In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Monday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Session ID: A24-419
Papers Session

This session brings together scholars working at the cutting edge of religion, ecology, and multispecies justice to confront the systems that sever humans from the more-than-human world. Whether through the sacred resistance of Minamata protest literature, the politics of poop, or the spiritual implications of multispecies entanglement, these papers challenge the logics of extraction, autonomy, and control that underwrite ecological collapse. In their place, they offer visions of embodied freedom, collective subjectivity, and ecological solidarity grounded in animist cosmologies, Buddhist ethics, and radical relationality. By interrogating the infrastructures—both material and metaphysical—that render life disposable, these scholars call for a transformation in how we imagine democracy, agency, and responsibility. This session is a call to unmake the old assumptions and begin building livable futures rooted in reciprocity, vulnerability, and the sacred entanglement of all life.

Papers

Multispecies democracy (MD) challenges human exceptionalism by advocating for the political inclusion of nonhumans, positioning itself as a hopeful intervention in an era of democratic crisis. While MD does not propose direct democratic participation for nonhumans, its advocates argue that humans should act as proxies, representing nonhuman interests in democratic processes. A crucial tension emerges, however: How can MD reject anthropocentric models of agency and freedom while simultaneously depending on humans to articulate nonhuman interests? This paper explores this tension by examining democracy’s dependence on practices of discursive accountability—giving and taking reasons, justifying claims, and revising shared norms. Because nonhumans lack the capacity to take part in these practices, the prospects for their democratic participation require further theorization. By clarifying the limits of MD’s current political vision, this paper argues for forms of nonhuman democratic representation that preserve democracy’s core structure of accountability while expanding its ethical scope.

Excreta, specifically human feces, as in poop, is an understudied phenomenon in the study of Religion. Yet, ancient texts and contemporary contexts speak to its importance for the lives of human individuals and the environment. There is a dual sanitation crisis plaguing the planet. On one hand, there are 3.5 billion people who do not have a dignified, private place to relieve themselves. On the other hand, the copious use of resources to flush (and then extract) feces and urine from fresh water is straining municipal systems. Much more than a technical problem, however, the crisis and its solutions require asking religious, psychological, and social questions. Paying attention to the dynamics of power, worldviews, and practices elucidate why the porcelain toilet system is so entrenched, even in places where ecological sanitation alternatives exist. This paper hones in on the religious dimensions of this question, theorizing that our sh*t is sacred.

This paper employs Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” to examine the systemic issues underpinning the environmental and humanitarian disaster in the Minamata Disease Incident—the worst industrial pollution in Japanese history—and show how the Minamata villagers were rendered “unimagined communities” by the Japanese government-industrial complex during postwar modernization. As is often the case in contexts marked by slow violence, literature emerged as a form of resistance in Minamata. This paper explores Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, a major driving force in the Minamata protest movement, and suggests that her writing, appealing to the local (pre)animistic worldview and the Buddhist notion of Tariki (Other-power), gestures towards a relational framework that reclaims the victims’ subjectivity beyond their subjection to objectification. This framework, transcending the confines of human agency, repudiates the “premises of individualism” on which neoliberal capitalism operates and reimagines a human-nature relationship characterized by sympathy and interdependence.

This paper argues that dominant anthropocentric ideologies, rooted in autonomy and human exceptionalism, have systematically denied agency and well-being to the more-than-human world, contributing to ecological degradation and species extinction. In response, I develop embodied freedom as a theoretical and ethical framework that redefines freedom as relational, interdependent, and materially grounded. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, this paper proposes a relational ethics that recognizes the shared vulnerability and agency of all beings, challenging the prevailing notion that freedom requires detachment from constraint. By reframing freedom through multispecies entanglements rather than human sovereignty, this paper offers a pathway toward a more just and sustainable vision of multispecies flourishing in an era of planetary crisis.

Monday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Session ID: A24-406
Roundtable Session

Entering the final year of the five-year seminar on Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship, this roundtable session gathers together scholars invested in the future of the field. Each discussant has been invited to offer brief remarks in response to the following prompts in order to seed a broader conversation with seminar attendees: As Muslims in the academy committed to engaged and/or constructive scholarship, describe what you think are the most productive trends contributing to the growth of engaged and constructive endeavors. Where do you see promise? Where do you see peril? What approaches, methods, and perspectives should this developing field be taking account of? What needs refinement? Where ought this work go in the years ahead? Where do you see your own work developing?

Monday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Session ID: A24-418
Papers Session

The vision of God is one of the key topics of Western philosophy and is frequently linked to a model of intellect derived from the Platonic tradition. This panel invites papers that explore how images of ‘vision’ relate to strictly epistemological and metaphysical concerns? These are issues that have captivated philosophers from Plato, to Nicholas of Cusa, to Spinoza, to Hegel and beyond. The notion of divine vision has generated numerous difficulties, as evinced by the critiques of many recent philosophers writing in the wake of both Heidegger and the twentieth century empiricists, both of whom have often been unsparing in their critiques of such metaphysical models. Analysis of some recent reflection on this topic from philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion or Stephen Clark would be welcome.  Papers are invited from both a historical and systematic perspective.   

Papers

This paper examines Pope Gregory the Great's ascetic epistemology historically and systematically. By treating Gregory's sources, both Latin and Greek, it establishes multiple lines of monastic influence on Gregory's approach to the knowledge of God in a Neoplatonic key. It does this by looking closely at Gregory's treatment of the gift of tears across his corpus. For Gregory, tears are a necessary precursor to the vision of God, they make growth in the knowledge and love of God possible, and they accompany the one seeking the vision of God throughout earthly life. By investigating sources of influence less commonly attributed to Gregory and tracing their effect on his picture of human knowledge of the divine, this paper offers a portrait of an understudied figure's inheritance and synthesis of multiple strands of the Christian Platonist tradition in the Late Antique period.

John Smith’s Select Discourses (1660) speaks often of the change of orientation required to come to a proper understanding of, and communion with, God. Moral, imaginative, and intellectual purification, mark a “conversion” from the material world to the realm of spirit and truth, plays a central role in Smith’s epistemology (clearly displayed in his “True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge”), natural theology (“Of the Immortality of the Soul”), and in his soteriology (most obviously presented in his “Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion”). In this paper, I will call attention to Smith’s explicit use of fourfold degrees of knowledge derived from Plato’s Divided Line as a “map” or “guide” for moral and intellectual conversion. Above all, the concern here is for the relationship between the theoretical and the practical. 

 

My paper will primarily attend to the question of how Plato and Weil each conceived of writing as related to the vision of God, considering the tension between the abstract form of the Good in Plato with Weil’s distinctly Christian notion of grace, as well as the implications of their differences in approach to reading and writing.

The most distinctive aspect of Thomas Gallus’ theology is his theological anthropology, which derives from Dionysius, where all created reality is governed by a threefold metaphysical dynamism of procession, remaining, and return. With respect to rational creatures, these dimensions acquire distinct expression. Metaphysical “procession” takes the form of a descending movement within the soul and a radical receptivity for receiving the divine self-communication. Metaphysical “return” for its part finds its anthropological expression in an ascending, ultimately self-transcending movement of the soul toward and into God. Gallus concretely expresses this dynamic anthropology by conceiving of the soul as a hierarchia in the specific Dionysian sense of the termthe goal of which is union with God. With this hierarchical anthropology, Gallus works out a sophisticated account of the soul's cognitive encounter with God, entailing both "intellectual cognition” and "affective cognition," which interact with each other to bring about a deifying union.

Monday, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Session ID: A24-410
Papers Session

Philosophical reflection often involves thinking through certain types of conditions. How might we understand, and possibly interrogate, texts and topics in the philosophy of religion with attention to the effects of contingent yet persistent social structures? How might such an engaged and critical question help us consider ways of relating philosophy of religion to the AAR’s 2025 presidential theme of “freedom”? The session will respond to these questions with a discussion about how philosophers of religion might identify unfreedoms, and then argue the merits of leaving these conditions intact. Leah Kalmanson considers how the self, itself, is a source of unfreedom. Zeyad el Nabolsy explains the consequences of God's image for African freedom. Yarran Hominh reformulates the problem of evil by theorizing unfreedom. And, Deborah Casewell evaluates 'strategic madness' as a philosophical response to power structures. 


 

Papers

For many traditions whose aim is liberation, the self on behalf of whom we desire freedom is the very cage that confines us. To seek freedom for this self is to pursue a delusion. Various Vedic schools and Buddhist and Jain sects agree on this point yet diverge on what constitutes “liberation.” It has been described as the blissful absorption of consciousness disassociated from materiality, the enlightened insight that sees past the mirage of individuated existence, the loving relationship between a devotee and a deity, or (in the case of Buddhism in particular) an indescribable attainment subject to neither perception nor non-perception. Although none of these senses of liberation resemble “freedom” as we typically understand it, I want to resist the impression that such “spiritual” trajectories are thereby depoliticized. This presentation tracks how notions such as agency and autonomy shift within a liberational framework that views the self itself as the source of unfreedom.


 

This paper focuses on Edward W. Blyden’s most famous book, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887). Specifically, it focuses on the problem of the image of God and its relationship to African freedom as conceived by Blyden. I argue that Blyden contends that Christianity presents an image of God that limits African freedom. Blyden focuses on the literal visual images of God that are characteristic of European Christian art. Blyden argues that the representation of the figure of Christ as a white European has made it impossible for Africans to identify with the figure of Christ without undermining their sense of self-worth. By contrast, Islam appeals to Blyden precisely because its iconoclasm leaves the image of God and of his prophets indeterminate. This, according to Blyden, has important consequences for African freedom.


 

Reinhold Niebuhr once said that “[a]ll profound religion is an effort to answer the challenge of pessimism.” Unfreedom, understood as socially caused and systematic impoverishments of human agency (such as those embodied in the ongoing system of global and imperial racial capitalism), is a source of pessimism. Why does unfreedom persist, even though people try to change things? This question of the ongoing stability of unfreedom is a reformulation of the traditional problem of evil. In this paper, I sketch a framework for theorizing unfreedom, drawing on pragmatism and non-ideal theory. This framework motivates a search for a practical answer to this question that is neither theodicy nor overly simple appeal to human nature. While, I will argue, we cannot know whether unfreedom can be fully overcome, grappling with this pessimism might illuminate some possibilities for change.


 

Although now primarily known as a philosopher and a mystic, Simone Weil was more well known in her short lifetime as an engaged political actor. One of her many concerns was with how contingent and yet persistent social structures contributed to oppression, and led to political systems that perpetuated what she referred to as force. Indeed, her analysis of power and power structures reveals for her that normal action, and normal thinking, can never fully interrogate or overcome our own desire for power and the exercise of that power against others and ourselves. Weil's response to these concerns, in both her life and her writing, was to identify the madness of action and thought, and embody that as far as possible as an example that no one could follow. This paper will conceptualise for the first time what I call her 'strategic' madness: one which she realised politically and philosophically. 

How do theological and philosophical understandings of language adequately meet the challenge of human difference and unfreedom in the modern world?  In grappling with this question, this paper will introduce a religious and theological reading of Stanley Cavell and show its explanatory power in critiquing and analyzing racial unfreedom in America. By putting Cavellian reflections on the “tyranny of convention” in conversation with Barbara and Karen Fields’ account of racial ideology, I argue that racial unfreedom can be best understood within ordinary language philosophy and its theological and religious inflections. By doing so, I will highlight, why, in the pursuit of liberation and freedom, the language of race has persisting significance for practitioners of religion in and outside of Christianity. 

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM Session ID: A25-103
Papers Session

This panel presents three diverse and sometimes surprising perspectives on conservative ideologies by situating them firmly within U.S. religious history. The first paper examines the role of “colorblind conservatism” during the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the prosperity gospel’s insistence on moral failure as the cause of the inequality of non-white Americans.  The second explores how conservative women’s groups from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to Moms for Liberty have exerted control over U.S. public school history curriculum and the far reaching impact of this influence on the nation’s future. The final paper reexamines the ideological and spiritual roots of Donald Trump’s rhetoric in his two election victories. With attention to American metaphysical traditions and neoliberal market logic, this paper ties Trump and his rhetoric to very American national myths.

Papers

This paper analyzes the relationship between prosperity gospel theology and colorblind conservatism in the years between Brown v. Board and the 1978 Bakke ruling. It argues that the boom in prosperity gospel churches and platforms in the 60s and 70s is both a product of and contributor to the rise of colorblind conservatism during those decades due to the way the prosperity gospel's highly individualistic theology paints a lack of success as stemming exclusively from personal moral failure and not from systemic barriers to upward mobility for non-white Americans. Because God and the free market would bless and chasten individuals as they deserved, under this framework, any policies that took into consideration a degree of racial preference—like affirmative action or today's DEI policies—could and would be labeled an infringement on the rights and freedoms of those they passed over—namely, white Americans. 

From the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to Moms for Liberty, conservative women’s groups have been powerful architects of historical memory. Belied by particular theological beliefs around race and gender, these groups have waged wars for control over how U.S. history is taught in public schools. The UDC’s Lost Cause narrative framed the Confederacy as ordained by God, just as Moms for Liberty invokes Christian values to challenge discussions of race, gender, and social justice in schools. Both groups leverage rhetoric of “freedom” to exclude perspectives that challenge their ideological commitments. Through lobbying, textbook influence, and public rituals, they have embedded their vision of history into American education. By examining their strategies, this paper reveals how religiously motivated conservative women have wielded extraordinary influence in shaping public education—demonstrating that battles over history are, at their core, battles over the future.

Was Donald Trump’s election—twice—shaped by the ideological undercurrents of American metaphysical religion? If Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of self-made success was more than New Thought-evangelical subculture but, as Catherine Albanese argues in The Delight Makers (2024), the fabric of American theology, then Trump’s political ethos—his relentless optimism, self-mastery rhetoric, and ‘Make America Great/Healthy Again’ paradigm—merits reexamination. This paper brings together Albanese’s Delight Makers and Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007), Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost (2009), and Kate Bowler’s Blessed (2013) to trace New Thought’s metaphysical endurance—from nineteenth-century spiritualists to Peale’s midcentury positive thinking through to Trump’s America. It asks whether the metaphysical tradition, fused with neoliberal market logic, has not just shaped the self-help genre but infused American politics with Albanese’s ‘theology of desire’—where ‘faith in belief’ functions as an operational gaze, a mechanism of control. This paper ultimately reconsiders how Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches myth remains a national creed.

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Roundtable Session

Why did the Son of God assume human form? For many in the Christian theological tradition, the answer is redemption—Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. But a few voices in the tradition have demurred, locating the divine motive for the incarnation supra lapsum, above the Fall. In this book panel, two recent proposals by Sam Wells and Edwin Chr. van Driel for a “supralapsarian” motive in the incarnation are critically examined and brought into conversation.  

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Papers Session

Nāgas are snake-like creatures that exhibit a complex and dynamic combination of cobra, human, divine, and other characteristics. They are foundational to South Asian traditions, appearing in stories, images, and practices across the region’s diverse religious communities for over two millennia. 

This panel presents an edited book project bringing together stories, images and performances which enable us to catch glimpses of how nāgas live, look and feel in the manifold worlds, religious traditions and cultures they inhabit. The time and area that will be covered in our book ranges from the earliest textual and visual traces of nāgas to the spread of their iconography and mythology across different parts of South Asia, where, in some cases, they blend with other water and serpent beings already present there. 

Papers

Naiṇī or Nāginā devī is the name of nine mythical serpent sisters who rule as goddesses and mothers over the Pindar river valley in Uttarakhand, India. They establish their rule and their kinship ties to the human people through half-year long journeys, during which they take the shape of bamboo poles clothed with saris. Their serpenthood sets the Naiṇīs into a relation to other serpent deities and spirits called nāg all over South Asia (and far beyond). In this paper, I aim to figure out the place of these local deities within a larger nāgasphere, exploring what they have in common with other nāginīs and nāgas, and what distinguishes them. Especially important are their relation to the Earth and to an Underworld, their connection to fresh water resources and to trees, their enmity to the Garuḍa bird, and their relation to widely known nāga kings such as Kāliya and Vāsuki. 

Nāgas are imaged as goddesses in South Indian Hinduism, where they enjoy enormous popularity due to their connection with fertility, healing, and auspiciousness. Nāga worship is also prescribed by astrologers to relieve nāga dōṣam, the astrological “blemish” caused by harming/killing snakes. Linked with late marriage and infertility, nāga dōṣam manifests in ill-fated configurations of the planetary deities Rahu and Ketu in one’s horoscope. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on nāga traditions in South India, this paper describes the multiple manifestations that nāgas may take and analyzes the rich repertoire of their worship. It also considers the tiered, ticketed pūjās to pacify Rahu and Ketu offered at the Srikalahasti temple. While these “one and done” rituals have emerged as attractive alternatives to more complex and time-intensive redressals for dōṣam, this paper suggests that shifting devotional tastes and consumption practices have contributed to decentering snakes in contemporary rituals to relieve this condition.

In previous translations of Buddhist stories, the Buddha is sometimes described as having “tamed” various nāgas, whose capacity for awakening in that lifetime is prevented by their animal birth. Yet visual narratives seem to show that artists carved such interactions with more nuance. Across early Buddhist sculptures, ancient artists represented the different bodily form of nāgas in visual narratives through their unique ability to maintain cobra form and take the form of a human body. In one Sanchi pillar scene, the artist has represented the Buddha’s encounter with a nāga as the head of a majestic and fearsome cobra peering out from behind a stone shrine representing the Buddha. Rather than “taming” the nāga there, the Buddha is written to have met the heat of the nāga’s fire, emblematic of his inability to restrain his anger, with his iddhi, matching "fire with fire".

This presentation draws on published scholarship and fieldwork in Vidarbha, central India, to consider the transformation of how Ambedkarite Indians have understood nāga figures in the past seventy years. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948), B.R. Ambedkar offered a self-consciously speculative reconstruction of Nagas as an ancient group of humans in central India, as part of an effort to establish ancient Buddhist roots for Dalits or so-called Untouchables who would eventually convert (reconvert, in Ambedkar’s view) to Buddhism in 1956. Since then, Ambedkar’s reading of naga history has been widely adopted by Ambedkarites as a disenchanted view of nāgas that also functions mythically (as a use of a historically unverifiable past) to enable Ambedkarites to offset Hindu nationalist historiography. These views of nagas are further complicated when interacting with Japanese Buddhist collaborators whose interpretations of nagas are very different.

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Roundtable Session

Those of us working in academia are aware of the numerous crises on the horizon, for higher education. No academic field is immune, but some are more vulnerable than others. Theology is one of those: excluded from many public institutions, the field relies on seminaries for life support. But increasingly, seminaries are skeptical of the value of theology and are removing it from their curricula. 

Is academic theology dying? Or is theology simply changing shape and form? This roundtable brings together scholars who have (at one point in their career) identified as theologians: graduate students, seminary professors, political theologians, comparative theologians, and those who have left the field behind. The discussion will bring a death studies lens to our conversation about theology as we reflect, together, on what it might mean to be part of a dying practice and what sorts of legacies we imagine it might have. 

Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Papers Session

The JW-MAP (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Motivations, Attitudes, Practices) research project is dedicated to exploring the existence of a gap between the beliefs and behaviors of JWs and their perception by the general public. Beliefs and behaviors were measured through a questionnaire distributed to JWs, while public perceptions were measured through a YouGov survey and social media research. The research covers six countries. At this meeting data from Argentina and Canada will be presented and discussed with the aim of helping to dispel the stereotypes that have hindered the integration of JWs into the social fabric and legal systems governing state-religion relations.

Papers

This paper has two purposes: it examines survey methodologies for researching minority religious communities, taking the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Motivations, Attitudes, Practices (JW-MAP) surveys as a case study; and then reports a comparative analysis of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada and Argentina. Analyzing responses from c. 2,000 Witnesses in each country, the paper compares religious belief, belonging, bonding, and behavior, examining differences in socialization pathways, religious motivations, and social networks as potential correlates of differences. Argentina’s predominantly Catholic context contrasts with Canada’s more diverse religious context and constitutional framework, providing useful contextual variation. Findings summarize national differences – and commonalities – in the religiosity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. By comparing Witnesses to broader population samples, the paper also provides evidence on their religious and social distinctiveness. The evidence presented here contributes to understanding of the evolving religious landscape, and the social space of Jehovah’s Witnesses within different national contexts. 

Research on Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada often uses American data to analyze their status. Although the two countries share many legal values and cultural pluralism, Canada is very different in its management of religious diversity and its interpretation of religious freedom. Our research attempts to paint an objective portrait of the JWs through court decisions and does the same for the social integration of the communities. To do so, we distinguish the court decisions between three different periods and follow the evolution of the JWs as a religious group. We will cross-reference these results with social perceptions of the JWs. The results may provide a better understanding of the underlying gaps.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have a long history in Argentina, arriving in the early 20th century. They faced two periods of religious prohibition, but with democracy’s return, their presence gradually gained acceptance. Today, they experience “low-key integration,” publicly practicing their faith without reprisals. However, challenges persist, particularly regarding blood transfusion objections and resistance to patriotic symbols. This paper examines the Argentinean context in comparison to other countries. It draws on data from the JW-MAP (Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Motivations, Attitudes, Practices) project, which conducted three surveys across six nations. These include a member survey, a YouTube presence and reactions analysis, and a YouGov survey. By analyzing these sources, we aim to explore different forms of social integration of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Argentina and how they compare to global trends.

This study investigates and assesses the prevailing attitudes towards Jehovah’s Witnesses on social media platforms in six different countries (Argentina, Canada, France, Japan, Nigeria, United Kingdom) over a five-year period. It does so by closely analyzing the portrayal of the organization on various YouTube channels native to these countries. By drawing on critical theories in social media studies, it specifically inquires into how the content of videos and social interactions on these channels depict the organization, its leadership, practices, and its core beliefs. It outlines how these representations seem strategically crafted to impact the organization’s active members and broader societal influence, legal viability, and theological visibility. The research used web scraping Python codes to collect data and qualitative methods, R Studio and various Python libraries to meticulously analyze and interpret results.