In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Anglican theological method, as represented in the concepts of comprehensiveness and provisionality, reveals a useful compatibility with comparative theological methods and approaches. This paper will show how provisionality and comprehensiveness are constituent elements of Anglican theological method by examining Richard Hooker’s extension of the category of church to Jewish and Roman Catholic context. This analysis will illustrate how comprehensiveness and provisionality resonates with comparative theological methods in contemporary contexts.

Comparative theology as a discipline is identified not only as a Western but also as a Catholic enterprise. Such an assumption is not unfounded given that many of the pioneers and notable figures of the field came from the Catholic tradition and Catholic universities located in North America and Europe. It is essential to discuss comparative theology works that integrate specific socio-cultural locations to challenge the assumption and open up more conversations on the development of the field. This paper aims to review the methodologies used in three recent works on comparative theology from Asian perspectives: Joshua Samuel (India), Satanun Bonyakiat (Thailand), and Hans Harmakaputra (Indonesia). The analysis focuses on how their Protestant identity and social location shaped their comparative works. Such an analysis contributes to the ongoing discussion concerning using the denominational lens in comparative theology, particularly identifying distinctive Protestant elements that set them apart from their Catholic counterparts.

This paper considers the task of comparative theology from the perspective of Uniting denominations in North America. It first describes the principles of “reformed and always reforming” in the United Church of Christ and “united and uniting” at work in the United Church of Canada, as motivations to engage in comparative work. It then considers how these impulses can contribute to reforming a Reformed doctrine of sin via comparative conversation with non-dual Saiva theology.  

Samuel Zwemer famously compared Calvinism to Islam, noting how Sunni Islam and Reformed Christianity shared commitments to divine sovereignty, revelation, and a critique of idolatry. Despite these broad conceptual similarities, Western Reformed systematic theologians such as Schleiermacher, Barth, and Moltmann rarely engage in depth with Islamic thought. Instead, they use Muslims and Islam as brief examples to reinforce Christian theological superiority. This paper draws from Jennifer Lackey’s philosophical study of testimony and courts to argue that Reformed Christian views on Islam are shaped in part by a form of epistemic superiority that she calls hearer excess. To counter this hearer excess, I propose a model of comparative theology carried out as witness and counter-witness - an approach for deepening Christian-Muslim theological exchange and for advancing internal Reformed dogmatic arguments about the nature of divine speech and revelation, theologies of religion, the doctrine of God, and other theological loci.

Thinking theologically across the human/non-human boundary often generates surprising results. Considering the topic of freedom in human and more-than-human contexts fits this pattern. This paper engages a number of striking complexities in what it might mean to take freedom for non-human animals seriously. For example, some accounts of animal liberation would require the abolition of all human control, but human accounts of freedom usually justify  human control over humans in certain circumstances. Setting aside implausible demands for full separation between humans and non-human animals, a more complex account is required. This paper argues that a liberation theology for non-human animals does not necessarily mean the abolition of all human use of non-human animals, but that it does have radical implications for what forms of co-existence and collaboration are legitimate.

My paper argues that the phenomenon of shared intentionality can serve both as an analogue for God as Trinity and as an explanatory concept for speaking about human freedom as participation in the life of the triune God. My paper has three parts. First, I summarize some recent findings of comparative and developmental psychologists, who have argued human beings are unique due to a capacity to share intentions with conspecifics. Second, I show how shared intentionality can serve as an analogue for God as Trinity. Finally, I argue that human freedom consists in being conformed to the shared intentionality of the triune God.

This paper engages Kathryn Tanner’s account of human nature in Christ the Key, where she re-interprets the common identification of freedom as imago Dei to be the plasticity of human nature. Drawing from disability theology the paper demonstrates the value of Tanner’s creative proposal for its potential inclusion of a vast range of human body/minds and the insistence that the body is an essential aspect of humanity’s plasticity. Lastly, the paper considers whether freedom as malleability is limited to a uniquely human nature. Drawing from indigenous and eco-theologies and disabled ecological advocates, the paper considers the interconnection of all creation, such that the “inputs” of which Tanner speaks go both ways: from environment to human and human to environment so as to shape not only human body/minds but all aspects of nature. The paper moves against the trend to theorize humanity isolated from land and all nature.

Dionysius depicts the divine Logos as the center of a circle, the many logoi of creation its radii.  This image offers resources for resisting the axiological hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being with which it is often wrongly equated. Organizational hierarchies are not value hierarchies: complex organisms are “higher” only in the sense that their possibility is predicated on the existence of simpler forms of organization. A multispecies analysis of freedom offers a fruitful context of application. The possibility of complex forms of freedom is predicated on the prior existence of simpler forms of freedom; the emergence of the former arrives together with heightened modes of interdependence and vulnerability.  Unpacking this dialectic of freedom and dependency, which this paper undertakes in conversation with Helmut Plessner, Hans Jonas, and Peter Godfrey-Smith, can correct human exceptionalism without obscuring the distinctive forms of freedom and agency that are possible for language-using animals. 

The Catholic Church’s magisterium has acknowledged doctrinal development as integral to the Catholic conception of the church and of divine revelation itself. But Catholic theologians, beginning with Newman, have mistakenly cast what is the church’s development as a development of doctrine itself. This paper concerns the consequences of erroneously taking “doctrine” as the subject of development, and how this perspective serves to make invisible the role in “doctrinal developments” of the theologian and her intellectual freedom. To show this, I focus on the Catholic Church’s development in its magisterial teaching on slavery; without theologians’ exercise of freedom vis-a-vis what was established doctrine in their time, no development would have occurred. Ultimately, I argue that to deny this freedom to theologians is to fall into the incoherence of a performative self-contradiction, for to deny the necessary means for a touted end is to deny the very validity of the end.

A review of synodal efforts of the 2021-2024 Synod on Synodality to examine structures and policies that restrict and, ultimately, endanger women, and the possibilities for continued synodal discernment for and about women. The presenting question is whether the ongoing process of synodality will bring about a free Catholic acceptance of ordained women, as well as whether there will be any ongoing process of synodality in the future.

Many Reformers replaced traditional virtue ethics with a view that emphasizes Christian freedom and individual consience. While this development connected Christianity with the emerging European modernity, Catholic-minded scholars like Alasdair MacIntyre or Brad Gregory have argued that Protestant individualism can no longer support the understanding of the church as communio, an institution in which the virtues are preserved so that a flourishing community can emerge.

Based on my recent work in ecumenical theology and Reformation history, I argue that the Lutheran doctrine of Christian freedom continues the Scotist and late medieval understanding of justice as a pursuit of another’s good (bonum alienum). This understanding is community-oriented rather than individualistic. While it provides an alternative to Thomist virtue ethics, it also regards virtues and communitarian needs as primary. An ecclesiology built on Christian freedom may highlight individual rights but it also builds on a strong concept of reciprocity and service.

Many Muslims have recently embarked on the exploration and experimentation with LLMs (Large Language Models) on religious texts. Some are developing their own AI chatbots based on the Qur'an. As these AI models are designed to respond to queries about Islam, AI enthusiasts coalesce their belief in the "transparency" of the Qur’an with their belief in the "transparency" of algorithms. Examining the design and perception of Qur’an-focused AI chatbots, this paper explores the cultural logic of un/translatability of the Qur’an in the age of LLMs: What does AI-ification do to the Qur’an and its un/translatability? In what ways do the ideas of transparency, explainability, and interpretability traffic between AI and the Qur’an? If LLMs’ "understanding" of language is not just statistical but also dependent on probabilistic reasoning, what happens to the theology of the Qur’an’s language? Can AI bring forth a new conception of the Qur’an’s miraculousness (ijaz)? 

This paper investigate the way the question of and the need to refute of Islam's presumed "ontological antiblackness" reflects what Calvin Warren would describe as a form of ontological terror. In his monograph of the same title, Warren argues that the affect associated with answering such questions is mani-fold; not only because it provides the power of finding "solutions" but because pressing ontological questions provokes terror, a terror related to the issue of existence "outside the precincts of humanity and humanism," (Warren, Ontological Terror, 4). Utilizing the work of Warren and Frank Wilderson as conduits to the Black Radical Tradition; this paper demonstrate how scholarly attempts to refuse Islam's presumed "ontological antiblackness" reveals how the question forms the basis of a contemporary ontological terror, one that isn't abated by recounting the complicated past, particularly as the religio-political conditions that circumscribe Black Muslim being in Muslim American communites remains unchanged.

Malcolm and Betty Shabazz’s grave in Westchester, New York, as well as key sites in northern Manhattan constitute a funerary complex, in the global tradition of revered Muslim saints and scholars. Individuals visit throughout the year but on May 19 hundreds make pilgrimage and perform a ritual commemoration. The grave and visitation practices were created to activate an embodied, material interaction of reverence and relation to Malcolm and later Dr. Shabazz. I argue that Muslims who participate in visitations, even with contentions around its permissibility, maintain an ontological assumption that the dead are in active relation with the living. Visitations are then an interaction where remembrance brings the past into the present, activating the knowledge and spiritual power of ancestors to transform the self and the world. Finally, the open, collaborative nature of this site creation, including women’s leadership, has contributed to the continued multifaith nature of this religious site.  

This paper reads Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire to demonstrate this thesis: by using Sophocles’ Antigone as intertext, Shamsie places Islam in the role that philosophy has traditionally put Antigone and, by extension, women. The disavowal of Islam from the “western” tradition is what “ironically” constitutes it. Sophocles’ play has been a well for Continental philosophers, particularly around questions of politics and gender. Hegel famously used the play to define women as the “irony” of the community and the “internal enemy.” European and American feminists and queer theorists have reread the play to successfully push back on Hegel’s sexist understanding. Yet, they have maintained a seal around “western” philosophy, excluding the importance of Islam to modern understandings of the Greeks. In this way, they have replicated Hegel’s basic move, but replaced “women” with “Islam.” By reading Home Fire, this paper shows how Shamsie gives the lie to this exclusion.

The Tamil Śiva-bhakti poet-saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is understood by that tradition to be the first devotional saint, and scholars date her to the sixth century. My argument is that she inhabited devotion as an exploration of the freedom to question inherited identity in order to create a resonant spiritual identity. She created a devotional subjectivity that dislodged key social identification markers such as gender, caste and class by only identifying herself in two self-determined ways in her poetry: As a servant and as a pēy (ghoul). At the heart of both is a transformative affective relationship to the god Śiva instead of social identity. The concept of a devotional subjectivity allows us to explore the play among self, persona, and transformation as an expressive freedom of self-fashioning. This puts the focus on the logics of female exemplars’ devotional writings instead of on the domesticating impact of biographical writings about them. 

Akka Mahadevi, a women saint and a major figure among the cadre of vachana-composers of the twelfth-century, has received much attention for her bold lyrical poems, which express intense devotion to and personal love for Shiva. This paper seeks to complicate the popularly-held representation of Mahadevi as a woman in love with the god by paying attention to poems that remain outside the general public’s focus and scholarly considerations. These “neglected” poems feature textual and literary elements that are not usually associated with Mahadevi. They include quotations of Sanskrit scripture and exhibit a catechistic worldview; their authorial voice is concerned with prescribed religious life. In the presentation, I shall contrast between the multiple subjectivities in Mahadevi’s poetry, suggest ways of understanding these contrasts by considering the historical contexts in which they were generated, and ask how we could accommodate multiple subjectivities of a “branded” woman saint.

Poetry attributed to Lal Ded first appears in the historical record in the late seventeenth century, over 300 years after she died, and thus was unlikely written by her but by later Kashmiri Hindu men. Even the earliest writings to mention Lal Ded, which are hagiographical, were written by Sufi men in the late 1500s. Through a close analysis of these early sources, this paper argues the Kashmiri woman saint Lal Ded was utilized in these earliest sources to shape and define a new ascetic masculinity—free from, but not unrelated to, other competing paradigms of masculinity in early modern Kashmir. New frameworks for understanding women saints may be produced through examining such historical reconfigurations of gendered protocols and expected behaviors, providing insights into the self-fashioning of past religious communities for both men and women.

The power of exemplary women from the past in the devotional (bhakti) traditions of Hinduism operates in participatory communal practices of story and song that attend them, their identities and voices relational and labile even as those of practitioners are, particularly in the case of the immensely popular sixteenth-century Krishna devotee Mirabai. This paper will argue that people’s continuing engagement with her story and songs reveal significant ways that such women open up alternative possibilities beyond normative gendering and facilitate the development of more expansive selves for both men and women devotees (bhaktas).  Through practices of singing and importantly also composing songs in her name as well as stories about her, people find their own voices, forge community, and craft alternate selves beyond socially prescribed identities and valuations. Such an approach offers an important avenue for comparative study when the lives and words of such women themselves are irretrievable.

It is clear reading the poetry of 18th c. devotional poet Vengamamba that she imagined herself as a kind of ascetic. Not only do her compositions reflect a depth of philosophical and yogic training, but she identifies herself as a poet and scholar, a friend of Vishnu. Most Telugu audiences, however, do not know Vengamamba through her textual compositions. They know her through oral life histories and hagiographical texts and films, which present her as a woman who refused marriage and traditional gender roles on the grounds that she was already married to Vishnu. This paper will examine this gap in the nature of the (male hagiographers’) fashioning and self-fashioning of Vengamamba. By contextualizing hagiographical narratives within the historical and cultural moment of the 19th c. this paper argues that the hagiographers and Vengamamba operate on very differing definitions of female asceticism and imagine very contrasting visions of Telugu womanhood.