The Theological Education between the Times Project presents a panel that attends to the unique gifts and challenges of theological education by and for historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities. Stemming in part from the project’s new edited volume, At This Time: Dialogues in Theological Education, the panel will feature a lively, sharp, and generous conversation about the potentials and the risks of ethnically-specific theological education. Bringing together five major leaders in theological education, this roundtable opens space for them to reflect together on the shared question of the goods, limits, challenges, and opportunities of theological education that is specifically from and for historically marginalized communities.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book
All time are listed in Eastern Time Zone.
The Theological Education between the Times Project presents a panel that attends to the unique gifts and challenges of theological education by and for historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities. Stemming in part from the project’s new edited volume, At This Time: Dialogues in Theological Education, the panel will feature a lively, sharp, and generous conversation about the potentials and the risks of ethnically-specific theological education. Bringing together five major leaders in theological education, this roundtable opens space for them to reflect together on the shared question of the goods, limits, challenges, and opportunities of theological education that is specifically from and for historically marginalized communities.
As a bishop, preacher, theologian, and correspondent, Augustine engaged a range of publics by virtue of his role as both an ecclesial and political figure leader as well as the range of modes in which he wrote. He was also deeply concerned with the social, ethical, and political effects – for good and for ill – of a range of cultural media (including literature, philosophy, preaching, and rhetoric) as well as public events (including rites, and festivals, and spectacles). This panel considers this theme in Augustine's work in historical context as well as its ongoing relevance for engaging contemporary ethical and political matters.
Papers
The use of Augustine in presidential political rhetoric has shifted from Obama’s global liberal realism to the brash nationalist integralism of J.D. Vance’s most recent invocation of ordered love to justify the current administration’s policies on immigration and deportation. These two views appeal to conflicting faces of Augustine’s view of neighbor love and threaten to empty Augustine’s famous notion of properly ordered love and the virtue of humanity. Such opposing appeals do not indicate incoherence in Augustine’s view of neighbor love but rather stem from an inadequate grasp of the complexity of Augustine’s view of horizontally ordered love of neighbor. Augustine adapted the Stoic ethical concept of oikeiosis to depict the competing concentric circles of affection that social and political leaders must mediate in fulfillment of their role-specific obligation to those near and far.
The health and preservation of democratic institutions relies on pervasive practices, formal and informal, of social criticism and civic accountability. Such practices are necessary but prone to incur “characteristic damages,” often hardening polarization through cycles of confrontation, denunciation, and backlash. This paper proposes a way of conceptualizing and disciplining the work of democratic accountability through the theological notion of fraternal correction. I draw on Augustine’s account of fraternal correction as a work of mercy and an act of spiritual friendship, performed among social equals and ordered toward healing, rather than retribution or self-assertion. Augustine’s acceptance of the “rougher magics” of political coercion is well-known, but alongside this paternalist, hierarchical model of political rule he recognized a place for a distributed, fraternal mode of accountability, independent of formal office-holding, whose medium was the word, not the sword, and which cut across gradients of social status.
Given increasing religious and political plurality, conscience is an important topic relating to contemporary tensions in public life. While contemporary accounts typically characterize conscience as a faculty, I suggest that this imports a subjective immediacy that risks curtailing public reasoning and deliberation while fostering ‘partisan epistemologies’.
My paper casts new light on current challenges facing democratic conceptions of citizenship vis-à-vis conscientious disagreement by exploring Augustine’s account of conscience—situated within late antique notions of conscientia as a virtuous practice of moral self-awareness—to enrich contemporary reflection. While Augustine affirms conscience’s interiority, he does not understand it as a faculty to be immediately followed but something fallibly formed by socio-cultural norms and warped by sin (conf. 3.8.15-16). I then explore how Augustine offers distinctive resources for contemporary tensions by re-envisioning conscience as a virtuous personal and civic practice that fosters public reasoning, resists epistemic self-enclosure, and provides resources for enduring and transforming disagreement.
Augustine of Hippo wrote extended reflections on spectacles throughout his career. Confessions and City of God offer timeless insights about how spectacles shape the public and arouse the passions of its spectators. This paper argues spectacles of antiblack violence arouse the passion of bloodlust and inebriate its spectators with bloodthirsty pleasure. This paper offers a close reading of gladiatorial spectacles in Book VI of Confessions. After parsing out the implications of Augustine’s analysis, the essay engages a Foucauldian analysis of spectacles of racial violence and the libidinal economies they produce. Then the paper considers the similarities between the gladiatorial spectacle as described by Augustine and the lynching spectacle as described by James Cone and W.E.B. Du Bois. Drawing on William Cavanaugh and Rowan Williams the paper concludes that spectacles of antiblack violence are idolatrous anti-liturgies which arouse passions like bloodlust and bloodthirsty pleasure.
Celidwen's book Flourishing Kin bridges Indigenous ontologies and methodologies, academic research, and poetic expression to cultivate sustainable collective flourishing through Indigenous contemplative spiritualities and sciences. This roundtable brings scholars of diverse fields to discuss Celidwen's perspectives of relationality and flourishing as a spiritual-aesthetic arrest only possible in community through cultivating relationships toward all kin, from human to more-than-human, and the living Earth. Celidwen’s research draws from Indigenous spiritualities through ontologies and methodologies from her upbringing of Nahua and Maya Traditions and other Indigenous Traditions from around the world. Her research converses with Contemplative Studies, Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, Religion and Ecology, African Religions, and Eastern Religions to show the tremendous benefit of integrating Indigenous forms of contemplation in approaches to well-being. Through poetic expression and authentic truth-telling, Celidwen invites a path that meets the world's complexity with reverence and joyous participation in the flourishing of all living beings.
In 2024, Tracy Pintchman published Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple. Drawing on over 15 years of research in a small city in Michigan, Pintchman moves beyond diasporic frames to showcase how a Goddess temple and its community creatively adapt Hindu ideas and practices to their lives in the United States. This panel features 4 scholars, including specialists in urban religion, bhakti traditions, and Caribbean Hinduism, who will reflect upon the significance of this book to the field of North American Hinduisms.
Tom Beauchamp and James Childress' seminal book, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, arose out of the Belmont Report in the late 1970s and serves as a common model in which clinical practitioners think through their ethical obligations and conflicts. The principlist approach has both ardent followers and critics, and the papers in this session will offer updated considerations of principlist approaches to bioethical questions in the context of religious scholarship and practice.
Papers
Beauchamp and Faden’s principlist approach in A History and Theory of Informed Consent subordinates justice to autonomy and beneficence, asserting that issues of informed consent are not fundamentally problems of social justice. Medical data, especially in the era of Big Data and AI-driven medicine, often benefits privileged groups while reinforcing health inequities. Traditional autonomy-based informed consent is impractical at this scale, necessitating a justice-centred alternative. Drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism as well as some feminist ethics of care approaches, this paper argues for an agape-centred model of justice that prioritises collective responsibility over individual choice. This approach advocates for independent institutions to govern data as a public good, ensuring equitable distribution and democratic oversight.
What role, if any, should principlism—the “four principles approach” popularized by Tom Beauchamp and Jim Childress—play in bioethics today? In the wake of Tom Beauchamp’s recent death (February 19, 2025), I argue that a “contractualist-principlism” has the power to preserve principlism’s best insights while addressing some of its most serious objections: 1) its constrained moral perception; 2) its want of a method for adjudicating conflicting claims; and 3) its lack of theoretical unity. Moreover, a “contractualist-principlism,” based on the work of T. M. Scanlon, suits the needs not only of bioethics but also of the emerging field of anti-poverty ethics, which also focuses on the well-being and autonomy of the vulnerable, and the just distribution of life-saving resources. Finally, to complement my contractualist approach to principlism, I conclude with a contractualist defense of principles—in particular, as helpful heuristics or shortcuts for both moral perception and judgment.
Abstract:
This roundtable discussion will explore the forthcoming book, Emergent Dharma: Asian American Buddhist Feminists on Practice, Identity, and Resistance, edited by Sharon A. Suh, as a critical intervention in Buddhist Studies, Asian American Studies, Asian American Religions, and Feminist Religious Studies (North Atlantic Books, 2025). This anthology presents a diverse array of voices that challenge dominant narratives of Buddhism in the United States, highlight feminist approaches to Buddhist practice, and critique the epistemological boundaries of traditional Buddhist Studies. This roundtable features three of the authors of the volume who will discuss their own contributions and implications for rethinking the intersections of race, gender, and Buddhism.
Panelist
Respondent
Muslims, Muslim-majority societies, and anti-Muslim hostility are firmly in the American public eye today. Ignorance is on full display, but in some contexts so are curiosity and the desire to understand and engage. During our roundtable discussion, colleagues with experience in Islamic Studies/Muslim Studies and related programs and centers a diverse array of American institutions of higher learning will talk about challenges, opportunities, and best practices in a broader climate that is insufficiently supportive of the humanities and the humanistic social sciences and in which the demands for public and student-facing work and intra-institutional service around topics associated with Islam and Muslims remain high. While dynamics specific to each institution shape the possibilities and constraints for Islamic Studies centers and programs, some issues and concerns are shared across campuses.
This panel explores how esoteric models of nature, cosmos, and the nonhuman are attuned to ecological consciousness and the agency of the more-than-human world in ways distinct from institutional religious thought. The first paper revisits Algernon Blackwood's weird fiction of vegetal horror and Mary-Jane Rubenstein's pantheistic mysticism to uncover a plant consciousness that challenges dominant materialisms. The second paper evaluates Aldo Leopold's reliance on P.D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum to show how esoteric influences and the notion of the cosmos' hidden legibility were democratized in his land ethic. The final paper looks at Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Renaissance occult philosophy through Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory and Peircean semiotics to propose an ecosystemic metaphysics where magical signs mediate invisible agencies across nature and culture. Together, these papers retrieve esoteric religious currents to recover relational ontologies and immanent agencies that reimagine religion’s ecological role beyond the limits of dominant traditions.
Papers
This paper seeks to critically weave three discourses together: Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s interrogation of deployments of pantheistic monsters, critical plant studies through Dawn Keetley’s “tentacular ecohorror” alongside recent discussions of plant consciousness (Zoe Schlanger), and the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” to think through how plant horror might also reveal some contours of a vegetal mysticism needed to take plants seriosuly the present. And it will ask if such an immanent plant mysticism might help to reclaim a more complicated view of pantheism (e.g., Roland Faber’s ‘transpantheism’), panpsychism, or new materialism (e.g., Jane Bennett) in turn.
In this paper, I point to neglected esoteric currents informing and animating much of Aldo Leopold’s pioneering work in environmental ethics, especially currents relating to what we might call the legibility of the world. Building on Ashley Pryor’s work which uncovered Leopold’s debt to P D Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, I point to other elements of of Leopold’s resonance with Ouspensky and the esoteric tradition. In particular, I show how thoroughly Leopold and the Western esoteric tradition alike draw on a deeper tradition of reading the world’s hidden legibility. I suggest, moreover, that Leopold’s recapitulation of this esoteric tradition was also a work of democratization and emancipation, a making exoteric both of the world’s legibility and of a land ethic partially incubated in esoteric traditions but now brought into the great outdoors and offered to all.
This paper interprets the henotheism of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) and subsequent occult grimoire's through Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Charles Peirce's Logic of the Signs. ANT emphasizes the role of material mediators in revealing overlooked actors within social and ecological assemblages. Just the same, occultists like Agrippa, emphasize the use of certain magical signs (natural and symbolic) to reveal and manipulate invisible supernatural actors. I join ANT with Peircean semiotics to describe how signs behave as mediating agents within social assemblages. This occult ontology of signs helps to attend to invisible agencies that become embodied only in their material signification. Such a fusion of ANT with occult metaphysics permits a broadly ecosystemic framework for religious semiosis that materializes the supernatural across ecological and cultural spheres.
Religious and faith communities are often described as essential for children and their childhood, yet, the inclusion of children in communal and religious practice(s) is understudied. In this session, scholars and practitioners explore what it looks like to embrace children in religious practice across cultures and religious affiliations.
Papers
The church must embrace radical inclusion of children with disabilities to address their spiritual needs. Historically marginalized, these children and their families often feel excluded. "Radical inclusion" calls for a reform of children’s programs, services, and ministries that moves beyond accommodation to valuing each child’s participation in the body of Christ. There is a gap in understanding the spirituality of children with disabilities. By understanding these children's unique gifts, capabilities, and spiritualities, the body of Christ can learn to see and value them as full members. By centering their experiences, the church can deepen its understanding and create a more inclusive and enriching spiritual community.
Keywords: Children with Disabilities, Children’s Spirituality, Radical Inclusion
Abstract
This study investigates how fostering practices within African diaspora communities, viewed through the framework of religious transnationalism, impact child migrants. It examines the severe consequences of cultural and spiritual conflicts through the tragic case studies of Victoria Climbié and Adam ‘Ikpomwosa’, whose torso was discovered in the River Thames, with a particular focus on esoteric beliefs and witchcraft. The study addresses a gap in existing literature by analysing how these beliefs affect child welfare and integration. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research gathers insights from diaspora parents and religious leaders in France and the UK. The findings aim to inform culturally sensitive policies that enhance child protection within migrant communities.
Among the many concepts associated with Hindu religious traditions are the central ones of maya (illusion) and moksha (freedom). Hindu practitioners seek freedom from illusion. How might we account for this? St. Ignatius of Loyola suggested that if one were to give him a child for seven years, then he would give them the man. This paper proposes that the explanation for illusion and freedom in the Hindu world reflects Hindu childrearing practices. Psychological anthropology characterizes these practices as pediatric. Pediatric childrearing practices reflect the reality of infectious disease ecologies, a reality consistent with the disease profile of South Asia. Pediatric childrearing practices nurture insecure-anxious attachment styles. These styles are conducive to adaptive, collectivist societies, themselves antipathogenic in nature. Psychologically, insecure-anxious attachment styles lead to a basic mistrust in the world. The Hindu concepts of freedom (moksha) from illusion (maya) reflect the adaptive realities of Hindu childrearing practices.