavowed. So as anti-Zionist Jews attempt to confront and disentangle themselves from the racialization of Jewishness as defined by Zionism, the question emerges. What is the post-Zionist, the anti-Zionist Jewish body?

So in moving away from the racialized definition of Jewishness, anti-Zionists have begun seeking Jewish identity beyond and before Zionism. We see a sharpened focus on ancestry, particularly through the triad of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi identities. This is an attempt to disentangle people from the racial Zionist classification systems as the Zionist project historically, culturally, and linguistically subsumes Jewish difference.

However, do these focuses end up mimicking the biology-centered tenets of Zionist systems? Do they leave out those for whom heritage Judaism is not a biologically traceable path? Adopted Jews, Jews by choice, crypto-Jews complicate these clean ancestral lineages that can be traced back before the Zionist project.

The focus on heritage Judaism also ignores the Jewish tradition of querying family systems in which family is not always created through biological reproduction. Those connected to Judaism through alternate family systems, including adoption and conversion, are excluded by these bio-essentialist familial claims to Judaism.

Finally, ancestry is complicated. Jewish ancestry is and has always been multi-ethnic, multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual. Sorting these hybrid diasporic, multi-layered identities into clean heritage categories does these histories a disservice.

So for the anti-Zionist Jew, there are multiple body longings at play. There's a desire to be part of a collective Jewish body, especially within the diaspora, and recognize oneself within a unified sense of identity. There's a desire to claim one's Jewish body as authentic, despite Zionist protests otherwise. There's a desire to connect to the Jewish past that can be experienced corporately, not just spiritually.

So as we think about how to define Jewishness, we can think expansively about Jewish queer family systems, perhaps as an answer to transcend the bio essentialist patterns of Jewish identity classification. But querying the idea of who composes a post anti-Zionist Jewish body runs the risk of challenging the dominant cultural norms from which Zionist racialization emerged. In other words, querying the Zionist body will not be palatable to dominant culture with a vested interest in racialization and genomics. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JIHYUN SON: Hello, my name is Jihyun. I'm a first year MDiv student here at HDS. I'm from South Korea, and I'm here to talk about the ongoing problem in the Korean church, the LGBTQ issues. The title of my presentation would be building a theological home for Korean queers. The possibilities for Korean queer theology through the eyes of Korean Christian queers.

Some of you might wonder the title what through the eyes of Korean Christian queers means. It recognizes that the current discussion of queer theology in Korea is not being done by the Korean queer subjects and outlines the direction of this presentation.

Then, why does it have to be Korean queers in church? First of all, we will be going to look at the intersectional identity of Korean Christian queers. They're navigating the dual identity of being a sexual minority in Korean society and at the same time has a religious belief in Christianity, which means it's not easy for them to abandon any of those identities. And therefore, they are being exploited, exposed, in the double exclusion from the communities they genuinely belong to.

In Korean churches, queerphobia manifests through systematic hom*ophobia, reproduced through erroneous teachings and institutional policies that label queer identities and theological discourses as heretical. These aspects contribute to a culture that marginalize and silences queer voices, often justifying exclusion through distorted theological and epistemological interpretations.

So these three levels of discriminations are closely related to each other and, thus, reinforces each other. While queer theology has been widely accepted in progressive Christian communities worldwide, it remains largely marginalized within Korea. Queer theology in Korea lacks its own distinct discourse, making it actually difficult for queer theologians to find safety, solidarity and financial resources.

The existing discourse is really scant and often met with significant resistance of mainline churches, limiting the development of many academic works that supports the queer rights. This resistance highlight the need for a theological evolution that embraces and addresses the reality of queer believers.

Then, how should it change? The development of queer theology in Korea must fundamentally involve the voices and vivid experiences of queer individuals. And by doing that, it should not just remain as a theory, encouraging more individuals to connect to each other.

By centering their lived experiences, queer theology can challenge traditional interpretations and encourage the church to rethink its approach to inclusion. It requires moving beyond denominational boundaries and to connect inter religiously through continuous dialogue and exchange so that those discussions can also have a broader social impact.

Coming out as a queer individual in a discriminative environment is not an easy job. But paradoxically, that's why we need them even more. Forming a firmer theological ground would help more individual voices to uncover themselves, and those actions will contribute to the construction of the theological foundation.

These two factors work as positive feedback that reinforce each other and will help the Korean church to build a safer community for all people. This would be the end of my presentation. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Wow. Thank you so much. Can we have another round of applause just to all of our panelists?

[APPLAUSE]

JIHYUN SON: I have one more slide, which is going to be over [INAUDIBLE].

SHARIAH ANDERSON: A true academic. Thank you so much. And so, yeah, I want to open up the floor if there are any questions regarding our fifth and final panel. Feel free to raise your hand. Samirah?

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: [INAUDIBLE] where do you all see your research going after this? Doesn't necessarily have to be right after Harvard. [INAUDIBLE]

MICAH RENSUNBERG: Yeah, I will be working with the Boston Children's Foundation in the coming years alongside their psychologists develop spiritual, meaningful interactions and development of meaning-making spaces for young children that include bodily movement and support and integration for complex ideas and religious spaces around the city and state.

KARINA YUM: Well, I might as well tell you all what I hate most about my research, and that it's super focused on the narratives themselves and the words that people are saying and not the embodied performances. I don't know if anyone here has ever witnessed a coming-out or an evangelical conversion narrative, but it is accompanied by bodily affect. And that's something that my current work does not capture whatsoever. So I'm really interested in finding a theory through which I can think about that.

SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: I think for me, as I think about how to build anti-Zionist Jewish spaces, this feels really essential to it, both from an academic and a community building lens like how to both honor people's heritage and think about ancestral connections without building spaces that are predicated on knowing and having access to those kinds of, like, heritage narratives.

JIHYUN SON: Yeah, I hope to raise Korean Christian queers voices. They do exist. But even queer people in Korea doesn't really recognize their existence because they're really few in number. And people in Korea don't really think that Christians can be queers because the way that they are shown in society is so many hatred and so many discrimination.

So they all think Christian queers are going to run away from the church. But actually, some of those really do that. But some of those, they don't. So I thought it would be really important to raise their voices and show their existence to the world. Yeah.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Yes?

AUDIENCE: I have a question directly to [INAUDIBLE] about your presentation. So I think on the page third of your presentation, somewhere in the third or fourth about the [INAUDIBLE] aspects of this queer church. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. So what about the part you say about [INAUDIBLE] your [INAUDIBLE] knowledge, being reproduced among the church members, or that church [INAUDIBLE]. What are some of the examples that you can give us?

JIHYUN SON: There are varieties of LGBTQ people in church and in society. But Korean church, their academia or their pastors, their ministry, they only raise hom*osexual people as like they just represent the all queer people in church or in the society. But actually, they are not. I think that's the biggest erroneous facts that they are reproducing. That might be an example to that. Did I answer it right?

AUDIENCE: Unless you have another example [INAUDIBLE].

JIHYUN SON: Also, they're making really biased facts like queer people can get many diseases by their sexual intercourse, like that. But actually, it's not, and it's really complicated. So those might be the examples of erroneous facts that they're producing, I think.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: I saw this hand first, and then we'll go over here. Go ahead, Fran.

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Shir, actually. You mentioned talking about the lineages or the ideas that you want to tap into [INAUDIBLE] alternative thinking about queer Jewish family [INAUDIBLE]. And I wonder what resources you're turning to as you [INAUDIBLE] to envision and bring in alternative ideas. Are you looking at sacred texts? Are you looking at personal narratives, history, [INAUDIBLE]?

SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: Yeah, well, I think there's an interesting tension that I see within the leftist Jewish world. Where on the one hand, like the kind of holding of queerness as really important. And at the same time, like this focus on heritage is very important.

And there's some folks doing work not so much within the Jewish world, but around deconstructing family structures. And I think that is interesting and relevant and connected to sacred Jewish texts thinking about Ruth and Naomi and other figures who deconstruct traditional family structures and still are linked to one another in ways that we now categorize as ancestors.

AUDIENCE: My question is for Shir. I know that you personally suffered from [INAUDIBLE] going on at school. So I was just wondering what advice you could give to other people or maybe just to school of how to better protect you and other Jews like you?

SHIR LOVETT-GRAFF: Yeah, thank you. Great to see you. Yeah, well, I guess the first thing I'll say is that any work being done in contrast to Zionism, like the majority of people who are affected negatively by that are Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students. So, white Jews like me are not at the forefront of being affected.

But I would say generally for anyone doing work critical of Zionism in Israel, I just came from a conference at Tufts in which we were talking about protecting free speech on campus. And I think that's something that universities have an obligation to protect student free speech and free expression and protests. And as we saw what happened at Columbia yesterday with hundreds of students arrested for peacefully protesting outside, we'll see the ways that institutions like Harvard and Columbia continue to find themselves making decisions between protecting their students and protecting the donor class. So, we'll see.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Well, I have a question for Jihyun, especially if what you said at the end of the presentation. Given [INAUDIBLE] Koreans, given that Korea is quite very conservative atmosphere in terms of church, so conservative that pastor who like bless queer was actually excommunicated recently. So given that atmosphere, I think focusing or making clear voice, clear or visible in the church might be dangerous for them without making the church a safer place. So could you explain how you want make church a safer place or how can you [INAUDIBLE]? How you make their voice visible in a less dangerous?

JIHYUN SON: That was the question that I always had. And like I said in my presentation, I'm really aware of the danger of coming out as a queer voice in Korea. That's why I emphasized the academical perspective in my presentation. I think at least the University and the faith community related to the University or its academia is the least dangerous place to make their voices.

Because they can represent their voice as a scholar, and you can say it as a-- because you're going to have a precedent scholars talking about that, and you're going to find the community inside that. But I think the problem of making safer voice in Korea is always the matter about having money in the church, whether you have money or not in the church.

So the more academic voice you have, the more money you're going to collect inside your academic institution like that. So it will going to build a larger community, and it'll make like safer, more safer community to raise the voices. And I know there are communities that are-- still, there are a lot of communities, which is not really safe to make their voices.

So, in some ways, the larger denominations, like mainline churches or mega churches in Korea, they should like split to make their own safer community like that. So it can be built on the foundation of the firmer theological ground, I think.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Yes?

AUDIENCE: This question is for Karina, but I think it also applies to everybody so [INAUDIBLE]. I noticed in your handout specifically, you're talking from what I could understand, narrative specifically of women, queer women coming out and more ex-evangelical and like both of them specifically identify as lesbian in these quotes. And I just wondering, for you, specifically, but then I guess more broadly what the role of gender is in [INAUDIBLE] the agency with which-- or maybe not even agency, but like the expectation of women or non-binary people to define themselves in a certain way and how that came up in your research and [INAUDIBLE].

KARINA YUM: Yeah, no, I think well, that was the thing I was sad about. And I didn't mention something that may shock and discredit you, which is the other ex-evangelical coming-out book that's written by a trans man. But that is a really good note.

And the thing that really captured my attention as I was digging through the Christianity Today archive is there are so many more-- literally, there was only one ex-gay narrative that was written by a man. And I don't know if that's a way to understand the ex-gay community, or if that's an editorial choice, which is a question I have a lot, I still hold.

In terms of the way gender is portrayed, there is this like the motherhood aspect of it. That's something that both Rosario and Butterfield and Jackie Hill Perry hold really tightly is really interesting to me. And I almost wonder if that as a pinnacle of womanhood and something that's like incompatible with being lesbian perhaps in the evangelical imagination makes those narratives more compelling, at least editorially.

So that's kind of what I have to offer you there. I wish I knew more. I wish there was a better archive of these sorts of narratives, but I'm working with what I got.

SHARIAH ANDERSON: Yes, well, let's give our panelists one final round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

And I also, just to conclude and invite Samirah back up. Let's all give Samirah a round of applause [INAUDIBLE].

[APPLAUSE]

SAMIRAH JAIGIRDAR: On behalf of the-- is this is working? Yes. On behalf of the HDS Student Association, thank you all so, so much for coming, for joining in, for asking our panelists wonderful questions, and for your engagement throughout the day. We would love to leave the room the way we found it. So if there's trash or recycling around you, please throw it on those bins on that side. And that being said, have a fantastic weekend.

[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, HDS Student Association.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024 the President and Fellows of Harvard College.