In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book
All time are listed in Eastern Time Zone.
Please note that this schedule is subject to change and is currently being updated. Please excuse our appearance as we finalize the schedule. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org.
The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion
God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.
This session will be followed by a half hour Business Meeting of the Society for Hindu Christian Studies.
Saturday, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM | Hynes Convention Center, Ballroom C …Session ID: P22-112
The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassion. God at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices. This session will be followed by a half hour Business Meeting of the Society for Hindu Christian Studies.
The Bhagavad-gītā is a world classic considered not only the "Hindu Bible" but sometimes the "Indian Bible" as well. Over the last 200 years or so, it has attracted much Indological attention; the present work continues this Indological scholarship, and particularly the works of R.C. Zaehner (OUP 1969) and Angelika Malinar (CUP 2007), which are profusely quoted and referred to. As such, it offers a systematic survey of the Bhagavad-gītā 's main topics and doctrines in an innovative way. In my book "Exploring the Bhagavad-gītā: Philosophy, Structure and Meaning" (Ashgate 2010 and later Routledge 2016) I have argued for a coherent structure underlying the Bhagavad-gītā, which I called "The Three Storey House" structure. This structure considers the Bhagavad-gītā to be based upon a hierarchical concept of reality, constructed by three tiers arranged one above the other, and connected by an ethical ladder, existentially leading one higher and higher through a gradual transformational process aiming at the upper tier. The present book develops this idea further thematically.
Educational prophet bell hooks long asserted that education is a practice of freedom. But education is not inevitably so. Education that imagines and invites freedom must be made to do so by educators and students alike. Where might we turn for wisdom, dreams, strategies, and stories about the nature and shape of teaching that rehearses freedom? According to practical theologians and religious educators Rachelle Green and Almeda Wright, we should look at Prisons and Archives. In this session, Green and Wright will put their recent scholarship into conversation with one another: Learning to Live: Prisons, Pedagogy, and Theological Education (2024) and Teaching to Live: Black Religion, Activist-Educators, and Radical Social Change (2024). This conversation will explore how teaching and learning in prison and during times of social change can help us wrestle with the question of how and why we teach when freedoms are threatened. The future of education depends on our ability to imagine futures beyond the present and shape them in and through our teaching.
This session contextualizes twenty-first-century healing, deliverance, and resurrection claims within global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian traditions. Each paper considers religio-cultural, historical, and political contexts to examine the methods, theologies, and social consequences of miracle claims. More specifically, the papers will offer general understandings of Charismatic beliefs, rituals, and practices of healing, deliverance, and resurrections to draw insights into our understanding of academic engagement with communities, archives, and spiritual authorities. Our underlying questions are: what is the Pentecostal-Charismatic distinctive when it comes to healing, deliverance, and resurrection? What happens to our understanding of the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic movement when we look at it through the analytical lens of miracles? Given the paucity of scholarly understanding of healing, deliverance, and resurrection claims, specifically among Pentecostal-Charismatics, how can fresh approaches in history, sociology, and ethnography refocus scholarly attention away from a flattening preoccupation with determining veracity and toward the impact on local and global cultural processes?
Papers
Healing practices, especially resurrection claims, are critical extensions of Pentecostal piety. As the analytical lens for this paper, I argue that piety—understood as that which attests to how adherents subversively use a distinct set of religio-cultural norms—specifically, Pentecostal piety performed by Black Pentecostal women like Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, solidified them as trusted practitioners and producers of supernatural occurrences. This paper uses the “heavenly experience” of Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, founder of the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, to elucidate the logics inherent to relationships articulated between religious authority, belief, and practice. As such, it interrogates Pentecostal piety's religio-cultural, -social, and -economic discourses within predominantly Black and women-led congregations in the early to mid-twentieth century. This paper emphasizes how Black Pentecostal women’s demonstration of Pentecostal piety—e.g., authority over sickness and death—went beyond the confines of the liturgy and worship to have practical importance.
The persistence of miracles in Pentecostal and Charismatic networks reveals the limits of enlightenment epistemologies in popular, global anthropologies. Traffic in miracles is evidence that most people, across the world, do not understand illness in a strictly scientific manner, but readily look for spiritual solutions to all kinds of distress, including those more flatly understood as “physical.” Scholars have demonstrated that healing and deliverance are core to the appeal of pentecostalisms, globally, but the continued appeal of miraculous interventions in the US religious market, in particular, suggests that many established scholarly explanations for the appeal of miracles such as lack of access to good healthcare or financial resources, have not been capacious enough. Healing remains a draw in US charismatic networks that are surprisingly well-off, well-accessed, and better-educated. This paper interrogates affluent healing for its consonance with wider consumptive and democratic cultures and wrestles with their political import worldwide.
This paper examines resurrection miracles—forms of divine healing prayer intended to bring dead bodies back to life. Resurrections (also called “raisings” and “resuscitations”) have appeared across the history of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Reports of raisings surfaced at the Azusa Street Revival, in the healing and deliverance revivals of the mid-twentieth century, and in later fires of independent Charismatic Christianity. In each iteration, dead-raising has been a transnational phenomenon subject to variation and debate. It is simultaneously empirically exceptional, perennially entangled in theological questions central to the history of Christianity, and has served as a source of Pentecostalism’s appeal. Dead-raising is a limit case of divine healing through which scholars of religion can look afresh on Pentecostal-Charismatic biblical hermeneutics, theodicies, and atonement theories. Examining resurrection sheds new light on approaches to prayer, modern medical technology, spiritual warfare, time, the body, and conceptualizing the meaning of human life and death.
This paper explains why practices aimed at “freedom from demons” play a significant, poorly understood role in Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity, and it illuminates how U.S. practices emerged though multi-staged, cross-cultural interactions. Despite the centrality of exorcism/deliverance to the ministry of Jesus—and widespread popular belief in demons today—the subject is controversial, or ignored, in most U.S. churches. A U.S. leadership vacuum is filled by maverick, self-styled exorcists whose sensationalism exacerbates suffering. Meanwhile, deliverance is well-integrated into many Global South churches. Spiritual cosmologies can obscure or facilitate awareness of structural injustices. The same term—liberación in Spanish, liberação in Portuguese—can denote spiritual and social freedom. Historically, as U.S. missionaries observed indigenous evangelists perform exorcisms, some missionaries became convinced of the reality of demons. At first discounting the problem as irrelevant to “civilized Americans,” later encounters with similar phenomena in the United States convinced missionaries that North Americans also need deliverance.
Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology begins with this claim to ground how Christian-colonial imaginaries of salvation and identity are challenged when we rethink assumptions about race, gender, and divine significance through the lens of the Virgin Mary, and specifically, through a return to the Black Madonna.
Staged as a Black feminist and womanist theological conversation, the book traverses Biblical exegesis, church history, theological inquiry, and artistic intervention to consider a theology partus sequitur ventrem—arising from the condition of the Black Mother, following the condition of the Black Madonna, and for the consideration of all those who pursue justice and life at the spiritual intersections of the world. The book questions the ‘legislative doctrine’ around perceptions of Mary as the Mother of God, and considers how Christian collusion with colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Blackness have worked to deny Blackness from the realms of the sacred. The book thinks through Black women’s reproductive legacies theologically, and revisits the figure of the Black Madonna as fugitive, the womb as hush harbor, birth as liturgy, and Black life as holy.
Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology begins with this claim to ground how Christian-colonial imaginaries of salvation and identity are challenged when we rethink assumptions about race, gender, and divine significance through the lens of the Virgin Mary, and specifically, through a return to the Black Madonna.
Staged as a Black feminist and womanist theological conversation, the book traverses Biblical exegesis, church history, theological inquiry, and artistic intervention to consider a theology partus sequitur ventrem—arising from the condition of the Black Mother, following the condition of the Black Madonna, and for the consideration of all those who pursue justice and life at the spiritual intersections of the world. The book questions the ‘legislative doctrine’ around perceptions of Mary as the Mother of God, and considers how Christian collusion with colonialism, capitalism, and anti-Blackness have worked to deny Blackness from the realms of the sacred. The book thinks through Black women’s reproductive legacies theologically, and revisits the figure of the Black Madonna as fugitive, the womb as hush harbor, birth as liturgy, and Black life as holy.
In this wide-ranging, anthropologically informed roundtable, we ask how freedom may fracture expertise and authority in North American religious, spiritual, and political contexts, both online and off. Does freedom mean everyone can be an expert on their own terms, and that everyone gets to define their own truth? These questions have pressing urgency in the current climate of proliferating authorities and experts, which we do not limit to a “death” of expertise but rather an opening up of the category that could dissolve traditional expertise structures. Through varied lenses of astrology, environmental regulation, minority religious communities, online ecosystems, and vaccine refusal, among others, we examine the multivalent implications of freedom for authority and expertise. These implications offer potential paths both to resilience among disenfranchised communities and threats to public wellbeing.
In this wide-ranging, anthropologically informed roundtable, we ask how freedom may fracture expertise and authority in North American religious, spiritual, and political contexts, both online and off. Does freedom mean everyone can be an expert on their own terms, and that everyone gets to define their own truth? These questions have pressing urgency in the current climate of proliferating authorities and experts, which we do not limit to a “death” of expertise but rather an opening up of the category that could dissolve traditional expertise structures. Through varied lenses of astrology, environmental regulation, minority religious communities, online ecosystems, and vaccine refusal, among others, we examine the multivalent implications of freedom for authority and expertise. These implications offer potential paths both to resilience among disenfranchised communities and threats to public wellbeing.
In Religion in Plain View, Sally Promey shows how evangelical Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism have co-produced the public display of American religion. Promey moves across geographies from New England to California to Hawaii, considering modes of display from street art and vehicle décor to monuments, architecture, and more. She concludes that the exhibitionary aesthetics of American religion serve as a Protestant technology of White nation formation. The book introduces four generative concepts– testimonial aesthetics, material establishment, heritage fabrication, and landshaping– for the study of religion, visual culture, race, and colonialism across diverse geographic and temporal contexts. This roundtable brings together a diverse panel of scholars to consider the utility of Promey’s analysis from a range of disciplinary and institutional locations.
