I’ll be attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, where I’ll be in conversation with several scholars about recent and forthcoming books on religion, children’s literature, and education. It’s part authors-meet-critics, part roundtable discussion. Exact date and time TBA.
Here’s a panel abstract and list of participants:
Blending the conversational format of a roundtable with the robust engagement of an authors-meet-critics discussion, this session uses an innovative format to reflect on emerging methods for studying childhood, family religion, and public education in Northeast Asia. Representing perspectives from Japan and Taiwan, the authors of two recently published and two forthcoming books collectively investigate family religion, religion as a form of pleasurable play, the contrast between popular teachings and formal doctrines, and the role of religion in public schools. To facilitate discussion, all participants will have read each book before the session; portions of each book’s introduction will be pre-circulated to audience members before the panel.
Two of the roundtable participants investigate how children’s picturebooks inculcate religious values outside of the framework of formal sectarian instruction through “affinity work” (Heller 2025) that often happens in a playful mode (Blair forthcoming). In productive contrast to such “iterative learning” (Heller), Covell (2024) investigates how Japanese Buddhist organizations have approached juvenile audiences through early childhood education programs and secondary education curricular development. Meanwhile, Thomas (forthcoming) examines how public schools in Japan use euphemistic concepts like “morality” to advance religion-adjacent lessons.
Even as the participants collectively argue for the importance of investigating non-elite and seemingly non-religious material as religion, they also critically reflect on the common rhetorical posture of taking ostensibly frivolous material “seriously.” They show how to do this in a non-defensive way through novel theorization and methodological innovation. Their methods involve examining religion as domestic rather than institutional (Heller), investigating the “constituent parts” of religion (Blair), focusing on what people do rather than overemphasizing prescriptive doctrines (Covell), or looking at supposedly non-religious public schools as sites of religion-making (Thomas). Grounded in Northeast Asian cases, these heuristic strategies constitute generalizable methods for understanding relationships between religion, childhood, and education in other countries within and beyond Asia. Crucially, the methods introduced in this session also help to elucidate matters of pressing public concern: Religion features prominently in ongoing debates about childhood and the family worldwide, highlighting how societies facing uncertain futures imagine the normative ideals that should be transmitted to future generations.
Participants:
Sara Swenson (Dartmouth), presiding
Heather Blair (University of Indiana), author of The Gods Make You Giggle (forthcoming)
Steve Covell (University of Western Michigan), author of The Teaching and Teachings of Buddhism in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2024)
Natasha Heller (UVA), author of Literature for Little Bodhisattvas (University of Hawai`i Press, 2025)
Jolyon Baraka Thomas (Penn), author of Difficult Subjects: Religion, Education, and the US-Japan Security Alliance (forthcoming, I hope)