In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Paulose Mar Gregorios (1922 – 1996) was an important theologian of the second half of the twentieth century from the Malankara (Indian) Orthodox Church. Gregorios played an important role in ecumenical movements, including a tenure as the President of the WCC. His theological works merged Eastern Orthodox fathers (particularly Gregory of Nyssa) with Indian thought and addressed the political situations in India and the world. Freedom was an important theme in several of his writings. As we consider the relationship between Eastern Orthodox thought and contemporary political and social change, Gregorios’ vision of the relationship between spiritual freedom and political freedom helps us. One pressing question for Eastern Orthodox today is the relationship between ascetical (inner) freedom to social and political freedom. In this paper I will analyze key aspects of Gregorios’ theology of freedom and suggest ways in which it can contribute to present Eastern Orthodox concerns. 

Saint Maximus the Confessor (580–662) is a key figure in Christian theology and philosophy, whose work continues to influence Eastern Orthodox thought. and contribute to reconstructing the original Greek texts. His writings, particularly on the nature of Christ and human will, address critical theological debates of his time. Maximus defended the doctrine of the Two Wills of Christ, asserting both a divine and human will, which played a significant role in the Christological controversies of the 7th and 8th centuries.
The Georgian translations of Maximus’s treatises are vital for preserving his ideas and understanding their influence in the Caucasus. These translations play a critical role in preserving his works. These translations, particularly those from the 12th-century Gelati manuscript, offer insights into the adaptation of Byzantine theology in the Christian East. They also serve as an essential resource for reconstructing lost parts of the original Greek texts.

The New Iadgari is a significant Georgian hymnographic collection from the 9th–10th centuries, encompassing hymns for the liturgical year. Despite its importance, its Georgian sources remain underexplored. Recent discoveries, such as the Greek manuscript Sinai MG NF 56+5 and the Syriac version in Sinai MS Syriac 4, provide valuable insights into the text's transmission and evolution.

A unique feature of the Georgian New Iadgari is the commemoration of the “Burnt Fathers” on March 19. This narrative, absent in the Greek and Syriac versions, recounts the martyrdom of ascetic monks attacked and burned by their enemies. The liturgical structure includes stichera on "Lord, I have cried," a mattins canon, and stichera on Lauds, emphasizing themes of faith and sacrifice.

The New Iadgari highlights Georgian contributions to Eastern Christian hymnography and reflects the dynamic adaptation of liturgical texts across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Despite their expressed commitment to conciliar theology, the modern Orthodox theologians, Sergius Bulgakov and John Behr both call into question the coherence of the credal confession that the Son of God was begotten before the ages. Specifically, these two theologians reject as nonsensical the suggestion that anything existed “before” time or even, in Bulgakov’s case, to describe creation as having a beginning (Behr 2019, 19ff., 248; Bulgakov 2002, 29).  Yet this distinction between “before” and “after” is one of the pillars of the distinction between the begetting of the Son and His making of creatures, a distinction that is championed by Athanasius, enshrined in the Nicene creed, and endorsed by Behr and Bulgakov. This paper explores the precise nature of the incoherence of the Nicene “before.” Is this incoherence a sign of the crudeness of Nicene theology or an unavoidable feature of any theological language that seeks to describe the paradox of a creation in time by an eternal God? 

This paper examines key theological and liturgical distinctions between Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Western Christian traditions concerning the Eucharist, particularly the use of leavened versus unleavened bread and the role of the Holy Spirit in the transformation of the elements. The Western tradition, influenced by Augustinian theology and the doctrine of Original Sin, emphasizes Christ’s crucifixion and atoning sacrifice, reflected in the use of unleavened bread. In contrast, the Eastern Churches prioritize Christ’s resurrection and the process of theosis, symbolized by leavened bread. Additionally, while Western Churches define the moment of consecration at the words of institution, Eastern traditions emphasize the entire Eucharistic liturgy, culminating in the epiclesis. These differences may stem from varying interpretations of the Last Supper in the Synoptic and Johannine narratives. Understanding these variations highlights deeper theological divergences and contributes to a more nuanced appreciation of Eucharistic theology across Christian traditions.

This paper explores a case study of one congregation’s attempt to develop affordable housing on their land—their animating theological imagination and the widening web of political engagements and solidarities produced by their conscientization—as an example of “iterative orthopraxy” through which “the real” and “right action” are progressively revealed. Thinking with Freire, Sobrino, and Dussel, I develop a theory of action as a transformative-epistemological method. Foregrounding the iterativity of orthopraxy underscores that actors cannot a priori know which concrete collective actions constitute “the good.” Each subsequent action made in solidarity toward liberation and life is a refined best approximation. The humility required and instilled by the space of unknowing demonstrates the spirituality of such praxis. I proceed to reflect on the revised portrait of relations and contradictions generated by this case, particularly with respect to the political-economy of property, and the questions such revelations raise for practitioners.  

Reflecting on San Bernardino’s recent history, its current issues such as the growing unhoused population and the realities of living on the streets – this paper discusses co-walking methodologies as a way to explore social, religious, spiritual and theological subjects in conversation with street life. Can walks and conversations with a church community leader serving the unhoused population provide an entry into a co-created conversation that explores urban religion in the streets and more? The paths and places that we walked were selected by both researcher and community leader, which in turn allowed the church leader to also direct the walk,  experiences we had and the topics we explored. With walking methods in view, this paper suggests how scholars and community members may create shared-forms of knowledge on religion as it exists in these city streets, how religion and the city problems interact and bring attention to problems in the city. 

What might our interrelationship with one another teach us about community development? What is the spiritual work required to foster a more beloved community? This engagement with practical theology examines the role of a city planner (a public sector role) as a ministerial and pastoral profession through Black, Buddhist, and Christian prophetic traditions. This paper asserts a framework for understanding neighboring is: a) a critical path for spiritual development, b) a vocational path/ministry, and c) a form of pastoral care and spiritual imagination.

Moving beyond proximity is a call to karmic action that deals with the material, spiritual, and civic aspects of the places we inhabit. By integrating the practical, liturgical, and theological aspects of the sangha as experienced through the lens of place, this paper proposes a framework for a socially engaged application to public service and city planning that aims to omit no one in the process. 

For twelve years, I have directed a set of practitioner-oriented, campus-community programs in religious literacy and interfaith leadership while at the same time publishing, teaching, and presenting in the critical study of religion. Wearing these “two hats” can produce a fair amount of internal conflict. Thus I routinely wrestle with the three exemplary issues for this session: how to bring a measure of rigor to the scholar-practitioner dialogues and interactions that I participate in and program, how to negotiate these two different roles within myself and with my students in the classroom, and how attune myself to the ethical questions that invariably arise in wearing these two hats in my scholarship, programming, and teaching. Although I do not have hard-and-fast answers or solutions to any of them, I can bring to them a measure of experience and perspective, one from which these issues are not as thorny as might seem.

This paper examines an Epiphanic theory of attentio from late medieval England, exemplified in a sermon of fourteenth-century Franciscan friar-poet William Herebert. Because, Herebert suggests, 1) attentio enables one to serve God, and 2) “no one can come to the Father except through [Jesus],” 3) attentio is a contemplative mediator, immanently Christological. Herebert tracks the verbal logic of his thema to the virtues Augustine ascribes to good teachers—attention, good will, and docility: to come is a sign of docility, to adore is a sign of good will, to see is a sign of attentio. This makes attentio a sign of the Epiphanic object, just as the Epiphanic object is a sign of the incarnate Word. Collapsing the middle terms, Herebert finds that attentio is a sign of Christ. Eucharistically, attending to the sign transforms it into the signified. I apply this theory of attention to Herebert’s extant devotional lyrics.

This paper examines the status of wonder (admiratio) in the seventeenth-century psychological writings of René Descartes and Benedictus de Spinoza. Wonder was an affective state that could be newly explained by a scientific psychology on the model of medicine and physics, but it also had an epistemological function, explaining how it is that our attention focuses on this rather than that, and an ethical function, guiding a person to right attention. Descartes treats wonder as the first of all passions, a precondition for all other feeling, but Spinoza declines to count it as an affect at all, not even as the last. This paper reads their divergence on wonder as evidence of their differing views on causal explanation and respective departures from scholastic epistemology. It illustrates one way in which theological and ethical arguments on causation, will, and self-development were involved in early modern attempts to ground natural science.

Immanuel Kant diagnoses both himself and Emanuel Swedenborg with diseases of attention. Kant’s hypochondria led him to attend to his body’s obscure affective forces for signs of lifeforce and longevity, while Swedenborg’s enthusiasm involved attending to his visions as souls or signs of the afterlife. This paper examines Kant’s epistemological account of attention, important, I argue, for his philosophy of religion. I consult Kant’s medical sources on attentional pathologies, which illuminate the role of affective and attentive experience in Kant’s critical philosophy, aligning his thought with earlier diagnoses and therapies of idolatrous fixation. By foregrounding the medicine of attention, this paper also draws connections to earlier scholastic and mystical sources, challenging the common assumption that Kant’s critique of enthusiasm marks an irrevocable break from these traditions. At least on the question of attention, Kant struggled to “look away.”

This paper situates Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 speeches On Religion within the aesthetic framework of Romantic universal poetry. While Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as “intuition and feeling” of the universe has typically been read as a critique of Fichtean intellectual intuition, these affects also play an important role in late Enlightenment and early Romantic art criticism, where they become associated with problems of attention and imagination. In On Religion, Schleiermacher transforms two key problems of attention that emerge at this time: 1) a Pygmalion-like attentive overinvestment, which seeks to animate, even copulate with the work of art, and 2) the Romantic problem of a distracted, excessive imagination that ignores the artwork. For Schleiermacher, both excessive attention and distraction – paired together – become positive means of ascent toward an experience of religious-erotic cosmic absorption that has no specific object because it participates in the universe’s endlessly proliferative process of self-representation.

This paper analyzes the music videos of Pastor Hyung Jin (Sean) Moon, or King Bullethead, as theological carriers of contemporary religious Korean American conservatisms. The work contextualizes Pastor Moon’s Tennessee-based World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church, or the Rod of Iron Ministries, within the broader Unification Church movement. Utilizing both institutional material and external documents, this analysis articulates the theologies (and their new media manifestations) which Moon, and the Rod of Iron Ministries, inherited from the South Korean Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church. Additionally, this paper will explore the theology’s reformulations since Hyung Jin Moon’s 2013 schism. These fall into three primary doctrinal camps: the political/spiritual, holy family, and the divine right to rule. The gun-slinging rap videos of King Bullethead give material (digital) shape to Moon’s doctrinal conservatisms and missionizes the ultimate imperialist and dominionist agenda of the Rod of Iron Ministries.

This paper explores Christian eschatology as orienting American society towards the disappearance of black persons from public life. Probing the iconic white supremacist film, The Birth of A Nation (1915), we will uncover how a racialized version of Christian eschatology is facilitated through this film. This paper argues that the expression of this Christian eschatology in The Birth of A Nation informs the disappearance of black persons from American life in the 20th century as a mode by which constitutes the organization of the United States as a racial project. I call this process a “theo-politics of disappearance;” which describes the intersection of Christian eschatology and anti-blackness as facilitating the removal of black persons from American life. This paper explores black removal as most notably expressed in the mass incarceration of black persons in America’s jails and prisons in the latter half of the 20th century. 

The God’s Not Dead film series is more than just faith-based entertainment—it is a battle cry. Over the past decade, the franchise has transformed from a simple tale of campus religious persecution into a full-fledged manifesto for Christian nationalism, urging believers to reclaim America through political action. This paper critically examines how the films construct a siege mentality, stoking fears of a secular takeover while positioning conservative Christians as the last defenders of the nation’s moral and spiritual fabric. Through historical analysis and discourse critique, I explore how God’s Not Dead strategically aligns its messaging with pivotal cultural flashpoints—Trumpism, education battles, and pandemic-era governance—to mobilize its audience. Ultimately, this paper argues that the franchise is not just reflecting Christian nationalist sentiment but actively shaping it, weaponizing nostalgia, faith, and fear to turn religious conviction into a political movement with tangible electoral consequences.

AppleTV’s Severance is on the surface a sci-fi flavoured workplace drama, but alongside this presentational veneer lies a more dynamic, multifaceted interrogation of what it means to believe in leaders (corporate, faith, and governmental alike), where the line is drawn between healthy faith and cult-like devotion, what freedom looks like and how (and when) it needs to be fought for, and how one defines identity (not least of all: their own). From these launch points, as illustrated by characters individually and collectively as well as through the overarching plot, Severance provides an exceptionally fruitful source material for examination, reflection and potential instruction across numerous critical and consequential contexts: our personal communities, the Academy as a whole, and the larger global sociopolital context of modern times. 

There are many reasons to be suspicious of filial piety: Sociological research details the harms done to LGBTQ+ persons trapped in harmful families of origin. Family abolitionists contend that the family has been co-opted by neocapitalism. Even the New Testament expresses suspicion of biogenetic relations. Yet for all these risks, a growing recognition of the place of queer elders in communities—as well as the ageism, idealized tropes, and other problems—point to a need to reevaluate the role that queer elders play and the obligations due to them. I argue that, fraught as it is, the concept of filial piety can help us do this work. I utilize sociological research, Confucian virtue ethics, queer theory arguments, and theological work on adoption to theorize the benefits of filial piety (the goods conferred by intergenerational relationships; the need to give and receive support across one’s lifespan; etc.) as well as its vicious shortcomings.

This study explores how Fiducia Supplicans (FS), the Vatican’s declaration on blessings for same-sex couples and those in “irregular situations,” is received by Filipino clergy and same-sex couples. Using a Conversation in the Spirit approach, it will facilitate a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) where both groups engage in open dialogue. Inspired by my experience in the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines’ (CBCP) Synodal Discussion on Gender and Sexuality, this research replicates that process of communal discernment. Instead of separate FGDs, a combined session will foster true encounter and dialogue, ensuring diverse perspectives are heard without judgment. Thematic analysis of the discussion will assess whether FS is received, rejected, or engaged with in a synodal manner. This study aims to provide insights into how Filipino clergy and laity navigate FS and whether their engagement reflects the Church’s call to synodality.