In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Sara Coleridge's Phantasmion (1837) is often identified as the first English fantasy novel. It has usually been read as an intentionally inconsequential work, meant to be enjoyed for its own sake. This paper proposes an alternative reading of the novel, one that views it as part of Coleridge's larger body of theological work. Phantasmion's form as a fantasy novel and the story that unfolds within that form are narrative expressions of her theology. This argument is developed along three lines: First, Coleridge expressly wrote that narrative and fairy tales are the best mode through which children are educated on Christianity. Second, Phantasmion's emphasis on the sanctification of its protagonist anticipates the concerns of her later Dialogues on Regeneration. Third, reading Phantasmion through the lens of Tolkien's "eucatastrophe" reveals that recovering the agency of women is essential to the renewal and restoration of the world.

This paper examines The Gold Thread (1860) by Norman MacLeod as a piece of literary pedagogy in a programme of Christianised Bildung. Written during an explosion of children’s literature in Victorian Britain, The Gold Thread is the first children's book written in literary form. MacLeod's use of literary form both illustrates and enacts his convictions concerning childhood education, which, I argue, were influenced by Freidrich Schiller’s vision of the education of the “beautiful soul"; a vision starkly contrasted to the highly moralised Victorian children's literature of the time. While MacLeod's connection to broader nineteeth century literary and philosophical trends have been largely ignored, this paper explores how MacLeod's Christian adaptation of the notion of Bildung and his use of literary form helped shift religious conceptions of the moral and spiritual lives of children in Britain, contributing to a social movement that culminated in the abolition of children’s labor in Scotland.

In this paper, I examine Kierkegaard’s use of polyvocal pseudonymity—the creation of multiple different authorial personae—in light of similar literary projects undertaken at roughly the same time by J. L. Heiberg and Robert Schumann. I argue that, despite the historical connections between Heiberg and Kierkegaard and their shared city and culture, Kierkegaardian polyvocality is better understood as akin to Schumann’s polyvocal pseudonymous music criticism. While Heiberg employs pseudonymity largely to instantiate distance between reader and author, Schumann’s pseudonymity appears as a response to the inability of language to describe or present music. Despite the authorial distance evident in parts of the Kierkegaardian authorship, I argue that Schumann’s understanding and use of polyvocal pseudonymity are a much better fit with Kierkegaard’s usage—and offer readers a literary entry point into discussions of both music and faith.

In an era of religious tumult, Thoreau was an original voice in American religion. He sought to divorce the religious sentiment from its institutional context and helped pioneer an eclectic, experiential and non-institutional spirituality that has taken on new popularity. His religiosity and iconoclastic theological vision have been obscured, however, by his harsh attacks on churches as well as his pluralism, nature mysticism and refusal to systemize his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, Thoreau was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. While not a confirmed theist, he was open to and sought union with a divine mystery that was at once immanent in nature and not contained by it. Thoreau called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God. His religious sensibility was a central thread in his work as a naturalist, his philosophical thought and his ethical commitments. 

George MacDonald constantly engages with the theme of motherhood. The topic appears in the theology of his sermons, literary criticism, fantasy tales, stories for children, and novels for adults. For MacDonald, motherhood is not inherently connected with pregnancy or giving birth, a perspective that was shaped by his experience of losing his mother at a young age but being loved as a child by his spinster aunt and stepmother. Motherhood, with its primary characteristic of love, belongs to all women. The more a woman increases in love and in the quality of her motherhood, the less she will care whether the children she mothers are her own or another’s. This paper argues that even as he develops an ideal of feminine motherhood, MacDonald affirms a primarily non-normative maternal role when he claims that a childless woman can be more truly a mother than a woman who has borne children.

“Liberation Theology” is still in its infancy stages of interreligious comparison and is predominantly understood solely in a Christian context. Even still, scholars are noticing similarities between Christians and Muslims, referring to some as “Islamic Liberation Theologians.” These comparisons are often without developing or defining what makes them “liberation.” In this paper, I will present a two-part framework that allows scholars to identify a type of theology or ethic as “liberation.” The first component of the framework is a theory of oppression, often in terms of salvation history and political oppression. The second component is a focus on praxis, the serious reflection on shared experiences of oppression that leads to the material liberation of the oppressed. To substantiate this framework, I will provide examples from two paradigmatic figures in Christianity and Islam: Gustavo Gutiérrez – Latin American Catholic priest – and Ali Shariati – Shia Muslim revolutionary.

In political discourse, liberation and reconciliation are often seen as competing goals. Liberation and freedom are conceived in terms of autonomy, while reconciliation and unity are conceived in terms of mutuality. Against these customary associations, the Black liberation theologian J. Deotis Roberts insists, “There can be no liberation without reconciliation and no reconciliation without liberation.” Roberts’s Christian theology offers an alternative, dialectical picture of the interplay between freedom and interdependence. This paper compares Roberts’s argument with the work of Mohandas Gandhi. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi argues similarly that true independence is not possible without taking responsibility for one another. The eighth-century Buddhist monk Śāntideva likewise offers a vision of liberation in which one is freed for the sake of others, and freed by caring for others. Comparing these authors’ arguments points toward an alternative paradigm for integrating the urgent demand for emancipation with the urgent need for cooperation.

This paper studies the myth of peace in the temples of Sukuh, Cetho, and Kethek during the twilight of the Majapahit Kingdom (14th–16th century) and Christian liberation theology. Both traditions emerged from periods of upheaval, seeking harmony through decolonial and transformative practices. The Javanese temples, with their punden architecture, Shaivite reinterpretations, and ruwatan rituals, reflect a quest for cosmic and social balance. Similarly, liberation theology, through Ignacio Ellacuría’s “liberating grace” and Cláudio Carvalhaes’s liturgical resistance, emphasizes decolonization and communal justice. Drawing on Raimon Panikkar’s intercultural myth as and Victor Turner’s ritual theory, this study examines how both traditions construct sacred narratives to address oppression and environmental crises. The ruwatan ritual is compared to Ellacuría’s and Carvalhaes’s transformative practices, highlighting a shared impulse to decolonize dominant paradigms and reimagine peace as spiritual and social renewal. This comparative approach enriches interreligious peacebuilding and offers a framework for contemporary challenges.

Informed by the lives and practices of Palestinian women in Gaza and Mayan women in Guatemala, this chapter attempts to provide an answer to the question “Wenak ya Allah?” - where are you, God, amid genocide? I advocate for an approach that embraces women’s experiences as sources for reflection and inspection of our theologies. Following George Khodr’s theology of the cross, I explore the parallels between the Guatemalan and Palestinian contexts. I argue, following Guatemalan and Palestinian women’s embodiment of care and agency amidst genocide and its aftermath, that the commitment to ethics of care embodies God’s presence within the community in Gaza and Guatemala. We see God embodied in those who practice care, particularly women.

Unlike most twentieth-century social revolutions religion played a central role in both the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions. Both Iranians and Nicaraguans re-articulated the meaning of their respective religions in prefigurative free spaces. As the socio-political climate worsened in their respective countries in the late 1970s they employed stories from the Bible and Qur’an to mobilize against their respective governments. 

Although class and regional differences exist between religious participants from each country our comparative case study reveals that they shared in common sacred stories centered on prophecy, religious virtue, miracles, and the challenges associated with demanding social justice.  Building on the religious discourse approach, centered on literatures that focus on stories and storytelling, we set out to examine the specific ways these sacred stories motivated them to take action and facilitated their transformation as revolutionary actors.

As part of broader anti-violence efforts, in 2019, the López Obrador administration launched Creamos Paz (Let’s Create/Believe in Peace) through the Office of Religious Affairs. This initiative promotes peacebuilding by collaborating with officials, scholars, and interfaith actors, challenging Mexico’s secular tradition. This paper examines how Mexico’s new religious policy is implemented and negotiated locally. Using a mixed-methods approach—including multivariate analysis, participant observation, interviews, and archival research—I identify two trends: while the Catholic-majority Bajío region remains less engaged, southeastern states, with higher Indigenous and non-Catholic Christian populations, show greater interest. Evangelical actors have strategically leveraged religious affairs offices to strengthen governmental ties. Despite its pluralistic rhetoric, Creamos Paz may advance Evangelical expansion while offering limited engagement—and veiled exclusion—to non-Christian minorities that misfit world religions frameworks. I argue that these developments reflect a broader shift toward Protestant-inflected secularism in Latin America, where religious freedom discourses reshape religious power within secular regimes.

Religious pluralism in the Arabian Gulf is not simply permitted or restricted but actively shaped by state policies that regulate, accommodate, or brand religious diversity. This paper examines five models of state-managed religious pluralism: Saudi Arabia’s restrictive monoconfessionalism, Bahrain’s sectarian pluralism, Kuwait and Qatar’s pragmatic accommodation, the UAE’s branded tolerance, and Oman’s subtle inclusivity. While the UAE has pioneered religious tolerance as a diplomatic and economic tool, Qatar is cautiously adopting similar strategies. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain manage religious diversity through controlled sectarian governance, while Oman sustains a low-profile, historically embedded pluralism. These models suggest that innovation in religious governance doesn't necessarily lead to greater freedom but often reinforces state control. By comparing these models of pluralism, this paper argues for expanding research beyond high-profile interfaith diplomacy to examine whether less visible, embedded models such as Oman’s—whether innovative or not—may offer a more durable foundation for religious pluralism.

Religious institutions have been central to Hong Kong’s education system, yet its religiously diverse school sector arose inadvertently as a byproduct of colonial governance and persisted into the postcolonial era. This paper contends that religious plurality in Hong Kong’s schools emerged not from deliberate policy but as an unintended consequence of administrative practices under British rule—shaped by laissez-faire oversight in education, reliance on religious bodies, and demographic shifts, notably migration, within evolving sociopolitical conditions. Through historical and institutional analysis, it traces the evolution of religious education from early Christian schooling and the establishment of Hong Kong’s first non-Christian (Buddhist) school in the 1930s to the transformative mid-20th century. It further examines how the educational system solidified existing pluralistic structures despite post-handover ideological tensions and constraints on Western religious influence. The paper analyzes how governance approaches, regulatory frameworks, and religious networks have collectively shaped Hong Kong’s distinctive form of religious plurality.

This paper presents findings from a multi-methodological study of atheism and agnosticism (which we collectively label as nontheism) in contemporary China, conducted as part of a broader international research program exploring nontheistic beliefs, identities, and moral perspectives. The results reveal that, unlike the naturalistic, anti-religious atheism common in the West, Chinese nontheism is characterized by high engagement with supernatural beliefs and low levels of anti-religious sentiment. While Chinese nontheists associate atheism with political orthodoxy, they do not favor particular nonreligious labels. In terms of moral outlooks, Chinese nontheists are not markedly different from the Chinese general population, exhibiting both relativist and conventionalist perspectives. These findings provide insight into the cross-cultural and pluralistic dimensions of atheism and agnosticism as well as the nature of meaning, value, and belief in twenty-first-century China.

Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly wrote in his diaries about building China a Christian nation, yet while he mobilized the church in state-building and war efforts, he never formally integrated Christianity into state governance. His faith was genuine, but his belief in divine appointment reinforced his authoritarian rule. Seeing himself as chosen to save China from foreign aggressors and atheistic Communists, he viewed eliminating enemies as necessary toward national salvation. This paradox raises the question of how his religious convictions influenced his governance, particularly his use of coercion and state power.

This paper argues that Chiang’s Christian nationalism was shaped by three intertwined forces: his Confucian understanding of kingship, the constraints of governing a multifaith society, and his strategic efforts to present himself as a Christian statesman in Western media. While he cultivated this image abroad, his governance remained authoritarian, with his religious convictions justifying, rather than restraining, his militant leadership.

Amir Sjarifoeddin (1907-1948) was a nationalist figure who was involved in Indonesia’s struggle for independence from colonial rule. Baptized into Christianity in 1931, he was an anomaly—his Christian faith motivated his fight for Indonesia’s independence at the time when usually one had to choose one or the other. However, due to the events of the latter part of his life, his legacy has not received the recognition it deserves. In this proposal, I wish to highlight Amir’s contributions to the Christian liberation message by focusing on his involvement within the efforts to claim Indonesia’s independence. My argument is that Amir’s message on Christian freedom is twofold: freedom is a collective goal against oppression, and it is something that needs to be pursued with a strong emphasis on the safety of the people’s lives.

This presentation will examine the contested ideas of freedom evident in the two writs of habeas corpus, filed in the Bombay Presidency by Indian Christians in the nineteenth century, challenging the Indian caste system.  The writ of habeas corpus, described as the ‘protector of liberties of the subject,’ was used by the English judges to protect the King’s subject across the British colonies. Through the writ Indian Christians from the marginal communities were claiming freedom from one’s neighbour, who ruthlessly oppressed them. 

Using this micro history of individual political and social freedom, this presentation will examine the macro connections with the Indian nationalist movement. Nationalist advocated Swaraj that had a narrow vision of political independence from foreign rule. Contested ideas of freedom is about how marginal community wanted freedom from the internal colonization and marginalization of the upper class in line with how the elites fought for freedom from external forces. 

Although the role of Christian missions during the end of imperialism and beginning of nationalism have often been overlooked, there is nonetheless a consensus among World Christianity historians that Christian mission-education played a key role in nationalist movements’ development. This paper examines the oft-overlooked Christian mission-educated black Southern Rhodesian politician Charles Mzingeli and his opposition to the 1945 Land Apportionment Amendment. Building on John Lonsdale’s concept of Africans maneuvering within the “tight corners” of imperialism (2000), I will explore how Mzingeli’s protest operates within the “tight corners” between British imperialist Christian missionaries and white settler nationalist Christian missionaries. Collaborating with the Anglican missionary Arthur Shearly Cripps, Mzingeli engaged the Fabian Colonial Bureau and invoked his “imperial citizenship” in the face of other missionaries’ resistance to imperial involvement. As Zimbabwe transitioned from imperialism to nationalism, how did Mzingeli navigate the opportunities and opposition of Christian mission in colonial Zimbabwe?

In 2021, Harvard University undergraduates revived The Salient, a self-proclaimed “free speech” publication that has since become a vehicle for conservative and white Christian nationalist discourse. Originally founded in 1981, the magazine has a history of controversy, including past critiques for homophobic and Islamophobic content. The 2021 revival coincided with right-wing mobilization in the Trump era, reinforcing narratives of conservative victimhood, religious nationalism, and reactionary resistance to progressive campus politics. This paper analyzes how The Salient constructs itself through religious and political claims, drawing on an archive of Salient issues I have collected over time during my experience as a Harvard residential staff member (2021–2025). By tracing The Salient’s evolving rhetoric—from free speech claims to explicit anti-queer, anti-immigrant, and Christian nationalist messaging—this paper situates the publication within broader right-wing efforts to reshape campus discourse, challenge academic freedom, and frame elite universities as battlegrounds for ideological control.

According to scholars of higher education, campus protest is one of the foundational ways in which students exercise “student voice” whether the protest be self-advocacy for activism on behalf of others (Jerusha Conner, 2023). Protests have changed on college campuses from the 1960s protests over Vietnam to the 2015 protests over Black Lives Matter. This paper will seek to address the proposed topic of “Campus politics, activism, and practices of engaged scholarship.” I argue that schools with religious backgrounds or formerly religious backgrounds have a unique platform to teach their campuses’ history to demonstrate the dynamism of religion and its relationship to campus activism. These platforms offer the opportunity for student to participate in engaged scholarship through archival research that can shape their understanding of student voice and sense of place on campus. 

George Benson’s legacy looms large on the campus of Harding University. Students are required to attend a daily chapel in an auditorium named for him, and his legacy is seen in his statues, paintings, and programs that exist around campus. This paper will use primary documents from the Ann Cowan Dixon Archives & Special Collections at Harding University’s Brackett Library in Searcy, AR, and historical sources on the rise of conservatism and “new evangelicalism” after the second World War to argue that the conservative social and political values that characterize Harding today are the direct result of Benson’s careful positioning of the University as a defender of the faith—a faith that was deeply influenced by a white, free enterprise, Christian nationalist supremacy. George Benson’s innovative use of mass media, student engagement, and eschatological framing made Benson’s understanding of “American principles” in the 1950s and 60s precursors to and representative of the values of today’s modern Religious Right.

This paper details some of the ways that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires queer and trans activism. The last few decades has seen staggering rates of violence against queer and trans Brazilians and there persists a continuous flow of hate crimes against Afro-Brazilian religions. This climate has created particularly precarious lives for those who belong to both communities. Afro-Brazilian religions are known for being more hospitable to LGBTQ+ people, in part due to the ways the religions’ deities, the orixás, defy European notions of gender boundaries. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that Afro-Brazilian religion inspires meaningful ways that queer and trans activists engage with in their social justice work such that it generates new pathways to freedom not obstructed by white supremacist heteropatriarchal epistemologies. I offer a reflection on the importance of non-European epistemologies in analyses of the sociopolitical milieu that creates such precarious lives for queer and trans Brazilians.

This paper reflects on Althaus-Reid as a (perhaps the) nascent “canonical” figure of queer theology, as her texts as required to be taught to beginners. What happens to the notion of a “canon” (or even minimally, a standard reading list) when Althaus-Reid is a cornerstone of it? And what happens to Althaus-Reid’s work when it is made canonical, however destabilized that notion might be? How does one teach her, and to beginners? Based on experiments in teaching and learning, this paper will considers various insights and challenges from the teaching of Althaus-Reid’s work.

In May 2024, a marketing campaign for the dating app Bumble took to billboards across America with a vicious jab against celibacy, commanding ‘THOU SHALT NOT GIVE UP ON DATING AND BECOME A NUN.’ In this paper, I examine the dynamic contours of religion, secularism, sexual freedom, and capitalism that underwrite Bumble’s anti-celibacy attitudes. This paper is oriented around two questions prompted by their campaign: First, what does Bumble’s choice to use explicitly religious language and imagery mean for hegemonic notions of sexual freedom? And second, why is celibacy—whether or not it’s understood as a religious commitment—posed as such a threat, and as incompatible with queer and feminist politics? I argue that in positioning itself in contradistinction to the perceived regulatory apparatus of religion, Bumble enacts its own regulatory protocol which mandates gendered and sexual self-governance and self-constitution through the pursuit of digitally-mediated sexual intimacy.

The transgender child is a highly contested figure in the politics and culture of the United States today. This paper demonstrates how both religious and secular narratives are deployed against childhood transition, analyzes their shared political theological commitments, and proposes an alternative framework. Religious arguments against childhood transition frame trans adults as both a sexual threat and religious outsiders, imagining them as an anti-Christian “cult” that preys on vulnerable youths. Secular arguments against childhood transition, meanwhile, presume the existence of a rational self buffered against undue outside influence. Both narratives share a commitment to cisness, as a structuring fantasy of normative development and repetition, as well as an understanding of transness as “bad religion” beyond the acceptable bounds of religious pluralism. We urgently need alternative theological and political narratives that affirmatively promote transition as a good for all who seek it, including children.

Recent works within trans studies in religion by Max Strassfeld and Colby Gordon have performed "bad" literal readings of sexed religious materials to resource trans possibilities within religious traditions. In addition, these thinkers have argued that contemporary critiques of such readings resonate with historical Christian polemics for allegorical, spiritual readings over material, literal readings. This paper develops this connection further with Saba Mahmood's description of the semiotic ideology of modern secularism in which "proper" religious reading practices must not collapse the arbitrary distinction between sign and signified. Therefore, current suspicions and critiques of trans literalism both as a reading practice and as an ongoing political commitment to the materialities of changing sex can be understood as one way in which transness (in current political parlance, "gender ideology") is marked as outside the bounds of proper secular rationality.

This paper examines how medieval Chinese esoteric manuals create transformative experiences through the harnessing of emotions and the enactment of ritual procedures. I use the Sādhana of the Great Yakṣiṇī Mother Joy and Priyaṅkara, a manual centered on Hārītī, as a case study to demonstrate the importance of controlling emotions and the centrality of physical actions in esoteric rituals. Specifically, I analyze one warning and one technique that encapsulate two strong feelings: lust and fear. The text warns the practitioner against developing lustful thoughts towards Hārītī, or the ritual will fail. While repressing sexual desire is necessary for the ritual to succeed, the text allows the practitioner to unleash other intense emotions, like fear and revenge, by empowering a human skull that can frighten one’s enemies. These instructions offer a window into how Buddhist texts bring about transformative experiences, which are often dictated by strong sentiments, whether wholesome or not. 

This paper explores the relationship between text and image in the Buddhist context, focusing on illuminated versions of the Avalokiteśvara-sūtra in Tangut, Chinese, and Uyghur languages, excavated from Khara-khoto, Dunhuang, and Turfan. Created between the 9th and 12th centuries, these manuscripts reveal striking visual coherence and suggest a well-established tradition of illuminated Buddhist texts in Eastern Central Asia during the middle period. The paper examines how the sutra integrates imagery with scripture to enhance the ritual experience, highlighting the role of visual elements in the transmission of religious teachings. Additionally, it expands the analysis to include other examples of text-image relationships, such as the pilgrim drawings found on the walls of the Mogao caves in Dunhuang. By drawing connections between these diverse materials, this research contributes to a broader understanding of the interplay between visual and textual forms in Buddhist practices and offers new insights into understudied materials.

This paper considers what the overt depictions of emotion and invitations of readerly affect in medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales can tell us about how early Chinese audiences received Buddhist sacred texts. While much scholarship has focused on the tales’ didactic dimensions, as informative testimonies to the power of devotion to sūtras and the mechanics of karma, less has been said about how these texts “work” toward their explicit goal of transforming its audiences into devotees. I argue here that by staging melodramatic encounters with sūtras, depicting characters’ experiences of fear, grief, illness and so on being changed into “tears of joy” by the wonderworking of Buddhist sacra, miracle tales understand the transformative power of sacred text to be chiefly affective, and attempt to induce such dispositional transformations in their readers and hearers. No mere lessons in metaphysics, these narratives propagate dharma through hair-raising and tear-jerking; by galvanizing emotional bodies.

How do Buddhist sūtras employ metaphoricity to transcend linguistic limitations and actualize non-conceptual realization? Focusing on the metaphor of water, waves, and ocean (Skt. udadhi, Chi, 大海; Skt. taraṃga, Chi. 波浪) as conceptual mappings for mind, consciousness, and conceptual thoughts, the paper examines the embodied dimension of metaphors in Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra and their role in shaping religious realities. Two key conceptual metaphors—mental activity as fluid movement and psychological peace as physical stillness—illustrate how Buddhist transmission relies on sensory engagement and transformation of experience to mediate teachings. With examinations of Chinese commentaries and associated cultural productions, the study argues that the reception and transformation of water-mind imagery highlights the cognitive and experiential mechanisms of metaphors that actualize Buddhist knowledge transmission, demonstrating how embodied metaphors extend Buddhist soteriological ideals beyond the textual realm into empirical practice. This approach reframes knowledge transfer by emphasizing embodied metaphors as integrative mechanisms bridging literature, philosophy and practice. 

This paper compares liberal Protestant with evangelical Protestant attitudes toward contemporary art between 1960 and the mid-1980s. Following the fundamentalist-modernist split in the United States in the 1920s, theologically orthodox and liberal Protestants diverged on many cultural issues. A study comparing the diverging theological stances on visual art has yet to be done. I approach this topic through a case study comparing content about contemporary art published in the popular liberal publication The Christian Century (CC) with that in its evangelical counterpart, Christianity Today (CT), during the quarter century in question. I demonstrate that CC theologically embraces contemporary art by suggesting all art can contribute to Christian devotion, while CT critiques such art as pessimistic reflections of secularity. By exploring the rhetoric permeating the larger public through popular periodicals, this paper enhances our understanding of the beliefs and values making up liberal Protestant and evangelical communities in the U.S.

The first portion of the ninth century Bethu Brigte,(The Book of Brigit) climaxes in St. Brigit being ordained as a bishop. There has been little discussion of this topic in the scholarship. The editor and translator of the critical edition of Bethu Brigte, simply states, “This is obviously a scribal error,” pointing out that later portions of the text show St. Brigit refraining from performing the sacrament of baptism. However, the concept had meaning for several communities within early medieval Ireland; Brigit’s episcopal ordination also appears in the 9th century Martyrology of Oengus and is retained, with additional explanations, in the later Middle Irish Life of Brigit. How are we to understand this repeated assertion? This paper investigates contextual factors that might have served to make Brigit the Bishop culturally intelligible to certain populations in early medieval Ireland, particularly the factor of religious status and gender exceptionalism in Early Irish law texts   

This paper analyzes the transformation of U.S. Protestant missions in Latin America through the lens of Jim (1927-1956) and Elisabeth Elliott (1926-2015), two Christian Missions in Many Lands missionaries in Ecuador. Through analysis of missionary photography, particularly the image "Jim with a few of his schoolboys in Shandia," and related literary works, the paper demonstrates how the Elliotts represent the shift from fundamentalism to evangelicalism in 20th-century missionary work. Jim exemplifies the fundamentalist approach focused on Biblical exposition, while Elisabeth represents a new evangelicalism that, while still conservative and aligned with White supremacist and capitalist values, adopted a more development-oriented approach. The research examines four key elements in the photograph: the "jungle" setting, professional attires, schoolboy situation, and absence of women. Drawing from diverse sources related to "Operation Auca," including recent indigenous perspectives, the paper illuminates how this transformation reflected broader changes in post-World War II American Christianity and impacted indigenous communities.

Beginning with Het Offer des Heeren (1561), Dutch Anabaptists collected and circulated narratives describing the deaths of their martyrs in ever-expanding volumes, culminating in the Martyrs Mirror (1685). These martyrologies intersperse accounts of the martyrs' deaths with theological treatises and prison letters, as well as purported interrogation records and official court sentences. This paper examines the editorial decisions made by the compilers of martyrologies to advance their apologetic aims of presenting Anabaptist Christianity as both legitimate heir to the Apostolic church and non-threatening to the state. It identifies themes and literary tropes borrowed from early Christian martyr texts and medieval hagiography and demonstrates how Anabaptist martyrologists put these to use to establish their martyrs as true Christians—not heretics deserving execution.