Returning from the AAR

From November 6th to 10th I attended the annual meeting of the American Academy of religion. It was a a lot of fun and I learned a great deal. I presented a paper on Catholic visions of the afterlife and how they were a factor in whether a Catholic apostatized or not under torture. I also got to meet a lot of nice people, heard some great papers, and learned some things I can use in my own research, especially my dissertation.

One thing that is interesting about AAR is that it includes people looking at things from a religious studies perspective (that is, one that is meant to be religiously neutral) and others who are looking from the perspective of a specific religion. For example, I attended a panel on critical issues in Buddhism. One of the papers was on how Buddhists need to study the texts and histories of other Buddhists. The person presenting the paper thought there was too much Buddhist sectarianism (I guess there are plenty of arguments between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhists) and that Buddhists need to read their history more critically. For example, the author pointed out that there are a lot of Buddhists who believe that the Heart Sutra was written during the lifetime of Shakyamuni when it would in fact seem that it was not. The presenter was lecturing on these views at a Buddhist center. I wonder if they will gain much currency and if they do what affect they will have on Buddhism. Many would argue that too much textual criticism is harmful to a religion, measured in terms of number of people belonging/converting to that tradition.

The other Buddhist paper that I heard in that panel (I had to leave early to have brunch with my adviser) was also interesting. It was on Buddhist sexual ethics. The panelist discussed how Buddhist teachings on sexual morality had developed. He focused a lot on adultery. Apparently in some of the early texts married men could have sexual relations with slaves or prostitutes (so long as she was paid directly; no pimps) that was acceptable and did not count as adultery. Having relations with another man's wife or having pre-marital sex with one's fiance did count as adultery however. The author ended his paper with a defense of Buddhist teachings against adultery but he ran out of time before he could say what definition of adultery he was using. I need to see if I can find out. Usually when I think of adultery I think it is pretty straight forward what it is but perhaps it's not so simple. Though in such things, personally, I say err on the side of caution!

I went to one interesting set of theological papers that were arguing about the atonement. I don't understand much theology but they seemed to be saying that Christians should move to a non-violent explanation of how the atonement works. This was striking to me because that seemed to play down the importance of the crucifixion, though one of the panelists said he was not doing that, so I'm not sure exactly what it means but it seemed rather curious to me. One panelist also seemed to play down the importance of suffering which also surprised me. The weird thing about that panel was that one panelist spent about 1/4 of his time criticizing a certain book. During the question and answer period the author got up and said that the panelist had misunderstood his book. I always dread doing something like that.

It's really interesting to see these different perspectives at work. My own paper was pretty much a straight forward history from a secular academic perspective. I like seeing these different perspectives but I think it might be good to make sure you don't have conflicting perspectives on the same panel. I attended a panel in which there were some problems because someone presented a paper from a theological standpoint that many members of the audience thought was to be taken from a historical perspective. This led to some problems.