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.

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.

This chapter asks how discourses of crisis in the humanities rely on the rhetoric so often applied to religion (i.e., the rhetoric of interior, personal matters) to privatize and silo humanistic inquiry. Religious studies as a discipline is particularly poised to talk about rhetorics of interiority, and this essay highlights how discourses of crisis often lead to defenses that emphasize the personal fulfillment of studying cultures, inadvertently making the “humanities” a private endeavor unworthy of public funding. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how articulations of “the humanities” – by positing a personal zone of belief, meaning, and value – function to discipline material viewed as divisive.

This chapter analyzes discourses surrounding “the American Worker” during the early 1970s to show how a perceived “crisis” eased the transition to the emergent neoliberal economic order that defined the late twentieth century. The essay then turns to the perceived crisis in academic labor amid the global pandemic to explore the ways that the rhetoric of crisis reinforces the acute material inequalities that structure the academy today.

This chapter considers the relationship between religious studies and theology and what “crises” have marked that relationship (or lack thereof).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew Durdin responds to the preceding papers, synthesizing these larger points of how we might theorize “crisis.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”?

Demonstrating the ways in which discourses of “crisis” in the academy are necessarily economically inflected, this chapter explores the roles that considerations of class play in identity studies more broadly. Specifically, the essay shows how identitarian claims (so frequently invoked in crisis-rhetoric) too often foreclose the intersectional approaches those claims nominally advance. This foreclosure occurs when the former employs analyses of specific economies of meaning to the exclusion of specific economies of capital. Intersectionality, however, demands active attention to the structural apparatuses constituting both economies simultaneously. Different and more interesting work becomes possible when those modes of economy are neither conflated nor dichotomized.

In this final chapter, Aaron Hughes responds to the chapters in the volume as well as to the immediate reaction to the oral version of the paper. Ultimately, this chapter addresses what happens when theorizing cuts too close to home.