In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Children have become central figures in contemporary political and religious rhetoric because they symbolize innocence, purity, and the future of society, making them powerful tools for moral and cultural arguments. By positioning children as vulnerable and in need of protection, leaders can galvanize support for their agendas, framing their policies as urgent moral imperatives. This is evident in the current intertwining of Christian theological rhetoric and public policy around issues like gender-affirming care, education, and public health, where invoking the welfare of children allows proponents to sidestep nuanced discussion in favor of emotional appeals. My research demonstrates that as children within Christian traditions function primarily as instruments for the confirmation, solidification, and expansion of Christian power, they have been rendered an unreliable ground for accomplishing aims which do not serve the interests of those in and seeking power. They may only find liberation when adult Christians cease seeking earthly power.

Persons under the age of eighteen are arguably the most disenfranchised and disadvantaged social group globally. As religious scholar John Wall notes, “Children across the world are more likely than adults to be poor, malnourished, deprived of security, prevented from exercising freedoms, silenced, done violence, abused, exploited, and discriminated against.” (John Wall, Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 7. Given this reality, how can religious scholars influence the academy and religious communities to prioritize children’s well-being and rights?  In this paper, I argue that the first step is to re-envision a childist account of what constitutes justice for children that is methodologically grounded in children’s actual perspectives, capacities, and experiences. My constructive proposal for such an account draws on the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, scholarly critique of adultism and the adult-child binary, and religious ethicist Margaret Farley’s account of justice. 

Children’s freedom to participate in key aspects of civic and religious life is significantly limited. Children are citizens of countries, but denied the right to vote. Children are made in the image of God and part of the body of Christ, but they are often denied access to the body of Christ at the communion rail. In this paper, I will compare arguments in favour of ageless voting—the right to vote from birth—with those of paedocommunion—communion from (infant) baptism. For both, the main justification for exclusion is on the basis of rational capacity, and the concern that children cannot make decisions for themselves. In response, I argue that the presence and agency of children at the communion rail and in the voting booth expand, challenge, and renew our understandings of these places, and call us to new responsibilities and engagement across generations.

This paper explores the liberative potential of music in the lives of African American youth through the lens of Black liberation theology. Historically, African American communities have utilized music to resist systemic racism and assert their humanity, from spirituals during slavery to contemporary gospel and hip-hop expressions. Theologically, the paper expands upon James Cone’s assertion of God's solidarity with the oppressed, arguing explicitly for the inclusion and centering of African American children's voices within theological discourse. Practically, the study demonstrates how music serves as a tool for spiritual expression, critical consciousness, and resilience-building among youth, highlighting specific examples such as youth gospel choirs and community-based music programs. Ultimately, the paper advocates for a theological praxis that empowers African American children, recognizing music’s profound potential to foster liberation, healing, and social transformation in the face of systemic injustice.

John Taylor (1808-1887) was the third president of the LDS Church. This paper will explore a little-known aspect of Taylor's time as prophet: his use of direct revelation in governing the Church. While Joseph Smith, the founding Mormon prophet-president, had organized and directed the Church using revelation, most of his successors have not used this textual form. Taylor is an exception. There are nine surviving Taylor revelations, each modeled on Smith’s style. Uncanonized and largely forgotten, they survive in several material forms which show Taylor’s flock using them as revealed scripture: seeking out and obtaining copies, studying them, sharing them with others, cross-referencing them to other scriptures, and acting on their commands. The material evidence of the use of these texts recommends against too strong a focus on the terms of formal canonization in the study of scripturalization in favor of greater attention to the informal contingencies of scriptural usage.

This paper explores the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ (RCJC) a queer Mormon sect that emerged in response to the exclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals by the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Throughout the 1980s and 90s, queer Mormons wrestled with the question of what it meant to be Mormon, with some members of Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons feeling the organization was either too Mormon or not Mormon enough. In response, a group of Affirmation members in Los Angeles formed RCJC, seeking to create a space that allowed them to continue practicing Mormonism. Drawing on archival research, this paper examines how RCJC members navigated their religious and sexual identities, utilizing queer theory and queer-of-color critique to analyze their struggles and contributions to redefining Mormonism. The study sheds light on how these queer Mormons challenged traditional understandings of faith, sexuality, and community within the larger Mormon tradition.

In the wake of the moon landing, an official Latter-day Saint magazine published an article which asserted belief in extraterrestrial life as a natural part of Latter-day Saint theology: “Are planets out in space inhabited by intelligent creatures? Without doubt. … People ‘out there’ are like people here, because we are all of the race of Gods.” While aliens in science fiction are often used to explore the concept of the Other, Mormon science fiction writers are more likely to look at aliens as a part of themselves and part of a unity of creation. This presentation seeks to examine how Latter-day Saint theology has influenced the portrayal of aliens in stories from Mormon science fiction writers, including stories written for a Latter-day Saint audience as well as those written for a national market. Prominent writers examined include Zenna Henderson, Orson Scott Card, and Brandon Sanderson.

This paper considers the nature and status of Nīlakaṇṭha’s Mahābhārata commentary, Bhāratabhāvadīpa (‘Illuminating the Inner Meaning of the Mahābhārata’), as a ‘meta-epic’, following Lena Linne’s articulation of the meta-epic genre as commenting upon the nature of an epic, a ‘medium’ or ‘locus’ of meta-generic reflection. Can such a framework be brought to bear upon attempts to comment holistically on the Sanskrit epic? A variety of works have alleged a meta-narrative of a deeper spiritual (adhyātma), typically, non-dualist (advaita) core to an epic’s surface form (Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa, Mokṣopāya, Bhārtabhāvadīpa, Bhagavadgītā etc.). Many often fall between the cracks of South Asian genre classification. A few significant features are shared by them: they claim to be about the whole epic, revealing its hidden (gūḍha) import, an import that is a necessarily spiritual and, lastly, typically representative of a non-dualist (advaitic) framework. The paper pays particular attention to the themes and tropes of the Bhāratabhāvadīpa.

Kālavāda, a doctrine of time, emerges as one of the central themes in the Mahābhārata. Through this conceptual lens, time functions as a fundamental regulatory force governing the universe and determining varying manifestations of dharma (righteousness) across successive cosmic cycles (yugas). Crucially, within this system that Ya. Vassilkov calls “philosophy of heroic fatalism,” time transcends its conventional understanding and becomes a supreme arbiter of human destiny—an omnipotent force predetermining the outcomes of all actions.

This paper engages with the conference’s presidential theme of ‘freedom’ by examining multiple complex tensions between human agency and cosmic predetermination that permeate the Mahābhārata. The investigation centers on several fundamental questions: To what extent do epic heroes exercise genuine autonomy? What forces ultimately determine their actions and afterlife? And perhaps most critically, how might we understand the concept of freedom within the Mahābhārata’s distinctive cosmological framework?

What happens when a poet, intent on inscribing his own subjective response to the things of this world, turns his attention to objects that are, themselves, the inscriptions of the responses of others?  And, to push the question further, what happens when those objects of his attention are paintings, which strive not to transmit subjective experience, but to transcend it?  Until Du Fu (712-770) started writing “poems on painting” (tihua shi), the answer would have been “nothing special.” But in Du Fu’s poetry, painting—or, at least, some paintings—were transformed from marvels of technical prowess into material traces of the human striving for transcendence; and poetry, from a vehicle for the expression of subjective experience into a meditation on mortal subjectivity itself. This paper will explore, not just how such moments of poiesis occurred in specific poems, but also the literary and philosophical conditions that made them possible.

I examine several poems written in the style of regulated poetry and one fu (rhapsody) composed by the seventeenth-century Chinese poet Dong Yue (1620–1686), including “On Dream Journey, Written for the Traveler Roaming around Five Lakes,” “Supplementing the Lines from a Dream,” and “Documenting a Dream from the Seventh Month.” These poems resulted from his active collaboration with his dreams (certain couplets in these poems were even produced within dreams). I attend to an analogy that Dong consistently drew: the process of literary writing is like that of dreaming. I suggest that this observation reflects the poet’s sensitivity towards the way in which literary creation enables virtuality. By choosing the theme of virtuality, I offer an interpretation of poetry’s ability to conjure up lifelike visions and imaginary experiences and to make them tangible, sharable, and in turn, real—a key aspect of poiesis as a transformative mechanism specific to literary writing.

This paper examines an early twentieth-century psychiatric case study as one resource for expanding approaches to esoteric religion. The mental patient was involuntarily institutionalized after an astrologer convinced him that his wife was having an affair. This archival document, circulated within early clinical pastoral education networks, demonstrates how esoteric practitioners were cast not only as “cons” but as sincerely mentally ill. My research thus extends scholarship on the limits of religious freedom by considering spaces beyond the courtroom. I look to mental hospitals as another site in which the veracity of esoteric religion was critically evaluated. This paper critically draws on Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column to juxtapose the “pseudo-rationality” of astrology with historical methods’ empiricist bent. Following Adorno’s critique of modernity’s compulsion to calculate, this paper asks: To what extent can the absurdity of our objects of study trouble the violence of mastery? 

This paper considers the places of theological reflection through an analysis of the “Christian kitsch-themed” and art space Atlanta bar, Sister Louisa’s CHURCH of the Living Room and Ping-Pong Emporium. Drawing on Melissa Wilcox’s notion of serious parody and Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading, this paper considers how Sister Louisa’s queer parody of American Christianity does not merely subvert or resist their normativities paranoically but re-presents and re-imagines theology in ways that reactivate its teachings, precisely where much of contemporary Christianity has become inured to it. , CHURCH performs in space what queer theology has claimed in text: to consciously pose to theology a serious of questions that expose, destabilize, and repurpose its sexual, political, and economic investments and sureties. And perhaps, even more than that, it may be church in more than name alone.

This paper develops an existential-analytic approach to postcolonial melancholia found in 1950s—1960s Korean literature, engaging with Walter Benjamin’s organized pessimism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic affirmation of vitality. Focusing on Obaltan (Beom-seon Lee), The Square (Choe Inhun), and A Respite (Oh Sangwon)—works shaped by the memory of Japanese occupation (1910-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953)—this study contends that postcolonial melancholia, with its theologico-political and ontological-ethical valence, is clarified when interpreted through a framework integrating organized pessimism and nihilistic affirmation of vitality. Drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, I theorize postcolonial melancholia as an existential attunement—manifested as grief—toward a world wherein the hope for redemption is grieved over as a loss. This melancholia confronts nothingness, revealing the absence of moral grounding in postcolonial liberation. Reading 1950s—1960s Korean literature through Nietzsche’s nihilism and Benjamin’s pessimism illustrates this condition, necessitating that theologies of postcolonial existence center their discourse on the courage to be and to endure when romanticized notions of redemption appear nebulous and meaningless, and thus undesirable.  

The paper discusses the book Islamic Feminism: Hermeneutics and Activism by Mulki Al-Sharmani published by Bloomsbury in 2024. The analysis highlights how the author combines textual analysis with anthropological research to provide a holistic understanding of a field that remains obscure to many. The book examines the epistemological and methodological contributions of nine prominent scholar activists and points to the value-added benefits of cross examining their works in conversation with one another. The discussion provides a critique of the main arguments and sheds light on the contribution this book makes to the study of women, gender, and Islam. 

Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues (The Dial Press, 2023) is a landmark publication of key methodologicaland epistemological significance for the study of gender, sexuality, and women in Islamic studies. Lamya H carves out a space for ambivalent readings of the Qur’an, grounded in her experiences as a queer Muslim woman, rather than relying on academic or conventionally authoritative readings of the Qur’an to grant authority to her own knowledge of the Qur’an’s guidance. Therefore, Hijab Butch Blues merits study as a methodological intervention in knowledge production about the Qur’an which is significant for the study of gender, sexuality, and women in Islam – even if outside the category of books conventionally deemed academic or scholarly. 

This presentation examines Katrina Daly Thompson's "Muslims on the Margins" (2023) and its theoretical framework of "discursive futurism" as a generative lens for understanding ethical aspirations among middle-class Muslim women in North India. Thompson's ethnography of queer Muslim communities reveals how marginalized Muslims actively create futures through embodied practices rather than merely envisioning them. I place this framework in conversation with my research on the triadic ethical labor—mushaqqat (struggle), sabr (patience), and khidmat (care)—that Muslim women in India employ to navigate between divine determination and agentive possibilities. Both studies illuminate decolonial approaches to Islamic knowledge production that challenge dominant narratives of Muslim women's agency. By examining how differently marginalized Muslims across transnational contexts employ ethical practices to construct alternative futures, this comparative analysis contributes to debates about gendered authority and embodied feminism.

Bauer and Hamza's Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur'an: A Patronage of Piety offers methodological innovation through its synthesis of intratextual Qur'anic studies with historical inquiry into gender and class-based social relations in late antiquity.  The authors identify the paterfamilias figure as the addressee of many Qur'anic ethical imperatives—due to his accumulated social capital and not an inherent spiritual superiority.  The Qur'an reconfigures his social authority to some degree by emphasizing female dignity and the rights of the poor and oppressed within the existing patronage structures of the period. The work advances feminist scholarship by emphasizing a Qur'anic vision in which social privilege demands greater moral accountability. By centering their analysis on Qur'anic moral imperatives, Bauer and Hamza highlight didactic aspects of Qur'anic discourse that have been deemphasized in the broader field of academic Qur'anic studies, a field that has focused on cross-religious convergences until recent decolonial Muslim scholarship has insisted on the novel contributions of the Qur'an to humanistic virtue ethics. 

The use of psychedelic-assisted therapy in addiction recovery raises complex challenges regarding alterations of autonomy. Addiction narratives and ayahuasca practices both frequently involve encounters with external entities perceived as influencing one’s sense of agency. In the case of addiction these entities impede it, yet autonomy may be restored. Through processes such as surrender to a higher power in 12-Step programs and ego-dissolution in psychedelic-assisted therapy, autonomy is paradoxically restored by relinquishing control. The questions regarding agency and autonomy which these raise will require new frameworks which emphasize connectedness. These frameworks also allow for the consideration of the role of community in shaping external agents and altering autonomy. Being shaped by the wider set and setting of culture, input from the humanities is needed to adequately explore the potential clinical applications of the various communities, practices, and frameworks confronting these altered states of autonomy.

This paper investigates the emerging intersection of Buddhism and addiction recovery in the United States through ethnographic interviews with participants in Buddhist recovery communities. Twelve-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous dominate the American recovery landscape. But though they aim to be compatible to those with any or no religious practice, some people find AA does not work for them. For those people, Buddhist alternatives like Recovery Dharma and Hungry Ghosts United have gained traction in recent decades. This study examines how participants navigate traditional Twelve-Step concepts, adapt Buddhist principles to recovery contexts, and approach spiritual experiences—including the complex relationship with psychedelics. I argue that Buddhist recovery communities represent creative spaces where practitioners renegotiate traditional Buddhist doctrines, Twelve-Step frameworks, and countercultural values to forge distinctive recovery pathways. This research contributes to scholarly understanding of the ongoing adaptations of Buddhism in America, particularly in regard to understudied issues of drugs, addiction, and recovery.  

American psychedelic users have often taken a turn toward religious life to situate and make sense of their profound experiences. In the 20th century and into the 21st, this turn towards religion also meant a “turn to the East,” invoking either Hindu or Buddhist traditions and cosmologies to make meaning of an extraordinary experience. These patterns suggest that psychedelics entail something altogether new to elucidate their true meaning. Yet early in this period of popular psychedelic experimentation in the late 1960s, Lisa Bieberman—a veteran of Harvard’s psychedelic research and head of the influential Psychedelic Information Center in Cambridge, MA— presented an alternative philosophy of psychedelic religion, rooted in Quaker practice and a radically simply gnosis that resulted from a psychedelic experience. Drawing from her essays and unpublished memoir, this paper will outline her view of psychedelic religion for “the West” and present its implications for contemporary psychedelic religious life.

Saturday Night Live recently aired a faux commercial featuring comedian and guest host Ramy Youssef using the controversial GLP-1 Ozempic to help with fasting during Ramadan. Youssef quips, “I used to rush to eat a whole meal before dawn, but now I just grab my prayer beads and my Ozempic needle. As long as I shoot up before the sun rises, it’s halal”(Saturday Night Live, 2024). While Ramy and the other cast members are joking, this paper takes seriously the potential religious use of GLP-1 medications, and their place within a longer genealogy of asceticism and transhumanism. I argue that they function as contemporary pharmacological forms of fasting that, while secularized and technoscientific, are part of larger religious projects of (managing) embodiment and transcendence. Drawing on Christian religious, historical, and sociological perspectives, I interrogate how GLP-1s recast many religious and spiritual dimensions of fasting through a newly biomedical framework. 

This paper argues that King's later theological work is imbued with a latent yet robust theology of "moral injury" that can inform theologies of social healing in the 21st century.  King distinctly and seamlessly linked the personal, the social, and the political in a radical praxis of liberation: he clearly characterizes the racist social sinning of peoples racialized as white--who are formed by an insidious ideology of white supremacy--as a kind of moral injury that must be addressed in order to realize Beloved Community.  King strikes a delicate theological balance of prioritizing the imminent liberation of Black peoples with diagnosing a cause of this oppression in the morally injured conscience of whites. So, for Black peoples to be fully liberated there must be a concomitant repentance, repair, and healing among those racialized as white, a claim with far-reaching implications for theology and ministry.

There is a sacred aspect to Selma, Alabama as a place where collective blood was shed for the sin of America–the original sin of slavery–in the same way Jesus shed blood for the sins of humankind. A throng of people joined in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s decision to take up the cross. This paper will also describe how Selma was, and remains, a modern-day Nazareth of ordinary folks living on the margins, but who yet made a difference that changed the world. 

Thus, there is a significance to Selma that is spiritual in nature in that the Edmund Pettus Bridge is itself a crucifix that continues to be crossed by thousands.

Drawing on the work of Keri Day, I argue that the Azusa Street Revival represents a stream of the Black radical tradition. Further, I contend that the civil rights movement associated with Martin Luther King Jr. represented a continuation of this stream. Specifically, I argue that the Azusa Street Revival and the Beloved Community as envisioned and built by King formed what I call anti-political communities.