In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Using a newly collected dataset of over 12,000 non-religious Americans, and a k-means clustering algorithm, this work devises a new typology of non-religion in the United States. Instead of using the crude categories of atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, this new approach focuses on posture toward religion, views of spirituality, and other relevant factors. Further, this paper will explore how non-religious Americans make meaning in their lives.

This paper will explore how American Bahá’ís in diverse communities throughout the US have adapted to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will present data on hundreds of Bahá’ís from dozens of communities concerning attendance at religious worship and religious education classes, outreach to the community, the shift to online forms of worship and celebration of sacred holidays, and their personal religious practices (prayer, reading holy writings, fasting, etc.) during the pandemic. This data will be compared with Christian churches  to see how other Americans in varied Christian denominations coped and thrived spiritually during the restrictions of COVID. Results indicate that Bahá’ís were able to maintain attendance levels at their online worship services and children and adult education classes at rates much higher than churches did on average. Both Bahá’í communities and Christian churches maintained a similar level of community service throughout the pandemic. 

The United States’ sociopolitical climate of the past year has likely shifted a clergyperson’s sense of professional agency—sense of being able to freely, safely, and confidently lead a community. A 2024 literature review confirmed that religious leaders are often burnt out and struggling, as individual, relational, and organizational factors compound upon each other, potentially jeopardizing their capacity to healthily and reliably execute their duties. Thus, any additional sense of decreased agency can have deleterious effects on not just the well-being of the religious leader but on the broader congregation and even local community. Drawn from the qualitative transcripts of group meetings with clergy from across the United States, two case studies will elucidate some of the ways congregational clergy have felt shifts in their sense of agency to freely perform their role since the presidential election in November 2024. 

Devotional textiles in traditional Indian artisanal forms can be considered as spiritual objects as well as embodiments of human labor and creativity that act as a culture’s heritage. In addition, our understanding of Indian textiles in both South Asian and Western collections can be enhanced by reflecting on the lives of artisans who made such cloths worn for religious rituals. As the weavers who made such cloths are long gone further context on these textiles is only possible by researching today’s practitioners who are inheritors of a craft and knowledge tradition. In light of my recent fieldwork on double and single-ikat Patola weaving in Gujarat, I approach making as arduous and repetitive physical labor. What do we learn about the spiritual attachments of such cloths when they are related to the conditions in which they are made and viewed as forms of work? What does devotional labor look like?

This paper introduces preliminary research into the possibility that the concept ‘Bahujan’ has in world-making and futures, inside museum collections. Bahujan, a political term meaning ‘many, or ‘majority’ refers to the diversity of religious peoples who numerically make up a majority in comparison to so-called twice-born Hindus, but whose practices, social positions, and everyday lives are increasingly marginalized in India and in diaspora communities. Historically, institutions have prioritized casteist perspectives on and of South Asian religious material culture, based on colonial logics of classification and history. These perspectives have rearticulated themselves in contemporary diasporic narratives, often normalized through appeals to affect and heritage. What is at stake for contemporary museum practice if we mobilize ‘Bahujan’ as an art-historical concept? This paper approaches this broad question by working through examples of Indo-Caribbean and Indian Ocean religious materiality.

The Religionskundliche Sammlung (est. 1927) in Marburg, Germany houses the university’s special collection of religious objects that was conceived of and founded by German theologian and author of The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto took two trips to India under the auspices of his role as founding-director of the collection during which he acquired books, objects, and ideas for his Hinduism exhibit. In this presentation, I draw on exhibition photographs, a goddess painting, two statues of Hindu deities, and a series of Otto’s reports and receipts to analyze the role that the process of collecting plays in the formation of cultural history and the dissemination of religious education, especially with the aim of representing Indian Religions to European audiences. 

This research interrogates the shifting semiotics of South Asian religious objects and images as they traverse museum and temple spaces in the UK. It critically examines the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization that shape the reception and interpretation of these objects. While museums position South Asian material culture within taxonomies of art and heritage, temple reliquaries and community spaces engage in their own acts of curatorial framing, embedding objects within devotional and ritualistic contexts. The paper explores how South Asian visuality is negotiated in these spaces, how institutional practices mediate religious materiality, and how objects maintain their agency despite secularized modes of representation. By foregrounding visitor engagement and institutional responses, this research reveals the contested nature of South Asian objects in contemporary diasporic settings, where the tensions between veneration, preservation, and public display continue to challenge rigid binaries of the sacred and the secular.

The Inquiry of Maitreya (Maitreyaparipṛcchā, abb. Mp), a chapter within the 49-chapter Mahāratnakūṭa collection, is an early Mahāyāna sūtra that presents a distinctive doctrinal configuration, contrasting the bodhisattva paths of Maitreya and Śākyamuni. The Mp reinterprets and echoes elements from the pre-existing multi-buddha framework, particularly the Bahubuddhakasūtra, to depict divergent trajectories in their bodhisattva careers. Maitreya’s path is characterized as an "Easier Path," emphasizing skillful means yet requiring more kalpas, whereas Śākyamuni's journey is framed as a swifter but more heroic course, marked by greater emphasis on compassion and self-sacrificial efforts. This contrast underscores the fact that Mp is more fittingly regarded as a bodhisattva-sūtra, offering perspectives on bodhisattva practice and bodhisattva path, rather than as a fully developed text on the Maitreya cult, in contrast to what is seen in the Maitreya's Ascend/Descend texts.

This paper examines how Maitreya is narratively connected to maitrī (loving-kindness) as a form of meditative cultivation (bhāvanā). While Maitreya is typically understood in relation to his role as the next Buddha, there is a tradition that utilize past-life narratives to construct a link between Maitreya’s name and the meditative maitrī as the first of the four immeasurables or brahmic abodes. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the paper argues that, in these narratives, Maitreya is conceived as a meditation virtuoso, embodying and extending the practice of maitrī in unique ways. The etymological link can also be seen as a bridge that connects the meditative maitrī in Śrāvakayāna sources and its elaboration in Mahāyāna sources.

Like other bodhisattvas, Maitreya is a figure in the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi (大日經), a major Mantrayāna text that in 724 was translated by Yixing 一行 (673–727) and Śubhakarasiṃha 善無 畏 (637–735). Yixing subsequently produced a commentary on the text based on the oral teachings of Śubhakarasiṃha. The commentary is unique in that it provides a direct interpretation of both the text and accompanying maṇḍala by a major Indian monk. This paper will first discuss the role of Maitreya in the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi, before moving on to the commentary and extant visual representations of the figure in the related maṇḍala. The symbolic interpretation of Maitreya in these contexts evolved from earlier Mahāyāna and Āgama literatures, but took on new elements. We can better understand the early reworking of established lore in Mantrayāna through examining Maitreya in the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi as it was transmitted to China.

This paper reflects on the interstices of religion and drama written in English around the year 1925. In this formative year for modernist literature, playwrights explored the relations among theater, religion, and ritual, developing theories of dramatic performance that persisted across the long twentieth century. As I show, 1925 marked an apogee of Anglophone dramatists’ diverse investments in religion. Authors from G. B. Shaw to Zora Neale Hurston, inquiring into the dramatic roles of religion in modernity, participated in a set of consummately modernist formal concerns, insofar as they sought to reinvigorate the theater by returning to its presumptive origins in devotional practice. These artists turned to religion to peer into the deep histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Their fascinations with religion – centrally, but not exclusively, related to medieval Christianity – served, paradoxically, to make modernist theater new.

In 1925 Dorothy Adlow completed her first year as art critic for The Christian Science Monitor. While forging a strong national reputation, Adlow gave singular attention to the Boston Expressionists. Chief among them was Hyman Bloom who probed the metaphysics of corporeal disintegration. Like Bloom, others in the group integrated occult and mystical themes with references to the Jewish and Christian Bible. Noone knew these artists better than Adlow.  In her reviews of the Boston Expressionists, one discovers the interplay and influence of traditional religion and new religious movements in modern art in the Jazz Age and beyond. 

Theme: “Arts, Literature, and Religion at the Centennial of 1925”

In 1925, Benito Mussolini proclaimed that Italy had given the world the "most holy of saints to Christendom and humanity:" St. Francis of Assisi. As part of the seventh centenary anniversary of the saint’s death the following year, Mussolini proclaimed Francis’s feast day a national holiday.  This paper examines how these events in 1925-1926 impacted Francis’s legacy in the context of Italian culture, fascist ideology and shifting Church–State relations. The paper also traces this history through several works linking contemporary issues with the saint, which attested to the attempted rapprochement in the lead up to the 1929 Lateran Pacts. Propaganda efforts exemplified the radical reinterpretation of St. Francis’s political legacy considering Mussolini’s cult of personality and autocracy, itself a form of political religion. The connections between Mussolini and St. Francis in 1925-26 also anticipated a broader cultural, post-war afterlife of the fascist co-option of religious ideas.

In May 1925, the New York Times reviewed Toyohiko Kagawa’s Before the Dawn, a Japanese bestseller that helped to bring Kagawa national public recognition both at home and in the United States. North Americans reviewers labeled Kagawa a mystic comparable to American spiritualists such Walt Whitman. But why was Kagawa, who in the Japanese context was primarily known and recognized as a social reformer, termed a mystic? Kagawa’s significance and his representation to American audiences as a mystic is best explained against the backdrop of another Asian Christian author who was published during the 1920s – Sundar Singh. Singh was a Sikh convert who lived as a Christian sadhu, or holy man, and became internationally famous through his books and speaking tours. Like Kagawa, Singh and his theological writings were largely discussed as mystical. This paper looks at Singh and Kagawa’s reception during the 1920s within the context of North American interest in mysticism and non-traditional religious movements and seeks to understand 1) how the reception of Singh informed the reception of Kagawa, and 2) how the publishing successes of both men shaped the North American religious imagination with regards to Asian Christianity and theology. 

Analysis of the 1925 Ben-Hur film within its historical and theological contexts displays that the film functioned both as religious and cultural artifact, one that advocated Christian orthodoxy and essentialist Christian gender roles amid shifting ideologies of the 1920s. In particular, this paper will use the 1925 film as a case study, holding it up in contrast between the 1880 literary work that spawned it and the 1959 version that followed it, to ask how its particular vision of gender and theology was unique to its moment.

This paper draws on extensive fieldwork with Maya and Mennonites navigating land conflict in southern Mexico in order to map possible paths towards common freedom understood as collective self-determination. Over the past 40 years, European Mennonites have begun settling in Maya ancestral territory and have brought with them industrial agricultural practices which deplete the local ecosystem. Their large families have fed a sharp expansion in this industry while their religious and economic systems remain resistant to innovation. Nonetheless, a Maya peasant network resists animosity with their new, insular neighbors and has invited us to accompany them as they seek paths toward sharing in the land. We offer this report on these Indigenous-led processes for transformative justice and share political and theological insights we are gleaning over seven years of collaboration. 

This paper focuses on contemporary debates about the dynamic between individual reproductive freedom and collective environmental sustainability. I examine two competing views: 1) population policy advocates, who argue that reproductive freedom should be constrained by governments because of global climate threats, and 2) reproductive justice advocates, who reject the notion that governments should constrain reproductive freedom for any reason. While environmentalists are correct that population growth exacerbates climate threats, RJ advocates are also right to direct our attention to the systemic conditions that situate reproductive choices. As such, I argue that governments are responsible for improving the environmental contexts in which reproduction takes place, namely by reducing our reliance upon the most carbon-costly energy sources. Because massive fossil fuel subsidies and the influence of industry lobbies make this difficult, I conclude with lessons from religious environmentalists who participate in anti-fossil fuel activism through institutional divestment campaigns and intergenerational organizing.

This essay enters and responds to a live and ongoing debate in global politics regarding the climate crisis—namely, between ecomodernism and degrowth theory—using Sabbath as a theological lens. I begin by developing Sabbath as a theological and political lens. In particular, I emphasize Sabbath as a spatial politic. With the help of the Marxist geographer Doreen Massey, the first half of this essay challenges Abraham Joshua Heschel’s notion that Sabbath is a purely temporal practice. Instead, I highlight Sabbath as a spatial project. A spatial Sabbath, then, enables a reorientation of Sabbath as both a spiritual and political project. This leads to the second half of the essay, where I use the spatial politics of Sabbath in combination with degrowth theory to build a collaborative vision of post-capitalist economics from a theological perspective. I conclude by offering one modern concrete example of spatial Sabbath in highlighting Agrarian Trust and the FaithLands project.

The #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock (2016-2017) ushered in a new era of spiritually grounded eco-activism. Over six years, I conducted fieldwork and participated in grassroots organizing among three of the most high-profile spiritually anchored eco-activist movements in the US: the Anishinaabe-led #StopLine3 oil pipeline resistance (MN); the coalition of Yogis and Baptists who helped derail the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (VA); and the partnership of Mennonites and Roman Catholic Sisters who resisted a fracked gas pipeline with a cornfield Chapel blockade (PA). Through the process, I identified the following themes running through all three campaigns: (1) a deep conviction that eco-activism is a sacred duty; (2) a shared commitment to principles of non-violent mass action; (3) the performance of religious ceremony as a tool of direct-action; (4) the embrace of an intersectional theory of justice; and (5) the emergence of new, interreligious spiritual communities arising from the crucible of eco-activism.

It is undeniable that human beings are at the heart of environmental issues. The root of the ongoing ecological crisis is in human exploitation of the Earth. In light of the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation, this paper explores the ecological crisis, focusing on the detachment of humans from the land as a pivotal condition of exploitation. Engaging with the feminist reinterpretations by Silvia Federici and ecological insights in Marx’s understanding of human-nature relations, the paper highlights the process of capitalist appropriation, expropriation, and exploitation in the commodification of land. Incorporating an animist perspective, the study examines how the detachment of humans from the land has contributed to the alienation of both humans and nature. The anthropological and religious literature on animism and indigenous wisdom is proposed as an entry point to call for a revolutionary imagination to restore the reciprocal relationship between body and land.

This paper focuses on the reception of the Council of Nicaea in Rome during the pontificates of Julius (337–352) and Liberius (352–366), as reflected in their correspondences. It examines how the Nicene canons, creed, and the council itself were perceived and referenced within the Roman and Italian episcopate. Key letters in Julius’s correspondence include those from Marcellus of Ancyra, Hosius of Cordova, Protogenes of Sardica, Valens of Mursa, and Ursacius of Singidunum. For Liberius, attention is given to his letters to the Bishops of Macedonia, Italy, and Emperor Constantine, as well as the epistle from Eustathius, Silvanus, and Theophilus. Additionally, the study considers appeals to Nicaea’s authority in the Pseudo-Julian letters Decuerat vos fratres and Decuerat vos adversus. Through this analysis, a nuanced perspective emerges on the role of Nicaea in shaping Roman ecclesiastical identity until the mid-360s.

This contribution examines the Coptic tradition’s preservation and reinterpretation of the Nicene (N) and Nicene-Constantinopolitan (C) Creeds, uncovering textual plasticity within doctrinal stability. Through interdisciplinary analysis of manuscripts like CLM 359, it traces creedal transmission from canonical collections to liturgical codices, revealing lexical adaptations and contextual theological refinements. By integrating non-Greek/Latin sources, the study highlights how Coptic scribes negotiated Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian influences, maintaining at center the “true” Nicene faith. The research underscores the dynamic interplay of culture, authority, and theology in late antique Egypt, challenging narratives of Nicene legacy and exploring the impact of other literary traditions.

The reception of the Nicene Creed among the Goths reveals the complex interplay between doctrinal boundaries and fluid identities in late antiquity. While the Creed sparked theological debates, its acceptance or rejection also influenced social and cultural dynamics, particularly in the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Traditional historiography often presents a rigid Latin-Nicene versus Gothic-Arian dichotomy, but evidence suggests a more nuanced reality. Arian communities, far from being marginalized, included prominent figures and remained vibrant into the fifth century. Similarly, Nicene communities included Gothic members, indicating that religious and ethnic boundaries were not strictly aligned. Gothic literature, such as the Skeireins, reflects sophisticated theological engagement with the Nicene Creed, often rejecting it through nuanced terminology. The fluidity of these boundaries is further evidenced by doctrinally neutral texts, suggesting that doctrinal differences did not always lead to social division. Instead, political and historical contexts often influenced the prominence of these disputes.

Although episcopal participants at Gallo-Frankish councils regularly claimed to be reliant on canonical tradition in crafting their own decrees, direct citations and quotations in published acts are relatively rare. This scarcity has made it difficult for modern scholars to evaluate the nature and extent of this ostensible reliance. This paper addresses this problem by looking specifically at the use of non-Gallic canonical materials by Merovingian-era synods, with a particular focus on Eastern and African canons. Special attention is paid to Nicaea (325) as a venerable, albeit selectively-utilized, reference point. It will be suggested through an examination of these exempla that Gallo-Frankish bishops recognized and sought to navigate an inherent tension between localism on the one hand and a canonical orthodoxy not limited by political borders. 

This paper focuses on the liturgical transmission of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which became central to the liturgy of the churches from the 6th century onward. Initially a baptismal creed in Constantinople, it was introduced into the Eucharistic celebration by the monophysite Patriarch Timothy, marking a pivotal transition. From there, its use spread to Egypt, the Iberian Peninsula, and ultimately Rome by the 11th century. The Second Vatican Council later reintroduced liturgical pluralism, allowing the Apostles’ Creed in Catholic worship. While the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed remains a key reference in ecumenical dialogue, theologians like Karl Rahner have argued for the need to develop new creedal expressions for contemporary faith transmission. This historical perspective highlights the liturgy’s essential role in shaping ecclesial identity and interpreting the legacy of the Council of Nicaea through the evolving use of the Creed.

In the context of early Church council studies and the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, analyzing Greek and Latin patristic texts presents linguistic and historical challenges. Advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques applied to linguistic datasets offer new insights into the reception and interpretation of such texts.
This presentation introduces DamSym, a computational tool designed to retrieve semantically similar sentences in both languages, aiding the study of thematic transmission and evolution in ancient literature. The first part outlines the tool’s methodology, focusing on its architecture and the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI to handle ancient text complexities.
A case study on the Council of Nicaea and its aftermath demonstrates DamSym’s application in tracing how Nicene theological concepts evolved over time. By surpassing verbatim matching, this approach identifies authors, perspectives, and conceptual cores. The presentation highlights how digital tools enhance our understanding of Church councils' legacy and impact.

As recounted in the popular romance fiction community, many women readers and writers got their start in the genre as youth by stumbling upon an older female relative (mother, grandmother, sister)’s stash of romance novels, and surreptitiously secreting books away to read in private. The commonality and repetition of this act as a habit establishes it as a rich site for ethical analysis which directs us not simply to literary analysis at the level of narrative depiction, but to book historical considerations of circulation, material culture, and embodiment, among reader reception. In this paper, I argue that this romance reader rite of passage – stash theft – is a form of moral agency. I show how Black readers’ juvenile pilfering of their mother’s and grandmother’s stashes generationally communicates “womanish” ethical sensibilities through Black women’s strategies of dissemblance, hiddenness, and sociality, grounding a womanist virtue ethic for romance reading and embodying flourishing.

PBS television host and guidebook author Rick Steves is often lauded as the most trusted American voice in European tourism. While most scholarship configures travel through lenses of leisure, consumption, and even settler-colonialism, this paper examines Rick Steves’ five-decade-long career through the lens of religion. Drawing on work on secularism, religious nationalism, and popular culture, as well as ethnographic data of six Rick Steves tours and text analysis of his PBS show, guidebooks, and radio show, I argue that analyzing Steves’ project through the lens of religion affords an important hermeneutic perspective that illuminates how travel is a form of pilgrimage and moral formation—specifically, a project of civil repair. Steves’ progressive vision as a Lutheran philanthropist and Democratic activist, including his resistance to the Trump administration, affords us the chance to examine the consistencies and contradictions of travel as a project of civil repair, including cosmopolitan identity and overtourism.

First contact novels offer a perfect place for authors of science fiction to explore ethical dilemmas. In The Sparrow duology by Mary Doria Russell and A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, alien cultures present as accepted fact ideas that humans may reject – that it is okay for one type of sentient being to eat another, and that it is necessary to abandon your planet of origin in order to live safely in space, respectively. The characters in these books struggle to respond ethically, and in each case main characters draw on Judaism to help them define and shape their reactions. The authors’ portrayal of Judaism differs, though: a centering of belief, text, and history in Russell’s texts versus a focus on social relationships, ethics, and narratives in Emrys’ novel. This change is consistent with changes in Americans’ understandings of how and why people are religious even in a “secular” society.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cinema  attempt to hold two incongruous themes together: a depiction of the end in its brutal, often sensationalist, violence and the promise that this ending will be the opportunity for ‘us’ to become the best version of who ‘we’ always already were. Recent films have embraced a gritty realism in order to depict the near future that may emerge as the result of the intersecting crises of climate change, intensifying social divisions and growing political instability. I argue these  explorations of the polycrisis harbour hidden hopes, but this poses a dilemma. This hope is directionless—it is a hope in hope itself. Taking 2073 (2024) as an example of this dilemma, I contrast polycrisis cinema with the cinema of the Cold War. I show that films from this earlier period were more willing to engage what Günther Anders calls a ‘naked apocalypse’.