New England-Maritimes American Academy of Religion News

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This arrived in my inbox from Rebecca Sachs Norris, American Academy of Religion. It should be of interest to our readers who live in what we now call the Snow Belt.

Greetings from your regional steering committee!

Please note -- some of these announcements are especially for GRADUATE STUDENTS

2011 Joint Mid-Atlantic / New England-Maritimes Regional Meeting

Registration for the regional meeting is now open and can be accessed at www.aarweb.org/Meetings/Regions/registration.asp?Region=MA.

Deadlines

After Feb. 1, the fees for all presenters go up to $75. All presenters must be pre-registered by March 1.

If you are a NEMAAR graduate student and are giving a paper at the regional conference you are eligible for the NEMAAR graduate student awards for excellence. To be considered for these awards please send your paper by February 18 to Rebecca Sachs Norris at rsnorris@sacredgames.org. If you have a serious difficulty with this deadline please contact us at that address – we may be able to grant extensions under some conditions.

The deadline for discounted room rates is March 1. Please see this link for housing information: http://www.aarweb.org/About_AAR/Regions/Mid-Atlantic/call.asp.

If you are looking for a roommate for the conference please contact NEMAAR at Nemaarproposal@gmail.com. All we can offer in this regard is to pass on contact information.

Upcoming Event for Graduate Students (Co-sponsored by NEMAAR)

Theological Times: A Gathering for Doctoral Students of Theology

Boston, February 18-19, 2011
Information and Registration: www.TheologySalon.org

The Harvard Theology Salon invites all doctoral students of theology across the New England Region to join us in Boston, Feb 18-19, 2011. This gathering will critically and self-reflexively explore theology as it is being practiced, taught, and creatively rethought. In the process, the gathering will strengthen and augment our collaborative community of emerging theological scholars. All doctoral students who understand themselves to do theology (however conceived) are encouraged to attend. For more information, please visit the website above or contact Hannah Hofheinz at hhofheinz@mail.harvard.edu. We are grateful to NEMAAR for supporting this event, and hope that many of you will join us!

NEMAAR Call for Conference or Event Proposals (available to all NEMAAR members)

We aim to support our membership by co-sponsoring your events in different parts of the region. Conferences, teaching workshops, salons or other gatherings to benefit AAR members are eligible. NEMAAR’s contribution can include funds of up to $800 towards expenses and access to regional e-mail notices to publicize the event. For further information please see:
http://www.aarweb.org/About_AAR/regions/New_England-Maritimes/callproposals.asp

Further Regional Meeting Information
We encourage everyone to attend. The theme for the conference is Religion and Embodiment, and the plenary speakers are Miguel De La Torre, Marie Griffith, and Kieran Scott. Please see below for more details on the speakers.

Miguel De La Torre is a member of the faculty at the Iliff School of Theology. Among his published books are the recent volumes Liberating Jonah: Forming an Ethics of Reconciliation (Orbis, 2007), Lily Among the Thorns: Imagining a New Christian Sexuality (Wiley, John and Sons, 2007), and Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins (Orbis, 2004). De La Torre chairs the AAR's Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee. In conjunction with his plenary address, he will be leading a workshop for faculty and graduate students on diversifying the field of religious studies for scholars from groups underrepresented within the Academy.

Marie Griffith is the John A. Bartlett Professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Griffith is the author of Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (University of California Press, 2004) and God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (University of California Press, 1997). Her current research focuses on the role of sexuality among American evangelical Christians.

Kieran Scott is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and religious studies department at Fordham University in New York City. He is the coeditor, with Harold Horell, of Human Sexuality in the Catholic Tradition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); and the coeditor, with Michael Warren, of Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2006).

"Things Do Things"

Emily Clark

Those of us who were in Atlanta for the AAR have had nearly a week to recover from our self-inflected wounds of staying up late and social networking over lagers and ales. We have also had a little under a week to digest the wide-ranging, quality panels and papers we had the opportunity to hear. One Saturday afternoon panel that continues to stick out for me was the Author Meets Critics panel for Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Though the book came out in 2006 and in 2009 the Journal of the American Academy of Religion published a review symposium, including a response from Tweed, this 2010 session in Atlanta drew quite a crowd. Based on his years in the field of religious studies and American religious history, Tweed defines religion as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing upon human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”

Unfortunately Ivan Strenski (of University of California, Riverside) was unable to attend, but the three other respondents/“critics” led off an engaging discussion that ranged from scholarly moral obligation to the agency of “things.” Chip Callahan (University of Missouri) reflected on Tweed’s book in light of his current research on the religious lives and worlds of New England whalers. Callahan found Tweed’s work helpful because his use of dynamic water metaphors allows us to focus on the everyday lives of our actual subjects. Marie Marquardt (Agnes Scott College)’s reflections on Oscar, a Mexican migrant “outsider” living in the US who she met during her fieldwork, demonstrate how a theory or definition that is itself “on the move” resonates well with subjects who are on the move. Also recognizing Tweed’s dynamic definition, Grant Wacker (Duke University) spoke about the “positionality of the observer” and the “motility of data,” along with amusing anecdotes from his years of working with/near Tweed in North Carolina.

During his response and the Q&A session following, Tweed reflected on his past projects and his forthcoming book on the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He spoke of the moral obligations we as scholars have to our subjects, living or dead. Both ethnographic work and archival work exists in a world of “moral entanglement.” Tweed also drew our attention to the significance of artifacts – for “buildings perform roles” and “statues have agency.” “Things do things.” Scholars of material culture have long called for the importance of stuff, but material culture can easily be overlooked by discussions of power and authority. Tweed’s short but poignant phrase “things do things” got me thinking about destroyed things. I’ve blogged before about Hurricane Katrina and Avery Gordon’s notions of haunting, as the absence of pre-Katrina buildings lends a ghostly presence to the Crescent City. Not only are dwellings important, the Q&A also prompted Tweed and the respondents to reflect on those who are excluded from home. In addition to looking at how/why some people are unwelcome from particular dwellings, destroyed dwellings and our subjects’ response to their destruction and absence is significant. Do they rebuild? Do they move? Do they forget? Or how do they remember? Non-things do things too.

A Plantation and a Church on a Bayou

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

If you're going to be at this weekend's annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, please consider attending a roundtable discussion of the "The Future of Southern Religious History." I will be speaking about the peculiarity of place and the conceptualization of home in the American South. Specifically, I will take the audience on a brief tour of a plantation and a church on a bayou. If you'd like to know how this song relates to the photographs below, then join me and the rest of the panel on Monday, November 1, at 9am.