Articles by Sara A Williams
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 2024
Anthropology’s “ethical turn” opens space for dialogue with Christian ethicists engaged in the “e... more Anthropology’s “ethical turn” opens space for dialogue with Christian ethicists engaged in the “ethnographic turn” using a common virtue-inflected language and set of concerns. While moral theologian Michael Banner has called for such a dialogue, there has been a lack of cross-pollination between Banner’s account and the broader ethnographic turn, which has turned to the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu as its main social scientific interlocuter. In this essay, I argue that the limits of practice theory call for a diversification of social scientific conversation partners in the ethnographic turn. I demonstrate how the anthropology of ethics offers one auspicious way forward in its ability to account for moral agency in everyday life.
Religion & Education, 2024
This article introduces the issues, histories, and questions at stake in a special issue of Relig... more This article introduces the issues, histories, and questions at stake in a special issue of Religion & Education on Religion, Ethics, and Academic Community Engagement. We begin by pointing to the absence of community engagement in the recent turn toward the ethics of higher education among reli- gious ethicists. In response, we call for more robust interdisciplinary engagement between religious ethicists and academic community engagement scholars and practitioners. To lay the groundwork, we offer an account of the historical intersections between religion and academic community engagement in U.S. higher education. We then highlight pressing ethical questions emerging from this history related to the mission and purpose of higher education, the influence of neoliberalism, and underexamined biases in academic community engagement connected to white Christian hegemony. We touch on how each of these issues emerge from the his- tory of religion and academic community engagement in the U.S., and detail how articles in this special issue respond to these challenges by drawing on a variety of religious traditions and resources.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2023
This article examines the intersection of racial and religious identity among progressive U.S. Ch... more This article examines the intersection of racial and religious identity among progressive U.S. Christians in the context of transnational travel. We approach our analysis through a comparative ethnographic study of two majority Black and two majority white Christian Palestinian Solidarity Tours, representing Mainline, evangelical, and Historically Black Protestant progressive theological traditions. We conceptualize majority white tours as “journeys to the margins” and majority Black tours as “journeys among the margins,” considering how the racial makeup and theological orientation of trips offer a range of affordances for meaning-making, identity-construction, and solidarity-building. Using Judith Weisenfeld’s religio-racial framework, we focus on how participants’ progressive Christian values are embedded in divergent racial schemas. Attending to how the logics of these schemas are reinforced or interrogated in transnational encounters, we extend Weisenfeld’s concept from the nation-state to the transnational as we examine how participants reproduce, revise, and re-envision religio-racial frameworks.
Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 2022
This article introduces a multiaxial pedagogical approach intended to complement to the Community... more This article introduces a multiaxial pedagogical approach intended to complement to the Community-Based Global Learning (CBGL) framework for globally-engaged experiential learning. This multiaxial approach emerged from a Spring 2019 course at Miami University titled “On the Border: Immigration Justice in Interfaith Perspective.” The article first offers a brief overview of CBGL, contextualizing its development in historical trajectories of global learning in higher education. It then outlines the multiaxial approach and suggests some contributions it can make to pedagogical design within the CBGL framework. Following this, the article describes how the multiaxial approach emerged from the course’s exploration and design. Finally, drawing on qualitative coding of a sample of student assignments, the article relates student outcomes to the course’s transformational learning goal.
Ecclesial Practices, 2021
This essay develops the idea of 'invitational ethics,' engagement with ethnographic description a... more This essay develops the idea of 'invitational ethics,' engagement with ethnographic description as normative praxis. I argue that by attending to ways in which people exercise practical wisdom in ordinary moments, the ethnographer and reader alike are invited to engage their own processes of ethical self-making. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with the Way of the Cross for Justice, an annual Good Friday public liturgy in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a site for invitational ethics in the frame of what anthropologist Joel Robbins has called an 'anthropology of the good.' I conclude by reflecting on how this invited me to engage my own ethical self-making.
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2020
This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and... more This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call "journeys to the margins": trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler's ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, "Come and See Tours" to Israel/Palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American Christian consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities.
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Sara A Williams
The Curious Case of the Swedish Woman: Ethnographic Reflexivity and Accountability in Transnational Feminism
Ethnography as Theology and Ethics, 2nd Ed. Christian Scharen and Aana Vigen, 2024
Edited Journal by Sara A Williams
Religion, Ethics, and Academic Community Engagement (co-edited with Kristyn Sessions)
Religion & Education, 2024
Practical Matters, 2015
This article discusses some recent theoretical and methodological trends in studies of pilgrimage... more This article discusses some recent theoretical and methodological trends in studies of pilgrimage, a field that has grown significantly as of late. It begins by exploring how scholars might study failure during pilgrimage, and the difficulties therein. It moves on to discuss the fruitful, but also fitful, coexistence of scholars and practitioners who contribute to studies of pilgrimage. It ends by tracing some avenues for further research that would move beyond the confines of a subfield, creating the potential for work on pilgrimage to shape important conversations in multiple disciplines and areas of expertise. Practical Matters Journal commodifications that are integral to the deeming process. " 25 This idea is by no means foreign to Pilgrimage Studies, which has nurtured a robust discussion about the intersection between tourism and pilgrimage over the last decade. 26 Yet we still too often reiterate projects that (explicitly or not) set up scales from sacred to secular to evaluate just how "religious" or "touristic" is any given experience. Early in my work on pilgrimage, I came to think of it as the "Susie Syndrome" based on sociologist William Swatos' description of Clearwater, Florida, which was home in the late 1990s to a Marian apparition site and a beach. The result, writes Swatos, is a jarring, post-modern mix of sacred and secular. "Purely secular" tourists mingle with the religious and he imagines the former showing photos of the trip upon return: "Here's Susie standing at the Mary Shrine in Clearwater. Now here's Susie at the beach. " 27 The implication is that Susie can be classed as a secular tourist (or at least something other than a pilgrim) if she values the beach as much as the shrine. 28 Being mindful of emic notions of the authentic or spurious does not mean that we must reproduce them by referring to the economics of pilgrimage as, to quote another recent text, the unnatural "contamination" of "genuine" experience. 29 To some degree, my concern about the tourism/pilgrimage divide brings us back to the question of failure, which likewise requires casting aside longstanding assumptions about what pilgrimage ought to dotransform, make a difference, take place at a shrine but not a beach. Scholars of pilgrimage have nuanced and destabilized the very categories of "pilgrimage" and "religion" upon which the subfield rests. They were doing so even before the genealogical turn or popular discussion of the secular within Religious Studies. In that sense, they are poised to produce potentially groundbreaking work that unearths how Western dichotomies (sacred/secular, religious/commercial) inflect studies of religion in the places or time periods where we work. 30 Moving forward, just as pilgrims' journeys take them beyond the bounded village field site, so must we ensure that our work travels beyond the subfield called Pilgrimage Studies. Straying from this path to explore wider fields, we create the potential for work on pilgrimage to shape important conversations in our respective disciplines and areas of expertise.
Book Reviews by Sara A Williams
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 2023
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2021
Critical Research on Religion, 2019
The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 2018
Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, 2017
Selected Public Scholarship by Sara A Williams
Theological Education Between the Times, 2023
The following remarks were delivered as part of a panel titled "If I Were a University President:... more The following remarks were delivered as part of a panel titled "If I Were a University President: Dreams, Goals, and Plans in the First 100 Days," sponsored by the University Ethics Interest Group at the Society of Christian Ethics 2023 Annual Meeting. I struggled with preparing my comments for today, not because I was coming up blank or did not have enough to say. I had quite the opposite problem: I was coming up with too much to say, and it all came to me in fragments. My challenge was finding the productive thread. Where
The Christian Century, 2022
The Cincinnati Enquirer, 2019
Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue, 2013
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Articles by Sara A Williams
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Sara A Williams
Edited Journal by Sara A Williams
Book Reviews by Sara A Williams
Selected Public Scholarship by Sara A Williams