In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper applies the concepts of "late fascism" and "fascist freedom" in the work of Alberto Toscano to consider the paradoxical vision of freedom animating ascendant ethno-nationalist evangelicals. This application generates an analysis of freedom rhetoric in public evangelicals like Charlie Kirk. On this basis, the paper demonstrates how thicker accounts of fascism indeed offer purchasing power for not only categorizing popular evangelical support for authoritarian political coalitions, but also generating questions that provoke and imagine resistance against authoritarianism.

This paper unpacks the development and spread of the so-called “72-hour rule” within Evangelical Christian teachings, where married couples ensure husbands are free from lust by engaging in regular sexual acitivty. The paper presents a feminist historical critique of the theological anthropology undergirding this “rule,” as well as of the related martial sexual economy. Drawing on Evangelical Christian sexual advice manuals published between the 1970s and today, as well as sermons, blogs, and Christian TradWife social media, the paper argues that the 72-hour rule provides a perfect microcosm for understanding the wider complexities of American Evangelical “purity culture.” Like purity culture teachings more broadly, the rule reduces complex human sexual behaviour into simplistic mandates that are presented as divinely authoritative. Understanding the history of the rule opens up an interesting case study in the Evangelical use, circulation, and application of extra-Biblical authorities and directives. 

After a half-decade of stagflation, how do you make capitalism fun again? This was the challenge administrators at Oklahoma Christian College took on in the late 1970s. Their answer took the form of a multi-million dollar "edutainment" center called Enterprise Square, USA. Employing animatronics, puppet shows, video games, and cutting-edge interactive multimedia, Enterprise Square took visitors on a grand tour of the American free market, hopefully leaving them enchanted enough at the end to buy one of the gift shop's "I <3 CAPITALISM" bumperstickers. This paper examines the "aesthetics of persuasion" (to borrow James Bielo's term) developed within Enterprise Square's exhibits, scripts, and displays. The paper situates Enterprise Square's edutainment efforts within a larger history of American Christian projects that embrace and promote capitalism as God's will for the United States, and it seeks to develop a language for identifying ongoing attempts to baptize capitalism as the economics of Christianity. 

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A film’s moving images move us, the viewers, in our bodies, minds and feelings, draw us out of ourselves and into the world of the film, and create a shared affectivity among viewers. This presentation will inquire about how cinema is able to move and affect us, focusing specifically on the genre of melodrama with its characteristic intense emotional expressivity and impact. Through the formal analysis of select scenes from non-typical melodramas – Shane, Breaking the Waves, Au hasard Balthazar, 120 BPM – I will argue that the careful construction of images and scenes through aesthetic forms creates an affective economy that reflects and impacts religious sensibilities (here focusing on Christianity) in several ways: it deepens the sense of self as gift, encourages the experience of shared creatureliness, draws attention to the affective dimension of moral orders, and opens up a space of new possibility of healing and flourishing.

When Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker (2012) was released on the Chinese internet, it generated a maelstrom of emotional responses. While some lauded it as an expression of authentic Buddhism, others voiced an overwhelming urge to pummel the eponymous walker—a monk who quietly performs slow walking meditation across Hong Kong. How did an unassuming short film affect such heated responses? This paper explores the interrelations between religious ethics, film aesthetics, and popular culture in Tsai’s slow cinema. Analyzing the film’s production, text, and reception, I trace the formations of Buddhistic wisdom, which reshapes psychoaffective experience while guiding skillful action in everyday life. Reflecting its artist’s devotion to Mahayana Buddhism, Walker’s film language resists modernity’s fixation with speed, seeking to foster viewerly states traditionally shaped by Buddhist ritual practices. Despite slow cinema’s limited reach under regnant patterns of media consumption, a diachronic perspective reveals generative possibilities that bear fruit over time.

This paper focuses on Luis Buñuel’s 1969 film La voie lactée (The Milky Way), a curiously understudied masterpiece of modern religious cinema. The film follows two pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, but its real focus is Buñuel’s avant-garde cinematography and nonlinear storytelling, which reinvent the cinematic language of religious experience. Here, pilgrimage is presented not as a pious journey, but as a surreal expedition through time and history, set against the backdrop of modern France and moments like the Mai 68 protests, Jesus’ ministry, and Roman heresies. Buñuel’s long camera pans and striking architectural shots juxtapose the banality of the landscape with the film’s ever-shifting emotional and temporal landscapes. Infused with the techniques of Surrealism, La voie lactée creates a filmic world where faith, doubt, Catholicism, and heresy collide. Ultimately, Buñuel captures the deep ambiguity of belief, revealing Catholicism’s fragile place in 1960s France.

While it is tempting (and not always without merit) to criticize Christian films on their predictable, sometimes risible storylines, this misses the main appeal of the genre to the target audience. Similar to how grindhouse horror films appeal to nice audiences not for their plot but for their gore, Christian films appeal not based on narrative but based on affect. This essay will build on Linda William's framework of genre affect to conceptualize how Christian films create their own unique affects that appeal to their target audiences. Only with this understanding can scholars truly begin to combat the genre’s extremist rhetoric found in its more conservative entries.

This paper thinks through the concept-practice of takwīn al-nafs (formation of the subject-self) as a form of ethico-politics among a group of anti-colonial writers and actors in the years surrounding the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962). I investigate how takwīn al-nafs troubles the assumed secularity of freedom (and its correlates, liberation, emancipation) as a category of political modernity in its troubling of the boundaries of the ethical/political, as well as the self-contained subject self in the relationship of the anthropos to other living beings: the Divine, as well as animals, plants, the earth, and other celestial beings. Drawing from archival material, publications, and ethnographic fieldwork with students of the Association of Algerian Muslim Scholars and the philosopher and critic Malek Bennabi, I explore how takwīn functioned as a response to colonial subjectification and as an enduring mode of re-membering a dismembered epistemic and ethical-political horizon.

This paper examines how asylum adjudications based on conversion to Christianity expose the paradoxes of religious freedom within secular nation-states. While the 1951 Refugee Convention upholds the right to change religion as grounds for asylum, European courts overwhelmingly reject such claims. Decision-makers assess not only persecution risk but also the “genuineness” of conversion, thereby constructing a “Christian orthodoxy” that is far removed from the lived religion of converts or their German supporters.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Germany, this paper argues that courts “secularize” Christianity by transforming it into a legal category, using religious freedom as a mechanism of exclusion rather than inclusion. Asylum seeking converts to Christianity must navigate a contradiction: invoking religious freedom while seeking cultural belonging to a secular state with a Christian history that distrusts overt religiosity. This process reveals how secularism does not simply protect freedom but also constrains it, reinforcing racial and national boundaries.

Against the backdrop of increasing constraints and surveillance in the name of secular “liberation,” French Muslim women pursue a vision of freedom that refuses any binary opposition between secularism and Muslim piety. Drawing on decolonial feminism and Islamic moral psychology, as well as on “secular sensibilities” of choice, rights, and liberation, French Muslim women pursue their freedom through spaces of gender and racial non-mixité. They engage with the moral language of choice, freedom, and rights in a way that intensifies rather than diluting their pious aspirations. Freedom is cherished as a devotional virtue cultivated in community, rather than as an individualized resistance. This presentation underscores the Islamic genealogies of freedom that inform these women’s discourses, as counterweights to an Enlightenment understanding. Islamic ethics of non-compulsion, of consent and testimony, and of training the soul are essential ways to understand freedom and choice as “Islamic secular,” decolonial feminist, and pious sensibilities.

The concept of ummah is often misrepresented in Western discourse as a transnational Muslim solidarity that undermines the nation-state. Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques ummah as “toxic cosmopolitanism,” claiming it prioritizes religious loyalty over universal moral obligations. However, this critique oversimplifies ummah and ignores its historical evolution, particularly among marginalized Muslim communities facing structural injustice. This study critically engages Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, highlighting its Eurocentric assumptions and its detachment from political struggle, which fail to address systemic exclusion and the lived experiences of racialized Muslim minorities.

Through a field study of Indonesian Muslim immigrants at Al-Falah Mosque in Philadelphia, this research examines ummah as an ethical practice of recognition and resilience. By centering lived experience, it challenges reductionist portrayals and argues that ummah functions as an alternative cosmopolitanism—a moral praxis of solidarity, liberation, and justice in response to systemic exclusion.

This paper examines the tripartite dialogical paradigm of Church–dialogue–Christ, first established by Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council, that informs the Catholic Church's approach to interreligious dialogue today. A study of Nostra Aetate and subsequent magisterial documents on dialogue reveals that the Church’s understanding of itself as missionary affects its approach to dialogue, and the content of this dialogue is determined by the Church’s understanding of Jesus Christ, who is both the Word professed in dialogue as well as the source of this very mission. Moreover, as the universalizing message of Nostra Aetate 'broke open' each point of this paradigm to the world, I argue that this paradigm of universal Church–universal dialogue–universal Christ still maintains efficacy, still speaks truth, in our current pluralistic context.

When Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on non-Christian religions, absolved the Jewish people of collective responsibility for the death of Christ, the church at last renounced an ancient prejudice. Among the American bishops at the council, the most vigorous advocate for this historic step was Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing. Drawing on untapped archival sources, this paper examines the context of Cushing's pivotal intervention, tracing his grassroots diplomacy with Jewish communities and his cultivation of Augustin Cardinal Bea, the Vatican official who led the charge for the declaration. Cushing's own zeal for Jewish-Christian relations arose in part from his encounter with anti-Semitism in his own archdiocese, particularly in the right-wing Catholic movement led by Father Leonard Feeney. Cushing's clash with traditionalists, and his belief that interfaith charity takes priority over doctrinal precision, mirrors ideological tensions in the church today, sixty years after the close of the council.

Based on over 100  (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) archival collections, this paper re-examines the "Jewish origins" of Nostra Aetate. Surveying the recent literature, published since the last two council anniversary (>2005), it first outlines and then challenges how our current narrative has strongly entangled memory with history in the past decades. Going against the grain and back to archival collections, it elaborates a more nuanced, complex and pluralistic account of Vatican II, through the many immediate "non-Christian" perspectives, which have remained lost or largely unknown to a mainly Catholic scholarship on VaticanII. 

As it tries to account for Jewish and Muslim voices on VaticanII in an emic perspective, decentering the narrative from its traditional historical and theological background, context and audience, the paper addresses 60 years of solid scholarship on VaticanII with a daring question: what remains indeed from VaticanII if we tell "what happened there", based on non-Christian sources only? 

This paper will examine how Nostra Aetate uses Mary as a bridge figure between Christians and Muslims and how it influenced subsequent Popes and religious figures to reference her in various speeches and statements.  It will examine how Muslims have been receptive to this initiative through visiting Meryem Ana Evi in Turkey as well as writing about her in academic and scholarly settings.  It will conclude by critically examining this use and ask how Mary can open doors to new theological inquiry, shared devotion and Christian-Muslim dialogue.