Publications

The Elon Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society (CSRCS) is happy to have supported the research published in the peer-reviewed books, chapters, articles, and journal issues listed below. In hosting conferences, convening panels, and providing material support, the CSRCS works to advance the scholarship of Elon faculty and their partners.

The Religious Body Imagined
Edited by Pamela D. Winfield, Mina Garcia and Katherine C. Zubko

The Religious Body Imagined examines the ways in which the human body has been imagined, imaged, and discursively produced in particular places, times, and religious traditions.

This book brings together representative papers from most of the world’s major traditions and geo-historical locations, and explores the religious body’s various functions, roles, and transformative effects through a range of disciplinary and theoretical lenses (e.g. visual culture, literary, performance and cultural studies, ethnography, space / place, ritual, postcolonial theory and social justice as it pertains to embodiment). Most significantly, it is organized according to novel, thought-provoking thematic foci that advance the field and can be generative for classroom use. Specifically, it includes twelve chapters organized into sections on the Gendered Body, LGBTQ Bodies, Migrating Bodies, Host Bodies, Sensational Bodies, and National Bodies.

The Religious Body Imagined contributes new and original research as well as theoretical insights that can substantially help to expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary field of religion and body in general.

Prelims:
Acknowledgement
Pamela D. Winfield, Mina Garcia

List of Figures x
Pamela D. Winfield, Mina Garcia

Introduction 1-9
Pamela D. Winfield, Mina Garcia

Part I: Gendered Bodies
1. People of the Book, Women of the Body: Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women’s Reproductive Literacy 13-34
Michal Raucher
2. The Male Body and Catholic Piety in Early Modern Spain  35-55
Elizabeth Rhodes

Part II: LGBTQ+ Bodies
3. Harvey Milk’s (Sexual and Sacred) Body 59-79
William Gilders
4. Non-binary Sexual and Gender Identities in the Community: The Khuntha as an Isolated Being in the Mosque 80-101
Saqer Almarri

Part III: Migrating Bodies
5. Lope’s El Hamete de Toledo: The Infidel’s Body as Conquered Land 105-122
Mina Garcia
6. The Embodied Palimpsest: Dancing Kinesthetic Empathy in Bharatanatyam 123-150
Katherine C. Zubko

Part IV: Microcosmic Bodies
7. Religion and the Imperial Body Politic of Japan 153-177
Pamela D. Winfielz
8. Surveilled, Harmonized, Purified: The Body in Chinese Religious Culture 178-198
Ori Tavor

Part V: Sensational Bodies
9. Seeing, Imagined, and Lived: Creating Darshan in Transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism 201-222
Anandi Silva Knuppel
10. ‘The Body is a Tool for Remembrance’: Healing, Transformation and the Instrumentality of the Body in a North American Sufi Order 223-243
Megan Adamson Sijapati

End Matter
Index 245-254
Pamela D. Winfield, Mina Garcia

For more information, see here.

International Journal of Religion 12/22 (2022)                              
Special Issue: Religion at the Borders
Edited by Sandy Marshall and Shayna Mehas

This special issue (here) includes articles and papers from the 2021 On the Edge Symposium hosted by the CSRCS. Elon faculty conveners for that symposium include Assoc. Prof. of Geography Sandy Marshall, Lecturer in History Shayna Mehas, Assoc. Professor of Art History Evan Gatti, and Assoc. Prof. of Religious Studies Amy Allocco.

Articles include:
“Captivity, Life and Death at the Nation’s Edge: Two Christian Visions of the U.S. Immigrant Detention Regime,” 69-83
Leah Sarat

“Maryam Jameelah and the Affective Economy of Islamic Revival,” 85-98
Justine Howe

“Nepantla in The Ninth Century: The Monastery of Redon and The Frankish-Breton Borderlands,” 99-112
Thomas A. E. Greene

“Crossing the Threshold,” 113-120
Aarti Patel

“Borders within Borders: Superkilen as the Site of Assimilation,” 121-137
Ehsan Sheikholharam

The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies (Georgetown University Press, 2022)
Edited by Lucinda Mosher

The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies investigates the field of interreligious studies, which analyzes interrelationship of individuals and groups with varying religious alignments. Among its international roster of experts and practitioners of the world’s religions and lifeways are Elon’s Brian Pennington, who wrote the opening assessment of the emerging field, and Amy Allocco, who co-authored a chapter with Pennington  on Elon University’s own Multifaith Scholars program.

For more information, see here.

Body and Religion 5/1 (2021) 
Special Issue: The Religious Body Imagined II
Edited by Mina Garcia

This special issue (here) includes articles and papers from the 2019 On the Edge Symposium hosted by the CSRCS. The two Elon faculty conveners for that symposium, Prof. of Religious Studies Pamela Winfield and Assoc. Prof. of Spanish Mina Garcia-Soormally, are featured in the issue guest-edited by Garcia.

Articles include:
“Harvey Milk’s (sexual and sacred) body,” 4-23
William K. Gilders

“Surveilled, harmonized, purified: The body in Chinese religious culture,”  24-44
Ori Tavor

“Religion and the imperial body politic of Japan,” 45-68
Pamela D. Winfield

“The embodied palimpsest: Dancing kinesthetic empathy in bharatanatyam,” 69-95
Katherine C. Zubko

“‘The body is a tool for remembrance’: Healing, transformation, and the instrumentality of the body in a North American Sufi order,” 96-115
Megan Adamson Sijapati

Culture, Religion and Homemaking in and Beyond South Asia
Edited by James Ponniah (Fortress Press, 2020)  

Culture, Religion, and Homemaking in and Beyond South Asia grows out of a 2016 conference co-sponsored by the CSRCS with its international partner, the University of Madras, in Chennai, India. It explores how rituals, beliefs and social practices repurpose or re-envision home in relation to experiences of modernity, urbanization, conflict, migration and displacement. Authors examine spaces of contestation over the categories of “home” and “religion,” including interfaith families, cities, and sacred places.

For more information, see here.

“(Neo)-liberal Challenges,” Brian K. Pennington      
In Interreligious Studies: Dispatches from an Emerging Field, edited by Hans Gustafson (Beacon Press 2020)

Interreligious Studies: Dispatches from an Emerging Field brings together thirty-six scholars, including Pennington, from four continents to produce “dispatches” on the current state of this burgeoning field. Whereas earlier volumes defining interreligious studies have focused on teaching, curricula, and applications, this volume probes the context, parameters, and contours of interreligious studies as a field of research. Pennington’s chapter urges the field towards a disentaglement from some of its unspoken alliances.

For more information, see here.

Body and Religion 4/1 (2020) 
Special Issue: The Religious Body Imagined
Edited by Pamela D. Winfield

This special issues (here) includes articles papers from the 2019 On the Edge Symposium hosted by the CSRCS. The two Elon faculty conveners for that symposium, Prof. of Religious Studies Pamela Winfield and Assoc. Prof. of Spanish Mina Garcia-Soormally, are featured in the issue guest-edited by Winfield.

Articles include:
“The religious body imagined,” 105-107
Pamela D. Winfield

“People of the book, women of the body: Ultra-orthodox Jewish women’s reproductive literacy,”108-28
Michal Raucher

“The male body and Catholic piety in early modern Spain,” 129-48
Elizabeth Rhodes

“Lope’s El Hamete de Toledo: The infidel’s body as conquered land,” 149-65
Mina García

“Non-binary sexual and gender identities in the community: The khuntha as an isolated being in the mosque,” 166-87
Saqer A. Almarri

“Seeing, imagined, and lived: creating darshan in transnational Gaudiya Vaishnavism,” 188-208
Anandi Silva Knuppel

Crosscurrents 68/2 (2018)Special Issue: On The Edge of Apocalypse
Edited by Lynn R. Huber and Tom Mould

This special issues (here) includes articles papers from the 2017 On the Edge Symposium hosted by the CSRCS. The two Elon faculty conveners for that symposium, Prof. of Religious Studies Lynn Huber and Prof. of Folklore Tom Mould, are featured in their guest-edited issue.

Articles include:
“On the Edge of Apocalypse: an Introduction”
207-215
Lynn R. Huber, Tom Mould

“India, America, and the Nationalist Apocalyptic”
216-236
Arun Chaudhuri

“Unpacking the Bunker: Sex, Abuse, and Apocalypticism in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”
237-259
Megan Goodwin

“Apocalypse Again: Language, Temporality, and Repetition in an Afghan Apocalypse”
260-282
William E. B. Sherman

“Pulling Down the Sky: Envisioning the Apocalypse with Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs”
283-308
Lynn R. Huber

“The Politics of Revelation: Unveiling Negativity in the Work of Lee Edelman and Georges Bataille”
309-322
Kent L. Brintnall

“Constructing Interreligious Studies: Thinking Critically About Interfaith Studies and the Interfaith Movement,” Amy L. Allocco, Geoffrey D. Claussen, and Brian K. Pennington
In Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, edited by Patel, Peace, and Silverman (Beacon Press, 2018)

Elon’s Amy Allocco, Geoff Claussen, and Brian Pennington (Religious Studies) contributed a chapter about Elon’s Interreligious Studies minor to a field-defining volume. Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, was the first book to describe the scope, methods, and intentions of a newly emerging field in which Elon has played an important role. As the book puts it, “How is this field distinct from, yet similar to, other fields, such as religious or theological studies? What are its signature pedagogies and methodologies? What are its motivations and key questions? In other words, what is the shape of interfaith and interreligious studies, and what is its distinct contribution? These questions are the driving force behind this anthology.”

For more information, see here.

Journal of Jewish Ethics 3/1 (2017) 
Roundtable: Virtue Ethics and the Mussar Movement

This roundtable of essays brings together a philosopher (Christian B. Miller, Wake Forest), a scholar of modern Judaism (Andrea Dara Cooper, UNC Chapel Hill), a Christian theologian (Jeffrey C. Pugh, Elon), and a Christian ethicist (Rebecca Todd Peters, Elon) in discussion of Elon Religious Studies professor Geoffrey D. Claussen’s book, Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015).

For more information, see here.