In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This presentation will explore the multifaceted processes of extraction in the West Bank, examining the ways in which both natural resources and human lives are exploited under occupation. Drawing from the works of Shourideh C. Molavi and Manal Shaqair, as well as firsthand testimonies from Palestinian activists, farmers, and scientists, the paper will analyze how Israeli settler-colonialism functions not only through the physical extraction of land and resources, but also through the extraction of Palestinian agency and dignity. Through a combination of critical scholarship and personal narratives, this proposal will highlight the environmental, social, and political dimensions of extraction in the West Bank, and how Palestinian communities resist and challenge these processes.

This paper analyzes how Appalachian communities reliant on extractivist livelihoods structure narratives of religious life. It does so by drawing on Robert Orsi’s concept of lived religion,’ which argues that the daily activities of believers shape religious practice. By conducting inductive narrative analysis on oral histories of life in Appalachian coal camps and villages in the 20th century, the paper demonstrates how religion, place, and cultures of extractivism influence each other. I expect to find that religious practice acts as a divine justification for extractivist livelihoods, as protection for precarious and dangerous forms of labor, but also giving it religious significance. However, I expect that the role of land in religion is important as source of religious identification beyond extractivist practice. The oral histories analyzed in the paper are part of various projects of the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. 

This paper examines the Tibetan Buddhist Treasure (gter ma) tradition as a model for ethical resource extraction in an era dominated by extractive capitalism. The tradition's linguistic and conceptual frameworks reveal a continuity between spiritual and material extraction: the term for Treasure (gter) originally referred to mineral resources, while indigenous spirits serve as guardians of both material wealth and spiritual teachings. Central to this tradition is the practice of offering treasure substitutes (gter tshab), establishing principles of reciprocity that acknowledge landscape agency and rights. Through a case study of Chokgyur Lingpa's 1866 revelation at Sengö Yumtso, this paper demonstrates how Treasure extraction operates through acknowledgment of more-than-human stakeholders, material reciprocity, temporal constraints, and commitment to communal benefit. These principles offer valuable insights for reimagining human relationships with resources in ways that honor the complex interdependencies that sustain all life.

Driven by the work of the now overlooked A. L. Morton and Dona Torr, the famed postwar British Marxist historians developed extensive research on the historic role of religious radicalism of peasants, artisans, middle-class dissenters, working class, etc. Their explanations of religion were its role in the transformation from feudalism to capitalism and how its progressive ideas were being absorbed into emergent socialism. After outlining the key ideas of the British Marxist historians, this paper looks at their legacy and reception. This discussion includes early receptions focused on expectations of the working class being able to realise the utopianism of historic religious radicalism. The paper then looks at how and why understanding the transformation of class relations was increasingly downplayed in the reception of the British Marxist historians over the twentieth century and why the emphasis shifted to a romanticised history of religion ‘from below.’      

Black women's clubs and organizations can be situated as extraecclesial sites that illustrate intersections of Black women’s labor advocacy and spiritual and moral praxes outside of church institutions. This project presents the Coming Street YWCA’s Training School for Domestic Workers (Charleston, SC) as a an extraecclesial site and case study of Black clubwomen’s efforts to have their students achieve higher paying domestic employment through merit while also acquiescing to the white gaze by subjecting their students to health examinations upon their completion. This case inserts the precarious role of class as clubwomen—mainly among the city’s Black middle and upper class monitored the health of their working-class counterparts in the name of economic uplift.

This paper addresses the question of labor, class and capitalist oriented systems by focusing on the social teaching of the preeminent 20th century theologians and social activists Archbishop William Temple (1881 -1944) and Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Temple and Day advocated for a restructuring of existing capitalist-oriented systems within the United Kingdom and United States respectively. The Great Depression highlighted gross exploitation which their distinct social teaching sought to address. This paper will argue that the doctrine of the Incarnation provides the Christian basis for a counter view of labor and class, focusing on Temple and Day’s incarnational theology. This incarnational theology promotes the equal dignity of humanity, based on Christ’s own embodiment of all humanity as a worker. The contemporary value of incarnationally centered social teaching advocates for a dissolution of capitalist-oriented structures which diminish humanity equality. 

As Kierkegaard deemed imprisonment to be an evil (et onde), this paper aims to begin a dialogue on Kierkegaard and prison reform in three ways: first, through a review of scholarship related to Kierkegaard and incarceration; second, by situating Kierkegaard in recent discussions on chaplaincy, pastoral care, and theological education in prisons; and thirdly, through a close reading of ideas on the demonic, the imprisoned self, and the crowd in Kierkegaard’s writings. Ultimately, I intend to show the contributions Kierkegaard can make to debates on prison reform in the United States and globally. Whereas religious scholars, philosophers, legalists, and ethicists have written extensively on punishment, prisons, and prison reform through the work of thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, and certainly Foucault, the scholarship is less developed in the context of Kierkegaard’s ideas. This absence only increases the need to turn to Kierkegaard on a substantive moral concern.

How Kierkegaard’s view on the relationship between faith and reason should be interpreted remains a fertile question. Prominent interpretations have debated the relationship between faith and reason in terms of their greater or lesser conceptual compatibility or opposition. However, in this paper I argue that Kierkegaard should not be interpreted as laying claim to or landing in a rigid conceptual debate about faith and reason. If faith and reason implicate the ethical and existential commitment of the self, and the self is a dynamic synthesis that temporally strives to live out and relate to the good and the true. I argue that to understand faith and reason, the self must be examined. The self as a synthesis is tasked with reflecting on the true and good. Although the true and eternal offends, that is, outstrips her reason, she is tasked with appropriating and evincing a relation that truth existentially. 

In conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche and René Girard, this paper develops an account of Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way and applies them to a reading of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and especially to the relationship between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov.