In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman famously argues that emancipation, rather than marking an absolute break between slavery and freedom, inaugurates an ambivalent condition defined by the convergence of abstract equality with new forms of racialized exploitation. This paper investigates the role of religion in this process, focusing on how Christian conceptions of personhood facilitated the formal transformation of emancipated Black subjects from chattel into individuals. In doing so, it engages a burgeoning literature which tracks the legacies, vestiges, or afterlives of racial slavery in modern concepts and practices of religion. Reading Hartman alongside Southern slave law and Christian proslavery literature, I argue that the subsumption of Black labor following emancipation operationalized an already existing isomorphism between “chattel” and “labor” established by the translatability of each into a shared Christian theological idiom. The paper concludes by considering the ramifications of this analysis for wider discussions of religion, race, and capitalism. 

This paper explores the emerging markets of fertility awareness (FA) and menstrual cycle tracking (CT), emphasizing their intersections with religious, economic, feminist, scientific, and technocratic frameworks. Historically linked to religious contexts (like Catholic Natural Family Planning), FA has largely secularized, reflecting tensions between religious heritage, secularism, and women’s rights in the digital age. Drawing on qualitative research in North America, the study highlights a shift from couples teaching couples to women teaching women, alongside competing economic models: collaborative, non-profit approaches versus entrepreneurial, neoliberal frameworks. These dynamics reveal power struggles over knowledge access, affordability, and inclusivity. The research emphasizes how FA and CT navigate the interplay of religion and economy, and highlights resistance to technocratic control through low-tech, empowering practices. This presentation of selected results from a broader study contributes to discussions on reproductive economies, ethics, and the commodification of body literacy in post-secular contexts.

This paper interrogates the intertwined trajectories of ritual sacrifice and economic expenditure in the luxury market through Georges Bataille’s theoretical lens. Focusing on the largely concealed practice of overstock destruction, the study reveals how this unofficial yet pivotal business strategy operates as a form of sacrificial expenditure. The deliberate elimination of surplus inventory serves as a modern analog to sacrificial acts, underscoring how the boundaries between the sacred and the secular blur in contemporary economic practices. By critically analyzing the structural logic behind overstock destruction and its role in sustaining market dynamics, the paper challenges prevailing secular narratives and critiques the mechanisms of value production of late Capitalism. Employing insights from recent work on Economic Theology and a comparative textual methodology, this research contributes to the ongoing dialogue of Religion & Economy, offering a fresh perspective on the interplay between ritual, sacrifice, and capitalist economy.

This paper is a religious history of Elizabeth "Baby Doe" Tabor that examines her vast archive of miscellany, including dream interpretations, accounts of spirit visions, tea and coffee divinations, palm readings, horoscopes, and prayer cards, in order to approach questions about religious sensibility, aesthetic rendering, extractive industry, and political economy in the western U.S. during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. Tabor was a practicing Catholic who sought her fortune on the Colorado frontier and found it in the silver mines of Leadville and its leading man, Horace A.W. Tabor. Her story has been told in the annals of frontier history and in Cold War-era opera. This paper examines these and other renderings of her life in order to reconsider religious forms in the context of an imperial nation and changing monetary policy.

Evangelical language permeates tech culture. “Angel investors” provide financing to small start-ups, business how-to books compare dedicated customers to “true believers,” and many technology companies have people on their payroll with the official title of “evangelist.” Part marketer, part missionary, and part teacher, the technology evangelist “educates customers and other key market players about the benefits of specific technology, including platforms, software tools, and applications.” Based on interviews with technology evangelists and an analysis of the business literature that gave rise to technology evangelism, this paper traces how since the late 1980s what I call Christianesque ideas about the transmission of life-changing good news, conversion, and discipleship have come to structure the interpersonal and financial relationships at the foundation of technological innovation, sales, and adoption.

While exclusionary forces continue to claim Muslims do not belong in India, specific Muslims are uniquely visible across diverse genres of cultural representation. This paper focuses on the tension between official forms of Muslim exclusion and the visibility of certain types of Muslims in diverse media forms including commercial theatre, Hindi cinema, and heritage tourism. Created by Muslim and non-Muslim producers, the paradoxical hyper-visibility of selective Muslims shows that the Hindutva movement functions not only as a politico-religious project but also as an economic one. Such representations support a neoliberal capitalist agenda that undermines Muslim dignity (Kunnummal 2022). Questions this paper explores include: what kinds of Muslims are “sellable” for twenty-first century forms of cultural consumption? How are the goals and strategies of producers to make Muslims visible in genres of cultural representation shaped by the forces of twenty-first century, late-stage Indian capitalism and neoliberalism? 

This paper calls for renewed consideration within liberation theologies of one of the material conditions that render freedom possible in contemporary life: freedom from external compulsion to perform waged labor. Compulsory waged labor is a condition of fundamental unfreedom that significantly curtails many other forms of freedom. Yet while liberation theologies have long called for the abolition of poverty in both Global South and Global North contexts, in recent decades the field has offered very little discussion of compulsory waged labor as one of the systems that creates poverty in the first place nor to what it would take for all people to be able to live free from it. Thus, in conversation with feminist anti-capitalist theory, the paper proposes that compulsory waged labor is not only a sociological epiphenomenon to be acknowledged on the way to doing liberation theology, but a core topic of liberationist theological critique and re-construction.

In what ways can spirituality be a life-giving resource in our death-dealing age? What methodological resources can help to inform our study of spirituality?  In this paper, I argue that pragmatic and liberationist methodologies have much to offer. I approach philosophical pragmatism and liberation theology as non-reductive empirical discourses that foreground the role of human intelligence in promoting human flourishing.  Such an approach helps to expand our understanding of spirituality as a pervasive quality of human experience, and it sheds significant light on spirituality as an active function of human intelligence.  Within a pragmatic model of inquiry, knowing is an “adaptive activity” that involves a dynamic process of doubt, belief, inquiry, and judgment.  As I show, in both pragmatism and liberation theology, human intelligence, broadly understood, is a—if not the—primary means by which human beings transact with the world and through which spirituality is, in fact, “activated.” 

Shelly Rambo asserts that trauma is “a radical break [that] has occurred between the old self and the new one.” However, what happens when the identity of the old self was already radically broken? Willie James Jennings in Acts, Justo González in The Mestizo Augustine, and Virgilio Elizondo in Galilean Journey investigate the multifaceted identities of three different holy figures - Timothy, Augustine, and Christ - in the midst of traumatic events. In utilizing Rambo’s notion of the Middle, I will examine how these three authors seek to disrupt the binaries of trauma, offering a glimpse of mestizo freedom, healing, and liberation.

The living-body bears the indelible marks of life’s deepest wounds and profound joys. With its scars and beauty, each body speaks of the earthly pilgrimage that one has undergone so far. In spiritual autobiography, the body emerges not just as a vessel of experience—but as the very text inscribed with the ineffable Mystery—experiences of grief, love, loss, and transcendence. This presentation examines how suffering speaks through the body in spiritual autobiographies, drawing from feminist mysticism, carnal hermeneutics, trauma studies, and narrative therapy. It explores the body as both interpreter and articulator of suffering, engaging thinkers such as Lanzetta, Anzaldúa, Kearney, and White. By reframing trauma as an embodied and communal phenomenon, the presentation situates spiritual autobiography as an act of resistance and theological articulation. In dialogue with liberation theologies, we argue that suffering is transfigured through storytelling, revealing the body as a crucible of transformation and a sacred text where the ineffable meets the human experience.

The dominant legal and political frameworks for intergenerational justice, including Edith Brown Weiss’s influential principles, often focus on procedural safeguards that risk reinforcing present-day biases. This paper critiques such proceduralism through the lens of theological traditions that understand freedom not merely as autonomy but as a relational, covenantal responsibility to those who come after us. Drawing on Latour, Whiteside, Morton, and Rose, as well as biblical insights into covenant and eschatology, this paper argues for an expansion of intergenerational equity beyond anthropocentric and procedural constraints. Proposed Future Generations Commissioners are not merely a legal innovation but a recognition of freedom’s long arc – one that extends beyond the living to those yet to be born and the creation they will inherit. Case studies in governance models will illustrate how this broadened theological vision can reshape legal and political structures to embody a more radical, future-oriented freedom.

Over the past forty years, litigants in U.S. and Brazilian courts have repeatedly questioned whether devotees of Santeria, Vodou, Voodoo, and Palo Mayombe are harming children when they include them in rituals and ceremonies. This presentation will explore two of those cases, one from the United States and one from Brazil, where claims of abuse were based solely on the child undergoing normal initiation processes in an African diaspora religion. It will compare the cases to one another, exploring the similarities and differences in the practices that were identified as the supposed harm. It will also examine the analogous defenses that the devotees raised to challenge the charges of abuse and the disparate outcomes of the cases.   

This study examines the lived experiences of religious and non-religious belief organizations in the United Kingdom, focusing on the challenges they face concerning freedom of religion or belief and the steps they take to address them. Despite extensive scholarship on religious freedom, no study has yet theorized how organizations navigate the difficulties associated with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This paper addresses that gap by introducing a substantive theory, generated through classic grounded theory methodology and based on interviews and textual data. It presents the theory’s key components, including the concepts of status quo, area of concern, and realizing the ideal. While the study focuses on the United Kingdom, its insights hold broader relevance for religious and non-religious belief organizations, advocacy groups, and policymakers worldwide.

Kam Louie's wen-wu paradigm offers valuable insights into elite Chinese masculinity, yet the case of eunuchs in Buddhist contexts demonstrates how lived experiences of gender-nonconforming individuals revealed alternative paths to masculine identity and authority. Despite vinaya codes explicitly barring eunuchs from ordination, historical records from Ming China reveal their presence within monasteries, either seeking refuge from court life or entering religious service after retirement. How did temples reconcile canonical prohibition with the presence of powerful eunuch benefactors seeking spiritual refuge? What negotiations occurred when palace eunuchs exchanged court life for monastic robes? Drawing on vinaya texts, temple records, and patronage accounts, this investigation explores how Buddhist institutions reconciled doctrinal restrictions with the lived experiences of eunuchs who sought monkhood. It further looks into how eunuchs, as both patrons and monastics, shaped Buddhist institutions, leveraging influence to negotiate their place within the monastic order.

This study examines how lower-level clerics in Qing China maintained familial ties, thereby challenging the gender norms imposed by their religious tradition. It highlights the tension between the idealized clerical conduct prescribed in monastic regulations and the lived experiences of monks who remained embedded in kinship and community networks. Drawing on underutilized criminal case records, this research adopts Matthew Sommer’s framework of Buddhist monasticism as a form of transgender practice, expanding current understandings of gender fluidity in late imperial China. While existing scholarship on Buddhist masculinities has largely focused on normative ideals and prescriptive sources, this study shifts attention to the everyday negotiations of monastic masculinity. In doing so, this work contributes to broader discussions on gender diversity and the lived realities of clerical life in late imperial China.

My paper argues for the category of the religious healer to be included in the conversation regarding Chinese masculinities. Using the case study of a contemporary Chinese American healer who employs qigong, fengshui, acupressure massage, and Buddhist chants, I explain how this religious healer attends to wounds in his community and for himself. Admitting one’s wounds and need for healing is a vulnerability not typically associated with masculinity. Through the dominant the lens of Chinese masculinity, the wen-wu (civil and martial) dyad, this healer had multiple teachers and is an autodidact, and practices baguaquan, a form of boxing martial arts. However, my case study aims to interrogate how my subject’s role as a religious healer moves beyond wen-wu. The theoretical contribution is to highlight what has been missing in scholarship on Chinese masculinities: physical touch and intimacy in the healer-patient relationship. His healing is not only physical, but also soteriological.

This study examines the Nine Emperor Gods Festival through a gender-focused lens, making two key contributions to the study of masculinity and male dominance. First, it demonstrates how masculinity is not only embedded in the festival’s structure but continually reinforced through ritual, myth, and institutional authority. In postcolonial Southeast Asia, sworn brotherhoods fostered a homosocial environment that shaped the festival’s leadership, securing male control over ritual space and religious power. Second, this study introduces the “peripheralizing impulse”, a mechanism that systematically relegates women to secondary or symbolic roles across individual, institutional, and cultic domains. Despite social and demographic shifts, the festival’s male-dominated hierarchy persists, sustained by historical inertia and evolving gendered exclusions that uphold masculine religious authority. By tracing the festival’s history across East and Southeast Asia, this study reveals how entrenched gendered power structures persist and adapt, ensuring the continuity of male dominance despite broader societal change.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet Union witnessed a rise in alternative new religious communities, inspired by Asian spiritual traditions. Lithuania, a former Soviet country, encountered these movements in the late 1970s, where they functioned as subcultures, fostering alternative belief systems and resistive networks against the Soviet ideology. Due to the strict control of public space and KGB surveillance, these groups were largely operating underground until the late 1980s, when Lithuania’s move towards independence allowed them to emerge into the public sphere, what sparked both public curiosity and increased media coverage in Lithuania. This paper examines media representations of the Asian-influenced alternative religious and spiritual movements during this time of crucial socio-political transformations. The paper argues that the media produced a specific “contact zone” (Pratt 2008), where discourses and debates on free speech, alternative spirituality, Orientalism, and globalization unfolded, shaping the post-independence Lithuanian identity.

The meteoric rise of the new religious movement of Santa Muerte has sparked fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and state authorities throughout the Americas. Once a clandestine folk devotion, Santa Muerte now commands a global following in the millions, attracting devotees from the marginalized fringes of society, including the urban poor, LGBTQ+ individuals, prisoners, and even cartel foot soldiers. Yet, her rapid ascent has drawn fire from the Vatican, which has branded the movement as satanic, and from law enforcement agencies that frequently associate her with criminality. This paper examines the ecclesiastical and governmental crackdown on Santa Muerte, analyzing the ideological and political forces driving this opposition and the broader implications for religious pluralism in the hemisphere.

In this paper, we examine promotional emails sent out by a Sikh New Religious movement (NRM) commonly known as 3HO/Sikh Dharma. The 3 Hs Organization, where the Hs stand for Happy, Healthy, and Holy (3HO)/Sikh Dharma International (SDI) community has been mired in controversy since 2020. Turning to organizational promotional emails, they help us understand community responses to this moment of crisis. Not only do these organizations reveal multiple strategies at cultivating a positive image, our analysis discusses how distinct religious landscapes shape organizational claims at a positive identity.

Media portrayals of New Religious Movements (NRMs) frequently employ two rhetorical strategies: delegitimization, which trivializes or ridicules, and demonization, which amplifies perceived threats. This paper explores how contemporary media representations of NRMs—particularly The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—utilize these opposing yet complementary tactics. Analyzing materials ranging from The Book of Mormon Musical and South Park to Under the Banner of Heaven and American Primeval, this study situates these portrayals within broader historical and cultural contexts. Drawing on rhetorical studies and cultural sociology, it examines how these strategies shape public perception and mobilize opposition to NRMs. Additionally, the paper considers how similar approaches have been deployed against other NRMs and how targeted groups respond to negative framing. By investigating these media dynamics, this research contributes to discussions on religious freedom, social inclusion, and the power structures that define mainstream versus marginal religious identities.

For the better part of two decades, actor and comedian Rainn Wilson has publicly pursued his passion for community-based spiritual inquiry. His recent book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution (2023), promotes secular-spiritual engagement with literally “anything concerning the divine”—including spiritual wisdom available through popular culture products such as television’s StarTrek and Kung Fu—as long as it contributes to the individual and social renewal that, in his view, is critical to keeping humanity from its own destruction. Especially palatable to those who affiliate as Spiritual but not Religious or “Nones,” Wilson’s sincere yet ironic, disarmingly quirky presentation of universalist grand narratives aims to engage our contemporary, mediatized moment. It will be read here through the lens of metamodern theory (per Vermeulen and van den Akker) and understood as an example of a trend of “metamodernization" that characterizes some contemporary spiritual figures. 

This paper follows the figure of Prāṇnāth (c. 1618-1694), the preeminent religious preacher of the Praṇāmī order (sampradāya). Straddling Kṛṣṇa-centered Vaiṣṇavism and Nizārī Ismā‘īlism—as well as a range of courtly spaces from Shahjahanabad/Delhi to Panna (Bundelkhand)—Prāṇnāth fashioned himself into a Mahdī, or messiah, in the line of Kṛṣṇa, Muḥammad, and Christ. In my paper, I closely examine a Hindavī text from the Praṇāmī scriptural corpus expressly addressed to the Muslims of Hindustān. I study the text’s (and more generally, Prāṇnāth’s) incorporation of Qurʾānic eschatology into Vaiṣṇava cosmology, as well as its social purport of transcending orthodoxies and immiscible sectarian differences. Indic sampradāyas, this paper aims to argue, often encountered Islam in ways that were neither fleeting nor so exogenous as to be incapable of transforming those very traditions. In the main, I hope to revisit prevailing heuristic habits of treating the ‘Indic’ and the ‘Islamic’ as separable civilizational matrices intersecting only under asymmetrical conditions.

It is a common view among scholars of South Asian Islam that Muslims in colonial India internalized Victorian sexual norms and distanced themselves from classical Persian texts due, in large part, to their erotic and homoerotic content. This paper challenges this ‘derivative discourse’ of social and religious change by exploring a parallel tradition of engagement with Persian literature. While some “modernist” Muslim intellectuals, mostly those with close ties to the colonial state, sought to discredit the sexual norms of classical Persian and Urdu literature, commercial publishing houses continued to circulate these texts widely, often with interpretive frames that signaled their enduring relevance to a broad readership. An early modern tradition of engaging Persian literature not only survived but reached new audiences through the medium of print. I demonstrate the point by drawing on the Indian reception of a thirteenth-century Persian text that became one of the most printed books in nineteenth-century India: the Gulistan (Rose-Garden) of Saʿdi.

Mughal Princess Jahanara (d.1681) had a curious experience of Islam. Mughal political zeitgeist forbade princesses, her generation onwards, from fulfilling the religious duty of heterosexual marriage. And Sufism, whose practitioners have often flouted the marriage injunction, allowed her to go only so far; she was not granted spiritual succession to Maulana Shah for being a woman. However, Jahanara’s privilege as the princess of the contemporary world’s wealthiest empire helped her deal with this situation creatively: She constructed Agra’s central mosque and a porch at Moinuddin Chishti’s dargah, both of which reserved, and have continued to reserve, spaces for women worshipers. What also continues at the mosque till date is the use of henna, a material with strong connotations of marriage and fecundity in Persianate cultures. In her writings, Jahanara astutely undoes Persian’s gender-neutrality, to assert an emphatic female voice. These, she did by neither transgressing rebelliously nor risking politico-religious perpetration. 

In the southern Indian state of Kerala, velichappatus (ritual possession specialists) have been attempting to redefine their ritual activities as work to secure fair compensation from the State-administered temple governing boards. In 2008, velichappatus from across the state formed a trade union-like collective I will refer to as the Bhagavathy Komaram Sangham (BKS) to demand healthcare benefits and pensions from the state government.  In the last few years, the mandate of this collective has expanded to include socio-cultural and legal activities undertaken to uphold the Goddess’s sovereignty and authority. In this paper, I trace the story of Kamala, a founding member of the BKS and examines what serving the Goddess means to ritual actors like the velichappatu. In attempting to translate worship as a form of work, what ethical aspirations are velichappatus trying to articulate, and what kinds of ethical communities are they creating?

Given the current political turmoil that excludes immigrants, and refugees in the US, this paper revisits Calvin, and examines the theo-political implications of his sacramental ecclesiology in the context of exile. I explore how he resisted exclusionary structures, particularly in relation to the Corpus Christianum, which sought social purity at the cost of producing countless refugees. Through an analysis of the Eucharist and its relation to the church, I trace the inversion of corpus mysticum and corpus verum, which shifted the church’s foundation from sacramental practice to legal structures. I will argue that Calvin, within the framework of the threefold body of Christ, seeks to restore the severed link between the Eucharist and the Church, a bond that began to weaken after the twelfth century, in a way that does not make any visible community sovereign, and that he instead envisions the church as a performative space of radical inclusion. 

I will consider the role of prophecy in the vita of late medieval women such as Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Elisabeth of Reute, and Colette of Corbie. This presentation will examine why prophetic gifts were especially emphasized in the discussion of saintly women in the Late Middle Ages. I will discuss the increasing public activism of saintly and prophetic women. Finally, I will ask how prophecy was used as a legitimation strategy for these women and on the other hand how somatic experiences legitimated their prophecies.

In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions. 

In this article I will try to survey both secondary and primary sources, providing a simple historical overview of female shamans, diviners and spirit mediums in China. The terminology, both in Chinese and in English, can be confusing. The term ‘divination’, as used in secondary literature, mostly describes the activities of prognostication of elite males. Women are present, but are a minority, and understood to be fairly irrelevant. In spirit-inspired forms of divination, like shamanism and spirit mediumship, on the other hand, women are not only present but widely disseminated across several practices and audiences, and actively engaged. My approach is broad and tries to encompass all of the above practices, foregrounding women’s activities, highlighting similarities over time but also differences.

This paper addresses the ways in which critiques of "gay" and "queer" as products of western colonialism (Massad 2007, Puar 2017) are co-opted by religious nationalist groups to support anti-queer policies under the guise of anti-colonialism. This co-option puts queer activists in a difficult double-bind of having to prove their belonging in the imagined nation even as they have to compete for funding in a homocapitalist global NGO economy (Rao 2020). I show that this double-bind leads some queer activists to reshape not only what it means to be queer but also what it means to belong to a religious community. By choosing when and how to be complicit with competing power structures, these queer activists are able to create room for innovation and inclusion through shifting approaches to identity. However, this instability comes at a cost. 

Building off the work of Frantz Fanon and Glen Sean Coulthard, this paper argues that J.D. Vance’s rhetoric of the “normal gay guy” during the 2024 United States Presidential election constitutes a recognition-based strategy of colonization designed to dictate the terms of the relationship between gay men and conservatives in a way that benefits the cisheteropatriarchal status quo. Moreover, this paper will unmask Vance’s rhetorical strategy as an extension of that of his own Church: like Vance’s “normal gay” rhetoric, the Catholic hierarchy’s “same-sex attraction” rhetoric creates a politics of recognition and accommodation that reinforces Catholic colonial aims. As such, in both church and state, politics of recognition rely upon an affirmation of the dominant-subaltern relationship characteristic of colonialism. Genuine liberation for gay men thus requires a fundamental rejection of underlying colonial structures that define the parameters of existing discourse.

Through the Space feature (a live audio conversation), X, formerly known as Twitter, serves as an alternative platform for conversations between openly gay and closeted gay individuals in Indonesia. Amid scapegoating threats and oppression toward LGBTQ individuals, gay Indonesians–using alternate accounts– transform this platform into a gay world. Using Digital Ethnography methods, this paper exposes lived experiences of Indonesian gay individuals on X, where the conversations intersect with interreligious dialogue, sexual health, kinship, and queer identity in Indonesia.