Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Lukasik, Candace; Bruner, Jason

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae025

This article examines the idea of global Christianity in scholarship and the postcolonial and present imperial conditions that underlie it. Through an analysis of the fields of World Christianity and the anthropology of Christianity, it considers how Western Christian histories and power dynamics have impacted Christian traditions of the Global South and seriously considers the pervasive logics of geopolitical power that transform local contexts–not only altering how such communities and traditions are written about, but also impacting the traditions, practices, and people themselves. Thinking with Coptic Orthodox Christians between Egypt and the United States and Born-Again Christians in Uganda, this article examines how global power inequalities in the circuits of ideas, forms of life, and theopolitics are integral to thinking about the idea of global Christianity and its variations in scholarship.

Jordan, Peter N

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae021

This article examines the rationale behind philanthropist John Templeton’s investment in the field of science and religion. His support stems in part from the conviction that historical developments in science are finally leading us to the right understanding of God’s relationship to the created order. The older, mechanical picture of nature that science purportedly gave us implies that God is distant from nature, whereas more recent discoveries are revealing nature’s complexity, elusiveness, intangibility, unpredictability, and creativity and imply God’s intimate presence to, and involvement in, nature. This newer theological picture is consistent with a theological tradition to which Templeton had been exposed since childhood. Believing that science is finally uncovering theological truths about God and God’s relationship to the world, Templeton sought to shape science and (especially) religion so that comparable breakthroughs might continue to flow in the future.

Moss, Yonatan

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae023

This article charts the changing uses of the interconnected terms sect, sectarian, sectarianist, and sectarianism in the academic study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Following a review of the term sect’s early roots in Greco-Roman antiquity and its distinctly Christian transformation, three main steps are analyzed in the genealogy of the category in modern scholarship: (1) deployments by Weber and his early followers; (2) an influential sociological turn in the latter half of the twentieth century; and (3) a sharp decline in the years around the turn of the century in the popularity of sect as a category, followed by a redefinition of its derivative terms (sectarian, etc.) in recent years. Toward the end of the article, lessons are drawn from this genealogy for the future use of the category within scholarship.

Baumann, Roger; Williams, Sara A

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae016

This article examines the intersection of racial and religious identity among progressive US Christians in the context of transnational travel. We approach our analysis through a comparative ethnographic study of two majority-Black and two majority-white Christian Palestinian solidarity tours, representing mainline, evangelical, and historically Black Protestant progressive theological traditions. We conceptualize majority-white tours as “journeys to the margins” and majority-Black tours as “journeys among the margins,” considering how the racial makeup and theological orientation of trips offer a range of affordances for meaning-making, identity construction, and solidarity-building. Using Judith Weisenfeld’s religio-racial framework, we focus on how participants’ progressive Christian values are embedded in divergent racial schemas. Attending to how the logics of these schemas are reinforced or interrogated in transnational encounters, we extend Weisenfeld’s concept from the nation-state to the transnational as we examine how participants reproduce, revise, and re-envision religio-racial frameworks.

White, Christopher; Hughey, Matthew W

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae019

Though W. E. B. Du Bois was critical of traditional religion, he understood the power of religious orientations to the world, including religious attitudes of faith and hope. Although many scholars have commented on Du Bois’s secular faith, few have understood the secular, scientific sources that he used to develop it. In this article, we examine how Du Bois built a post-Christian otherworldly perspective in part by drawing from popular science writers who examined the possibilities, both real and imagined, of higher-dimensional spaces and planes of existence. We analyze Du Bois’s scholarship, visionary fiction, prayers, and poems to better understand how he repurposed higher-dimensional concepts to envision a post-racial God, reimagine the social order, and develop key ideas that informed his life’s work, including the concept of the “color line.”

Patterson, Sara M; Newell, Quincy D

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae026

This article explores how absent objects continue to work on religious communities using two case studies: the gold plates from which Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Mormon, and the first 116 manuscript pages of that translation. Neither of these objects are available to believers now, but they played and continue to play an outsized role in the early history of the Mormon tradition, but in different ways. Based on these case studies, this article argues that scholars of material religion need to attend to the absence of objects in their explorations of how religious assemblages operate.

Herskowitz, Daniel M

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae022

This study contributes to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and that its proper conceptual background is the fin de siècle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geopolitical writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig’s vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, as not targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on “the way,” strive. It concludes by calling for an 'imperial turn' in the study of modern Jewish thought.

Gold, Jonathan C

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae001

This article presents a rereading of Buddhist scriptures from the Pāli Nikāyas in the light of Christopher Beckwith’s 2015 theory that Pyrrho professed early Buddhist ideas. This changes, above all, how we read one of the central terms in Buddhism, dukkha/duḥkha (usually “suffering,” now “unreliable” or “precarious”). I argue that many scriptures make better sense with Pyrrho’s reading and, moreover, that it reveals a depth of wisdom in many otherwise obscure passages in early Buddhist teachings. Through an exploratory, hermeneutic method, the article suggests a reconceptualization of Buddhist scriptures and philosophy in the light of Pyrrho.

Coleman Taylor, Ashley

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae020

In her biomythographical work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde’s lover Afrekete appears as a Black queer femme who alters her sense of self and her being through religio-erotic experience. After tracing the spirit who inspired Lorde’s Afrekete throughout the Americas, I propose a theory of the shoreline as a site of transoceanic becoming, or the experience of self-identification required to navigate the Western world as an African diaspora being. I focus primarily on the ontologies of Black trans and queer femmes and the unconscious yet necessary process of becoming at the intersections of existence.

Li, Jingjing

2024 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfae024

In this article, I elaborate on the approach to joy preserved in East Asian Yogācāra texts authored by Xuanzang and his disciple, Kuiji. I argue that these Yogācāra Buddhists propose a contextualist approach that does not presume joy to be an emotion with an essential property but rather perceives joy as always contextualized in lifeworlds at the personal and interpersonal levels. As such, Xuanzang and Kuiji outline two contrasting pictures of joy to capture how it is experienced in the lifeworld of ignorance and the lifeworld of wisdom, respectively. Upon delineating what joy is and how it is experienced, I continue to explore what joy can promise. Since joy does not have an inherent property, people can always make a collaborative effort to recontextualize joy for inclusion and emancipation. As such, I hope to draw on the Yogācāra analysis of joy to enrich the feminist discussion on happiness.