In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This session brings mimetic theory into dialogue with theology, pedagogy, and contemporary theories of identity to explore how desire shapes personal and communal formation. The first paper presents a pedagogical framework for teaching the lives of the saints in Catholic religious education, emphasizing the saints’ conversion of desire as a model for adolescent development. Drawing on Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, positive mimesis, and affective conversion, it proposes ways educators can invite students to critically reflect on their own desires through figures like St. Ignatius of Loyola. The second paper engages queer and crip theologies alongside mimetic theory to critique the limits of rigid identity categories. While queer and crip perspectives challenge binaries, mimetic theory reveals how such categories can still participate in cycles of exclusion and violence. Together, these papers explore alternative models of identity grounded not in rivalry or social comparison, but in openness to divine and transformative desire.

The devil, the figure styled by John Calvin as “God’s enemy and ours,” is ubiquitous in the witness of the New Testament, but contemporary Christian doctrine generally remains dumbfounded about what to do with him. At the same time, modern impulses have yielded a resurgence in the language of the “demonic”—that is, pervasive, pernicious, personified evil. In light of this perplexity, Philip G. Ziegler raises and seeks to answer a pointed question in his book God's Adversary and Ours: Can the gospel actually be heard and understood without meaningful reference to this inimical entity? 
This panel will discuss Ziegler's cautious but determined biblical-theological exploration of the identity, ontology, and agency of the devil.

You're invited to our annual Connecting Conversations Luncheon!  The PWD Committee is thrilled to host this special event, a cherished tradition that has always provided a valuable space for our members with disabilities and their allies in the Academy to connect and build community.

This year, we're making a small change to the format. Instead of a paid meal, we'll be hosting a Bring Your Own Lunch (BYOL) event. Whether you bring your own lunch or not, please join us! We believe the most important part of this gathering is the conversation and connection.

If you have any questions, please contact the PWD chair, Nick Shrubsole, at Nicholas.Shrubsole@ucf.edu.

The Status of Women and Gender Minoritized Persons in the Professions Committee and The Committee on Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Professions Committee invite all woman-identified and gender-minoritized AAR members at any stage in their professions to Mentoring Tables for self-reflective, critical, and supportive conversations. The Mentoring Tables event offers space for candid conversations about challenging issues the participants are facing due to their social identities, institutional culture, political climate, and more. Intended as peer-to-peer mentoring in a supportive environment, table conversations include, but are not limited to, academic freedom, scholarship, non-academic careers, research and publication, job search, professional development, social identity-related issues in professions, and graduate schools. 

Unlike previous years, meals will not be available for this event, but light snacks and refreshments will be provided. If you prefer to bring your own lunch, feel free to do so. No reservation is required. 

In an era of faculty precarity, ideological polarization, and institutional histories of injustice, what does it mean to practice hope as an intellectual and political commitment? What strategies and choices make hope and freedom viable? This panel explores hope not as naïve optimism, but as a form of sovereignty—a declaration of intellectual and ethical autonomy as well as accountability—in the face of everyday structural constraints, implicit and explicit (and old and new) hierarchies, censorship and surveillance, and professional vulnerability.