Religious Studies

Charles Hallisey, Khyentse Foundation lecture

Seeing Things with Words: Relishing Beauty with Buddhist Literature and Why It Matters.

Chair: Naomi Appleton

Abstract: The production and appreciation of literature have long been part of the religious lives of Buddhist communities across Asia. Indeed, Buddhists were centrally visible in the earliest literary cultures in ancient India. This givenness of literature in Buddhist life encourages us to ask just what it is about literature that Buddhists have valued and to consider what we can learn from this about the Buddhist traditions as well as what we can learn from Buddhist examples about how we might ourselves relish the beauty that is before us and around us.

Joshua Ralston (University of Edinburgh)

Chair: Alysa Ghose

Ethical Critiques and Anti-Muslim Tropes: Saudi Arabia and Sportswashing.

Abstract: Over the last 5 years, the sovereign investment fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has invested billions of dollars in sport. They have purchased Newcastle United in the English Premier League, attracted star footballers to their own Saudi domestic league, hosted a new F1 grand prix, and disrupted professional golf through the creation of the new LIV golf league and the Aramco Women’s Series. These economic and political investment in sport have been met with increasing accusations that Saudi Arabia is using sports to distract from its government’s abuses of human rights and Muhammad bin Salman’s authoritarian rule.

This paper draws on debates in critical religion and secularism as well as the history of Christian-Muslim relations to argue that sportwashing rhetoric actually inhibits our understanding of Saudi Arabia, sports, and global politics. It does this in two parts. First by illustrating how sportwashing discourse draws on longstanding anti-Muslim tropes around Islamic law, gender, greed, and violence to reinforce the view that Arabs are inherently ‘behind’ the West and in need of reform. Second, it contends that these tropes against Saudi function to obscure how European and North American governments, business, and sports agencies are complicit in many of same abuses against migrants and dissidents that Saudi and other Gulf states are condemned for. The essay concludes by asking if it is possible to imagine sport, religion, and critique beyond the framing of sportwashing.

Alysa Ghose (University of Edinburgh)

Chair: Joshua Ralston

What spirits want: Dance and the aesthetics of Black sociality

Abstract: This paper focuses on a cajón, a drumming celebration or party held for the dead (muertos) for those involved in Kongo-Bantu inspired practices in Cuba. It discusses collaborative, embodied knowledge production and examines how spirits have desires and goals in participating in religiosity as much as practictioners; namely here: that they want to be embodied through trance. While practitioners come together for a cajón to sing, dance, and drink, and as a result produce knowledge and foster community, above all, the cajón is an effort to provide muertos with the opportunity to materialize. When guiding, advising, and helping their caballos (practitioners; literally ‘horses’), spirits can contribute to their own spiritual progression. Yet when they mount practitioners they not only benefit spiritually, but they also can be in a body and enjoy and experience sensual pleasures, alongside receiving recognition as especially important, knowledgeable, and valuable social actors. This paper examines the significance of this recognition and joy for spirits who were enslaved during life. Emphasis on the Black body as a source of knowledge and value underlines the book, and this chapter’s discussion extends the conversation to spirits. In doing so, I carve out space to speak to conversations surrounding social life and social death through actors who are ontologically dead (Patterson 1985; Sexton 2011; Wilderson 2015, 2020). I illuminate how spirits, again crucially those enslaved in life, don’t just haunt the political, they actively participate in it, showing up and giving every day, material advice to practitioners. Beyond that, they are also able to have joyful experiences positing a unique ethico-ontology through Black religiosity.

Deigo Malara (Glasgow University)

Chair: Emma Wild-Wood

On the Urbanity of Sacred Substance: Purity, Sin, and the Flow of Blessing in Addis Ababa

Co-badged with the Centre for World Christianity.

Abstract: In Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, the Eucharist is regarded as an exceptionally pure substance, and regulated by such stringent ritual proscriptions that only a very small number of Christians partake of it regularly. In this presentation, I examine this phenomenon while also tracing the circulation and uses of another sacred substance—holy water—which is intimately associated with the body of Christ and, by extension, with the Eucharist. While the logics of containment and contagion that govern access to, and consumption of, both holy water and the Eucharist draw upon a shared ritual grammar, I show that to grasp the efficacy and ubiquity of holy water, we must attend analytically to its material affordances, its capacity to travel across urban landscape, and the distinctive forms of spiritual experience and care for others that it enables. The salience of these experiences and properties becomes apparent, in turn, when situated within the heterogenous sacred geography of Addis Ababa—a city that is at once a potent zone of active blessing and one of the most worldly spaces in Ethiopian Orthodox moral cartography. Foregrounding relations of care within troubled households and densely populated neighbourhoods, the presentation concludes by refocusing discussions of ethics away from dominant tropes of individual self-cultivation and the pursuit of high moral goals, and toward the predictably fraught yet spiritually productive workings of socio-religious networks and collectives.

Dustin Lalkulhpuia (British Council/IASH Fellow)

Chair: Arkotong Longkumer

The Ontological Clash and Epistemological Shift in Mizo Christianity, Northeast India: Towards an Integrated Creation-Care Ethic

Abstract: This paper argues that the rapid conversion of the Mizo people to Christianity resulted in a damaging shift from an indigenous relational ontology of nature to a Western, anthropocentric dualism. The pre-Christian Sakhua tradition fostered an epistemology of negotiation with the environment, acting as an ecological restraint, particularly in jhum (shifting cultivation) agriculture. By labeling nature spirits (Ramhuai) as solely demonic and emphasizing a disembodied salvation, missionary theology inadvertently dismantled this indigenous ecological knowledge system, leading to a diminished ethic of creation-care. Drawing on Mizo theological and cultural scholarship, this study calls for an integrated Mizo Christian ecotheology that reclaims the relational ontology of Pathian and the cosmos. This recovery is crucial for establishing a contemporary, participatory eco-epistemology—a Mizo way of knowing the world—necessary to confront current ecological challenges in Mizoram.

Title: Ethical Critiques and Anti-Muslim Tropes: Saudi Arabia and Sportswashing

Chair: Professor Arkotong Longkumer