In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

The Muga No Ai (Selfless Love) movement, founded in Tokyo in 1905 by one-time Jōdo Shin Buddhist priest Itō Shōshin, blended teachings of Buddhism, Christianity, and Tolstoyan spirituality. While Shōshin’s life and thought have been well-studied, the remarkable lifestory of his wife, Itō Asako (1881-1956), remains largely unknown. As a child, Asako lost much of her hair due to alopecia areata. Social pressures led her to feel ashamed and live as a shut-in. Muga No Ai teachings emboldened her to take on a new persona, engage in religious training, wed Shōshin, and become a religious leader. She also became active in feminist politics, and her feminism influenced how she practiced her religious ideal of “selfless love,” most notably in the scandal of a public love affair with a younger man. Through a study of Itō Asako’s career, this paper will investigate the connections between religious liberation and political liberation.

This paper examines the public images of Okano Kimiko, the female founder of Kōdō Kyōdan—a lay Buddhist organization established in 1936 that is also categorized as a New Religious Movement—to explore how it positioned itself within the postwar Japanese religious landscape. While mass media have largely portrayed New Religious Movements and their female founders in a negative light since their emergence, the postwar media representations of Okano Kimiko and Kōdō Kyōdan present an anomaly, as they received neutral and even positive recognition. Through historical analysis of national, regional, and organizational print media, this paper argues that Okano Kimiko’s increasingly respectable media presence was shaped by the Kōdō Kyōdan leadership’s strategic relationships with social, political, and religious actors, which facilitated the organization’s integration into the traditional Buddhist community. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the agency of New Religious Movements in shaping their public images.

This research examines women's leadership in Japanese new Buddhist movements through case studies of Shinsō Itō (1942-) of Shinnyo-en and Kōshō Niwano (1968-) of Risshō Kōseikai. As daughter and granddaughter of their organizations' founders respectively, these women navigate the intersection of gender, lineage, and religious authority in traditionally male-dominated contexts. Through textual analysis of their published works and organizational materials, the study explores how they understand their leadership roles, how familial succession influences their approaches, and how gender shapes their leadership expression. Initial findings reveal that while both emphasize continuity as "torchbearers," they differ in addressing gender: Niwano reinforces traditional norms through family themes, while Itō explicitly frames her female leadership as reflecting societal change and her parents' inclusive vision. This research addresses significant gaps in Japanese Religious Studies by simultaneously examining women's contributions and new religious movements, offering fresh perspectives on evolving organizational leadership within contemporary Japanese Buddhism.

​As educators and community leaders increasingly utilize generative AI to create interactive educational activities, understanding the nuances of human-AI conversations becomes essential. Religious dialogues, rich with existential and factual inquiries, provide a unique lens for examining these interactions. This study analyzes over 85,000 messages from more than 10,000 conversations with "Ask Cathy," a chatbot designed to answer questions about the Episcopal Church using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques. Our research team, comprising experts in linguistics and computer science, employed various methods—including topic and sentiment analysis validated against human-assessor baselines—to assess user engagement and evidence of learning. Preliminary findings reveal distinct patterns in human-AI religious dialogues, offering insights into designing effective chatbots for education and faith formation. These results hold significant implications for educators, technologists, and faith leaders seeking to foster meaningful interactions through AI-driven platforms.

Society’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence, along with rapidly improving AI autonomy and decision-making abilities, raises theological and ethical questions concerning agency and accountability. The recent Vatican document Antiqua et Nova, a Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, examines the anthropological and ethical challenges AI introduces regarding human and artificial intelligence, freedom, and agency. Antiqua et Nova then proposes the concept of relational intelligence, a holistic framework that acknowledges AI technological capabilities as well as humanity’s communal nature. By combining AI and human strengths, relational intelligence encourages cooperative, collaborative human-AI relationships that respect human dignity and contribute to the common good. Hence, Antiqua et Nova and relational intelligence provide theological perspectives on artificial and human intelligence, augment secular ethical views with religious notions of human freedom, and clarify the notion of moral agency within an increasingly technological world.

The recent proliferation of ‘Generative AI’ has raised a significant question: can AI generate legitimate art? I attempt to answer this question through Augustine’s theory of numbers and imagination. In his De Musica, numbers name the fundamental principle of beauty, and imagination is the faculty that (re)orders the numbers in one's memory to produce images of beauty. There are significant analogies between this theory of imagination and the operation of the ML algorithm here. However, for Augustine, the problem of our limited sensibilities and perspectives is critical. Our imagination is bound by our desires, and only transcendent love can free one's imagination. I argue that the simulated imagination of the AI is always bound by its limited architecture and the finite desires of its designers and users. Thus, it cannot but generate false phantasms and 'hallucinate.' I conclude by suggesting some practical and ethical implications of this analysis.

This paper will review the contributions of official Catholic teaching on AI within the context of Catholic Social Teaching. Using these contributions, as well as the work of Roman Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley and theologian JB Metz, the paper will ask what AI can show us in relief about what it means to be human. It will offer the thesis that it is our relationships with one another and creation that open the horizon of being human and in relationship with God.

This paper investigates the theological implications of AI-generated spiritual discourse, exploring how AI chatbots, particularly the Episcopal Church’s AskCathy, are reshaping religious authority and spiritual practice. Employing the CASA framework and practical theological methodologies, it argues that user interactions with AI reflect implicit theological affirmations of algorithmic discourse as genuinely theologically authoritative. Grounded within the Liberal Catholic Anglican tradition, the paper positions technology as integral to creation, asserting the Spirit’s dynamic activity within AI-generated discourse. Ultimately, it proposes a new theological paradigm where algorithmically mediated spirituality meaningfully extends historical Anglican engagements with technological and cultural innovation.

Anti-freedom and freedom movements are intrinsically intertwined, exemplified in current US political imaginaries and praxis that impede or empower freedom. In myriad ways, US civil religion perennially re/constructs an exclusionary or an inclusive worldview of “we, the people” in the US body politic. Music participates in US religio-political discourse and praxis about identity and envisions alternative possible futures. Music constitutes and signifies a sharp contrast between repressive and liberative notions of freedom, symbolized in current civil religiously-based authoritarian regimes and solidarity movements. Historically rooted in abolitionist, suffragist, and multiple subsequent social justice movements, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” played an unexpected prominent religio-political role in the 2025 US presidential inaugural event and counterinaugural protests. This paper analyzes and juxtaposes how this hymn was re-cited and re-construed in both President Trump’s inauguration and in the Women’s March-sponsored People’s March to advance either state-sponsored violence or intersectional visions of liberation, respectively.  

Examining the role of the visions within the life of Harriet Tubman, this paper connects insights from womanist theology and Black feminism to describe a theology of freedom.

Engaging with feminist theologians’ work, such as Fat Church by Anastasia E.B. Kidd, and fat liberation work from Hannah Bacon, this paper will further demonstrate the need for freedom from paternalistic systems that continue to oppress bodies, especially fat bodies. Implementing extant work from fat liberation theologies, and looking to the biblical text, this paper proposes a new hermeneutical lens—a Liberative Body Hermeneutic, which gives primacy to the form of the body—as a means of understanding the will of God toward all bodies, but specifically fat bodies. If we are to free bodies from systemic control, and make a theological argument concerning this liberation, one must interrogate the biblical text toward an understanding of what lies within. This hermeneutic will provide a means to read scripture that allows the reader to see the text with new eyes—eyes of freedom for all bodies.

Native American communities in the American South face administrative and public invisibility. For the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina, cultural revitalization is tied to struggles for recognition, land protection, and religious freedom. Native Christianity serves as both political protection and a complicating factor in recognition efforts. This paper explores how Edisto women leverage an Indigenous Christian feminism to navigate political and spiritual identity. By appealing to Pentecostal Christianity, they assert sovereignty on their own terms. Through long-term community-based research, this study examines how gender, religion, and political recognition intersect in the Edisto’s fight for self-determination.

This paper details the context and findings of exploratory research investigating how women undertaking doctoral research in theology characterise the impact on their freedom to flourish of a holistic project which supports and explicitly addresses the intersectionality of their academic, spiritual and personal lives. Conceiving feminist research as spiritual practice, and females as marginalised in the academy and faith communities, it evaluates the project using Self Determination Theory: a psychological, empirically driven, organismic motivational meta-theory, rarely engaged with by feminist or practical theologians. Measures and theories of SDT are used directly or inform multiple types of qualitative and quantitative data gathering from project participants. Data analysis will identify the project’s support or thwarting of three essential ‘nutriments’ of autonomy, competence and relatedness that SDT posits as essential to human flourishing, and propose emerging insights and questions from dialogue between these ‘nutriments’ and feminist discourses around women’s self-authenticity, agency and relationality.

Despite the American ideal of “liberty for all,” work remains to definitively establish within our law and culture that people with female reproductive systems are equally free. In particular, after the fall of Roe, the targeted state domination and economic exploitation of this group for its reproductive labor power are of grave concern. As hegemonic ideology is a crucial point of intervention, this paper commends and builds upon the work of feminist liturgical scholars, who have long charged that Christian Eucharist liturgy constructs women as colonized reproductive laborers for a Father God. Analyzing content and ritual actions in a specific instance of contemporary Advent liturgy, it underscores the renewed urgency of worship problems raised decades ago and illustrates the type of work needed on a larger scale, both to dislodge the unjust cultural common sense about reproduction culturally and to advance feminist, liberatory re-formation of Christian worship.

This paper applies the concepts of "late fascism" and "fascist freedom" in the work of Alberto Toscano to consider the paradoxical vision of freedom animating ascendant ethno-nationalist evangelicals. This application generates an analysis of freedom rhetoric in public evangelicals like Charlie Kirk. On this basis, the paper demonstrates how thicker accounts of fascism indeed offer purchasing power for not only categorizing popular evangelical support for authoritarian political coalitions, but also generating questions that provoke and imagine resistance against authoritarianism.

This paper unpacks the development and spread of the so-called “72-hour rule” within Evangelical Christian teachings, where married couples ensure husbands are free from lust by engaging in regular sexual acitivty. The paper presents a feminist historical critique of the theological anthropology undergirding this “rule,” as well as of the related martial sexual economy. Drawing on Evangelical Christian sexual advice manuals published between the 1970s and today, as well as sermons, blogs, and Christian TradWife social media, the paper argues that the 72-hour rule provides a perfect microcosm for understanding the wider complexities of American Evangelical “purity culture.” Like purity culture teachings more broadly, the rule reduces complex human sexual behaviour into simplistic mandates that are presented as divinely authoritative. Understanding the history of the rule opens up an interesting case study in the Evangelical use, circulation, and application of extra-Biblical authorities and directives. 

After a half-decade of stagflation, how do you make capitalism fun again? This was the challenge administrators at Oklahoma Christian College took on in the late 1970s. Their answer took the form of a multi-million dollar "edutainment" center called Enterprise Square, USA. Employing animatronics, puppet shows, video games, and cutting-edge interactive multimedia, Enterprise Square took visitors on a grand tour of the American free market, hopefully leaving them enchanted enough at the end to buy one of the gift shop's "I <3 CAPITALISM" bumperstickers. This paper examines the "aesthetics of persuasion" (to borrow James Bielo's term) developed within Enterprise Square's exhibits, scripts, and displays. The paper situates Enterprise Square's edutainment efforts within a larger history of American Christian projects that embrace and promote capitalism as God's will for the United States, and it seeks to develop a language for identifying ongoing attempts to baptize capitalism as the economics of Christianity. 

.

.

.

.

A film’s moving images move us, the viewers, in our bodies, minds and feelings, draw us out of ourselves and into the world of the film, and create a shared affectivity among viewers. This presentation will inquire about how cinema is able to move and affect us, focusing specifically on the genre of melodrama with its characteristic intense emotional expressivity and impact. Through the formal analysis of select scenes from non-typical melodramas – Shane, Breaking the Waves, Au hasard Balthazar, 120 BPM – I will argue that the careful construction of images and scenes through aesthetic forms creates an affective economy that reflects and impacts religious sensibilities (here focusing on Christianity) in several ways: it deepens the sense of self as gift, encourages the experience of shared creatureliness, draws attention to the affective dimension of moral orders, and opens up a space of new possibility of healing and flourishing.

When Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker (2012) was released on the Chinese internet, it generated a maelstrom of emotional responses. While some lauded it as an expression of authentic Buddhism, others voiced an overwhelming urge to pummel the eponymous walker—a monk who quietly performs slow walking meditation across Hong Kong. How did an unassuming short film affect such heated responses? This paper explores the interrelations between religious ethics, film aesthetics, and popular culture in Tsai’s slow cinema. Analyzing the film’s production, text, and reception, I trace the formations of Buddhistic wisdom, which reshapes psychoaffective experience while guiding skillful action in everyday life. Reflecting its artist’s devotion to Mahayana Buddhism, Walker’s film language resists modernity’s fixation with speed, seeking to foster viewerly states traditionally shaped by Buddhist ritual practices. Despite slow cinema’s limited reach under regnant patterns of media consumption, a diachronic perspective reveals generative possibilities that bear fruit over time.

This paper focuses on Luis Buñuel’s 1969 film La voie lactée (The Milky Way), a curiously understudied masterpiece of modern religious cinema. The film follows two pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, but its real focus is Buñuel’s avant-garde cinematography and nonlinear storytelling, which reinvent the cinematic language of religious experience. Here, pilgrimage is presented not as a pious journey, but as a surreal expedition through time and history, set against the backdrop of modern France and moments like the Mai 68 protests, Jesus’ ministry, and Roman heresies. Buñuel’s long camera pans and striking architectural shots juxtapose the banality of the landscape with the film’s ever-shifting emotional and temporal landscapes. Infused with the techniques of Surrealism, La voie lactée creates a filmic world where faith, doubt, Catholicism, and heresy collide. Ultimately, Buñuel captures the deep ambiguity of belief, revealing Catholicism’s fragile place in 1960s France.

While it is tempting (and not always without merit) to criticize Christian films on their predictable, sometimes risible storylines, this misses the main appeal of the genre to the target audience. Similar to how grindhouse horror films appeal to nice audiences not for their plot but for their gore, Christian films appeal not based on narrative but based on affect. This essay will build on Linda William's framework of genre affect to conceptualize how Christian films create their own unique affects that appeal to their target audiences. Only with this understanding can scholars truly begin to combat the genre’s extremist rhetoric found in its more conservative entries.