In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Palestinian evangelicals in Israel-Palestine describe themselves as a “minority of a minority of a minority”—Palestinians in a Jewish state, Christians among a Muslim-majority co-ethnic population, and evangelicals within older Christian traditions. Though small in number, they strategically mobilize their minority status to engage global evangelical narratives on religious freedom, often securing influence beyond their demographic size. Yet, their relationship with dominant evangelical frameworks—especially Christian Zionism— as well as the Israeli state is complex and fraught.

This paper explores how Palestinian evangelicals navigate competing notions of freedom—religious, political, and theological—within both the Israeli state and global evangelicalism. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel-Palestine, it contributes to critical debates on the politics of religious liberty and highlights the intersection of religion, power, and geopolitics in Israel-Palestine.

For centuries, the Coptic Church has proudly identified itself as the Church of the Martyrs (Kanīsat al-Shuhadā’). Given this spiritual heritage and the enduring plight of Christian minorities in the Middle East, this paper examines Matta al-Miskīn’s theology of martyrdom. Rather than advocating for the protection of Christian minorities, Matta exalts martyrdom as the pinnacle of Christian spirituality. While he contends that God sends the “spirit of martyrdom” to serve the purpose of “healing” a deeply wounded world, the paper argues that it is also through “martyrdom” that the Church sustains its “freedom” in Matta’s thought – where both “healing” and “freedom” are defined in purely spiritual terms that align with his Orthodox ecclesiology.

Discernment in the New Testament is a communal practice shaped by the wisdom of the cross and agape love, not a step-based decision-making process. It forms a people whose way of life is governed by self-giving love. In Syria, after the fall of Assad, the Church faces the temptation of survivalism. Yet, discernment must resist fear-driven isolation and reclaim the Church’s prophetic vocation. Practical theology must balance immediate needs with the Church’s call to embody Christ’s self-giving love, forming structures of care that sustain without compromising mission. This vision also speaks to American Christians, offering a path beyond polarization toward communal wisdom, faith, and love.

This paper will discuss the function of Eastern Christian liturgical music in preserving the religious and cultural identity of Middle Eastern Christians, with a special focus on the role of women in the successful transmission of oral traditions. One of the most distinctive features of Eastern Christian worship, the musical traditions of the Orthodox Churches represent ancestral bonds that hold their communities together across time and space, allowing them to resist assimilation into the dominant cultures of Islamic society and Western Christendom. I will highlight non-standardization and embodiment as key features that enable this resistance. After establishing a theoretical background, I will discuss the practical necessity of expanding women’s access to liturgical music for the future of Orthodox communities in the Middle East and in the diaspora. I will conclude by discussing the enduring barriers to women’s participation in chant and highlighting recent efforts by Orthodox women to overcome them.

Gaza's ancient Christian community faces imminent disappearance. Rooted in the first century, it has endured twenty centuries of resilience. However, the recent Israeli military operations in Gaza since October 2023 have inflicted severe, possibly irreversible damage on this small community. International human rights organizations raise concerns about potential genocide. This paper examines the history of Gaza's Christians, arguing they have suffered near-extermination. I propose the term ecclesiocide to describe the destruction of a Christian community, encompassing loss of life, displacement, cultural damage, and disruption of communal life, emphasizing the scale of harm to the Church in Gaza. Furthermore, I analyze the role of the Zionist Christian lobby in providing political and theological support for Israeli actions, including calls for the forced displacement of Gaza's population. This paper demonstrates the impending vanishing of Gaza's historical Christian presence, even as it offers a testament to their enduring faith.

The International Survey of Catholic Women (McEwan, McPhillips, Pepper, 2023) reported that 29% of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that without reform there was no place for them in the Catholic Church. What reforms are women seeking? Do they correlate with the outcomes of the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality? In Australia Catholic Church efforts to listen to women have a long history, yet little has changed. Are there reasons to hope that synodality can deliver these long called for reforms?  If the practice of synodality listens without responding with demarginalizing action, will it become a trigger for an escalation in disaffiliation and deconversion of women from the Catholic Church?

In this presentation, I analyze whether it is possible to trace a similar phenomenon among Finnish Millennial Christians as the Exvangelical movement has been in the United States in the past decade. There are Christian groups in Finland that have historically been influenced by Anglo-American Evangelicalism, the most important of them being the so called “Fifth revival movement”. In the presentation, I analyze how comparable is the situation of the Finnish Millennial ex-members of the Fifth in the 21st century with the situation of American Millennial Evangelicals who deconstructed or left their Evangelical background behind in the United States. To support the findings, I present more general insights about the American influences on topical discussions within and around the Fifth revival movement in Finland.

Religious affiliation in the United States is undergoing a seismic transformation, with the number of religiously unaffiliated individuals—often termed “nones”—rising significantly. However, this demographic is not homogeneously irreligious. Many continue to engage in spiritual practices, pray, and even report experiences of divine communication. This paper examines the psychological and theological dimensions of religious deconstruction, particularly among those who de-identify from traditional religion but retain a sense of spiritual yearning. Drawing on empirical findings from a Templeton-funded study, this research explores the phenomenon of "religious residue," wherein individuals retain quasi-religious behaviors and worldviews post-disaffiliation. It further investigates how religious trauma and spiritual abuse contribute to mental health challenges among deconstructing individuals. Proposing a framework for post-religious spiritual flourishing, this paper highlights novel therapeutic interventions that prioritize ritual, belonging, and meaning-making beyond institutional religious structures. These findings offer new pathways for understanding and supporting individuals navigating religious transitions.

Religious deconversion studies are currently attempting to identify deconversion’s psycho-social determinants (Streib, 2021). One of the stronger contenders appears to be value misalignment, which occurs when the individual and their religious community’s values are misaligned, which predates the loss of faith and appears to serve as fertile ground for a believer’s discontent and eventual departure (see Hui, et al., 2018; Saroglou, et al., 2020). However, value alignment theory is also underdeveloped, relies on an impoverished conception of values, and leaves us with several pertinent questions. This paper uses original data from a case study of North American Latter-day Saints and Ex-Mormons to engage with these questions and argue for the deconversion as conflict hypothesis. It brings value misalignment theory into conversation with ‘conflict analysis and resolution studies’ to theorize social-ideological mechanisms which can push believers from value misalignment to religious deconversion, and push believers from value alignment to deeper conversion. 

This paper examines the story of the animal earth-diver. Commonly called a creation story, or myth, the earth-diver motif appears among Indigenous peoples in North America, Siberia, and Northern Europe, nearly everywhere the landscape contains marshes. I examine an example of the earth-diver story among subarctic Dene people, of muskrat creating land in a water world by diving to find mud. It is tempting to call this motif religion and to abstract the story from its material reality and ecological, political, and economic implications for real people and real animals. When contextualized within a traditional Dene framework other elements of the story emerge; such as a rational examination of the natural world, and a political structuring of human relationships and ecology with animals and other other-than-humans, all of which inform a trans-species ethos and is a powerful articulation of sovereignty.

“Our horses, exhausted, died a little while later.” Father Léon Doucet, OMI, wrote these words in his journal on July 13, 1873 while describing the end of a trip in the lands today known as Alberta, Canada. Through Doucet’s 1868 to 1890 journal and other Oblate records, this paper explores the relationship between Indigenous communities, horses, and Oblate missionaries in the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century North West. Many Indigenous communities on the Prairies respected and valued their horses. This included the Blackfoot, Métis, Plains Cree, and Stoney Nakoda communities among whom Doucet worked. In contrast, many Oblates, as evidenced by Doucet, did not understand or adequately care for their horses. Slowly, along with learning Indigenous languages, the Oblates learned local horse cultures as part of their attempts to acculturate themselves and to attract Catholic converts.

In this paper, I demonstrate that the Sisters of Providence insisted upon riding sidesaddle because Native women rode astride. By framing this common and often necessary mode of travel in the U.S. West as a transgression, the nuns also convey their beliefs about their superiority relative to Indigenous women in particular. I am expanding my research to examine the nuns’ relationship with horses, in the context of the horse cultures of the tribes they lived among on the Flathead Indian Reservation, including the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend Oreille. Specifically, the paper examines how horses themselves, as well as the tribes’ long-established relationships with horses challenge and reorient the practices and ideas of the nuns described above. 

This paper examines the shifting perceptions of animal sacrifice among Bhil Adivasi (Indigenous) communities in Gujarat, India, interrogating when and how sacrificial killing comes to be framed as “violence” (hiṃsā). Traditionally, Bhil Adivasis conceptualize animal sacrifice (vadhervu) as a ritual exchange with deities, reinforcing human-animal reciprocity and spiritual oneness. However, with the growing influence of reformist bhakti traditions, particularly BAPS Swaminarayan Hinduism, a competing ethical discourse has emerged around this human-animal oneness, reinterpreting animal sacrifice as an act of violence while advocating for vegetarian offerings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores how this reformist critique aligns with historical Jain, Vaishnava, and devotional discourses on nonviolence while simultaneously reshaping Adivasi cosmology, ritual obligations, and divine expectations. The paper argues that this transformation is entangled with broader economic, secular, and religious shifts that are now redefining human-animal interactions.

This paper explores the intersection of nature and spirituality in contemporary pilgrimage practices, particularly within modern Pagan and eco-spiritual movements. While traditional Pilgrimage Studies have largely focused on human rituals, this research highlights the often-looked involvement of the more-than-human world and its role in shaping spiritual experiences. By examining alternative spiritual practices, including modern Paganism and nature-based rituals, the paper investigates how nature is actively engaged and a sacred participant in the pilgrim’s journey. Drawing on frameworks such as Graham Harvey’s neo-animism and Susan Greenwood’s magical consciousness, the study emphasizes the transformative and participatory dimensions of these journeys. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the paper offers new perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies, Neo-Paganism, and eco-spirituality, challenging traditional religious frameworks and contributing to a heightened ecological consciousness.

I propose that Western Goddess Spirituality provides a blueprint for Sámi-Americans who wish to reclaim and rebuild pre-colonial spiritual practices. The blending of multiple traditions – comparable to how Western Goddess Spiritual traditions operate - presents a path forward for Sámi-Americans who don’t know where or how to start. This is not without its potential difficulties, however, as the blending and co-opting of multiple traditions runs the risk of appropriation and exploitation leading to the commodification and decontextualization of sacred practices. The benefit in this method, however, is the ability to create a Sámi-American specific approach that respects both cultural continuity and acknowledges the difficulties in recreating a distinctive Sámi spirituality in North America.

Contemporary Pagan and Witchcraft communities, like queer communities with which they often overlap, take their names from reclaimed slurs. These identifications reflect a shared opposition to hegemonic, Christian-influenced discourse. While Paganism is a diverse religious category that can include openly politically conservative and nativist traditions, in the Anglophone west there are important convergences between Pagan alternative religious movements and LGBTQ+ activism, both in their developmental histories and in their current manifestations. 

From the beginning, contemporary Paganism has connected sexuality to sacred joy, a sexual theology which makes possible, though does not guarantee, LGBTQ+ inclusion. Pagan communities reflect a variety of ideologies around sex and gender, from traditional gender complementarities, through feminist essentialism and same-sex ritual symbolism, to theories of gender construction and sexual fluidity. Generational models, following progressive politics, have evolved from heterosexist gender complementarity, through separatism, to radical queerness.

Artificial Intelligence stands at the center of debates around Pagans & Magicians and the use of Technology. In interviews, my interlocutors were mixed. There are the enthusiastic users, happy to employ AI as an assistant to enhance their art- whether that be of a clerical or magick nature. On the other side, there were those who worry about the potential implications of an increased AI presence - including a displacement of human artisans and human material creators within the occulture. By examining literature on relational ontology and sources on relational ethics from a Heathen perspective, I will show that an ordered relational ontology must include AI, or at the very least must be prepared to include it. As progenitors, we are responsible for Artificial Intelligence and we must guide it, as a parent guides a child. 

This paper explores the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and agency within the context of structural injustices, drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young and Sally Haslanger. Young's theory of structural injustice highlights the complex, long-term nature of harms that cannot be attributed to individual actors or specific policies but instead result from systemic forces. She critiques backward-looking liability models and advocates for a forward-looking political responsibility, emphasizing collective action to address these injustices. Haslanger’s analysis of social practices as sites for social intervention offers a valuable supplement to Young's theory by expanding our understanding of political responsibility. Social practices, which shape and are shaped by social systems, enable coordination and can be sites for addressing structural injustices. By integrating Haslanger’s perspective, this paper proposes a more robust vision of political responsibility, emphasizing collective intervention to confront structural injustices like economic inequality, climate change, gender-based violence, and segregation.

This paper argues that the most productive conceptions of freedom result in both humility—that is, an awareness of our lack of certainty and lack of universal knowledge—and a call to responsibility. This can be seen especially in the work of Dorothy Roberts and M. Shawn Copeland, both of whom understand freedom as necessitating resources and conditions that make choice possible and illuminate freedom as something lived and carried out in bodies, not just a concept touted in the abstract. Whereas some understandings of freedom, especially negative freedoms that consist mainly of non-interference, yield virtually no sense of responsibility, Roberts and Copeland’s understandings of freedom imply a responsibility akin to that described by Iris Marion Young, that is, the social connection model of responsibility that calls on persons of privilege to recognize the ways they have contributed to the perpetuation of injustice and continue to do so. 

I been an addiction recovery coach since 2017, with a specific focus on women in addiction and recovery since 2022. As such, I have facilitated four different recovery support groups for women, and have conducted over 100 interviews with over 60 women. This work/research provides the material for the present paper.

Of the 63 women thus far interviewed, 61 have experienced significant physical or sexual abuse (most often both) antecedent to the onset of severe active addiction. In most cases, the experience of abuse has occurred over an extended period of time, with, for instance, criminal confinement and strangulation being common. These facts have direct implications for assessing freedom and responsibility in women’s addiction and recovery. 

This paper argues that such patterns of violence constitute a “regime of gendered torture,” with a particular set of ideologies underpinning it. It then shows how Catholic teaching on gender reinforces these ideologies.

This paper argues that there is a limit to the responsibility an individual has towards acts of evil--a limit that comes not out of indifference or lack of compassion, but out of human finitude. Moral agents often occupy a position of wanting to thoroughly invest and respond to the ever-growing lists of evils they encounter, while being limited in their time, resources, and capacities. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’ idea of complete and incomplete acts of will (velleity) and a concept of ethical division of labor (vocation), this paper contends that moral agents can fail to respond to an evil in external action while not being guilty of indifference. The hope in making this argument is not to give individuals a carte blanche when it pertains to issues of injustice, but to provide relief for the individual who suffers guilt from their inability to respond to every act of evil.