In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper explores a case study of one congregation’s attempt to develop affordable housing on their land—their animating theological imagination and the widening web of political engagements and solidarities produced by their conscientization—as an example of “iterative orthopraxy” through which “the real” and “right action” are progressively revealed. Thinking with Freire, Sobrino, and Dussel, I develop a theory of action as a transformative-epistemological method. Foregrounding the iterativity of orthopraxy underscores that actors cannot a priori know which concrete collective actions constitute “the good.” Each subsequent action made in solidarity toward liberation and life is a refined best approximation. The humility required and instilled by the space of unknowing demonstrates the spirituality of such praxis. I proceed to reflect on the revised portrait of relations and contradictions generated by this case, particularly with respect to the political-economy of property, and the questions such revelations raise for practitioners.  

Reflecting on San Bernardino’s recent history, its current issues such as the growing unhoused population and the realities of living on the streets – this paper discusses co-walking methodologies as a way to explore social, religious, spiritual and theological subjects in conversation with street life. Can walks and conversations with a church community leader serving the unhoused population provide an entry into a co-created conversation that explores urban religion in the streets and more? The paths and places that we walked were selected by both researcher and community leader, which in turn allowed the church leader to also direct the walk,  experiences we had and the topics we explored. With walking methods in view, this paper suggests how scholars and community members may create shared-forms of knowledge on religion as it exists in these city streets, how religion and the city problems interact and bring attention to problems in the city. 

What might our interrelationship with one another teach us about community development? What is the spiritual work required to foster a more beloved community? This engagement with practical theology examines the role of a city planner (a public sector role) as a ministerial and pastoral profession through Black, Buddhist, and Christian prophetic traditions. This paper asserts a framework for understanding neighboring is: a) a critical path for spiritual development, b) a vocational path/ministry, and c) a form of pastoral care and spiritual imagination.

Moving beyond proximity is a call to karmic action that deals with the material, spiritual, and civic aspects of the places we inhabit. By integrating the practical, liturgical, and theological aspects of the sangha as experienced through the lens of place, this paper proposes a framework for a socially engaged application to public service and city planning that aims to omit no one in the process. 

For twelve years, I have directed a set of practitioner-oriented, campus-community programs in religious literacy and interfaith leadership while at the same time publishing, teaching, and presenting in the critical study of religion. Wearing these “two hats” can produce a fair amount of internal conflict. Thus I routinely wrestle with the three exemplary issues for this session: how to bring a measure of rigor to the scholar-practitioner dialogues and interactions that I participate in and program, how to negotiate these two different roles within myself and with my students in the classroom, and how attune myself to the ethical questions that invariably arise in wearing these two hats in my scholarship, programming, and teaching. Although I do not have hard-and-fast answers or solutions to any of them, I can bring to them a measure of experience and perspective, one from which these issues are not as thorny as might seem.

This paper examines an Epiphanic theory of attentio from late medieval England, exemplified in a sermon of fourteenth-century Franciscan friar-poet William Herebert. Because, Herebert suggests, 1) attentio enables one to serve God, and 2) “no one can come to the Father except through [Jesus],” 3) attentio is a contemplative mediator, immanently Christological. Herebert tracks the verbal logic of his thema to the virtues Augustine ascribes to good teachers—attention, good will, and docility: to come is a sign of docility, to adore is a sign of good will, to see is a sign of attentio. This makes attentio a sign of the Epiphanic object, just as the Epiphanic object is a sign of the incarnate Word. Collapsing the middle terms, Herebert finds that attentio is a sign of Christ. Eucharistically, attending to the sign transforms it into the signified. I apply this theory of attention to Herebert’s extant devotional lyrics.

This paper examines the status of wonder (admiratio) in the seventeenth-century psychological writings of René Descartes and Benedictus de Spinoza. Wonder was an affective state that could be newly explained by a scientific psychology on the model of medicine and physics, but it also had an epistemological function, explaining how it is that our attention focuses on this rather than that, and an ethical function, guiding a person to right attention. Descartes treats wonder as the first of all passions, a precondition for all other feeling, but Spinoza declines to count it as an affect at all, not even as the last. This paper reads their divergence on wonder as evidence of their differing views on causal explanation and respective departures from scholastic epistemology. It illustrates one way in which theological and ethical arguments on causation, will, and self-development were involved in early modern attempts to ground natural science.

Immanuel Kant diagnoses both himself and Emanuel Swedenborg with diseases of attention. Kant’s hypochondria led him to attend to his body’s obscure affective forces for signs of lifeforce and longevity, while Swedenborg’s enthusiasm involved attending to his visions as souls or signs of the afterlife. This paper examines Kant’s epistemological account of attention, important, I argue, for his philosophy of religion. I consult Kant’s medical sources on attentional pathologies, which illuminate the role of affective and attentive experience in Kant’s critical philosophy, aligning his thought with earlier diagnoses and therapies of idolatrous fixation. By foregrounding the medicine of attention, this paper also draws connections to earlier scholastic and mystical sources, challenging the common assumption that Kant’s critique of enthusiasm marks an irrevocable break from these traditions. At least on the question of attention, Kant struggled to “look away.”

This paper situates Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 speeches On Religion within the aesthetic framework of Romantic universal poetry. While Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as “intuition and feeling” of the universe has typically been read as a critique of Fichtean intellectual intuition, these affects also play an important role in late Enlightenment and early Romantic art criticism, where they become associated with problems of attention and imagination. In On Religion, Schleiermacher transforms two key problems of attention that emerge at this time: 1) a Pygmalion-like attentive overinvestment, which seeks to animate, even copulate with the work of art, and 2) the Romantic problem of a distracted, excessive imagination that ignores the artwork. For Schleiermacher, both excessive attention and distraction – paired together – become positive means of ascent toward an experience of religious-erotic cosmic absorption that has no specific object because it participates in the universe’s endlessly proliferative process of self-representation.

This paper analyzes the music videos of Pastor Hyung Jin (Sean) Moon, or King Bullethead, as theological carriers of contemporary religious Korean American conservatisms. The work contextualizes Pastor Moon’s Tennessee-based World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church, or the Rod of Iron Ministries, within the broader Unification Church movement. Utilizing both institutional material and external documents, this analysis articulates the theologies (and their new media manifestations) which Moon, and the Rod of Iron Ministries, inherited from the South Korean Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church. Additionally, this paper will explore the theology’s reformulations since Hyung Jin Moon’s 2013 schism. These fall into three primary doctrinal camps: the political/spiritual, holy family, and the divine right to rule. The gun-slinging rap videos of King Bullethead give material (digital) shape to Moon’s doctrinal conservatisms and missionizes the ultimate imperialist and dominionist agenda of the Rod of Iron Ministries.

This paper explores Christian eschatology as orienting American society towards the disappearance of black persons from public life. Probing the iconic white supremacist film, The Birth of A Nation (1915), we will uncover how a racialized version of Christian eschatology is facilitated through this film. This paper argues that the expression of this Christian eschatology in The Birth of A Nation informs the disappearance of black persons from American life in the 20th century as a mode by which constitutes the organization of the United States as a racial project. I call this process a “theo-politics of disappearance;” which describes the intersection of Christian eschatology and anti-blackness as facilitating the removal of black persons from American life. This paper explores black removal as most notably expressed in the mass incarceration of black persons in America’s jails and prisons in the latter half of the 20th century. 

The God’s Not Dead film series is more than just faith-based entertainment—it is a battle cry. Over the past decade, the franchise has transformed from a simple tale of campus religious persecution into a full-fledged manifesto for Christian nationalism, urging believers to reclaim America through political action. This paper critically examines how the films construct a siege mentality, stoking fears of a secular takeover while positioning conservative Christians as the last defenders of the nation’s moral and spiritual fabric. Through historical analysis and discourse critique, I explore how God’s Not Dead strategically aligns its messaging with pivotal cultural flashpoints—Trumpism, education battles, and pandemic-era governance—to mobilize its audience. Ultimately, this paper argues that the franchise is not just reflecting Christian nationalist sentiment but actively shaping it, weaponizing nostalgia, faith, and fear to turn religious conviction into a political movement with tangible electoral consequences.

AppleTV’s Severance is on the surface a sci-fi flavoured workplace drama, but alongside this presentational veneer lies a more dynamic, multifaceted interrogation of what it means to believe in leaders (corporate, faith, and governmental alike), where the line is drawn between healthy faith and cult-like devotion, what freedom looks like and how (and when) it needs to be fought for, and how one defines identity (not least of all: their own). From these launch points, as illustrated by characters individually and collectively as well as through the overarching plot, Severance provides an exceptionally fruitful source material for examination, reflection and potential instruction across numerous critical and consequential contexts: our personal communities, the Academy as a whole, and the larger global sociopolital context of modern times. 

There are many reasons to be suspicious of filial piety: Sociological research details the harms done to LGBTQ+ persons trapped in harmful families of origin. Family abolitionists contend that the family has been co-opted by neocapitalism. Even the New Testament expresses suspicion of biogenetic relations. Yet for all these risks, a growing recognition of the place of queer elders in communities—as well as the ageism, idealized tropes, and other problems—point to a need to reevaluate the role that queer elders play and the obligations due to them. I argue that, fraught as it is, the concept of filial piety can help us do this work. I utilize sociological research, Confucian virtue ethics, queer theory arguments, and theological work on adoption to theorize the benefits of filial piety (the goods conferred by intergenerational relationships; the need to give and receive support across one’s lifespan; etc.) as well as its vicious shortcomings.

This study explores how Fiducia Supplicans (FS), the Vatican’s declaration on blessings for same-sex couples and those in “irregular situations,” is received by Filipino clergy and same-sex couples. Using a Conversation in the Spirit approach, it will facilitate a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) where both groups engage in open dialogue. Inspired by my experience in the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines’ (CBCP) Synodal Discussion on Gender and Sexuality, this research replicates that process of communal discernment. Instead of separate FGDs, a combined session will foster true encounter and dialogue, ensuring diverse perspectives are heard without judgment. Thematic analysis of the discussion will assess whether FS is received, rejected, or engaged with in a synodal manner. This study aims to provide insights into how Filipino clergy and laity navigate FS and whether their engagement reflects the Church’s call to synodality.

In 2003, amidst a groundswell of activism on behalf of children living with HIV, the United States initiated the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Suddenly, children who were born with HIV in PEPFAR-supported countries had access to antiretroviral medication. Those children are now considered the first generation of people born with HIV to live into adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a twelve-year-relationship with Mwana Mwema, a network of faith-based pediatric HIV clinics across Nairobi that were supported by PEPFAR and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) before their abrupt closure in 2024, I explore the ways PEPFAR and USAID policy became imbedded in the lives of some of these young adults. Analyzing the fragile social, financial, and spiritual ecosystems instituted through global health policy, I illuminate how young adults and practitioners widened the impact of PEPFAR and made the initiative work despite its contingent nature. 

This paper analyses the understanding of faith-based development work in Called to Transformation – Ecumenical Diakonia (World Council of Churches 2022) in three steps. Firstly, I discuss the understanding of Christian social practice and ecumenical diakonia articulated in the document. Secondly, I examine how the relationship between churches and specialized ministries is conceptualised in the context of ecumenical diaconia and faith-based responses to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thirdly, I analyse how the document understands the relationship between religious faith and human rights and how it plays a role in Christian faith-based development work. I conclude by reflecting on how Called to Transformation – Ecumenical Diakonia positions faith-based actors in development practice towards 2030 and the post-2030 agenda.

This study explores the dual use of Sunni theological discourse in Turkish politics, examining how religious movements employ theological arguments to both endorse and challenge President Erdoğan’s leadership. Using political discourse analysis, the research systematically analyzes public statements, sermons, and social media posts from major religious groups. The study argues that religious discourse provides a rich set of justifications, allowing actors to selectively frame political positions through theological reasoning. It examines how Erdoğan is alternatively portrayed as a defender of the ummah and a leader uniting the Islamic world or as a hypocrite failing to uphold justice. The analysis highlights how religious leaders serve as brokers, using theological cues to mobilize political behavior. By bridging religion, social science, and political discourse, this study contributes to broader discussions on the intersection of theology and political behavior in contemporary societies.

Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) is widely recognized as a fundamental human right, yet in practice it remains marginalised within many global development frameworks. This presentation explores the practical integration of FoRB beyond legal instruments, arguing that it is not merely a right to be acknowledged but a practice to be woven into humanitarian and development work. Building on the Moral Duty Bearer Framework (MDB) and the Religion & Development Systems Framework (RDS), we demonstrate how these conceptual backbones guide the operationalization of FoRB in diverse contexts. Drawing on LM International’s multi-regional programs with a focus on Sahel in Africa we showcase practical applications such as gender analysis, interfaith dialogue, youth engagement, and faith-sensitive service delivery. We also examine the challenges—such as limited engagement with faith-based actors, particularly local faith actors and the exclusion of FoRB from crisis and conflict response—and highlight critical gaps in current monitoring and policy frameworks. Ultimately, this presentation argues that FoRB is essential for just, inclusive, and resilient development, and provides concrete pathways for integrating FoRB as both a principle and practice in international development work.

Drawing on recent work on religion and empire, this paper looks to Burma’s Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885) to investigate the entanglement between Buddhism and empire. Scholars working outside of Asia have been publishing new findings on how religion has structured and resisted imperialism (Wenger and Johnson 2022); however, scholarship on Asian history, especially in Southeast Asia, has been less attentive to entanglements between Buddhism and empire. This paper investigates how the Burmese negotiators of the 1867 Treaty for the Further Protection of Trade with the British used Buddhist history, literature, and practices to assert the Burmese sovereign’s right to corner particular markets as Burmese royal monopolies. This paper seeks to complicate the histories we tell about empire and Southeast Asia to show how Buddhist traditions have participated in empire at multiple registers—from resistance to domination.

Calls to decolonize Buddhist Studies are growing, but what decolonization means remains contested. This paper argues that dismantling Orientalist legacies is not enough. The field’s epistemic foundations must be rethought. Starting from the history of Buddhists Studies in Japan, this paper will show how the field was co-produced through transnational entanglements, shaped as much by Japanese intellectuals as by European Orientalists. Indeed, Japanese scholars reframed Buddhism to resist Western hegemonic classifications, yet in doing so, they also helped construct the categories that continue to define the field—often in ways aligned with Japan’s imperial ambitions. This history complicates default postcolonial critiques. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges and a metamodern approach, this paper proposes an alternative: a Buddhist Studies that integrates Buddhist epistemologies as generative theoretical resources rather than mere objects of study, opening new methodological possibilities for the discipline and religious studies at large.

Inspired by Curators of the Buddha, this paper examines the American Vipassana movement through the lens of Orientalism. Departing from the typical Buddhist modernism framework, I explore how the movement established authority by employing both exoticizing and denigrating forms of Orientalism. Exoticizing Orientalism, such as portraying Asia as a source of ancient wisdom and utilizing the “Oriental monk” trope, was employed to legitimate the founders’ authority. Conversely, denigrating Orientalism discredited Asian and Asian American Theravada by depicting it as corrupt and backward, thereby justifying the movement's innovations. This dual approach shaped sectarian boundaries by fostering alliances with other convert meditation-centric lineages while Othering and excluding Asian and Asian American Theravada, thereby solidifying the movement's distinct identity and authority.

Ambivalence–simultaneous love and hate of an object of desire–is a recurrent concept in Curators of the Buddha (1995): it is mentioned explicitly in Donald Lopez Jr.’s introduction as well as the essays written by Luis Gómez and Lopez. While it has been given explicit theoretical treatment in postcolonial studies by authors like Homi Bhabha, such analysis has not yet been adequately applied to Buddhist Studies. This paper revisits ambivalence in order to better understand the “logics of representation” (11) and how this applies to the current state of Buddhist Studies. It argues that the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein is best suited for analyzing ambivalence for its object relations theory as an analysis of desire. In doing so, this paper aims to not only contribute to ‘postcolonial’ Buddhist Studies but to postcolonial critique more generally through the use of the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein.