In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Session ID: A23-126
Roundtable Session

This panel presents original engagements with, and reflections on, Sara Moslener’s After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White America (Penguin, 2025), followed by a response to the panelists by Sara Moslener. The structures and dynamics of “purity culture” and its role within White American evangelicalism have received increased attention in recent years. In her most recent work on purity culture, After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America, Sara Moslener significantly advances this scholarly agenda and extends it in valuable new directions. Drawing on her research (through the After Purity Project) on the experiences of women impacted by purity culture, she explores the constitutive role of white supremacy in the construction of so-called “traditional” or “biblical” conceptions of “purity” as it impacts the domains of not only gender and sexuality, but family, religion, politics, and racial identity. 

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Session ID: A23-121
Roundtable Session

This roundtable explores the relation between political theology and performance in conversation with Arthur Bradley’s book Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia University Press, 2024). The panel gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars drawn from departments of English, Philosophy, and Religion. Taking Bradley’s book as an incitement, they will place of religion in debates over sovereignty, aesthetics, and theatrical power. By clarifying the link between ritual performance and the production of authority, the panelists will reflect upon the crisis that currently faces pluralist democracies.

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Roundtable Session

This roundtable will bring together U.S.-based practitioners of restorative justice (RJ), transformative justice (TJ), and prison abolition from within and outside academe. It will both situate their praxes as peacebuilding practice and explore these entwined (and sometimes at-tension) modalities as lived religion. While conceiving of prison abolition as a religious practice of peacebuilding is novel, one quickly finds similarities between them in the work of community-led interventions in violence, exercises of imagination, social analysis, and critiques of dominant systems. This roundtable will contextualize prison abolition, RJ and TJ within the peace studies subfield of religious studies, allow participants to engage one another in terms of what, concretely, their praxes entail; the degree to which their activities, commitments, and coalitions constitute lived religious practice; and how everyone can learn from differing emphases in praxes with the potential for collaboration. 

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Papers Session

Cathy Cohen (1997) argues that queer people’s capacity is to cultivate interlocking systems of resistance. Expanding queerness beyond an embodied form of gender of sexual “deviance,” she proposes a project of coalition-building across geographies and traditions. Taking up this framing, we do four things. One, investigate the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of the first openly queer imam, Muhsin Hendricks in South Africa (d.2025). Two, examine the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Three, analyze examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to understand how it is mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. Finally, explore the work of two queer artists in American Chinatowns, imagining alternative spaces and futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns.

Papers

This paper investigates the cultural violence leading up to the assassination of Imam Muhsin Hendricks (d. 2025), the first “openly-queer” imam in the world. It argues that while dominant clerical groups (ʿulamāʾ) in Cape Town condemned the extra-judicial killing of the imam, they spread a toxic theology of violent exclusion. For the last ten years, members of the ʿulamāʾ advocated a position of virulent exclusion or takfīr based on a theological reconciliation between Islam and queerness. This form of excommunication presents a religio-cultural system of marginalization, legitimating the murder of the imam, and even proposing it as a form of cleansing the “moral corruption” in the broader Muslim community. This paper investigates how religious forms are deployed in service of hegemonic sexual scripts legitimating exclusion. Therwsfater, it will analyze the constructive theological work of Imam Muhsin as a form of reimagining Islam. 

This paper examines the anti-trans discourses of neotraditional Muslim American preachers as an adoption of conservative white Christian political discourse in the United States. Transphobia offers discursive mileage to conservative religious leaders and politicians to promote their exclusionary visions for religious norms or the state. This paper considers anti-trans discourses as an expression of white Christian supremacy relying on the marginalization of gender, sexual, racial, and religious minorities such as Muslims. First, it draws parallels in anti-trans rhetoric between the open letters, essays, and fatwas of neotraditional Muslim preachers and the bills and executive orders of conservative white Christian politicians. Thereafter it theorizes the use of discourse for neotraditional Muslim preachers.  Lastly, this paper ends with queerness as a necessarily intersectional political position as reflected in queer and trans Muslims reclaiming Islam as well as in the growing movement challenging anti-trans legislation.

This paper will explore examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to better understand the ways that queerness is being mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. What are the possibilities borne of a refusal to align with the political role ascribed to Jewishness by, for instance, the Trump administration's privileging of campaigns to combat anti-semitism on college campuses? What is the role of queerness in religious and liturgical performances of this refusal? How is queerness sparking re-imaginations of Jewishness, Jewish life, and Jewish ritual in direct opposition to political violence and Zionism as an attempt to enclose and emplace Jewishness? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a reading of queer anti-Zionist Jewish communities through the lenses of queer theory, theories of space and place, and religious studies

This paper examines the works of two queer artists in U.S. Chinatowns who imagine alternative spaces and alternative futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns. In these cultural communities that are increasingly forced into spatial visions of futurity offered by capitalism and carceral violence, queer Chinatown-based artwork (many of whom employ religious and mythical symbolism) instead opens up alternative futures that redefine what safety and freedom look like: they instead illustrate queer visions of freedom and safety through kinship and community that reject mass incarceration or cultural assimilation as means to queer diasporic safety. Reading these queer artwork through the lens of both queer theory and theological aesthetics, this paper considers how these queer/feminist artworks reimagine futures of freedom for Chinatown communities and open up “sanctuary spaces” for queer and minoritized subjects.

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Roundtable Session

This roundtable discussion considers the Qur'an's circulation as a religious scripture in daily life through its manifold "crossing" of sensory and communal boundaries. Though the Qur'an has been richly analyzed through both its vocal recitation and the visuality of manuscript reproductions, other anthropologists of religion have productively engaged scriptures in "transmedial" form, that is, as expressions that "cross" material and sensory thresholds. Drawing on these critiques, the various participants on this roundtable engage different iterations of Qur'anic "crossing," from the Qur'an's circulation as an object of both interfaith understanding and intercommunal violence in the U.S.; to the "voicing" of the Qur'an in the visual medium of American Sign Language; to the Qur'an's remediation through the "interpretive" genre of oral exegesis (tafsir). In doing so, we hope to encourage other anthropologists of religion to rethink the ontologies and sensory epistemologies of the texts and material artifacts in the traditions they study.

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Roundtable Session

This roundtable session will explore the intersection of theology and trauma, with particular focus on religious trauma. Recent global studies indicate that 1 out of every 10 people around the world are de-identifying from religion, specifically because of traumatic or abusive experiences in church (McLaughlin et al. 2022). It is thus the task of this panel to reimaine conceptual and contextual frameworks for connection with the divine alongside trauma survivors. As a panel that is interdisciplinary in nature, we will have input from theologians, philosophers, psychologyists, clinicians, and pastors alongside of the experiences and testimony of trauma survivors.

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Session ID: A23-134
Roundtable Session
Hosted by: Special Session

(1) Womanist Approaches in Religion & Society - Melanie Jones Quarles and Valerie Miles-Tribble (2) Black Theology Unit - Dr. Ebony Marshall Truman (3) Women & Religion Unit - Dr. Tomi Oredein, Dr. Tracey McEwan, Dr. Boyung Lee (4) Cultural African Diaspora Unit - Dr. Scott Barton and Dr. Carol Webster (5) Theology of Martin Luther King Unit - Dr. Leonard McKinnis and Dr. Montague Williams (6) Racial & Ethnic Minorities unit (Dr. Karen Baker-Fletcher) (7) Liberation Theologies Unit - Christine Pae (8) SBL-Womanist Interpretation & Public Theology Unit - Drs. Mitzi Smith and Renita Weems (9) Dr. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, (10) Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas, SBRG .

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Roundtable Session

In recent years, scholarship on African American religious history has moved away from Black Christian denominations as sites of scholarly inquiry. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of James Melvin Washington’s Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (1986), this panel argues for the diverse contributions that denominational histories can make to the study of African American religions.

The panelists for this session will place their work in conversation with Washington’s book. They will identify the ways in which their research grows the canon of scholarship of Black religious traditions through their focus on the Christian denominations that they investigate.

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM Session ID: A23-132
Papers Session

This panel explores a variety of sociological approaches to ritual theory and practice. The first paper analyzes interviews with members who voted to approve women's ordination within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) to determine that this shift came about as a result of experiences of ritual and relationships with authority. The second paper provides results from the multi-sited, mixed-methods Young People and Christian Worship (YPCW) study, focusing on a taxonomy and practices of young ritual participants. The third paper relies on a survey and interviews with Japanese Buddhist monks from diverse sects to examine their varied responses to contemporary mindfulness programs, showing concerns about adaptation to secular Western contexts. The final paper utilizes extensive ethnographic research into Rick Steves' group tours, as well as his books and broadcast media, to show the benefits of applying social performance theory in analyzing ritual action. 

Papers

Our study draws upon 66 first-person accounts of women and men in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) who, only months after the denomination approved women’s ordination in 1984, reflected on how they came to support women’s ordination. The majority of these individuals were either neutral or opposed to women’s ordination before the 1984 conference. How then did they come to support women’s ordination? Ultimately, we argue that support for women’s ordination in the RLDS Church did not simply reflect how individuals wanted to position themselves in relation to ecumenical partners and the great project of “modernity,” as Mark Chaves might suggest, but that the experiences of ritual and its power to shape people after the fact, as described by Molly Farneth, and relationships with authority, as explained by Craig Harline, were key to individual church members changing their minds about women’s ordination.

The Young People and Christian Worship study listens deeply to how young people, including teenagers and emerging adults (aged 13-29), experience public Christian ritual in a range of liturgical expressions—Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and charismatic. This binational, multisite, mixed methods research is situated at the intersection of sociology of religion, ritual studies, and liturgical theology. Research at six field sites included focus groups (185 participants), individual interviews (69 participants), and participant observation (29 days), and is complemented by a survey (1000 respondents). This paper is focused on challenging transactional approaches to ritual and young people through (1) a robust description of the diversity of ways young people experience ritual, and (2) a clear conception of the formation of young people within distinct traditions. Attention to these dynamics frees young people to experience and value diverse dimensions of Christian ritual and illuminates what ritual is meaning and doing today. 

This study examines the response of Japanese Buddhist monks to contemporary mindfulness programs, which have roots in Buddhist traditions but have evolved into secular practices in the West. While mindfulness has gained traction in Japan, the response among monks varies. Some reject its Western interpretations as distortions of Buddhist meditation, while others acknowledge its potential benefits, particularly in alleviating suffering. Concerns are raised regarding the lack of a holistic perspective in these programs, the failure to address underlying issues, and insufficient support for individuals facing challenges during practice. The research involves a questionnaire survey and interviews with Japanese monks from diverse sects to capture both vocal and non-vocal perspectives on mindfulness. The anticipated outcome is to highlight common concerns about the adaptation of mindfulness in Western contexts and its perceived impact on Buddhist philosophy, ultimately contributing to the ongoing dialogue about the intersection of traditional Buddhist practices and modern mindfulness.

Keywords: Mindfulness, Japan, Buddhism, monks, meditation

Over the last twenty years, challenges have been waged at the viability of ritual to capture the complexities and indeterminacies of late modern life: how can we prioritize symbolic meanings of the sacred and profane in analysis while also capturing interpretive agency and contingency? The analytic framework of social performance is a robust solution. I argue that social performance analysis is a valuable approach for scholars of religion, given the framework’s sensitivity to meaning, aesthetics, and audience agency in powering ritual action as well as the ways in which power—both material and symbolic—empowers and constrains ritual action. This framework also doubles as a strong methodological advocate for the importance of studying religion, given the ways it illuminates moral frameworks that undergird seemingly secular spaces. This paper explores these conceptual affordances through a multi-method qualitative study of American travel writer, PBS host, and Lutheran philanthropist Rick Steves.

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Papers Session

Texts found in the Tibetan and Himalayan religions are filled with events and beings that extend beyond the ordinary world into realms of the supernatural and the superhuman. Speculative fiction, whether in genres of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, explores in its own ways many of the same questions about reality, morality, and possibility posed by Tibetan accounts.This two-hour panel places a variety of Tibetan Buddhist sources in conversation with works of speculative fiction to elucidate or interrogate these questions. In six distinctive papers spanning time periods and genres, presenters will use their text pairings as mutually enriching heuristic devices for thinking-with thematic binaries such as freedom/oppression, imagination/reality, enlightenment/delusion, death/rebirth, and humanity/other sentience. The panel includes Tibetan, East Asian, and Euro-American scholars of Tibetan religion at various career stages, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, tenure-track and tenured professors, as well as a published novelist.

Papers

Just as works of speculative fiction address social and ecological concerns through dystopian scenarios, delog (revenant) narratives animate Buddhist ethical concerns and the Tibetan imagination about death and rebirth through visceral images of hellish torment. Accounts of a delog’s visionary journeys into the realms beyond death both edify and generate anxieties about the workings of karma. What if a relative is suffering in hell? What if something we ourselves have done leads to such suffering? This paper takes up literary anxiety, the creation of speculative scenarios in literature that invoke anxieties about possible futures. We place the visionary autobiography of delog Kunzang Chökyi Drolma (b. 1869–70) in conversation with the speculative tale Elsewhere (2022) by Alexis Schaitk about mothers who disappear into the mists in order to explore the edge between the known and unknowable and how literary anxieties over local customs can propel liberative pursuits.

This paper examines narrative control and agency through a comparative analysis of the Tibetan collection of "Zombie Tales" (ro sgrung) and George Saunders' 2022 dystopian short story "Liberation Day." Both works employ speculative fiction to present protagonists who become so engrossed in narratives that they forget themselves and fail to achieve their goals. In the Zombie Tales, a prince repeatedly responds to a captive zombie's stories about karma, compromising his mission. In Saunders' dystopia, a memory-wiped "Speaker" named Jeremy kills his would-be liberators while absorbed in narrating a historical battle. Both works thus explore a central tension: narratives can be vehicles of both control and liberation. This comparative reading highlights a salient feature of Buddhist ethics–though they espouse general moral virtues, they also insist on the irreducibly particularist nature of ethical action.

What does a 17th-century Tibetan travelogue have to do with the novel Piranesi? Taktsang Repa (Stag tshang ras pa, 1574-1651) documented his arduous pilgrimage from Central Tibet to the land of Padmasambhava in Travel Account to Orgyen, the Land of Ḍākinīs: the Steps to Travel on the Path to Liberation, which brims with disarming straightforwardness, candor, and unexpected turns of poetryIn 2020, the British novelist Susanna Clarke, who was by then highly celebrated despite having only published one other novel, released a puzzling new work of speculative fiction entitled Piranesi that took critics and readers alike by surprise. This paper argues that both texts weave the simple act of documenting facts into a grand and startling narrative about the awe and agony implicit in the discovery of truth. Through juxtaposition with Clarke’s radical work of fiction, the narrative moves made by Taktsang Repa centuries earlier are brought into focus.

This paper compares the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's last testament with the British novel Darkness and the Light in order to help better appreciate the content, context, and significance of both narratives. In 1942 British science fiction author Olaf Stapledon published his novel, Darkness and the Light, which narrates a near-future global political order where forces of "darkness" and "light" vie for power. The side of light begins with an independent Tibet's renaissance, where "Young Lamas" lead a scientific and social revolution that spreads across the globe. Just four years later in 1946 Thirteenth Dalai Lama's "last testament" was published in English. The Dalai Lama narrates his efforts toward securing a sovereign and enlightened Tibetan nation. Bound by time, these two texts vividly depict the value of Tibetan voices, both real and imagined, for readerships in a period of world war as they grappled with human suffering and flourishing.

Choné Yum Tsering’s contemporary work of speculative fiction, The Meeting of the Mountain Gods depicts a young man’s experience of attending a meeting of regional gods who are in crisis due to changes in their relationships with humans and each other. Yumtsering employs Tibetan myths about the origin of these relationships in a narrative that probes contemporary realities of environmental degradation and secularizing forces, while also asserting the power of storytelling. Clouds of Offerings for Nyenchen Thanglha similarly addresses a shift in relationships between humans and local gods, in this case precipitated by the new Buddhist regimes of knowledge and ritual technology taking root in Tibet in the 8th century during the time of its attributed author, Padmasambhava, and again in the 14th century, when it was revealed. Both works demonstrate the power of literary creativity to address and construct intersubjective relationships between humans, gods, and the environment.

This paper brings three narratives of sacred landscape and place-based personhood into conversation, exploring how the poetics and politics of imagination engage human and more-than-human powers of cultural memory and resistance. In Alai’s novel A Song for King Gesar, the events of the epic intersect with the present-day story of a young Tibetan man navigating a time of cultural erasure. In the myth of Three Sisters Mountain, the mountain’s female-gendered body enacts a multidimensional protective relationality with the masculine bodies of mountains in Eastern Tibet, as well as with Padmasambhava and Gesar. In N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, each borough of New York City takes embodied form as a more-than-human being tasked with defending the city from destruction. Evoking anthropologist James C. Scott’s ideas of the “hidden transcript,” this paper explores how speculative fiction and place-based chronicles of more-than-human relationships engage multiple registers of meaning-making and truth telling.