In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

In 1974, Rev. José Mojica founded the first Spanish-speaking church for gays and lesbians in the United States, MCC Hispana, in New York. A native of Santurce, Puerto Rico, and a former evangelist in the Assemblies of God, Mojica became an itinerant preacher in the predominantly gay United Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) in the 1970s, driven by his passion for sharing the “gospel of gay liberation” with Spanish-speaking gays and lesbians. Mojica played a pivotal role in the 1980s in bringing Las Iglesias de la Comunidad Metropolitana (Spanish for MCC) to Mexico and South America as head of the MCC’s Hispanic Americas mission work. Following Mojica’s trajectory as a gay Pentecostal evangelist and missionary, this paper provides a window into early transnational flows of religious and sexual identities between the United States and Latin America. It also centers the often-overlooked contributions of queer Latino/as in LGBTQ religious history. 

The Pentecostalization of world Christianity has given rise to a great variety of ecclesial formations shaped and adapted by the context in which they emerge. Two characteristics commonly shared by Pentecostal-charismatic Christian (PCC) churches, regardless of geographic location, are their historically literalist reading of the Bible and a strong emphasis on individual holiness, which often translates into anti-LGBTQ policies, discourses, and practices. However, recent research has documented the emergence of LGBTQ-inclusive PCC churches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This paper will share findings from fieldwork conducted at the 2023 annual conference of Arena Apostolica Church, a self-identified Pentecostal and LGBTQ+ inclusive congregation in Brasilia (Brazil). Drawing on this case study, the presentation examines how the empowerment by the Spirit enables queer individuals within a Pentecostal church to challenge the heteronormative discourses traditionally associated with this religious movement. In particular, it highlights how the Arena Apostólica Church represents a form of religious innovation within "third-wave" Brazilian Pentecostalism, bringing about creative and deeply contextualized articulations between queerness and Pentecostalism.

The term “Indecent Pentecostalism” may seem contradictory. Many Pentecostalisms in Colombia reproduce theologies that impose heteronormative morals and biblical interpretations that place most expectations of sexual holiness on women. Yet, this paper advocates for the urgent formulation of Indecent Pentecostalisms. It does so by revisiting Elisabeth Brusco’s influential work, The Reformation of Machismo, frequently cited in Pentecostal studies in the United States. Conducted in the mid-1980s, Brusco’s work argues that Colombian women’s conversion to Pentecostalism serves as a liberating act that propels the conversion of their husbands–whose machismo makes them reject the domestic realm–and transforms the family structure resulting in upward mobility among other beneficial consequences. Drawing on ethnographic research with twenty-first-century Pentecostal women in Colombia, this presentation challenges the continuing validity of Brusco’s conclusions for present-day Pentecostalism in Latin America. The paper engages Brusco’s findings in conversation with Marcela Althaus-Reid’s advocacy for the indecency of heterosexual women in Latin America, which requires coming out of a “heterosexual closet” characterized by domestication, monogamy, and submission. 

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The "freedom of a Christian" has been a contested and reinterpreted term over the centuries in Reformed Theology. Looking at four snapshots running across the centuries in Luther, Calvin, Virginia, and Abolitionism, I offer clarity and steps towards a fresh way forward.

The Reformed tradition of human depravity and freedom speaks with a multifold voice. This paper will explore three of those voices: two theologians—John Calvin, Karl Barth—and the contemporary writer and director, Paul Schrader. Though first two are theologians, and the third a filmmaker, they all are working within and with a tradition, learning from it and arguing with it (as MacIntyre argues is the nature of tradition). Through these interpreters of the Reformed tradition (one of which was of course the founder), we discover that depravity always lurks under the surface of human life, but that freedom is really possible, and ultimately assured, in Christ.

This essay examines Barth’s doctrine of death in Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 through the lens of forensic and cosmological apocalyptic patterns proposed by Pauline scholar Martinus de Boer. Despite extensive Barth scholarship, Barth’s doctrine of death remains relatively underexplored, particularly its apocalyptic characteristics. This essay seeks to address this gap by first distinguishing between two types of death in Barth’s framework: “natural death” and “evil death.” It then utilizes de Boer’s apocalyptic patterns to analyze Barth’s discussion of evil death. The essay contends that elements of both patterns are present and closely intertwined in Barth’s treatment. Finally, this analysis deepens our understanding of Barth’s soteriology, demonstrating that Christ’s crucifixion grants us not only “freedom from death” but also “freedom to death.” In other words, those in Christ are liberated from the enslavement to evil death and are liberated for the natural death corresponding to their divine determination.

The Reformed tradition claims it is "always being reformed by the Word of God." Yet, the Spirit, the animating force of such transformation, is (too) often estranged and relegated to the Trinity's third person and last position. There is much more focus on the doctrine of God and Christology than pneumatology. In this paper, I explore how returning to the participatory and operative pneumatology in Paul's thought can inform and contribute to ongoing contemporary conversations and practices within Reformed theology. 

In an effort to make visible the affective dimension of intellectual work, Donovan Schaefer describes the satisfying feeling of “click” that motivates scholars to pursue discovery. In an affect economy, as described by Sara Ahmed, feelings circulate across bodies, concepts, space, and time to facilitate the maintenance of culture and society. What feelings, then, circulate in the study of the Far Christian Right? How do these feelings circulate between experienced scholars and beginners, like the undergraduates I teach? If the classroom is not neutral, religiously, politically, or emotionally, what do we do with it?  Can we avoid flattening the complex humanity out of the Christian right and also enumerate the threat to Canadian democracy posed by these communities?

Research on Christian nationalism in the United States has largely focused on White Evangelical Christianity. However, the most widely used measures for assessing support for Christian nationalism—such as those employed by PRRI/Brookings (2023) and the General Social Survey (Gorski et al., 2022)—consistently capture significant numbers of non-Evangelical supporters and adherents. This paper, drawing on findings from a six-month comparative ethnography conducted among Orthodox Jews and Latter-day Saints (LDS) in the United States during the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2024 elections, argues that non-Evangelical support for the MAGA movement offers a useful lens for reconsidering the concept of Christian nationalism. Specifically, it does so by offering two interventions into the current discourse on Christian nationalism: (1) by distinguishing the overarching Christian nationalist meta-narrative from its particular Evangelical expression and (2) by highlighting the diverse leadership structures that facilitate Christian nationalist support beyond Evangelical contexts.

From 2016 to 2023, Latin American conservative politicians mobilized a new form of religious discourse that resembled the White Christian Nationalism (WCN) rhetoric employed by US President Donald Trump in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, leading to both political victories and significant vote shares in Latin American elections. Using content analysis of political speeches, campaign communications, and policy proposals across Latin American countries, this paper studies how these politicians adapted WCN into a distinct Latin American Christian Nationalism (LCN) by: (i) advancing a historically rooted, divinely sanctioned Latin American “deep story” of what Latin American nations were, (ii) arguing for a “political vision” in which Latin American countries must be governed by laws and leaders protecting their “Christian identity,” (iii) framing their opposition to progressive social policies as the defense of “Christian nations” from “un-Christian foreign interference,” and (iv) allowing them to align their political identities with Trump’s brand.

This paper explores the epistemology of contemplative practice through three texts representative of distinct contemplative traditions: the Paramārthasāra of Abhinavagupta, Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa and Pañcīkaraṇa (Śaṃkara Bhagavatpāda attr.). It approaches them to discern an underlying methodological framework of the managing or governance of attention (avadhāna) as a primary mode of textual reflection and philosophical hermeneutics. Engaging new materialist scholarship and attention studies, it explores the tight mutual relationship obtaining between the material body and its immaterial other, articulated differently in each text but resting on a parallel phenomenological structure and movement from the corporeal to the incorporeal.

Leading researchers have criticized the pace at which mindfulness meditation has become adopted as a clinical intervention, warning that its benefits have not been adequately established and potential harms not ruled out (e.g., Van Dam et al. 2018). Their abundance of caution stems from an undue reliance on the evidence-based medicine (EBM) hierarchy of evidence, according to which randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses are superior to other evidence. I argue that, plausibly, meditation is effective not because of a single “active ingredient,” but also due to its embeddedness in a rich context. Yet RCT methodology precludes discovering that this is the case and meta-analyses typically exclude non-RCT evidence. I instead propose the inductive reward principle for weighing evidence: However we conceive of evidence quality, we should relax our standard if the prima facie risk of harm is low and the potential to benefit many people is high. 

The recitation of the Qurʾān in Arabic and the chanting of Arabic Sufi poetry are regular contemplative practices throughout the Muslim world that are a means of arriving at a higher state of awareness or consciousness of reality.  Thus they are an epistemological route that help the reciter acquire a higher form of knowing and knowledge.  In this paper I share how the both the Qurʾān and Sufi poetry (written by well-known Sufis such as Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240) but also by lesser known Sufis such as ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūnīyya (d. 1517)) have been used as a means of acquiring a higher form of knowledge and entering into higher states of consciousness and being.

Using the framework of 4E cognition, this study focuses on how processes of learning to meditate are both embedded and enactive. Drawing on ethnographic data from participant observation and structured, in-depth interviews with hospital chaplains (n=20) in a Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program, this study describes how participants' prior knowledge of devotional practices constituted important social and cultural context for learning. Likewise, this study documents how learners enactively adapted the postures, durations, and mental exercises of the CBCT protocol when incorporating it into their regular habits of practice. In learning this standardized contemplative intervention, chaplains were not passive recipients but instead actively and creatively tailored and even hybridized CBCT to meet their needs and pursue their goals. The embedded and enactive aspects of contemplative learning reveal valuable resources that shape how contemplative practices are adopted and adapted into practitioners’ lives.

Hunting critics have consistently attacked the rhetoric that contemporary hunters use to justify the slaying of wild animals. This paper examines two such techniques as found in a collection of Evangelical hunting devotionals: the projection of the desire to be put out of one’s misery in the case of wounded animals and the construal of slain animals as having sacrificed themselves. Although these rationalizations merit criticism for conveniently eliding animals’ actual perspectives, confirming the suspicions of anti-hunters, these cases also deflate the idea that hunters' ethical discourses amount to a mere charade. Moreover, the particular articulations of these techniques in the devotionals achieve the complex effect of saturating the slaying of animals with gravity and ambiguity. Without diminishing the vices of these works, such an effect, I propose, merits contemplation in the Anthropocene, which is partially characterized by the mass annihilation and mutilation of nonhuman animals.

The concept of Christian vocation has long centered around work. This narrow concept of vocation conflating “call” and “career” is problematic for both humans and all creatures. I examine how problematic interpretations of vocation are oppressive for humans and nonhuman animals. If nonhuman animals are laborers, then the theo-ethical systems that protect human workers should also include nonhuman animal workers. However, simple support for nonhuman laborers is insufficient as a just theo-ethic. I explore attitudes towards labor in Christianity, and how a persistent rhetoric of “call as career” denigrates the concept of vocation for all creatures. I also explore how intersecting concepts of animality, class, ability, and race coalesce to maintain the forced labor of creaturekind. I argue for the delinking of labor and vocation, and a repudiation of the idea that the purpose of existence is work, calling out Christianity’s complicity in the oppression of human and nonhuman workers. 

The portrayal of animals in the hadith literature offers a unique perspective on the spiritual status of nonhuman beings within Islamic tradition. While the Qur’an affirms that all of creation glorifies God, the hadith expands upon this theme, presenting animals as active participants in devotional acts, as believers in Muhammad’s prophethood, and as morally accountable beings in the afterlife. These themes challenge anthropocentric assumptions and invite believers to reconsider the relationship between humans and nonhuman creatures in a way that fosters affinity, humility, and ethical responsibility. Despite this, some modern and premodern interpretations dismiss the religious significance of animals in Islamic scripture, reducing their devotion to mechanical or instinctive behavior. This presentation explores the religious dimension of animals in the hadith, critically engages with contesting views that undermine this theme, and highlights its ethical impact in fostering a sense of interspecies kinship and promoting ethical attitudes toward the nonhuman other.

This paper explores the ethical implications of a current debate about evolution, natural evil, and the goodness of God. There is an ongoing “fault-line” (in Christopher Southgate’s words) between those who believe God willed the evolutionary process with all its struggle, suffering, and destruction, because this was the only way to create complex life, and those who regard the struggle, suffering, and destruction as opposed to God’s good purposes. Yet some on both sides agree strikingly on the shape of eschatological hope for other-than-human animals. Following Southgate’s own call for an eschatological ethic of animal care, the paper explores the ethical implications of this recent eschatological convergence across the fault-line, focusing on two issues: killing animals for food, and responding to anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic species extinction. While endorsing much in Southgate’s proposed eschatological ethic, it disagrees with his practical conclusions about both these issues.

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.

A consistent question in the study of moral injury is whether it should be treated as a medical condition, and a consistent focus of mad studies and disability studies is the downsides of medicalization. Despite this, moral injury has largely not been analyzed through the lens of disability. Taking Tyler Boudreau’s paradigmatic argument against the medicalization of moral injury as a starting point, this paper argues that the insights of mad studies and disability studies provide strong additions to the argument against this medicalization. As Boudreau argues, psychiatry tends to privatize discussions of moral injury and avoid real political or ethical grappling with the conditions that lead to moral injury; medicine similarly privatizes and depoliticizes the social conditions that create disability. Psychiatrized people are also discredited as knowers, which excludes the insights of veterans with moral injury from public discourse.

This presentation combines close textual and performative analysis of comedian Dave Chappelle’s recent work with comparative theological and ethical inquiry, as well as intersectional approaches, to investigate how humor can simultaneously cause and potentially heal moral injury across diverse communities. By focusing on Chappelle’s role as both a provocateur – accused by some of “punching down” on transgender identities – and a cultural figure sought for guidance (notably as host of Saturday Night Live following multiple pivotal U.S. elections), the study integrates perspectives from A. Roy Eckardt, Brian Powers, and Resmaa Menakem to illustrate how comedy serves as a ritual space where communities confront trauma and reimagine manhood. Anchored in Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada’s conceptualization of manhood as an institutionally guarded construct forged through family, community, and faith commitments, the talk highlights Chappelle’s Islamic identity and suggests that comedy, properly understood, can foster new possibilities for moral repair and constructive public discourse.

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 walking methodologies as a way to explore social, religious, spiritual and theological subjects in conversation with street life. Can walks and conversations with a street minister serving the unhoused population provide an entry into a further study of urban religion, lived religion, lived theology in close proximity to the streets? 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, and topics we explored. With walking methods in view, this paper suggests how scholars and community members can together explore religion as it exists in city streets, how religion and the city problems interact, bring attention to problems in the city, and remember the forgotten.  

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.