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Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion

Edited by
Lauren Horn Griffin [+–]
Louisiana State University
Lauren Horn Griffin is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department at
Louisiana State University. Her work focuses on religion, politics, media, and technology.

After an opening section that explores the deployment of “crisis” in various aspects of higher education, this volume is structures the critical approach to the category of crisis through four distinct sections: Language, Lexicon, Locus, and Locution. The section on Language examines the social rhetoric that emerges in historical moments of rupture, resistance, and reconstitution. The section on Lexicon considers different projects of persuasion exemplified in the critical study of religion in and through crisis. The section on Locus discusses three instances of religious institutions adapting to “crises” in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, highlighting that religions are not fixed entities but living constructions. The final section, Locution, brings together senior scholars to assess the stated aim of the American Academy of Religion (i.e., “thinking about the actual human implications of religion in a world upended”) and explain how we might provide an alternative to that use of crisis in the field of religious studies. The book is concluded with an Afterword by Aaron Hughes.

Series: NAASR Working Papers

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introduction [+–]
Lauren Horn Griffin
Louisiana State University
Lauren Horn Griffin is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department at
Louisiana State University. Her work focuses on religion, politics, media, and technology.
The introduction authored by the editor will set out the issues and explain the organization of the volume. It will offer a reflection on the ways in which the field of religious studies continues to construct “religion” as an object of study vis-à-vis other categories (in this case, crisis) as if it is self-evident. The introduction explicitly positions this book as an alternative to the approach put forth by the American Academy of Religion, serving as an example of a more critical approach to the study of religion in times of crisis. Following the introduction, the book is comprised of four sections that focus on one of the following key categories in theorizing “crisis”: Language, Lexicon, Locus, and Locution.

Part I: Critiquing “Crisis” in Higher Education

1. What Crisis? The Study of Religion is Always in Crisis [+–]
Aaron W. Hughes
University of Rochester
Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
This chapter focuses on the concept of “crisis” in the field of religious studies. Based on his keynote address, Aaron Hughes argues that crises exist at the level of discourse, among a group whose members share affinities, share narratives, and share goals—and thus share the identities that then result. After a brief history and analysis of the term itself, Hughes asks us to examine how such things as rhetorics of crisis work—when they’re invoked, why they’re invoked, who gets to invoke them, and what might be accomplished by making such claims.
2. The Contingency Crisis [+–]
Emily D. Crews
University of Chicago
Emily D. Crews is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she
teaches in the Religious Studies Department and the College. She completed her PhD in
History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2021. Her work focuses
on the ways that women’s reproductive bodies are linked to projects of identity construction, maintenance, and negotiation in Nigerian Pentecostal immigrant communities in the United States. In the classroom she thinks with students about categories and ideas in the study of religion through mundane phenomena like love, sororities, Jane Austen, and Alabama football (Roll Tide).
This paper considers the adjunctification of university faculty, a disappearing job market, and the perils of contingency. Has framing this as a crisis worked to provoke change?
3. Theology and Religious Studies: a Relationship in Crisis? [+–]
Suzanne Owen
Leeds Trinity University
Suzanne Owen is a senior lecturer in religious studies at Leeds Trinity University, UK. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and researches contemporary indigenous and pagan religions.
This chapter considers the relationship between religious studies and theology and what “crises” have marked that relationship (or lack thereof).
4. Deploying “Crisis” for the Financialization of Higher Ed: Platform Capitalism and the Information Society [+–]
Lauren Horn Griffin
Louisiana State University
Lauren Horn Griffin is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department at
Louisiana State University. Her work focuses on religion, politics, media, and technology.
What are the consequences of framing higher ed as “in crisis”? What delegitimizing work does it do, and for whom and for what purpose? Taking seriously Aaron Hughes’s exploration of “crisis” as a discursive construction, we can ask how it is used, by what social actors, and for what purposes. This chapter serves as an example of the consequences of framing an institution “in crisis” by exploring the “budget crisis” in higher ed, whose interests that serves, and how that relates to very real problems of equity for people. The university is obviously no bastion of democracy and transparency, but always constructing it in terms of “crisis” (both funding and culture-wise) masks the fact that it does have the institutional infrastructure to caretake information and the public trust that becomes the basis of identity formation in an information society.
5. Scholars are People Too: The (Sometimes) Difficult Shift to the Discourse of Crisis [+–]
Russell T. McCutcheon
University of Alabama
Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, USA. He publishes widely on the history of the study of religion, the tools scholars use in their work, and the practical implications of that work. Among his recent publications are Reading J. Z. Smith (with Willi Braun; Oxford University Press, 2018), ‘Religion’ in Theory and Practice (Equinox Publishing, 2018) and Fabricating Religion (de Gruyter, 2018).
In response to the critical tools that Aaron Hughes offered to his listeners to examine how such things as rhetorics of crisis work, we instead learned about various actual crises that seem to preoccupy them: from the crisis of the scientific study of religion to various crises of the contemporary corporatized university and, yes, even the crisis of Donald Trump’s place in current American politics, not to mention some ill-defined things said to be “existential crises.” The moral of the story is that scholars are themselves no different from the people whom we study; for we deploy the usual set of techniques to establish group identity and to nurture what we take to be shared affinities and common alienations. Our critical intelligence, as useful as it is when engaging in the study of distant peoples and places—whether chronologically or geographically—can sometimes be of surprisingly little assistance when those things that we ourselves value feel under threat, even if that threat comes from the critical gaze of a colleague. While I would encourage scholars of religion to be rather more bold and uncompromising in the application of such critical, self-reflexive scholarship—even when it is felt to be applied uncomfortably close to home—we can take away something from this episode to help us understand the push-back that our work often receives either from the people being studied or, as is more likely, from those of our colleagues who hold them dear.

Part II: Language: Theorizing Crisis as “A Turning Point”

6. Profit and Loss: The New Time of Crisis [+–]
Zoe Anthony
University of Toronto
PhD Candidate, University of Toronto
The claim that there is something unprecedented about the COVID-19 crisis inspires a comparison to the work of both Walter Benjamin and Reinhart Koselleck, the former whose messianism recalls the unexpected, ever-anticipated eruption into history that would end all history, the latter whose focus on the historical development of the category of “crisis” as a temporal classification that yields continually new pictures of time. I argue that the conceptual tools of Koselleck offer a clearer picture of what is theoretically noteworthy within this moment in time. My claim is that there is an interesting tension in the description of crisis between these two figures in terms of the idea of crisis as rupture into history. My argument is that the rhetoric of the unprecedented can be interpreted through a historiography of the transcendent, by which I mean a conceptualization of what is unexpected through as what is transcendent. The moment in which the transcendent erupts into history the transcendent becomes amenable to rational discourse. As rational the transcendent can be capitalized, monetized, and profited from.
7. Black Fires: Analyzing the Relationship Between Radical Theology and Arson in South Georgia [+–]
Aaron Treadwell
Middle Tennessee State University
In the summer of 1962, there were six major arson cases in Southern Georgia. These acts of terrorism became national news, and would receive a response from J. Edgar Hoover, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jackie Robinson. This paper will examine the cause and effect of these acts of terrorism, with intention to express the theological reverberations of church fires. In the follow two months, six regional churches would face arson. By so doing, the epicenter for black resistance organization became ground zero arenas for racial war in southern Georgia.
8. Force of Law: Resources in Derrida for Rethinking Policing [+–]
Karen Elizabeth Zoppa
University of Winnipeg
Karen Elizabeth Zoppa earned her PhD from the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on Critical Theory of Religion in relation to contemporary philosophy and literature. She teaches Humanities at the University of Winnipeg.
The current crisis in law enforcement is a crisis of faith, according to the critique of law/enforcement offered in Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority”. His analysis of the filiation of law to enforcement argues that law is founded both in an inescapable violence and in an authority that is founded on nothing more than its credibility, that is to say, the faith granted to its inscriptions. In its current iteration, the law and its enforcement is founded upon a theory of justice that violates the integrity of the other, of “otherness” as such, in privileging an ideal person equal before a universalizable law. As well, the ubiquitous violence of language which founds and preserves the law contests the aim of eliminating racialized violence among those who would defund or even abolish the police with. On the other hand, Derrida offers a remedy to the aporia of the current crisis by recalling a different iteration of justice, one that places “the other” at its axis. The following analysis aims to offer a coherent structural critique of the current crisis.
9. Thinking Through Crisis as Turning Point [+–]
Andrew Durdin
Florida State University
Andrew Durdin is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State
University. His work focuses on critical approaches to the study of religion with an emphasis on the Roman imperial period, the modern historiography of ancient religions, and magic and
religion in the ancient and modern world.
Andrew Durdin responds to the preceding papers, synthesizing these larger points of how we might theorize “crisis.”

Part III: Lexicon: Crisis as Method in the Study of Religion

10. The Crisis of World Religions and the Critique of Essentialism [+–]
Michael DeJonge
University of South Florida
In what follows, I argue that the philosophical rejection of essentialism that fuels critics of WRP is embedded in a broader critique of the substance metaphysics in which essentialism is most at home. When compared with this philosophical rejection, essentialism critiques of WRP are often imprecise and superficial: imprecise in their accounts of essentialism and superficial in their reception of this philosophical rejection. Deeper engagement with this philosophical rejection of essentialism would encourage naming essentialism specifically as an ontological doctrine and rejecting essentialism by appropriating a non-substance metaphysics.
11. Enlarging Religious Studies, Wither-ing Neoliberalism [+–]
Matt Sheedy
University of Bonn

Matt Sheedy holds a Ph.D. in the study of religion and is a visiting professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism and atheism, as well as representations of Christianity, Islam, and Native American traditions in popular and political culture. He is the author of Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021).

In this chapter I address the theme of crisis in the study of religion through the broader lens of neoliberal ideology, which I combine with a discussion of Scott Elliott’s 2013 volume Reinventing Religious Studies: Key Writings in the History of the Discipline, covering forty-years of debates in the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (CSSR) Bulletin, from 1969-2009. One thing that is clear when looking back on this period is that a feeling a crisis has always been lingering in the field, though the terms and conditions have decidedly changed. Previous crises in religious studies have primarily focused on who gets to determine the shape and identity of the discipline, with theology and its various sublimations playing the heel. In our current era, the very existence of the field as a tenuous member of the humanities and social sciences is under increasing threat, and this time the power to contest our disciplinary identity may be largely out of our hands. Or is it? That is the primary question that I wish to provoke here.
12. Pop Goes the People—Populism, Panics, and Pandemics [+–]
Carmen Celestini
University of Waterloo
As QAnon, Pizzagate, COVID19 hoax theories, the Great Reset, and the topics of freedom, liberty, and religious persecution became the headlines of media sources, the content of social media memes and posts, the theoretical became reality. Teaching courses about these topics in For conference participant use only. Not for reproduction or distribution. Living in the midst of crisis has changed both my pedagogy but also my interactions with my students. Throughout the pandemic my syllabi have become more of a possible roadmap with an understanding that there will be forks in the road where we, instructor and students, will leave the chosen path and venture into the reality of what is occurring outside of the classroom walls.

Part IV: Locus: Landmarks in Religious Adaptations in the Face of Crisis

13. “Social Church” and a ‘Pragmatic’ Relationship with the State: The Wager of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and Orthodox Church in Russia in Times of Crisis [+–]
Xochiquetzal Luna Morales
Wilfrid Laurier University
Without intending to portray these two religious institutions as static and monolithic, this chapter examines how the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and the Orthodox Church in Russia navigated two critical periods of political and social crisis during the twentieth century. Specifically, it focuses on the years at the end of the Cristero War in Mexico and the time of glasnost and perestroika in Russia. It argues that these institutions have survived – despite their internal fractures and divisions – because they managed to have a ‘pragmatic’ relationship with the government and wagered to be a ‘social’ church and not an ‘individual’ one. It also compares if and how the church’s current efforts/posture resemble responses during previous political and social turmoil, given that, today, the ‘enemy’ is not a political condition or ideology but a universal health crisis. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first one sets out the definitions of “crisis” and “social church.” The second and third parts explore the prevailing approaches after the Cristero War in Mexico and perestroika in Russia that the Catholic and Orthodox Church used to navigate those difficult years. Finally, the fourth section reflects on how those approaches remain salient (or not) for these churches in their current responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
14. Yoga’s ‘Flexibility’ in Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic [+–]
Gustavo Moura
Wilfrid Laurier University
Yoga is well-known for its flexibility, which goes much beyond the exotic postures associated with it. In South Asia alone, Yoga’s ideas have a long history of adaptations within Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. More recently these ideas have traveled widely around the world, forming a movement encompassing diverse communities linked through shared practices, values and aspirations under today’s fashionable label ‘yoga’. Based on my recent field observations, I here ask how the Yoga movement is responding to the COVID-19 crisis in Brazil and what lessons we may learn by observing such adaptations and developments. The first part of this paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Brazilian Yoga movement: Is the number of people interested in yoga increasing, and if so, why? How are instructors and practitioners coping with lockdown policies? What strategies have been deployed in the cities, in the ashrams, and within the online space? Above all, how enduring are these adaptations and in what ways could they be reshaping the yoga landscape? The second part of the paper then discusses the nature of this yoga movement asking what is shared with a wider international yoga public and what is peculiar to the Brazilian situation. Also, how is the technology of communication blurring borders and contributing to the already prominent culture of hybridism in Brazil? To address this question, I apply Meredith McGuire’s (2008) approach of “lived religion” with special attention to issues of individual practice and hybridity. Moreover, for the sake of highlighting the experiential nature of yoga as a system of practices, I engage Foucault’s (1982) concept of “technologies of the self”. Finally, I For conference participant use only. Not for reproduction or distribution. Do not cite without permission of the author. NAASR Annual Meeting 2021 reflect on the flavor of yoga in Brazil as Indian ingredients are combined with African and indigenous ones.
15. Compounded Crises: How the Principle of Subsidiarity Informs Catholic Responses to Critical Issues in North America [+–]
Ben Szoller
University of Waterloo
This chapter examines what the principle of subsidiarity, developed within Catholic social thought, reveals about the Church’s expanding conception of the social “crisis” in North America since the Second Vatican Council. First, it considers how in Canada and the United States, Catholic bishops incorporated a national and global outlook into their public messaging, largely informed by the economic crisis of the 1980s. Second, it looks briefly at rural organization as a lens through which we might examine critical issues in North America today, particularly in light of recent Catholic documents. Catholic teaching around complex and often overlapping social, economic, and environmental concerns has been particularly salient in the rural context. Third, this paper considers how revelations around Catholic-run residential schools in Canada elicit important questions about how the Church responds to crisis and the suitability of subsidiarity mechanisms. Evaluating how Catholic groups rendered the principles of subsidiarity and 1 “Many Catholics were disturbed by the social teaching of their bishops,” Baum wrote, regardless of the disparate views around Canadian clerical authority beforehand (Baum 1984, 19). Solidarity in recent decades might help those interested in religion and society understand the growing concern around globalization within Catholic thought and how the Church develops and scales substantive social responses today. Moreover, looking at compounded critical issues through the lens of religious moral praxis (such as Catholic social teaching) helps to assess how religious frameworks continue to shape public discourses in North America.

Part V: Locution: Upending the Discipline

16. Response [+–]
K. Merinda Simmons
University of Alabama
View Website
K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Director of the Religion in Culture MA Program at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Columbia UP, 2015), and Race and New Modernisms (co-authored with James A. Crank, Bloomsbury, 2019). She is editor of the book series Concepts in the Study of Religion: Critical Primers (Equinox).
This year’s AAR Presidential Theme calls for “thinking about the actual human implications of religion in a world upended.” Given NAASR’s work as a critical engagement, this chapter asks what does it mean to frame the world which we study as a “world upended”? How can we think critically about not just crisis itself but also about what is constructed as “crisis”?
17. Response [+–]
Adrian Hermann
University of Bonn
Adrian Hermann is Professor of Religion and Society at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW) of the University of Bonn.
This chapter responds to the following questions: What are the implications to our scholarly endeavors and our profession if responding to “crisis” becomes our modus operandi? How does this framework privilege certain voices or interests over others within the field (or within the objects of study)?
18. Afterword
Aaron W. Hughes
University of Rochester
Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781000000000
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£75.00 / $100.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781000000000
Price (Paperback)
£24.95 / $32.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781000000000
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£24.95 / $32.00
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£75.00 / $100.00
Publication
01/10/2024
Pages
224
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
scholars

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