Reflecting on the AAR’s 2026 presidential theme of future/s, the Christian Systematic Theology Unit, alongside the Open and Relational Theologies Unit, has assembled a panel that considers the imagination required for liberative futures. This panel will begin by addressing our current moral disorientation and its potential for generating a more liberative future, even within the context of a capitalist world order. Recognizing the complexity of all ethical endeavor and the problematic power structures involved, we will discuss the relationship of self and other in our current globalized environment. Having described our time and the challenges it presents, the panel will then consider a response to the present that utilizes antebellum theologies of abolition to critique and transform current politics. Finally, we will consider the experience of time during incarceration, and the means by which carceral time can generate a liberative future for returning citizens.
Oriented by critiques of Christian eschatology emerging from liberation theology, this paper argues that the imagination of liberative futures can be facilitated by thinking alongside the temporality of resurgent life. Drawing upon abolitionist thought, this paper suggests that resurgent life takes place and makes place within the future anterior of abolition time: a temporal orientation involving practices that work against carceral logics and cultivating present forms of life that anticipate liberative futures not yet existent. Abolition thus involves quotidian practices of building communal relations that make liberation partially present now, organizing life around what should or must be. As such, this paper suggests that everyday practices of abolition instantiate a temporal grammar that parallels an eschatological expectation for life’s persistence amidst devastation and harm.
In this paper, I attempt to move Kathryn Tanner's work in Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism in a new direction by developing what I call anti-capitalist virtues: character traits that are developed over time and enable a person to live in ways that challenge and disrupt finance-capitalist structures and the forms of life that they seek to foster. I begin by giving an overview of the critique of finance-capitalism that Tanner develops in Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. I then develop a brief theory of virtue in conversation with Jennifer Herdt’s Assuming Responsibility: Ecstatic Eudaimonism and the Call to Live Well. I conclude by bringing the two into conversation by explicitly articulating anti-capitalist virtues that allow one to resist the malforming effects of finance-capitalism.
This paper places developments in Open and Relational Theology (ORT) into constructive dialogue with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas through a reading of Luke 13—here termed the “Little Job.” Confronted with suffering, Jesus offers no ontological explanation for evil, much like the divine in the book of Job. Instead, Luke 13 redirects attention toward ethical urgency: tears over Jerusalem, the parable of the fig tree, and Sabbath healing all signal an open future charged with responsibility. Drawing on Levinas’ priority of the ethical, asymmetrical responsibility, and the irreducible alterity of the Other, this paper argues that the face of the Other is the stage of possibility, which continually reopens a future seemingly foreclosed by suffering. ORT’s vision of a genuinely open future (LOTUS) provides the cognitive and theological space necessary for liberative action bound by responsibility for the Other and their future.
This paper argues that moral disorientation holds an ambivalent potential for imagining and inhabiting liberative future(s). Focusing on disclosures of moral disorientation among Christian leaders responding to antiblack violence and racism, I read these accounts through Sara Ahmed and Ami Harbin’s phenomenologies of (dis)orientation to show how moral disorientation unsettles inherited theological bearings, disrupts our relations to our (divine) others, and conditions the potential for liberative imaginations of the future(s). I then engage Simone Weil’s account of affliction and decreation to illuminate the ethical and spiritual ruptures inherent in moral disorientation, while critically interrogating her understanding of divine providence. Returning to everyday disclosures of moral disorientation, I contrast moments when disorientation is closed through logics of divine providence to moments of sustained, generative moral disorientation that reimagine divine participation in open and liberative future(s).
This paper examines how transformed experiences of time during incarceration can generate new orientations toward liberative futures for both incarcerated individuals and the societies to which they return. It places the sociological insights of The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (2021) in conversation with anakainosis-desmios, the concept of “spiritual renewal of consciousness while incarcerated” introduced in The Word Confined (2020). While The Cage of Days analyzes how prison restructures temporal experience through rhythms of suspension, repetition, and reflection, anakainosis-desmios interprets such disruption as a context for moral, spiritual, and cognitive renewal. Drawing also on qualitative research from the forthcoming book I Am Unconfined, the paper argues that carceral time can become a transformative arena in which individuals reimagine identity, responsibility, and possibility, opening new pathways for dialogue about justice, rehabilitation, and shared social futures.