In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper presents the first critical edition of Guru Gobind Singh's Ẓafarnāma (1705), a powerful critique of Mughal imperial authority that articulates the Sikh doctrine of Double Sovereignty (mīrī-pīrī). Based on my forthcoming monograph, The Zafarnama of Guru Gobind Singh: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary with a preface by Wheeler Thackston, this work examines thirty-eight manuscripts to correct pervasive textual distortions in modern printed editions. Nearly a third of all verses in current editions contain serious defects including broken meters and missing rhyme patterns. By returning to near-contemporaneous Gurmukhī manuscripts, this research recovers the Guru's bold assertion of sovereignty and transforms apparent praise for Emperor Aurangzeb into a coherent critique of imperial authority. The phonetic nature of Gurmukhī script additionally preserves historical Mughal Persian pronunciation. This critical edition establishes new foundations for understanding how religious authority confronts imperial power through extensive manuscript documentation, grammatical analysis, and historical contextualization.

Studies of Sikh diasporic religious politics and identity are often framed by territorial assumptions centred on Punjab. This paper examines how everyday spiritual values, aesthetics, and practices shape contested articulations of sacred space across the UK, South Asia, and East Africa. Advancing the concept of sacred worlding as a political ontology, it explores how religious practice, politics, and history intertwine within poetic, craft, and musical expressions of Sikh heritage.

Our findings reveal that diasporic support for creative heritage takes contested material and embodied forms, shaped by intersections of caste, gender, and generation. These tensions reflect and produce divergent territorialised and deterritorialised concepts of Sikh sacred space. We argue that sacred worlding offers a framework for understanding the plural, symbolic, and sensory production of religious projects. It deepens empirical analysis of creative religious expressions, contextualises diasporic settlement journeys, and reframes the geographies of diasporic religious politics across interconnected scales and sites.

In this project, I conduct a critical ethnography of Nuestra Cuir Chingoña, a Queer Latine Migrant Christian ministry, to explore how active resistance – as a Queer theoethic – critiques economic, social, and political hegemonies in churches. I engage Calvillo’s (2022) and Sostaita’s (2024) treatment of sanctuary as an alignment of Nuestra Cuir Chingoña’s approach to active resistance – parentesco (“kinship”) – which affirms relationality through alternative kinship networks that challenge eschatological essentialisms upheld by soteriological violence. Furthermore, by theorizing active resistance as a Queer theoethic, I engage Miranda’s (2022) and Geerling and Lundberg’s (2020) research on critical ethnography as a deconstruction of “value-free” knowledge production to counter eschatological essentialisms and soteriological violence that inhibit Queer livability, particularly for Queer Latine Migrant Christians and similarly oppressed groups. In this way, I attempt to contribute to scholarly-activist discourse of reimagining eschatological and soteriological interventions that assert Queer livability in churches. 

Throughout this paper, I explore the moral imperative and spiritual obligation of reproductive justice seekers and Denver organizers to advocate and organize for migrants in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection and promise to enact the largest deportation this country has ever seen. As a Latine social ethicist, I engage liberative, faith-aware ethical frameworks drawn from the tenets of Latin American social ethics: lo cotidiano, el acompañamiento, and doing ethics en conjunto. I argue that because of our culturally Catholic upbringing and lived experiences as migrants or children of immigrants ourselves, organizers like me hold epistemological privileges in advocating for these communities at the legislative level. We are the trusted messengers. 

Maize, a sacred gift from the god Quetzalcoatl, has been at the heart of Mesoamerican civilizations for millennia, shaping not only diets but also societal structures, rituals, and cultural identity. I explore how maize continues to be a powerful symbol of resistance in contemporary Mexico, particularly through its role in the fight against globalization and genetic modification. Likewise, I highlight Mexico's recent ban on genetically modified (GMO) corn as a pivotal moment for food sovereignty, indigenous rights, and environmental justice. By analyzing both historical and contemporary cultivation practices, along with the photographic work of David Lauer, which documents the resilience of indigenous maize cultures, I demonstrate how maize serves as both a living cultural artifact and a political tool of resistance in the face of global challenges like climate change and corporate agricultural control. Building upon the concept of México Profundo by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, I argue that maize is not only central to Mexico's physical sustenance but also to the soul of its indigenous communities, offering pathways to biodiversity conservation and cultural preservation. My overall research examines how cultural values shape our understanding of the world and challenges us to reconsider what truly sustains us.

Brazil’s increase in ecological catastrophes is directly associated with the permanence of ancestral colonization dispositifs in governing territories and populations—especially among the poorest, most peripheral, and racialized. From the perspective of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Falling of the Brazilian Sky—our climate apocalypse—has its cosmopolitical origins in the colonial invasion of Amerindian territories by the “napë” [white men] and the extractive violence of the “people of the commodity.” Based on the ethnographic description of what would come to be considered one of the greatest environmental crime-disasters in the modern history of mining industries in the world, the collapse of the iron ore tailings mine in the city of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil), I aim to create a critique dialogue between Process Philosophy, Philosophy of Multiplicity, Amerindian cosmologies, and Black Feminist Theory to explore the state of cosmopolitical conflict observed in Brazilian ecological catastrophes. 

Modern medicine often obscures death, sustaining life at all costs and rendering mortality a choice. This paper examines two challenges Christian nurses face in caring for the dying: medicine’s obfuscation of death (Kaufman, Weber) and the hierarchy that disqualifies nursing knowledge (Foucault). Nursing traditional response in patient advocacy assumes patients can self-determine their best interests, yet institutional truths shape what patients can recognize as their own. Instead, this paper proposes parrhesia—courageous truth-telling—as a faithful nursing response. Drawing from Foucault’s late work on parrhesia and Christian asceticism, the nurse parrhesiast humbly critiques medicine’s denial of death, bearing witness to life’s finitude. By speaking truthfully despite personal risk, the nurse parrhesiast disrupts institutional silence around mortality, restoring honesty and compassion to end-of-life care.

By revealing previously unimaginable knowledge about human bodies, genetic testing and data collection hold the potential to fall into a certain pattern of medicine that views patients as objects to control, resulting in an isolating approach to healthcare. This is a particularly harmful problem for already marginalized groups like those living with disabilities and communities of color. Christian anthropology’s understanding of the human person as relational, dependent, and creative illuminates an alternative framework for the purpose and employment of genetic testing. In particular, Alejandro García-Rivera’s imaginary of the garden illuminates a way that genetic technology can be limited according to human frailty and directed towards a flourishing rooted in the interdependent nature of human life. In short, genetic technology should be employed according to a view of human persons as interdependent, fragile, and relational to serve individual and collective flourishing rather than serve as isolating and controlling. 

“Organoid intelligence” (OI) is an emerging field that aims to leverage the processing power of the human brain, which has been shown to match supercomputer processing at a tiny fraction of the energy requirement. OI builds upon recent developments in brain organoids that promise to replicate aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Brain organoids are networked together to form a biological computer. This paper argues that the idealization of the human brain as a computer already de-humanizes us. To this end, this paper offers a genealogy of cognitive science and its resultant disappearance of the human in two parts: (1) the spatialization of the mind, and (2) the cybernetic mechanization of the mind as computer. The resulting cognitive science and neuroscience simply assume the mind as a computer and an ersatz incarnation of a dataist metaphysics.

Mohamed Meziane’s States of the Earth attends to the materiality of the phenomenon we’ve come to call “secularism.” Far from just a set of beliefs, orientations, or even behaviors, secularism performs literally dirt-y work, unearthing the treasures of Earth in the name of industrial paradise. Material as this work undoubtedly is, Meziane suggests it is framed by a cosmo-theological revolution. Cosmologically, the heavens are “sacrificed” or “dissolved” in favor of an increasingly disemboweled Earth. Theologically, the sovereign is (both numerically and geographically) fragmented and disseminated.

In appreciation of the author’s cosmotheomaterial account of the secular, this response turns to the recent techno-industrial recreation of human efforts in space. How might we understand the increasingly entrepreneurial storming of the “dissolved” heavens? As self-professed saviors design extra-terrestrial colonies built from lunar and asteroidal mines, are we witnessing an extension, transformation, or reversal of the secular-etractive paradigm? What do we make of the abandonment of heaven for Earth as the techno-prophets abandon Earth for the heavens?

In The States of the Earth, Mohamed Amer Meziane contends that “Secularization is not the decline of religion but the birth of a new climatic order” (xiv). Using Sylvia Wynter, I trace how antiblackness is a precursor to processes of secularization as well as that which organizes not a “new climatic order,” but an enduring Christian medieval geographic order that renders black spaces climatic to extract from the earth. Weathering black spaces unveils the “energic” function of black fungibility (Hartman 1997) in which blackness functions as an open state of energy which can be converted from one form to another (Lethabo King 2019). Black energic fungibility subjects black bodies to forms of extraction (Williams 1995) but also reveals possibilities for black life to transform and maneuver beyond “states of the earth.” Attention to the construction of blackness reveals a different story and emphasis on secularization, imperiality, energy extraction, and climate.

Meziane’s magisterial The States of the Earth ends with a somewhat mysterious subterranean provocation.  “This work,” the final sentences read, “…calls for another…work that doubles its lines by its subterranean presence, a presence irreducible to that of the fossil states of the earth.”  If the Secularocene and the “sacrifice of heaven” “overturn[ed] the earth” through the colonial dissemination of empire, as Meziane insists, then what was exposed when the earth was turned over?  While drill bits penetrate the depths of the earth to fuel modernity, no one has traveled to these realms of intense pressure and temperature.  If the heavens were “sacrificed” as a realm of divine difference, becoming instead a material realm that mortals could investigate and (eventually) travel to, then the same sacrifice has yet to occur for the realms below the earth.  Even as speculation on the heavens continues to bring science close to religion, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein has suggested, speculation on the realms below the earth has received no comparable scientific/religious rituals.  -cont-

One indelible mark of this era for fossil states was the confounding “problem” of Islam, which seemed to confound the disciplinary techniques of secularism—that is until the fateful fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920. For John R. Mott, this combined with the discovery of oil in Persia (with the assistance of U.S. missionaries) and the larger crashing of the industrial West into “the Moslem world” signaled a Muslim downfall and an opportunity for “Protestant Powers” to finally remake the world. Meziane, too, has his finger on the pulse of 19th century Orientalism and the role of fossil fuel in the acceleration of 19th century imperialism. But rather than my Protestant, mainly Anglophone archives, Meziane offers an Arab/North African perspective on the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene. 

This paper examines the bahbsang—the Korean kitchen table—as a sacred cultural site where Korean and Korean American women navigate identity, spirituality, and heritage while resisting diasporic racism and sexism. Grounded in Song Nam Soon’s conceptualization of bahb (rice) as essential to Korean diasporic life, the bahbsang transcends mere nourishment to serve as a critical locus for cultural continuity, resistance, and transformation. Historically contextualizing the bahbsang, the study highlights Korean Christian grandmothers’ negotiation of patriarchal and Confucian norms through culinary practices encapsulated in sonmat, a repository of emotional and embodied wisdom. Extending into contemporary diasporic realities, it explores evolving culinary rituals, including honbap, as forms of personal empowerment and collective resilience. Ultimately, the paper reconceptualizes the bahbsang as a dynamic feminist theological space, framing everyday culinary labor as powerful, sacred acts that affirm women’s authority, agency, and integral roles in shaping cultural and theological discourse.

Culinary heritage disputes, such as the Indonesia-Malaysia rendang controversy, illustrate how cuisine becomes entangled with political economic interests. Dubbed as gastropolitics, such conflicts often involve accusations of theft. Nation-states quarrel over the right to claim the dish as their national cuisine and leverage it to bolster nationalism and augment tourism for economic gain. This presentation critiques the racial capitalist logic underlying gastropolitics, where modern nation-states assert ownership over cultural heritage that oftentimes are older than the nation-states themselves. Against this framework, I propose understanding cuisine through the lens of cultural commons, as conceptualized, among others, by Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess, and Christian Barrere. Cultural commons emphasize communal management, shared stewardship, and dynamic evolution. As an alternative political economy, it moves beyond rigid notions of national ownership. By reframing cuisine as a collectively sustained and evolving heritage, this approach fosters a more inclusive and equitable recognition of culinary traditions, acknowledging the contributions of diverse communities beyond national boundaries.

Not Yet Uhuru: The Colonised South Africa Plate: Meat holds profound cultural significance in South Africa, symbolising community, status, and tradition. The “braai (barbecue) is celebrated as a unifying national ritual” in the post-apartheid era, transcending racial and class divisions as people gather around the grill. In seeking solutions to reduce meat consumption, we must review all aspects of our lives, including our relationship with food. However, this effort requires recognising and acknowledging the role of South Africa’s National Braai Day, which this paper argues is exploited by corporate South Africa to position meat consumption as central to the South African plate. This, in turn, reinforces the narrative of daily meat consumption as a component of the cultural heritage of Black South Africans prior to colonisation.

Religious conversion is a deeply personal and transformative process that encompasses cognitive shifts, mystical experiences, and intellectual awakenings. The Urantia Book fosters unique conversion experiences, often occurring outside institutional religious frameworks, through self-guided engagement with its teachings. This paper applies phenomenology, psychology of religion, and AI-based pedagogy to examine how individuals experience Urantia-based spiritual transformation. Drawing on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience and James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, the study explores the psychological and developmental aspects of these conversions. Additionally, the paper investigates the role of artificial intelligence in mediating religious engagement through algorithmic exposure, AI-guided theological discussions, and adaptive learning systems. By integrating personal narratives, cognitive analysis, and technological mediation, this paper provides a multidimensional approach to religious conversion, contributing to broader discussions on faith development, digital spirituality, and the evolving relationship between AI and transformative belief systems.

Although the current academic discussion on religious conversion predominantly considers conversion as a process, the number of empirical studies that explore the same converts in different points in time remains limited. Also, there is still little research on the asylum seekers’ conversions from Islam to Christianity following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. This article provides a longitudinal perspective through revisiting the experiences of Iraqi forced migrants in Finland, first interviewed in 2017–2018 and then six years later in 2023–2024. While religious conversion has been defined in various ways in different academic fields, faith traditions and societal contexts, this study takes a data-driven approach and analyzes what conversion means in these data. The results show that conversion can signify different things to different individuals, as well as the same individuals at different times, providing perspectives useful to academia and societal actors dealing with religion and forced migration. 

In many Christian traditions, baptism is generally conferred on infants, who cannot consent to the sacrament. What happens if, as teenagers or adults, they later reject their initiation into Christian faith? This paper will reflect on the Debaptism Movement, which has been gaining popularity across the West in recent years. It will begin with a history of the movement, outline the ideologies, practices, and forms of community that draw nonbelievers together, and explore Christian responses. What can Christian communities learn from the beliefs and practices that undergird Debaptism, what do they reveal about the way Christians understand and live out their shared ecclesial life, and how might theologians seriously engage (a)theologies of baptism as they seek to dialogue with the modern, secular world?

Street shrines are an emerging phenomenon in Indian cities as they function well in and around urban public spaces, often along crossroads, roadsides, and highways. Positioned close to the road, street shrines serve both as religious sites for devotees and as spectacles for passersby. In this paper, I examine one such street shrine in Ahmedabad, India. Drawing on ethnographic findings from my preliminary fieldwork, I argue that street shrines create undetected and encrypted spaces—not as acts of resistance, but as byproducts of the city's rigorous planning of public spaces, in the form of what I claim as JUGAAD- a south asian phenomena which means creative and cheap use of second-hand products, in this case a byproduct space. To support my analysis, I engage with Michel de Certeau’s conception of everyday life, using it to examine the activities of shrine caretakers as tactical maneuvers, in contrast to those outside the shrine who, largely unaware of its intricacies, function as strategists. By conducting a micro-study of street shrines in Ahmedabad, this essay seeks to uncover the encrypted places within the public infrastructural developments in cities.

Under the leadership of Rev. Cecil Williams, Glide Memorial Methodist Church emerged as vibrant center for progressive social activism in San Francisco. Various radical social groups, from the Daughters of Bilitis to the Black Panthers, found a home at Glide, and Glide lent its theological and institutional support to such organizations’ work. Building on archival work with the Glide Historical Records, this paper considers Glide as a node within a larger network of radical social activism within the San Francisco Bay Area. This paper centers the early ministry of Rev. Cecil A. Williams and the connections he, and other religious leaders, built with Black Power activists such as Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, and argues that our understanding of radical American politics during the Black Power era must consider the role churches played in creating sanctuaries for the revolution.

At a rally in Ferguson, Missouri six months after the killing of Michael Brown, a seminarian took the bullhorn. Offering a twist on the then-popular chant, “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!” she called out: “Show me what theology looks like.” And the crowd responded, “This is what theology looks like!”

This paper looks at the ways in which the public-facing work of one broad-based, interfaith community organizing project in Philadelphia, POWER Interfaith, functions to not only “show us what theology looks like,” but suggests two things. First, that race-centered, interfaith organizing can be seen not only as a religious practice, but as a form of public theology. Second, in a departure from traditional faith-based organizing practice, being differently-religious together in urban space is not just a means to the end of winning organizing campaigns, but can also be an end in itself. 

This paper examines the religious roots of growtheology, a term which refers to the system of beliefs behind a civil religion that deifies economic growth and urban development. It also explores the opportunities for a Christian and generally religious resistance to the infinite pursuit of economic growth at the expense of people and planet under the banner of “degrowth” organizing. To this end, it turns to the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, the banking capital of the Bible Belt, to critically examine the theological beliefs behind the city manager’s proclamation in July 2024 that “cities are either growing or dying” (Sands 2024). It turns to grassroots anti-gentrification and environmental justice organizations across the Queen City to show how “degrowth” social movements perform prophetic or iconoclastic functions, critiquing the unequal benefits as well as the social and environmental costs of the city’s suburban and urban explosion.

New contexts appear for religious eschatological reflections. This presentation focuses on the transhumanist vision of Ray Kurzweil and compares it with the ecological eschatology of Bruno Latour. Kurzweil argues for a horizontal understanding of the future without divine interference, for a continuous negotiation between spatial and temporal aspects of the future, and for a continuation of the present into the future but mostly with an emphasis on non-materiality, i.e., mind-uploading. Latour shares the horizontal framework but focuses entirely on the spatial aspect since times already up for the planet’s ecological system, and he emphasizes continuity for the material world since the entanglement of the biosphere makes salvation without the ecosystem unintelligible. The comparison highlights some of the particular themes in transhumanism eschatology and informs new conversations on religious eschatological reflection in general.

In this paper I argue that theological understandings of human nature are a major component of people’s views of human enhancement technologies. After examining studies regarding public perception of human enhancement technologies and studies exploring public perceptions of evolution, I contend the primary difference in views from these studies is how invasive enhancement technologies are. The resistance to enhancements that could change human nature I believe is connected to a theological anthropology that is too anthropocentric, and an extension of the position that humans were created by God in their present form at least 10,000 years ago. In order to address emerging technology, theology needs to do more constructive work regarding human nature and how humanity could evolve into one or more species other than Homo sapiens, both through natural and technologically assisted means.

Purchasing advantage and merit is a frequent topic for both secular and theological ethicists.  Similar attention has been given to questions on the commodification of certain goods and the moral nature of blocked exchanges. Less common, however, is sustained consideration of the  moral nature of the market itself as it affects and effects the moral perception of the purchase.

Presenting biotechnological enhancements within a market framework allows the user, and the larger society, to ignore, deny, or circumvent the moral status of (1) the goods purchased and (2) the permissability of the action of purchase itself. Framing the enhancements as "options" and "choices" that are offered freely in the market square obscures the moral questions involved and diminishes the ability to recognize and address these questions. Differentiating between enhancement as "purchase" and enhancement as "action" provides a lens through which to examine the moral and ethical issues at stake.