In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper examines the bahbsang—the Korean kitchen table—as a sacred cultural site where Korean and Korean American women navigate identity, spirituality, and heritage while resisting diasporic racism and sexism. Grounded in Song Nam Soon’s conceptualization of bahb (rice) as essential to Korean diasporic life, the bahbsang transcends mere nourishment to serve as a critical locus for cultural continuity, resistance, and transformation. Historically contextualizing the bahbsang, the study highlights Korean Christian grandmothers’ negotiation of patriarchal and Confucian norms through culinary practices encapsulated in sonmat, a repository of emotional and embodied wisdom. Extending into contemporary diasporic realities, it explores evolving culinary rituals, including honbap, as forms of personal empowerment and collective resilience. Ultimately, the paper reconceptualizes the bahbsang as a dynamic feminist theological space, framing everyday culinary labor as powerful, sacred acts that affirm women’s authority, agency, and integral roles in shaping cultural and theological discourse.

Culinary heritage disputes, such as the Indonesia-Malaysia rendang controversy, illustrate how cuisine becomes entangled with political economic interests. Dubbed as gastropolitics, such conflicts often involve accusations of theft. Nation-states quarrel over the right to claim the dish as their national cuisine and leverage it to bolster nationalism and augment tourism for economic gain. This presentation critiques the racial capitalist logic underlying gastropolitics, where modern nation-states assert ownership over cultural heritage that oftentimes are older than the nation-states themselves. Against this framework, I propose understanding cuisine through the lens of cultural commons, as conceptualized, among others, by Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess, and Christian Barrere. Cultural commons emphasize communal management, shared stewardship, and dynamic evolution. As an alternative political economy, it moves beyond rigid notions of national ownership. By reframing cuisine as a collectively sustained and evolving heritage, this approach fosters a more inclusive and equitable recognition of culinary traditions, acknowledging the contributions of diverse communities beyond national boundaries.

Not Yet Uhuru: The Colonised South Africa Plate: Meat holds profound cultural significance in South Africa, symbolising community, status, and tradition. The “braai (barbecue) is celebrated as a unifying national ritual” in the post-apartheid era, transcending racial and class divisions as people gather around the grill. In seeking solutions to reduce meat consumption, we must review all aspects of our lives, including our relationship with food. However, this effort requires recognising and acknowledging the role of South Africa’s National Braai Day, which this paper argues is exploited by corporate South Africa to position meat consumption as central to the South African plate. This, in turn, reinforces the narrative of daily meat consumption as a component of the cultural heritage of Black South Africans prior to colonisation.

This paper aims to examine the idea of ​​a ‘great free man’ presented by Seon Master Daehaeng, which focuses on the realization of human nature, interconnectedness, and development of the society. Daehaeng spoke of the freedom to pursue the inherent nature of all people, to empathize and be compassionate with each other as interconnected beings, and to make progress in society by utilizing inner wisdom; to let go of self-centered mind is an essential method of practice in daily life. The paper also explains our direct experiences through counseling with the most unfree prisoners, including death row inmates and life sentences for years, from the perspective of the true human dignity and the transforming power of compassion. It illuminates that true individual freedom and happiness are directly connected to others and society, and that everyone has the inherent freedom to cultivate inner wisdom and compassion to contribute to humanity.

L'Encyclopédie, published in France between 1751 and 1772, is a monumental 35-volume work compiled by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, key figures of the French Enlightenment. Diderot’s entry on Philosophie des Chinois offers a rare Enlightenment perspective on East Asian thought, yet it presents challenges in translation, particularly in its distorted rendering of Chinese names, terms, and references. Our talk critically examines these difficulties and explores how Diderot’s work contributes to the legacy of Eurocentric Enlightenment perspectives on non-Western traditions. Central to our discussion is the paradox of freedom—while the Enlightenment championed liberty and knowledge, it remained constrained by its own cultural biases. Diderot’s engagement with Chinese philosophy reflects this tension, revealing both an expansion of intellectual horizons and the persistence of Western epistemological frameworks. We thus consider how Enlightenment freedom both enabled and restricted ways of knowing across cultural boundaries.

This study examines how, despite the achievements of women’s liberation in Korean society, confrontational feminism has paradoxically reinforced patriarchal sexist codes. It critically analyzes the gendered ontological and epistemological foundations of the liberal humanist subject, inherited by confrontational feminism and proposes an alternative feminine subject marginalized by both patriarchy and feminism. Engaging with the Presidential theme, it interrogates the liberal humanist notion of freedom, presenting instead a subversive conception of it rooted in our feminine subjectivity, i.e., freedom from–not of–the ego. Central to this discussion is salim, a Korean homonym meaning household labor and “life-giving.” Drawing from Laozi, Nietzsche, Levinas, Deleuze, and Byung-Chul Han, this study will explore how their ideas mutually enrich one another, ultimately conceptualizing salim, in a multifaceted way, as a model of postmodern feminine subjectivity—the Salimist. Finally, the works of Korean female artists will be analyzed as aesthetic manifestations of the Salimist.

Religious conversion is a deeply personal and transformative process that encompasses cognitive shifts, mystical experiences, and intellectual awakenings. The Urantia Book fosters unique conversion experiences, often occurring outside institutional religious frameworks, through self-guided engagement with its teachings. This paper applies phenomenology, psychology of religion, and AI-based pedagogy to examine how individuals experience Urantia-based spiritual transformation. Drawing on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience and James Fowler’s Stages of Faith, the study explores the psychological and developmental aspects of these conversions. Additionally, the paper investigates the role of artificial intelligence in mediating religious engagement through algorithmic exposure, AI-guided theological discussions, and adaptive learning systems. By integrating personal narratives, cognitive analysis, and technological mediation, this paper provides a multidimensional approach to religious conversion, contributing to broader discussions on faith development, digital spirituality, and the evolving relationship between AI and transformative belief systems.

Although the current academic discussion on religious conversion predominantly considers conversion as a process, the number of empirical studies that explore the same converts in different points in time remains limited. Also, there is still little research on the asylum seekers’ conversions from Islam to Christianity following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. This article provides a longitudinal perspective through revisiting the experiences of Iraqi forced migrants in Finland, first interviewed in 2017–2018 and then six years later in 2023–2024. While religious conversion has been defined in various ways in different academic fields, faith traditions and societal contexts, this study takes a data-driven approach and analyzes what conversion means in these data. The results show that conversion can signify different things to different individuals, as well as the same individuals at different times, providing perspectives useful to academia and societal actors dealing with religion and forced migration. 

In many Christian traditions, baptism is generally conferred on infants, who cannot consent to the sacrament. What happens if, as teenagers or adults, they later reject their initiation into Christian faith? This paper will reflect on the Debaptism Movement, which has been gaining popularity across the West in recent years. It will begin with a history of the movement, outline the ideologies, practices, and forms of community that draw nonbelievers together, and explore Christian responses. What can Christian communities learn from the beliefs and practices that undergird Debaptism, what do they reveal about the way Christians understand and live out their shared ecclesial life, and how might theologians seriously engage (a)theologies of baptism as they seek to dialogue with the modern, secular world?

Street shrines are an emerging phenomenon in Indian cities as they function well in and around urban public spaces, often along crossroads, roadsides, and highways. Positioned close to the road, street shrines serve both as religious sites for devotees and as spectacles for passersby. In this paper, I examine one such street shrine in Ahmedabad, India. Drawing on ethnographic findings from my preliminary fieldwork, I argue that street shrines create undetected and encrypted spaces—not as acts of resistance, but as byproducts of the city's rigorous planning of public spaces, in the form of what I claim as JUGAAD- a south asian phenomena which means creative and cheap use of second-hand products, in this case a byproduct space. To support my analysis, I engage with Michel de Certeau’s conception of everyday life, using it to examine the activities of shrine caretakers as tactical maneuvers, in contrast to those outside the shrine who, largely unaware of its intricacies, function as strategists. By conducting a micro-study of street shrines in Ahmedabad, this essay seeks to uncover the encrypted places within the public infrastructural developments in cities.

Under the leadership of Rev. Cecil Williams, Glide Memorial Methodist Church emerged as vibrant center for progressive social activism in San Francisco. Various radical social groups, from the Daughters of Bilitis to the Black Panthers, found a home at Glide, and Glide lent its theological and institutional support to such organizations’ work. Building on archival work with the Glide Historical Records, this paper considers Glide as a node within a larger network of radical social activism within the San Francisco Bay Area. This paper centers the early ministry of Rev. Cecil A. Williams and the connections he, and other religious leaders, built with Black Power activists such as Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, and argues that our understanding of radical American politics during the Black Power era must consider the role churches played in creating sanctuaries for the revolution.

At a rally in Ferguson, Missouri six months after the killing of Michael Brown, a seminarian took the bullhorn. Offering a twist on the then-popular chant, “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!” she called out: “Show me what theology looks like.” And the crowd responded, “This is what theology looks like!”

This paper looks at the ways in which the public-facing work of one broad-based, interfaith community organizing project in Philadelphia, POWER Interfaith, functions to not only “show us what theology looks like,” but suggests two things. First, that race-centered, interfaith organizing can be seen not only as a religious practice, but as a form of public theology. Second, in a departure from traditional faith-based organizing practice, being differently-religious together in urban space is not just a means to the end of winning organizing campaigns, but can also be an end in itself. 

This paper examines the religious roots of growtheology, a term which refers to the system of beliefs behind a civil religion that deifies economic growth and urban development. It also explores the opportunities for a Christian and generally religious resistance to the infinite pursuit of economic growth at the expense of people and planet under the banner of “degrowth” organizing. To this end, it turns to the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, the banking capital of the Bible Belt, to critically examine the theological beliefs behind the city manager’s proclamation in July 2024 that “cities are either growing or dying” (Sands 2024). It turns to grassroots anti-gentrification and environmental justice organizations across the Queen City to show how “degrowth” social movements perform prophetic or iconoclastic functions, critiquing the unequal benefits as well as the social and environmental costs of the city’s suburban and urban explosion.

New contexts appear for religious eschatological reflections. This presentation focuses on the transhumanist vision of Ray Kurzweil and compares it with the ecological eschatology of Bruno Latour. Kurzweil argues for a horizontal understanding of the future without divine interference, for a continuous negotiation between spatial and temporal aspects of the future, and for a continuation of the present into the future but mostly with an emphasis on non-materiality, i.e., mind-uploading. Latour shares the horizontal framework but focuses entirely on the spatial aspect since times already up for the planet’s ecological system, and he emphasizes continuity for the material world since the entanglement of the biosphere makes salvation without the ecosystem unintelligible. The comparison highlights some of the particular themes in transhumanism eschatology and informs new conversations on religious eschatological reflection in general.

In this paper I argue that theological understandings of human nature are a major component of people’s views of human enhancement technologies. After examining studies regarding public perception of human enhancement technologies and studies exploring public perceptions of evolution, I contend the primary difference in views from these studies is how invasive enhancement technologies are. The resistance to enhancements that could change human nature I believe is connected to a theological anthropology that is too anthropocentric, and an extension of the position that humans were created by God in their present form at least 10,000 years ago. In order to address emerging technology, theology needs to do more constructive work regarding human nature and how humanity could evolve into one or more species other than Homo sapiens, both through natural and technologically assisted means.

Purchasing advantage and merit is a frequent topic for both secular and theological ethicists.  Similar attention has been given to questions on the commodification of certain goods and the moral nature of blocked exchanges. Less common, however, is sustained consideration of the  moral nature of the market itself as it affects and effects the moral perception of the purchase.

Presenting biotechnological enhancements within a market framework allows the user, and the larger society, to ignore, deny, or circumvent the moral status of (1) the goods purchased and (2) the permissability of the action of purchase itself. Framing the enhancements as "options" and "choices" that are offered freely in the market square obscures the moral questions involved and diminishes the ability to recognize and address these questions. Differentiating between enhancement as "purchase" and enhancement as "action" provides a lens through which to examine the moral and ethical issues at stake.

This paper examines alternative constructions of motherhood in Islamic traditions, focusing on the Prophet’s wives as “Mothers of the Believers” (ummahat al-mu’minin) and his daughter, Fatima, as “Mother of Her Father” (Umm Abiha). The Qur’an (33:6) grants the Prophet’s wives the title ummahat al-mu’minin, traditionally viewed as a juridical category restricting their remarriage. Though only Khadija was a biological mother of his children, their symbolic maternal status positioned them as key figures in shaping Islamic discourses on social reform and activism. Figures like Zainab bint Jahsh and Umm Salama played active roles in the prophetic mission, demonstrating maternal leadership in transforming social and communal norms. Fatima’s title Umm Abiha, often seen as an endearment, marks a radical redefinition of the prevalent paradigms of lineage and legacy. This paper argues that these women embody motherhood as resilience, reform, and activism, offering alternative maternal paradigms that extend beyond the normative. 

This paper will demonstrate that motherhood, as a social expectation and a social role, greatly shaped Chinese women’s religious lives in the Song (960–1279) . Because women’s life trajectories in pre-modern China were shaped by the expectation of motherhood, their religious practices and experiences were often informed by it—either by the need to fulfill it or the desire to escape it. The longing to experience motherhood motivated women to pray to different deities, while the desire to avoid it catapulted young women to become monastics. Similarly, solitary religious adepts also chose to reject motherhood. In addition, the religious practices and experiences of mothers were sometimes related to their maternal roles. Drawing on different sources such as the Record of the Listener, tomb epitaphs, and Miscellanies written by Songliterati, this paper seeks to underscore how motherhood, as a defining factor in Song women’s lives, regularly informed their religious choices.

This paper draw on the poetic and visceral power of an Aztec childbirth oration, displaced in a drama of the birth of Christianity, in order to counter masculinised, neutered, pacified, abstracted, co-opted and superseded dramas of 'birth'. The orator is an authoritative female voice, shifting between an older kinswoman, speaking on behalf of all generations forever, a midwife (an ‘artisan and crafstwomen of birth’), and the goddesses Cihuacoatl and Yohualticitl. Centre stage is the metamorphosis and ‘matrescence’ (Jones 2023) of the nascent mother, and a battle of birth on which the very world depends, as surely as it depends on the ongoing life of the sun. I use the energy of the oration to expose the queer displacements of birth in the Judeo-Christian tradition and 'secular' institutions of motherhood, and ask what our cultural imaginaries might look like if natality were not discarded as incidental--or feminist.

This paper interrogates the historical phenomenon of the foundling program administered by the Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec between 1800 and 1845 as the dense site of cooperative and collaborative maternal practices. As a point of confluence where disparate streams of maternal practice converge—biological motherhood, sacramental motherhood, nutritive motherhood, and spiritual motherhood—the foundling program provides a test case for interrogating the historical contingencies of motherhood. What does this case illuminate about nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood and maternal practices? About the role of Catholic devotion and theology in shaping—or resisting—those ideologies and practices? What does it reveal about our own contemporary ideals of intensive mothering? What might taking seriously the phenomena of sacramental motherhood and spiritual motherhood add to our theoretical conceptions of both motherhood as institution and mothering as practice—and to the elaboration of maternal thinking as methodological approach to the study of religion?

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Søren Kierkegaard firmly rejected the idea of progress. According to Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti-Climacus, we humans are the same as we have always been. After reviewing Kierkegaard's explicit comments about history, this paper sets Kierkegaard's denial of progress in its historical context, arguing that he develops a counter-philosophy of history which combats the prevailing Hegelianism of his age. The paper also draws connections between Kierkegaard's philosophy of history and the themes of imitation and contemporaneity, showing how a denial of history’s progress enables contemporary humans to interact with the same world Christ faced. Kierkegaard's understanding of contemporaneity--which is crucial to his Christology, his ethics, and his critique of Christendom--is built upon his philosophy of history.

The doctrine of Providence, addressing both divine sovereignty and human freedom, is politically charged and often co-opted for imperialist and totalitarian purposes. In an era when many hesitate to affirm that every event is willed by God, how can theologians engage with Providence without dismissing skepticism as a lack of faith? This essay examines the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, focusing on Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith and Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. It argues that both offer a vision of divine preservation that resists biological reductionism and ideological distortion. Schleiermacher emphasizes internal experience, while Bonhoeffer focuses on external reality, yet their perspectives complement each other. The study explores three key aspects: the relationship between preservation and redemption, Bonhoeffer’s engagement with Schleiermacher’s understanding of original sin, and human freedom in divine preservation. The essay concludes by proposing a vision of divine preservation that promotes solidarity and ethical responsibility for both believers and non-believers.

In modern European theology, the tension between historical revelation and universal reason fueled debates over how to bridge the gap between historical evidence and truth. G. E. Lessing famously articulated this as the "ugly broad ditch,” proposing that revelation is progressively assimilated through historical development. This paper examines Lessing’s strategy, particularly his multi-layers of ditch, especially the temporal gap as foundational to his theological framework, and how Kierkegaard, through Johannes Climacus, challenges it. While Lessing reconciles history, faith and reason through historical progress, Kierkegaard dismantles the very premise of history as a medium for faith. Through an analysis of Philosophical Fragments, I argue that Climacus refutes Lessing by dismantling the temporal gap of Lessing through the concept of contemporaneity, shifting faith’s foundation from teachings to the teacher. By engaging with Lessing’s theology, this study reveals how Kierkegaard’s critique can be considered a reconfiguration of faith that invalidates modern historical consciousness.