MF CASR lunch with Justin David Strong

Can You Baptize a Fish?: Part II

Most of our constructive research in religion and theology is done with an implicit claim that “the human” marks a hard boundary.

In recent decades, the interdisciplinary field, “Animal Studies,” has unsettled this assumption. It has called attention to this boundary between “human” and “animal,” exposing it as profoundly unstable, historically contingent, and in perpetual need of reestablishment, disestablishment, and redefinition. It has shown that despite our best efforts in recent decades to sequester ourselves, human and nonhuman-animal lives are profoundly entangled and always have been—in our homes, economies, rituals, metaphors, diets, religious texts, and imaginations.

A rapidly growing body of scholarship has appeared to deal with the implications of these simple observations. By entertaining an ostensibly absurd question like, “Can you baptize a fish?,” this talk will explore how quickly our cherished categories can be problematized and tease us into active thought about religious issues using the non-human animals around us and in our sacred texts. The “Part II” signals that this discussion has surfaced repeatedly across the history of the West, by intellects from Plato to George W. Bush, and Jesus to evolutionary biologists, who will frame the discussion.