In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This presentation explores the interplay between sound and meaning in the Qur’an, demonstrating how phonetic patterns contribute to both thematic depth and aesthetic harmony. While Ferdinand de Saussure’s emphasis on linguistic arbitrariness led to the marginalization of sound symbolism in linguistic studies, research by Edward Sapir and contemporary scholars has revived interest in phonetic associations across languages. Building on this foundation, I examine how the Qur’an employs vowel length, rhyme shifts, and consonant contrasts to enhance meaning.

Through case studies from Sūrat al-Muddaththir, Sūrat al-Balad, and Sūrat Maryam, I show how long and short vowels signal abundance and its cessation, while consonant patterns evoke reflection, turbulence, or severity. These phonetic choices not only enhance the Qur’an’s rhetorical and poetic qualities but also reinforce its theological messages. This study highlights the Qur’an’s soundscapes as a sophisticated linguistic device, where meaning and aesthetics function in seamless harmony.

The miḥna sparked extensive discourse on the Qur’an’s ontological nature and God’s Attribute of Speech (kalām Allāh). The Māturīdis and Ashʿarīs distinguished between the pre-eternal kalām nafsī and the temporal kalām lafẓī. In parallel, the uṣūliyyūn debated the Qur’an’s essential composition. The Ahl al-Ḥadīth held that the Qur’an consists of both lafẓ and maʿnā, while the Ḥanafīs, as Omar Qureshi argues, viewed it as maʿnā alone, permitting translations as valid Qur’anic expressions. Shāfiʿī critics equated this with the Muʿtazilī Created Qur’an doctrine. Qureshi suggests that later Ḥanafīs abandoned this view, but I argue that defenses persisted, notably in Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī and Mullā Jīwan. The Ḥanafī ontology of the Qur’an aligns with the dominant mutakallimūn position, though its legal application evolved. Mustafa Sabri’s refutation of Qur’anic translations under Atatürk underscores this tension. I will explore these shifts in applied uṣūl and fiqh, and demonstrate the persistence of the original ontology.

In his famed Qur’anic commentary, al-Kashshāf, al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) proposed a new hermeneutic and third way for interpreting the ambiguous verses (mutashābihāt) of Islamic scripture: an imaginative hermeneutic (ṭarīq al-takhyīl). While secondary scholarship has identified this innovative proposal and has attempted to identify precisely what is meant by al-Zamakhsharī’s imaginative hermeneutics, a fuller examination of its reception in the genre of Qur’anic commentary (tafsīr) awaits future study. In this paper, I examine encyclopedic, marginal glosses, as well as madrasa commentaries in the post-classical period to conclude that al-Zamaksharī’s proposal was debated and subsequently re-interpreted to conform with mainstream theological hermeneutics and Arabic rhetoric, ultimately neutralizing its revolutionary potential. 

This paper examines the scriptural hermeneutics of Mollā Muḥammed b. Ḥamza el-Fenārī (d. 834/1431), a pivotal figure in the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Ottoman intellectual tradition. Fenārī was both a jurist and a Sufi metaphysician, producing works in legal theory and Sufi Quranic exegesis. By analyzing Fuṣūl al-Badāʿiʿ and ʿAyn al-Aʿyān, this study argues that there is a subtle crossover between exoteric and esoteric interpretive frameworks in Fenārī's writings. By adhering to classical Ḥanafī legal theory, Fenārī critiques Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s alternative understanding of linguistic communication and interpretation, favoring an approach that aligns with Sufi notions of interpretive plurality. This paper aims to contribute to an integrative picture of Fenārī between these traditions within the context of the later periods of Islamic thought.

My paper explains how 4E Cognition can illuminate a Christian understanding of humans as the image of God. My paper has three parts. First, I situate recent scholarship in comparative psychology, which has argued that humans are unique due to a capacity for shared intentionality, within a 4E Cognition framework. Second, I show how, for Christians, the triune God may be conceived as an eternal act of shared intentionality, which the trinitarian persons eternally enact. Finally, I argue that humans are the image of God because of their capacity to dynamically couple with, and enact in humans, the shared intentionality with the divine.

4e cognition offers resources supporting an anthropology and an ontology that overcome mind/body and related dualisms, dualisms which contradict the original understandings of the Western monotheisms and of some Asian religions. 4e cognition  embraces a holism with respect to the human organism, enabling a rapprochement with the Hebrew biblical, New Testament, and Qur’anic view of the human being as a psycho-somatic unity. For 4e cognition, the human organism comes embedded or emplaced in an environment with affordances, as it enacts meaning in co-constituting its  lifeworld. The cruciality of social relationships and nature resonate with Western scriptures and with Mahayana Buddhism, Ruism/Confucianism, and Daoism. 4e cognition  extends the joint project of organism and environment to evolution, with a mutual adaptation or specification of organism and environment. The fit of organism and environment finds resonance with classical religions, insofar as they uphold the goodness of creation or of the world.

Religion can be studied within the paradigm of Scientific Worldview Studies. Worldviews address fundamental issues, enabling humans to make sense of their place in the larger scheme of things. Scientific Worldview Studies grounds this meaning-making in an evolutionary context, treating human worldviews as continuous with basic sense-making tasks all organisms engage in. Terror Management Theory (TMT) supports this meaning-making role of worldviews. While TMT treats worldviews within an evolutionary context, its explanatory framework of ‘the denial of death’ limits its scope and empirical support. Enactivism allows for a richer account of continuity between basic-level world-making and the socio-linguistic sophistication of religious worldviews. It argues that all organisms act in non-random ways to maintain functional integrity—this is autopoiesis. For social creatures, this process encompasses elements of the social environment, setting the stage for the symbolically encoded worldviews constructed by humans. This approach frames worldview construction as an extension of autopoietic processes. 

The connection between body-minds and their embedding in the environment is a primary concern of 4E cognition, nature religion movements, and environmentalism. Wiccan practice presents a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of these concerns through its centering of the connection of body-mind and nature. Two cognitive strategies found in Wicca will be examined: correspondence of embodiment and environmental embedding through the conceptual blend of nature deities, and practices of enactive sense-making in natural settings. In combination, these facilitate interpretative drift toward connection and identification with nature. This subsequently leads to an increased propensity toward environmentalist activity, another central tenet of Wiccan spiritual practice. Taken together, Wiccan practice not only offers fertile ground for the exploration of embodied, embedded, and enactive cognition in religious practices, but also how these may also intersect with environmentalist concerns.

This paper expands the scope of the cognitive science of meditation by applying an enactive approach to the goals of classical and contemporary Abrahamic contemplative traditions. Drawing on recent enactive accounts of Buddhist contemplative practices and paths, it argues that influential Jewish, Christian, and Islamic accounts conceive of the contemplative path as a transformation of the "emergent self"—a self that can be deconstructed but is ultimately reconstructed in ways that simultaneously enhance attunement with divine reality in creation and ethical action. Rather than advocating for the complete dissolution of selfhood, these traditions describe ultimate contemplative transformation as the realization of a dynamically coupled (resurrected) self and world.

This paper is an auto-ethnographic account of cultivating compassion through embodied ascetic Tibetan Buddhist practices performed during a fasting retreat called nyungne. It is an account from experiences during fieldwork at Tekcholing Nunnery in Boudhanath, Nepal 2023, where I gathered interviews and experiences of care, compassion, love, and confidence to understand how these moments are felt and experienced. This auto-ethnography contributes to the comparative conversation on embodied theology by showing how an ascetic contemplative practice may rely upon the physical body and circumvent rational, conceptual ideas gained from cultural, philosophical, or doctrine. In this way, we can see how other practitioners may also rely upon their own embodied knowledge in lieu of more conceptual knowledge acquisition.

This paper engages the 14th century anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, particularly his “Letter of Privy Counseling,” and explores the role of affectivity in Christian contemplative practice in comparative perspective. While contextualizing the Cloud author within the “affective Dionysian” tradition of medieval mysticism and outlining the doctrinal and devotional elements of the practice he commends, the paper draws upon phenomenological resources to highlight the role of affectivity (or “auto-affection”) in grounding and sustaining contemplative transformation. Using phenomenology as a bridge, the paper sketches key points of comparison with Tibetan Buddhist practice traditions, particularly where the role of basic affect is concerned. The work of Tsoknyi Rinpoche, John Welwood, and John Makransky are especially informative of this move.

This paper develops for comparative theological work an understanding of the role played by affect in contemplative insight. It works out the role of affective “sensing,” or intimating, in the unfolding of contemplative insight, the way cultivating and remaining in a specific basic affect creates the conditions under which sudden contemplative insight can occur. It does so by examining instructions in the “preliminary practices” (sngon ’gro) of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition Dzogchen (rdzogs chen, “Great Completeness”). Dzogchen’s preliminary practices self-consciously cultivate intensive affective states, using them to evoke recognition of rig pa (“awareness”)—the simple, primordial, unconditioned ground of awareness. I suggest that, for Dzogchen commentators, there is a specific but utterly simple affect which uniquely intimates rig pa’s qualities: a felt sense of total safety released into expanse. I use Eugene Gendlin’s account of how implicit meanings are present to us as affects to understand this facet of Dzogchen.

This paper explores the entanglement of disability and faith in Frederick Douglass's writings. In contrast to other nineteenth-century deployments of broken bones, burns, and limps, Douglass refuses to attach innocence and passive receptivity to the disabled body. Instead, Douglass imbued disabled bodies with activity and resourcefulness. His narratives use disability to condemn slavery, as in the figures of Doctor Copper and Henny Bailey, as well as point to the possibility of slavery’s undoing. I’ll argue that, for Douglass, disability was more than a metaphor or revelation of false piety. Disability was lived materiality produced by a “diseased [white, Christian] imagination” that, when re-membered through its agential capacity, held promises of kinship and freedom.

This paper traces how Christian representations of madness and moral choice impacted Anglo-American healthcare in the 19th and early 20th century. Theological associations between autonomy and self-management framed modern psychology as a moral endeavor and the management of psychiatric conditions as control of the will. Normalcy, sanity, and health function not only as absence of psychosis, but also as lack of dependency. Using ethnographies of group therapy, I examine how self-management models for mood disorders require individual and self-reflective capacities which are outside the grasp of a person with a mood disorder. Rather than reflecting lived experiences of people with psychosocial disabilities, many self-management strategies assume a self-governing and independent moral agent. I argue that distributed agency and participatory decision-making better describe how people with psychosocial disabilities display agency, structuring moral choice as a collaborative event rather than an individual capacity. 

Cook (2019), a psychiatrist and theologian, observes that religious experiences during mania and psychosis are often framed within a binary perception — that “either someone is psychotic, or they are having a genuine spiritual experience, but not both.” This framework dismisses and silences those who report profound religious experiences during mania or psychosis, reducing their accounts to purely illness narratives. Individuals experience epistemic injustice as diagnosis and psychiatry are prioritised over an individual’s interpretation of their experience as meaningful and spiritual. These experiences are consistently pathologized through the lens of mental illness, psychiatry, and medicine. Drawing on phenomenology of illness and epistemic injustice literature, this paper utilises first-person accounts of Christians who have reported religious experiences during mania and psychosis. The research highlights the significance of first-person narratives, amplifying an often-overlooked community, and advocating for freedom to interpret their experiences as both illness and meaningful religious encounters. 

Individuals with intellectual disabilities experience disproportionately high rates of depression and anxiety (Mrayyan et al. 2019, 1), yet communication deficits often render these conditions undiagnosed and untreated. Conventional mental healthcare, which prioritizes medication and controlled environments, fails to address their holistic well-being. While recent literature explores spiritual care as a tool for alleviating mental distress, individuals with intellectual disabilities are often excluded due to assumptions that cognitive impairments preclude meaningful spiritual engagement (Bertelli et al. 2020). This paper challenges such assumptions by employing a disability-enabling hermeneutic (Swinton, 2011) and a somatic reading of biblical narratives, alongside the author’s autoethnographic experience as a primary caregiver for a son with Down Syndrome. God, as revealed in Scripture, meets individuals within their unique capacities. These findings advocate for spirituality as a viable resource for individuals with intellectual disabilities while challenging exclusionary attitudes in church communities and the privileging of hyper-cognitive spiritual practices.

This paper brings the study of intellectual disability into dialogue with contemplative theology, using resources from both these disciplines to challenge a narrow epistemology that sees intelligence only in terms of conceptual reasoning. Such a view of intelligence ignores scientific evidence that affect, embodiment, and reason are linked in cognition. It also ignores evidence that intelligence has been defined differently throughout history. Non-discursive forms of intelligence have been highly valued in the tradition of affective spirituality in medieval contemplative thought. Nevertheless, people with intellectual disabilities are often excluded from sacraments. In this paper I give evidence that contemplative writers valued forms of intelligence other than conceptual thought. I offer an alternative way of knowing described by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. This paper claims that a reading of The Cloud in relation to intellectual disability will discover a way of knowing that is accessible to all.

‘Another Gospel’ or ‘A remaining tension’? Methodist Arminianism in Great Britain from the Free Grace Controversy to the Anglican-Methodist Covenant, 1740-2004

From its origins in the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival, Methodism in the tradition of the Wesleys has defined itself as confidently and robustly Arminian. This has been a marker of Methodist identity, and it has influenced evangelistic and pastoral practice. After a century of vigorous debate with the proponents of Reformed theology, Calvinist/Arminian polemics diminished from the latter part of the nineteenth century, while from the mid-twentieth century Methodism’s evangelical Arminianism was gradually re-cast into an emphasis on breadth, tolerance, and inclusivity. This paper will track the trajectory of Arminianism in British Methodism from the Wesleys to the present-day, looking particularly at post-Wesley developments, including the reframing or replacement of Arminianism over the past century and the presence or absence of this doctrinal emphasis in ecumenical dialogues.

The classic divide between Arminians and Calvinists pre-date the late 18th and 19th Century slavery debates, and when Arminians and Calvinists engaged the subject of slavery they had their own distinctive perspectives on which to draw.  This paper will examine how slavery was seen by Arminians and Calvinists, arguing that central aspects of Calvinism were easily exploited to support slavery, while central tenets of Arminianism were compatible with abolition.  In particular, Calvinist understandings of divine sovereignty and predestination were used to endorse and even bless slavery, while Arminian understandings of grace and free will undergirded freedom.

One of the doctrines Methodism adopted from Arminianism, and further developed, is prevenient grace – the grace that comes before, that invites, encourages, and even urges humans to accept the divine invitation, the grace where freedom, the ability to choose, ability to respond, is given. This paper will explore the connections, similarities and differences between the Arminian version of prevenient grace and prevenient grace in contemporary Methodist theology. 

Prevenient grace is a theological rationale for human freedom – why freedom is there, and what freedom is for. What human freedom is for might have changed over the centuries. A contemporary version of prevenient grace can include God’s presence in a multireligious world, in a globalized world and in a world marked by conflict. By prevenient grace, humans are enabled to freedom, to responsibility, to do good. Is that still a doctrine to believe in?

The prodigious scholarship of Richard Muller has moderated but not dissipated longstanding critiques of Jacobus Arminius’s Christology, soteriology, personal integrity, and identification as a Reformed theologian. Muller also has noted insightfully the integration of doctrines in post-Reformation dogmatics, such that altering one doctrine would affect others. This paper engages with Muller’s scholarship by first assessing Muller’s four criticisms of Arminius and mounting counterarguments, then building on Muller’s insight on doctrinal integration to identify the common themes that integrate Muller’s and Arminius’s contrasting understandings of Christology, soteriology, ethics and epistemology, and the Reformed tradition. This exercise in theological pattern recognition and comparison yields two models of the integration of doctrine, ethics, and ecclesial identity for contemporary theologians to consider in relation to today’s religious landscape, not least the recent history and current state of Methodism.