Religion

By examining the intersection of religious and media practices, my research investigates the stakes and consequences of localizing Buddhism in North America—for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association (the Association) as one of the world’s largest North American based Buddhist networks. By focusing on the media that Buddhists affiliated with the Association produce for religious purposes, I examine how this dispersed religious community appropriates a variety of media technologies to attune their “embodied sensoria.” These bodily attainments by way of media use produces the modern religious subjects with nonliberal orientations valued within this community.

I draw upon my ethnographic research with monastic and lay Buddhist media producers to understand how their media practices help to generate Buddhist identities and socialities predicated upon alternatively valued modes of life—rooted in their practices of precepts, purity, and non-attachment and animated by feelings of compassion, repentance, and resolve. The dissertation charts the centrality of the senses in the history of Buddhism as well as outlines The Shurangama Sutra (T.945), as a central teaching of the Association. By thinking alongside this sutra as local theory, I develop an anthropological analytic of sensory praxis and the concept of the “dharma vajra” to understand Buddhist uses of media. I employ my analytic to disentangle the embodied sensorial practices that I encountered among members of the Association. Subsequent chapters both describe and analyze the Association’s use of audio-media to craft of temple soundscapes, as well as media technologies employed in their mnemonic and meditative efforts.

This dissertation charts the techniques through which nonliberal Buddhist persons and communities are constructed, mediated, and enacted, both locally and internationally, and the role that media technologies play in this process. This study provides an account of the ways that the media worlds of Buddhism specifically, and religion more generally, generate alternative social imaginaries that extend globally from their local positioning within North American modernities. More broadly, my research bridges frameworks of media production and embodied sensory practice; transnational formations of religious identity; religiosity and its mediations of social life.

This essay situates James K. A. Smith's Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology in the context of contemporary social criticism, Augustinian politics, and the cultural turn in religious ethics. While commending Smith's liturgical ambitions and newfound appreciation for the democratic tradition, I raise critical questions pertaining to eschatology, war and nationhood, and the extent to which he overcomes familiar debates in Christian social ethics. Let me thank Davey Henreckson for organizing this panel, and Jamie Smith for this book. It is a fitting conclusion to his trilogy that defies scholarly boundaries and conventions. My endorsement on the book's cover suggests my admiration should not come as a surprise: the publication of this work makes it no longer possible to say evangelicals lack a viable political theology. I very much welcome his critical yet constructive, funky, ascetical, postcolonial and eclectic Kuyperian political theology that is actually theological. It stands in contrast to the practical atheism of many God-and-Heaven forgetting evangelical discussions of religion and politics, shalom, worldviews, cultural transformation , natural law, and common grace. And it is because of his theology-for us creatures of desire in a world that will not fulfill those desires-that Smith broadens our imagination for what counts as politics, how to be political, and the tasks of theology for a time between the times. Refusing the Benedict Option or the culture wars, he extends the gifts of neo-Calvinism to American evangelicalism beyond analytic philosophy of religion and principled pluralism.

This essay on Richard Miller’s Friends and Other Strangers (2016) locates its arguments in the context of how the practice of religious ethics bears upon debates about normativity in the study of religion and the cultural turn in the humanities.  After reviewing its main claims about identity and otherness, I focus on three areas.  First, while commending Miller’s effort to analogize virtuous empathy with Augustine’s ethics of rightly ordered love, I raise questions about his use of Augustine and his distinctive formulation of Augustinian “iconic realism.”  Second, I suggest his discussion of public reason is at odds with the dialogical spirit of the book and may distract from the democratic solidarity required by our political moment.  Third, more briefly, I highlight the practical implications of Miller’s vision for higher education at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

The limits and secularity of political life have been signature themes of modern Augustinianism, often couched in non-theological language of realism and the role of religion in public life. In dialogue with Gilbert Meilaender, this article inverts and theologizes that interest by asking how Augustinian pilgrims might characterize the positive relation of political history to saving history and the ways in which political action in time might teach us something about the nature of salvation that comes to us from beyond history. This relation of continuity and discontinuity eludes dogmatic formulation, but the goal of the present article is to see where a shared Augustinianism and a shared commitment to aspects of the liberal political tradition might find illuminating disagreement.

This volume hopes to renew a conversation that has a long history in the academy, the Church, and the wider world. In addition to various precursors in English and Scottish moral philosophy, theistic engagement with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill had a profound impact on Anglo-American theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1960sand1970s, Christian ethics focused explicitly on various theories of actand rule-utilitarianism. 1 Ongoing debates about proportionalism in Roman Catholic moral theology trade upon the extent to which proponents of this view adopt a form of consequentialism inconsistent with church doctrine. 2 Today, however, sustained engagement with utilitarianism by theologians typically occurs more indirectly through proxy debates in economics, public policy, political theory, and psychology. Deontological and utilitarian ethics still frame many discussions in normative and applied ethics. Peter Singer's own writings have done much to fund this interest, often provoking polemical charges of immorality and irrationality by philosophers and theologians alike. At the same time, the growing appeal of virtue language in theological circles tends to focus on character and goodness rather than right action. In contrast to previous generations, contemporary Christian ethics has been shaped more by alliances with Kantian contractualism and Aristotelian virtue ethics than utilitarianism. Indeed, despite the appeal of proportionalism or the soft consequentialism of Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism, it is difficult to think of a prominent Christian consequentialist or even explicit treatment of contemporary utilitarian philosophers in recent Christian ethics. It is therefore a welcome

The nature and scope of government surveillance have intensified debates about liberty and security in a post-9/11 world. Critics of the just war tradition argue it is not able to constructively address these new challenges. Defenders often simply reaffirm its various criteria in making retrospective judgments or clarifying principles. By contrast, this article argues that our political moment-marked by the arbitrary exercise of power, the prospect of permanent war, and the rapid speed of global politics-reinforces the need to frame just war thinking within a constructive account of statecraft and practical reasoning. In particular, I highlight moral (rather than simply legal) dimensions of authority and intention which reveal a fundamental question about what we want from the just war tradition in relation to democratic social criticism and the possibility of political morality.

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One of the more interesting developments in recent theological ethics is the emergence of what has been called "Protestant Thomism." 1 By this term, following John Bowlin, I mean the renewed influence of Aquinas's account of natural law and the virtues among Protestant moralists. This seemingly oxymoronic turn draws more explicitly from work on Aquinas as theologian than Barth as ethicist, though it benefits from recent efforts to read them together and without caricature. 2 It promotes a dynamic version of Thomism that is at once more Aristotelian and more Augustinian than scholastic Counter-Reformation moral theology that is sometimes held responsible for the independent rationalism of early modern moral philosophy. It is also quite different from common approaches to Aquinas in analytic philosophy of reli-50

This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, "A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community" (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism.