Filtering by: Roundtable
North American Religions Unit Roundtable: Reimagining the Midcentury
Nov
24
9:00 AM09:00

North American Religions Unit Roundtable: Reimagining the Midcentury

This roundtable discussion re-examines religion in the mid-twentieth century United States. Histories of this time period have traditionally emphasized a religious boom post-World War II, Cold War anxieties, suburbanization, and “tri-faith” consensus. Our conversation will begin the process of destabilizing these familiar historiographies.

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AAS Roundtable: Denaturalizing Culturalism and Essentialism in the Research and Teaching of Japan
Mar
16
8:30 AM08:30

AAS Roundtable: Denaturalizing Culturalism and Essentialism in the Research and Teaching of Japan

This interdisciplinary roundtable focusing on Japan explores how essentialist or culturalist arguments are mobilized in research and teaching contexts by interlocutors, other academics, and students, and how to respond as scholars and instructors.

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Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable: Justin B. Stein, Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific
Nov
19
9:00 AM09:00

Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable: Justin B. Stein, Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific

I have organized an exciting roundtable at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion that will be co-sponsored by the Japanese Religions Unit; The Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Unit; the New Religious Movements Unit; and the Esotericism Unit.

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AAR Panel: Weaponizing Religious Authenticity
Dec
2
4:00 PM16:00

AAR Panel: Weaponizing Religious Authenticity

This panel addresses relationship between religious liberty, national identity, and the category of religion, as described in two University of Chicago Press books from 2019: Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan and Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism and the Redefinition of Democracy.

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Debunked: Fakes and Their Investigators
Nov
22
7:00 PM19:00

Debunked: Fakes and Their Investigators

I will talk about debunking as pedagogy, focusing on competing didactic approaches to debunking taken by bureaucrats, scholars, clerics, and journalists during the Allied Occupation of Japan and in its immediate aftermath (roughly 1945–1960). Others will cover Herman Melville novels, Joseph Smith’s golden plates, the social sciences in Cold War America, debunking and the figure of the spoilsport, and televised spirit possession.

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