In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Congregations play an important role in shaping parishioners’ political attitudes. A key way that congregations transmit political messages is through sermons. This project analyzes an original collection of over 170,000 publicly posted sermons from Chicago, IL, assembled through the Chicago Congregations Project—the first approximate census of congregations in the city.

We use this data to address three primary research questions: how often do sermons feature discussions of political issues and calls for direct action, such as marching for or against public policies? To what extent do the messages that congregations deliver reinforce or bridge political divides? What congregational-level and neighborhood-level factors explain variation in sermons’ political themes? 

This project will leverage speech-to-text and large language models to analyze both overt and subtle political messaging within complex religious discourse. We will further merge political measures of sermon text with community-level data to reveal how they interact with congregations’ local contexts.

This paper presents preliminary findings from a faith-based community development project in one of the most diverse yet impoverished neighborhoods in East Oakland, CA. The project began with the question: Given the decline in church attendance, how can urban churches repurpose vacant church properties for the good of their low-income neighbors? The two churches in this case study—one a largely Asian American and White (categorically multiracial) evangelical church and the other a Black Pentecostal church—have served impoverished groups in Oakland for decades. The project galvanized their existing partnership with Hope Avenue, a newly created nonprofit that uses asset-based community development and community gardening practices to build bridges between congregations and neighborhood institutions. Connecting a year’s worth of fieldnotes with sociological literature on churches and social capital, community activism and mutual aid, and race and class inequalities, I explore the mechanisms that are making organizational partnerships and community building across race and class possible.

This presentation will cover findings, methods, and limitations of The Church Landscape Review (CLR), a ten year study that revisits 41 church plants first surveyed in 2014. In 2014, 100 church plants in the Boston area were identified, and of the 100, lead pastors of 41 of these churches were interviewed. This research revisits these church plants first interviewed in 2014, analyzing how they adapted or persisted over the past decade. 
This paper will examine the long-term sustainability of church plants in Boston, a city where secularization, high real estate costs, and demographic shifts challenge congregational longevity. Methodologically, this study integrates pre-post quantitative and qualitative research while incorporating Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to engage local pastors as long-term partners rather than subjects. Through the findings of the CLR, this paper will challenge static models of church decline, illustrating how congregations persist through strategic and theological flexibility. 

This paper investigates the significance of an urban nature project – a community garden - in how one Christian parish in inner Sydney, Australia responds to their rapidly changing social and political context of secularisation and gentrification. The project is part of a broader ethnography with community gardens and bush regeneration groups in inner-urban Sydney that explores the expanding and changing notions of the social – particularly relating to religion, spirituality, and meaning making - in the Anthropocene. I draw upon the work of both Burchardt on ‘infrastructuring religion’ and Bennett on ‘vital materiality’ to reflect upon the ways in which the materiality of the garden and practices undertaken within it were (or were not) productive of urban religious and political life, and the efficacy of the parish’s efforts to use the community garden to maintain their salience to their urban neighbourhood in a context of rapid religious decline.

This paper examines the fourteenth-century thinker Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī’s engagement with philosophical and theological debates about the nature of Being (wujūd) through a close reading of his Muqaddimah, the prolegomena to his influential commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. Qayṣarī’s work offers a crucial vantage point for understanding and contextualizing several centuries of philosophical and theological debates on the nature of Being. As a pivotal figure in the Akbarian tradition of Ibn ʿArabī, Qayṣarī challenges and refines the positions of his intellectual predecessors, such as Nasīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, Suhrawardī and Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, bringing Sufi terminology and ideas into direct conversation with philosophical concepts such as the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd). In addition to bringing an unprecedented level of clarity and systematic exposition to Ibn ʿArabī’s often impenetrable ideas, Qayṣarī’s Muqaddimah serves as an important window to broader discourses about the nature of Being in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

Advaita Vedāntins face a paradox shared by other apophatic theological traditions. On the one hand, the Upaniṣads speak of Brahman as beyond all words and concepts; on the other hand, they affirm that Brahman exists. Insofar as “existence” (or “being” or “reality,” sat) is itself a word and a concept, how can Brahman be described as existent? In this paper I will consider two Advaitin attempts to address the paradox, drawing attention along the way to internal diversity and historical developments within the tradition. Ultimately I will suggest that Brahman’s “existence” and the “existence” of the world are equivocal terms. Advaitins themselves prefer to attribute existence to Brahman and to deny existence to the world, but I will argue that this position is not so different, in the final analysis, from attributing existence to the world and denying “existence” to Brahman.

In this paper, I revisit two key passages from Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. 1635) Īqāẓ al-nā’imīn through the lens of Gadādhara’s (d. ca 1660) remarks on causation in his Kāraṇatāvāda. Mullā Ṣadrā maintains that the Divine is “creator” only within a specific mode of being, adding that God and creation share the same existence at the level of manifestation. At first glance, this seems to conflict with Gadādhara’s emphasis on a firm distinction between cause and effect. I argue that there is no real contradiction, because Mullā Ṣadrā’s claim of shared existence highlights the effect’s total dependence on the cause rather than denying its distinct identity. Finally, I turn to eighteenth-century India and the writings of Kundan Lāl Ashkī to show how Hindu thinkers historically compared Avicennan and Naiyāyika perspectives on causation, demonstrating the implications of such comparisons for understanding intellectual history in South Asia.

This paper examines the fourteenth-century thinker Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī’s engagement with philosophical and theological debates about the nature of Being (wujūd) through a close reading of his Muqaddimah, the prolegomena to his influential commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. Qayṣarī’s work offers a crucial vantage point for understanding and contextualizing several centuries of philosophical and theological debates on the nature of Being. As a pivotal figure in the Akbarian tradition of Ibn ʿArabī, Qayṣarī challenges and refines the positions of his intellectual predecessors, such as Nasīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, Suhrawardī and Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, bringing Sufi terminology and ideas into direct conversation with philosophical concepts such as the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd). In addition to bringing an unprecedented level of clarity and systematic exposition to Ibn ʿArabī’s often impenetrable ideas, Qayṣarī’s Muqaddimah serves as an important window to broader discourses about the nature of Being in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

Advaita Vedāntins face a paradox shared by other apophatic theological traditions. On the one hand, the Upaniṣads speak of Brahman as beyond all words and concepts; on the other hand, they affirm that Brahman exists. Insofar as “existence” (or “being” or “reality,” sat) is itself a word and a concept, how can Brahman be described as existent? In this paper I will consider two Advaitin attempts to address the paradox, drawing attention along the way to internal diversity and historical developments within the tradition. Ultimately I will suggest that Brahman’s “existence” and the “existence” of the world are equivocal terms. Advaitins themselves prefer to attribute existence to Brahman and to deny existence to the world, but I will argue that this position is not so different, in the final analysis, from attributing existence to the world and denying “existence” to Brahman.

In this paper, I revisit two key passages from Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. 1635) Īqāẓ al-nā’imīn through the lens of Gadādhara’s (d. ca 1660) remarks on causation in his Kāraṇatāvāda. Mullā Ṣadrā maintains that the Divine is “creator” only within a specific mode of being, adding that God and creation share the same existence at the level of manifestation. At first glance, this seems to conflict with Gadādhara’s emphasis on a firm distinction between cause and effect. I argue that there is no real contradiction, because Mullā Ṣadrā’s claim of shared existence highlights the effect’s total dependence on the cause rather than denying its distinct identity. Finally, I turn to eighteenth-century India and the writings of Kundan Lāl Ashkī to show how Hindu thinkers historically compared Avicennan and Naiyāyika perspectives on causation, demonstrating the implications of such comparisons for understanding intellectual history in South Asia.