In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper addresses the ways in which critiques of "gay" and "queer" as products of western colonialism (Massad 2007, Puar 2017) are co-opted by religious nationalist groups to support anti-queer policies under the guise of anti-colonialism. This co-option puts queer activists in a difficult double-bind of having to prove their belonging in the imagined nation even as they have to compete for funding in a homocapitalist global NGO economy (Rao 2020). I show that this double-bind leads some queer activists to reshape not only what it means to be queer but also what it means to belong to a religious community. By choosing when and how to be complicit with competing power structures, these queer activists are able to create room for innovation and inclusion through shifting approaches to identity. However, this instability comes at a cost. 

Building off the work of Frantz Fanon and Glen Sean Coulthard, this paper argues that J.D. Vance’s rhetoric of the “normal gay guy” during the 2024 United States Presidential election constitutes a recognition-based strategy of colonization designed to dictate the terms of the relationship between gay men and conservatives in a way that benefits the cisheteropatriarchal status quo. Moreover, this paper will unmask Vance’s rhetorical strategy as an extension of that of his own Church: like Vance’s “normal gay” rhetoric, the Catholic hierarchy’s “same-sex attraction” rhetoric creates a politics of recognition and accommodation that reinforces Catholic colonial aims. As such, in both church and state, politics of recognition rely upon an affirmation of the dominant-subaltern relationship characteristic of colonialism. Genuine liberation for gay men thus requires a fundamental rejection of underlying colonial structures that define the parameters of existing discourse.

Through the Space feature (a live audio conversation), X, formerly known as Twitter, serves as an alternative platform for conversations between openly gay and closeted gay individuals in Indonesia. Amid scapegoating threats and oppression toward LGBTQ individuals, gay Indonesians–using alternate accounts– transform this platform into a gay world. Using Digital Ethnography methods, this paper exposes lived experiences of Indonesian gay individuals on X, where the conversations intersect with interreligious dialogue, sexual health, kinship, and queer identity in Indonesia.

In spite of the consensus that has been achieved by scholars of migration and climate change—that climate-induced migration, while real, is complicated by other factors—a narrative of “invasion” persists on the part of both the general public and academics from other fields. This paper interrogates this “invasion” narrative in terms of both its cultural roots and its relevance to Christian thought. The paper unfolds in three steps. First, it sketches the history of the research on climate change and migration in order to contextualize the “invasion” narrative. Second, it argues that this narrative stems from an abstracted an oppositional imaginary for human/nonhuman relations. Third, it identifies a Christian dimension to this imaginary, both as a source of the problem and as an element in a creative response. In other words, Christian thought is both a resistance to the narrative of invasion and an expression of it.

Rising global temperatures harm everyone’s quality of life without regard to national boundaries. The effects of climate change indiscriminately destroy precious habitats and hasten species extinction, which generates incredible human and economic costs for millions of people from property loss, food shortages, disease, and needless deaths each year. As conditions worsen, unfarmable land and job loss force residents to relocate for employment opportunities and better living conditions. Contemporary discussions about migration frequently simplify/generalize the topic by asserting that displaced people share comparable stories, circumstances, and motivations. Hence, the challenge climate migration poses to discourse about people on the move, both locally and globally, is in assuming that migration is a monolithic issue. To achieve social justice for all, it is essential that religious and secular leaders recognize the diversity of migration and address each group’s various needs and goals.

As climate change accelerates forced migration, Catholic social teaching (CST) provides a critical ethical and theological framework for addressing climate-induced displacement. This paper examines how CST informs Catholic responses to climate migration through humanitarian action, policy advocacy, and global governance efforts. Using case studies from Catholic Relief Services in Central America and the Catholic Climate Covenant in the U.S., this paper highlights the Church’s role in supporting climate migrants. It explores how Catholic Social Teaching principles, especially the common good, human dignity, and the preferential option for the poor, shape faith-based interventions and influence international migration policy. Catholic organizations challenge existing legal definitions of refugees, advocating for expanded protections for climate-displaced persons. This study asserts that Catholic actors are not only responding to climate migration but actively shaping ethical and political discourse on migration governance in an era of ecological crisis.

As climate change accelerates migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises, understanding the role of religion in shaping community responses is crucial. This presentation explores multi-agent artificial intelligence modeling applied to four case studies: refugee integration in the Netherlands, religious aid dynamics in Lesbos, climate policy resistance in the EU, and conflict-climate interactions in Palestine through a collaboration with UNDP Program for Assistance to the Palestinian People.

Findings reveal that faith-based interventions often outperform secular approaches in fostering social cohesion, aid distribution, and policy adoption. In Palestine, for example, climate shocks exacerbated religious-political divisions, requiring culturally attuned development aid strategies. Our AI-driven simulations provide predictive insights for optimizing aid distribution, refugee policies, and climate mitigation efforts.

By bridging computational modeling and religious studies, this research highlights AI’s potential to enhance development aid strategies, ensuring they are ethically, culturally, and religiously sensitive in an era of climate-driven crises.

This paper advocates a new ethical paradigm for seeking and creating public policy change to bolster individual freedom for millions of health seekers on Medicaid. Bioethicists should prioritize health agency over the principle of autonomy and engage in ethical work with communities who are consistently cast outside the public’s concern. Our mixed-methods, interdisciplinary, community-valued study of Indiana’s Medicaid Expansion, the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP), examines the “administrative burdens” (Herd and Moynihan, 2018) produced by HIP’s personal responsibility incentives. We demonstrate how these burdens interact and compound each other, contributing to racial disparities in accessing comprehensive health benefits by Black and Latine HIP enrollees. The “alchemy of beauty and events” (Coates, 2024) in the co-production of moral knowledge of sacred values with community members propels our team’s actions for policy change and challenges the framework of health promotion and autonomy through personal responsibility as it resurges through Medicaid nationally.

Narratives experiences of persons who are purposedly childless have been missing from political and public pronatalist debates. This paper examines reproductive justice and faith by encouraging a liberatory lens that takes seriously the embodied experiences of childfree Black women. Through autoethnography, qualitative focus groups, and the theorizing of ethicists Nikki Young and Wylin Wilson, this paper illuminates the moral harms caused by the repeal of Roe potentially saddling Black women who desire to be childfree with unwanted pregnancies. Rejecting pronatalist arguments as limited constructs of family, my paper investigates how Black women make themselves over as participants in new familial structures that are not contingent upon reproduction, biology, and religious rhetoric. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the role of religion in supporting these Black women’s experience of reproductive freedom and suggests that this reproductive agency has ethical and political ramifications.

COVID-19 highlighted the diversity of Catholic experience in the US when some communities experienced disenfranchisement because of public health mandates and others actively supported these policies. What factors shape how Catholic parishes experienced stay-at-home and risk mitigation public policies, as well as how public health actors and the public perceived Catholics? To examine these questions, I engage secularism studies and narrative medicine to analyze 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I completed with two different Catholic congregations. One congregation utilized a narrative framework very similar to public health professionals to interpret their pandemic experiences and engaged in risk mitigation efforts above and beyond what public health policy required. The other parish was traditional, practicing the Latin Mass, and did not narratively interpret COVID-19 similarly to public health actors. They experienced conflict and disenfranchisement. Public health actors discursively labeled the first church as “good religion” and the second as “bad belief.”

This paper examines how religious and secular worldviews shape attitudes toward Covid-19 public health measures, drawing on empirical data from a three-year research project in Switzerland. Using a comparative analysis of semi-structured interviews, it critiques essentialist views on religion and objectivist approaches to risk. The study employs concepts from worldviews research, vernacular religion, folklore studies, and medical humanities to explore the narrative construction of risk. Moving beyond individual-centered approaches, it integrates cultural analysis to highlight how worldviews interact within social contexts. The findings challenge a binary view of compliance and non-compliance, emphasizing that risk perception is shaped more by relational positioning than by worldview content. The paper argues for a more comprehensive analysis of both compliant and non-compliant attitudes to better understand their underlying social dynamics.

In pre-modern Jain literature and in the writings of early 20th century CE scholars, the terms yati and caityavāsin, as applied to ascetics, have taken on a very pejorative connotation and have been used to refer to dissenting monks known for their lax practices. Strikingly, the term yati already appears as an equal to śramaṇa and muni in about ten long narrative works, mainly in prose and verse, written by monks between the 8th and 12th centuries CE. The aim of this paper is to examine in this under-explored corpus and in related works whether the use of the term yati applies to the so-called caityavāsins and if so, which type of monk it characterises in the complex and still shadowy monastic world of the turn of the first millennium.

The term caityavāsin has long been used to describe Śvetāmbara Jain monks accused of abandoning itinerancy and residing in temple complexes—a characterization shaped by later reformist narratives that equated temple dwelling with monastic laxity. However, pre-reform sources largely remain silent on these issues, and even non-Khartaragaccha texts do not emphasize this supposed transformation. Over time, caityavāsin became a ubiquitous polemical label, retrospectively applied to define the pre-reform past or discredit rivals. Through the case study of Upakeśagaccha, this paper examines the limitations of these polemical labels and questions the assumption that temple residence inherently violated monastic vows. By reassessing epigraphic, textual, and archaeological evidence, it challenges reductionist views and responds to broader questions of how to define the caityavāsin tradition, its practices, and the evolving concerns over monastic dwelling in Jain reform movements.

Much of the history of Jainism has been shaped by the reformist context in which it was gathered by western scholars. In the Śvetāmbara sect, 20th century CE scholars gathered most of their material from saṃvegī sādhus, who had recently all but succeeded in reforming the yati renouncers out of the tradition. This colored Jain histories of the modern era, either by characterizing yati monks by monastic laxity or śithilatā, or by leaving them out of Jain history altogether. When yatis are mentioned in histories of Jainism, they are characterized as corrupt priests who took either partial or diminished vows. In reality, yatis were highly venerated renouncers with large followings. The question remains whether they took the five great vows of a proper Jain monk. This paper will survey colonial era evidence, from gazetteers to invitation scrolls, to argue that the term “semi-renunciant” mischaracterizes the actual status of yati renouncers.

In popular conceptions of the history of Digambara Jain asceticism, ideal, naked and peripatetic mendicants (muni) are thought to have disappeared early in the second millennium CE. Persecuted by Indo-Muslim rulers, they were replaced by sedentary and clothed ‘semi-renouncers’ (bhaṭṭāraka) and only reappeared in the 20th century CE. Recent research however shows that Sultanate and Mughal era bhaṭṭārakas took the vows of fully-initiated Digambara renouncers and were venerated as paramount ascetics. The practices and symbols of sovereignty they adopted from Rajput and Persianate courtly cultures were not seen as signs of their ascetic laxity, but as expressions of their authority as the kingpins of Digambara polities. While contemporary Digambara munis operate in a social world which values different models of power, they engage in many of the same community functions as their bhaṭṭāraka forebears, and in some ways are still conceived of as kings (mahārāja).