In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

In the past decade, the decluttering trend—a broad phenomenon that includes movements such as Minimalism, Slow Living, Simple Living, Swedish Death Cleaning, Feng Shui, Underconsumption Core, and Marie Kondo—has gained a significant following in the United States. The decluttering trend attributes agency to objects and assumes that unnecessary objects in the home actively restrict human freedom. This paper examines the decluttering rituals people engage in to free themselves of the hold their possessions have over them. I argue that these decluttering rituals produce and subsequently obscure waste. Thus, decluttering rituals liberate people from their possessions by burdening marginalized populations and places with managing the waste and absorbing its toxicity.  

This paper uses influencer videos, Pinterest boards, and how-to blog posts to explore the intersection of space, gender, and evangelical religious practice in the space of the "prayer closet." It argues that the modern iteration of the prayer closet works as both an external demonstration of the user's piety and a way to claim religious power and authority in a community where women are expected to be, kind, nice, and prioritizing of others, if not explicitly submissive. Within her meticulously decorated prayer closet, a woman can wage war on forces of evil, whether they be Satanic influence or merely an upcoming midterm exam. Further, by waging this war in the privacy of her own home, a prayer closet user is able to claim the heroic violence of the title "prayer warrior" while maintaining the niceness that is appropriate to evangelical femininity everywhere outside of the prayer closet.

This study examines the ritual of serpent handling in Appalachian Pentecostal communities, drawing on fieldwork, practitioner interviews, and extensive analysis of books, articles, and videos. Using Cristina Bicchieri’s theories of unwritten rules, the research explores how implicit norms, such as the necessity of the “anointing,” sustain the ritual’s spiritual integrity and communal adherence. Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality and communitas highlight the transformative and unifying aspects of the practice, while Richard Schechner’s performance theories reveal the interplay between structure, spontaneity, and the dual purposes of efficacy and entertainment. By analyzing serpent handling as an embodied practice and a lived religion, this study demonstrates how the ritual bridges personal faith and collective identity. Through a multidisciplinary approach and diverse sources, the research contributes to a deeper understanding of the cultural, religious, and social dynamics that shape and sustain this unique tradition.

The concept of religion has proved rhetorically useful for both advocates and detractors of Bitcoin in their analysis of this new digital technology for storing and exchanging value, highlighting the good and wholesome aspects of religion or its irrational and dogmatic tendencies respectively. But scholars of religion have, thus far, mostly ignored cryptocurrencies. This paper turns to ritual theory to help us better understand this new technology and the freedom that its advocates find in it. I describe what Bitcoin is, discuss the reasons its advocates consider it liberating, and identify rituals that sustain Bitcoin “maximalists” in spite of the volatility of crypto markets. I argue that investing in Bitcoin can be understood as a ritual action that seeks to restructure power relations in the global economy, resulting in a sense of personal dignity and freedom.

This study will explore the intersection between multi-level marketing (MLM) and Christian spirituality among White American women by means of a systemic analysis of faith-based language and rhetoric that is utilized by members of MLMs. Through the use of qualitative content analysis, I will examine how MLMs like BODi, Amway, and Young Living engage their members in a form of spiritual consumer culture. Drawing from Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Kathryn Lofton’s Consuming Religion, this project argues that MLMs not only engage in the buying and selling of products but also construct a faith-formed lifestyle that situates consumerism within religious identity. This study contributes to ongoing discussions in religious studies regarding the interest in spirituality and capitalism by revealing how faith-based consumerism reshapes Christian spirituality and promotes new forms of religious participation in late-stage capitalism. 

Through books, videos, podcasts, and webinars, the Henri Nouwen Society’s Caregiving Initiative aims to provide “practical and spiritual encouragement” to professional and family caregivers by sharing Nouwen’s “unique perspective on caregiving.” This paper analyzes the proliferation of caregiving resources through Nouwen’s legacy in light of two critical concerns: 1) the instrumentalization of intellectual disability for the spiritual transformation of nondisabled caregivers and 2) the valorization of sacrificial care labor under racial capitalism. By examining Nouwen’s account of spiritual transformation through care, I argue that these caregiving resources reinforce capitalist logics that reduce disabled people to the value they produce for nondisabled caregivers while simultaneously masking the exploitation of care labor (most often carried out by women of color) as a form of virtuous suffering. Ultimately, I reflect on whether and how care might be spiritually transformative, even as a site of ongoing violence and exploitation.

The cross-pollinating of religion and technology has found a new means of developing in Christian prayer apps. In our dataset of user-generated and publicly-shared prayers on a popular prayer app, thousands of evangelical Christian users submit thousands of daily prayer requests related to their health, relationships and finances. Data suggest that on the app – itself a product that is sold to churches as a platform for engagement – users increasingly turn to praying strangers for support for business venture, startups, and entrepreneurial creativity and flourishing. Differing patterns of prayer requests by gender and race [disclosed/provided by users] suggest that not only are business concerns increasing a part of spiritual practices, but that different segments of evangelical Christianity think and pray about business differently. Our paper contributes to conversations on spirituality, technology and media usage. 

Exodus 90 is an app-based Catholic men’s program whose stated goal is to aid participants in becoming “uncommonly free.” Three pillars of prayer, asceticism, and fraternity are the framework for this pursuit of freedom; this paper uses Exodus 90 as a case study revealing trends in the contemporary understanding of these three pillars and of spiritual freedom. It will review how Exodus 90 describes and promotes its program, integrating publicly available reflections on the program and using the lens of Foucault’s taxonomy of morality to explore points of contact between asceticism, ethics and subjectivity. It argues that by making an explicit appeal to discomfort in the spiritual life, Exodus 90 proposes a solution to consumer culture’s presumption of comfort, but must do so while engaging in the marketplace which encourages the pursuit of comfort that the program is meant to diminish. 

This paper explores the intersection of Christian materialism and open theism in shaping a theological understanding of resurrection and eschatological hope. Christian materialism asserts that humans are wholly physical, with personal identity formed through experience, grounding ultimate hope in bodily resurrection where suffering is redeemed rather than erased. Open theism portrays God as relational and responsive, experiencing time dynamically and suffering genuine loss at death, which it views as the true end of existence. Together, these perspectives challenge traditional notions of an immediate, disembodied afterlife, instead emphasizing salvation as the healing and restoration of creation. The resurrection, therefore, is not merely an individual hope but a cosmic fulfillment of both human and divine longing for embodied transformation.

In his chief work on pneumatology, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, Jürgen Moltmann explores three conceptions of freedom--as subjectivity, as sociality, and as orientation towards the future--associating these with the theological virtues of faith, love, and hope, respectively. He explores each with reference to a theology of the Holy Spirit, focusing on the hope that springs from the "liberation for life" by which the Spirit makes us participants in God's ongoing creative work.

On a classical conception of the theological virtues, love is the only one of the three that belongs to God. I argue, however, that Moltmann's theology invites us to understand our hope as grounded in God's own hoping as a dream for the future of the world.

A central theme of Open and Relational Theology is the need for a theodicy that explains the confession that God is love and the presence of evil. The response generally suggests that God does not have the power to overcome evil. For some in this movement, these theodicies fall short, thus the need for an eschatological alternative in the form of the restoration of all things (apokastasis). This paper begins with the assumption that the future is largely open, but that God will in time draw all things to a close, restoring all things to their proper order such that God will be all in all. This paper draws on Scripture, early Christian theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, and modern theologians Jurgen Moltmann and Sergius Bulgakov, to offer an alternative vision.

Following Jürgen Moltmann, this paper holds that eschatological thinking is crucial for expanding our imaginations beyond present unjust realities and orienting ourselves towards new possibilities for transformation. The consideration of other theologians writing against German fascism such as Karl Rahner, and critiques by decolonial theologians such as Miguel De La Torre, however, surface questions regarding the imagination of freedom and hope in Christian eschatological discourses. To what extent must Christian theologians emphasize the openness of the future in an effort to maintain human freedom, and to what extent should eschatological hopes for “freedom” be grounded in the assurance of liberation for marginalized communities? This paper draws the works of Moltmann, Rahner, and De La Torre into conversation, considering the ways their unique problem-spaces shape their theological questions, and argues constructively for an eschatological imagination that balances the freedom of the future with the need for concretizing hopes against injustice.

According to François Laruelle, philosophy and religion are haunted by a structure of decision–one that bears no small resemblance to the one invoked by the infamous Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. This paper offers a reading of Laruelle’s invitation to indecision, one intended to distinguish it from a number of more familiar political-theological tropes. In an important sense, Laruelle insists that the human has never really been captured by the decisional pretense of philosophy or religion; as a result, the human has no real need to be emancipated from it. The meaning of this non-emancipatory posture, the paper argues, can be clarified by way of an analogy to the difference between two political theologians whose criticisms of Schmitt have been habitually confused for one another’s: Giorgio Agamben and Ernst Kantorowicz.

This paper takes the measure of Laruelle’s discontent with deconstruction and puts it in conversation with the larger field of religious studies—in part simply to sharpen understanding of Laruelle, but also because so much of religious studies still bears the imprint of postmodern and deconstructive methods. Laruelle’s work asks scholars of religion to confront realities like the inhumanity of critique (the way that it transits in authority and remains complicit in metaphysics) but also the emergence of new alternatives when we take up another stance. What are the risks of a still-deconstructive study of religion? If our task is not to identify the slippages that betray ideology’s unstable footings, or to highlight the incoherent justifications behind religious logics of oppression, what are we to do in their place?

This paper considers a passage from François Laruelle’s Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. In that passage, Laruelle invokes a conflict between, on the one hand, the figure of Saint Paul and the Church, and, on the other hand, the figures of Saint Sebastian and Christ. I argue that Laruelle figures Sebastian and Christ as ‘clones’ of the Victim-in-person. Toward that end, I give an account of Laruelle’s non-philosophical project, especially his theory of the subject (i.e., the clone), with a view toward articulating a method for philosophy of religion. I call this method Sebastianism. Sebastianism is a method or style of thought that—as a non-philosophical project—proceeds strictly according-to-the-Victim, but which is distinctive in that (this is its non-philosophical ‘deviation’) it makes the critique of Christianity the fundamental vocation of philosophers of religion.

Søren Kierkegaard’s sense of Divine Authority was a counterpart to 19th century liberal treatments of human freedom. German idealist philosophers and theologians—including Hegel and Schleiermacher—were striving to overcome oppositions between divine and human authority, especially to reconcile naturalistic causal accounts of the universe with Divine action. These have been key points of retrieval by contemporary theologians. But Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of the attempt to reconcile contradicting claims of agency. Instead, he offered an  account of absolute and rigorous Divine Authority. And yet Kierkegaard’s account is so interesting because it pairs with an equally rigorous account of human agency and free choice before this authority. Both  are found in Kierkegaard’s signed religious discourses and later-life polemics. I  conclude Kierkegaard’s high sense of Divine authority serves, rather than detracts from, a high sense of human freedom and a general ontology of dynamic engagement between God and world. 

In light of the proliferation of legislation against DEI, choruses abound across liberal news outlets about how critical race theory is really about understanding and empathy rather than blame, shame, or guilt. There is a temptation to defend our pedagogies by claiming that we are not teaching about guilt. In response, this paper asks: What might an articulation of sin’s inheritance offer contemporary Christians and the broader American public to challenge the racism, sexism, colonialism, and transphobia perpetuated by such legislation? I use Friedrich Schleiermacher and James Cone to explore this question. I highlight the ambivalence of sin’s inheritance. On the one hand, sin teaches us there is something devastatingly wrong with a world in which we disavow our guilt as we enact quotidian and systemic violence. On the other, the history of sin also exemplifies just how guilty we, as Christian theologians, are. 

This paper aims to be a constructive exploration of dependence as fundamental for any Christian account of human freedom. Towards these ends, both Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth offer abundant resources for thinking about the relation between dependency and freedom. Pairing these two might seem, at first glance, an exercise in inevitable frustration, but it will become clear that there are similarities in the form and substance of their Christological instincts for theological anthropology. Both men insist that true humanity is not found by first making observations on human freedom generally and then moving to think about how Jesus fits that pattern, but rather they insist that one only understands human freedom in considering how Jesus is the unique revelation of true humanity. In taking cues from both men, this paper presses further the question of freedom in dependency by attending to biblical, trinitarian, and systematic considerations.

What does it mean for theology to seek liberation in the context of structural sin and oppression? This paper  develops an answer through a constructive counter-reading of F.D.E. Schleiermacher's little-known reflections on the morality of same-sex desire. Developing his reflections on marriage, sex, and economy in the aftermath of the 1792 Allgemeine Landrecht, Schleiermacher develops an account of queer desire as natural manifestations of human sexuality under disordered political-economic conditions in which the conditions for sexual reproduction do not coincide with the conditions for social reproduction. Condemning approaches to the morality of queer desire that affirm or deny its morality for the individual outside the context of a broader commitment to social transformation and change, Schleiermacher contributes towards the formation of a new theo-political coalition that centers economic justice without neglecting the culture-wars issues that have contributed to the conditions in which partisan gridlock enables dictatorial action.

In this paper, I explore the role of Buddhist iconometry in the production of new anatomical knowledge in early-modern Tibet. In 1687, the painter Lhodrak Tenzin Norbu went where no Tibetan artist had ever gone before: the surgeon’s dissection table. There, he carefully observed and sketched the liver, heart, and spleen of a recently dissected corpse. Before his work as an artist-anatomist, Norbu earned widespread recognition as a master of Buddhist iconometry, the tradition of divine proportions foundational to sacred art in Tibet. I argue that Norbu adapted iconometry into a technology of scientific visualization that provided a precise system for anatomical mapping. As I show, at the end of the seventeenth century, iconometry answered more than just the question, “How should the Buddha be represented?” It also addressed a new and pressing challenge: “How do we visualize human anatomy?”

Paper talismans were among the most frequently ingested medicines in the premodern Buddhist world. Within the diverse forms of “Buddhist edibles,” this paper examines talismans from the Chosŏn period that were specifically employed to counteract gu poisoning, one of the most potent and feared toxins in premodern East Asia. The first half of the paper analyzes the visual elements of gu talismans, demonstrating how the deliberate arrangement of symbolic and textual components contributed to their perceived therapeutic efficacy. The latter half explores the inverse process—ingesting the talismans—to illuminate the interplay between the revelation and concealment of their visual potency. By situating this practice within the broader discourse on iconophages, this study foregrounds an understudied dimension of the “internal visualization” of healing talismans, offering new insights into their role within the material life cycle of powerful ritual objects such as paper talismans.

This paper discusses the integration of visual narrative tropes within illustrations of disease-demons produced by Buddhist monks in medieval Japan. In particular, it examines On the Types of Corpse-vector Disease (Denshibyō shu no koto, ca. 1300), a ritual and medical manuscript. Although On the Types has remained entirely unknown in research on art history and Buddhism in Japan, this work made an outsized contribution to the iconography of illness, supplying what would become the template for graphically representing pathogens. What made On the Types influential, I argue, was how its compilers depicted scenes of pathogenic horror inspired by narrative: the harrowing moment when demons assault their human victims and induce a fatal affliction. This attempt to channel the captivating power of narrative horror into disease representation, I demonstrate, cannot be understood through ritual and medical texts alone, but must be grasped alongside currents of narrative visual culture in medieval Japan.

In the post-mortem meditative state of tukdam, the bodies of advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners stay lifelike for days or even weeks after clinical death. These extraordinary bodies share in characteristics of images as articulated by film and cultural theorists as well as anthropologists writing on mortuary traditions. I focus on the dynamic of presence and absence, central to images, life and death, and tukdam. Unlike images and normal corpses, which make present what is absent, a tukdam body is, by definition, imbued with presence. Beyond astonishing physical signs like non-decay and suppleness, tukdam bodies exhibit dhang (mdangs). Sometimes translated as “radiance,” this can be understood as a visual manifestation of presence. Challenging photographic representation, once seen as the paragon of objectivity, as well as attempts at scientific measurement, the perception of dhang seems to resist categorization into objective or subjective domains through a visuality – and felt presence – that exceeds both.

This paper examines how medieval Chinese esoteric manuals create transformative experiences through the harnessing of emotions and the enactment of ritual procedures. I use the Sādhana of the Great Yakṣiṇī Mother Joy and Priyaṅkara, a manual centered on Hārītī, as a case study to demonstrate the importance of controlling emotions and the centrality of physical actions in esoteric rituals. Specifically, I analyze one warning and one technique that encapsulate two strong feelings: lust and fear. The text warns the practitioner against developing lustful thoughts towards Hārītī, or the ritual will fail. While repressing sexual desire is necessary for the ritual to succeed, the text allows the practitioner to unleash other intense emotions, like fear and revenge, by empowering a human skull that can frighten one’s enemies. These instructions offer a window into how Buddhist texts bring about transformative experiences, which are often dictated by strong sentiments, whether wholesome or not. 

This paper explores the relationship between text and image in the Buddhist context, focusing on illuminated versions of the Avalokiteśvara-sūtra in Tangut, Chinese, and Uyghur languages, excavated from Khara-khoto, Dunhuang, and Turfan. Created between the 9th and 12th centuries, these manuscripts reveal striking visual coherence and suggest a well-established tradition of illuminated Buddhist texts in Eastern Central Asia during the middle period. The paper examines how the sutra integrates imagery with scripture to enhance the ritual experience, highlighting the role of visual elements in the transmission of religious teachings. Additionally, it expands the analysis to include other examples of text-image relationships, such as the pilgrim drawings found on the walls of the Mogao caves in Dunhuang. By drawing connections between these diverse materials, this research contributes to a broader understanding of the interplay between visual and textual forms in Buddhist practices and offers new insights into understudied materials.

This paper considers what the overt depictions of emotion and invitations of readerly affect in medieval Chinese Buddhist miracle tales can tell us about how early Chinese audiences received Buddhist sacred texts. While much scholarship has focused on the tales’ didactic dimensions, as informative testimonies to the power of devotion to sūtras and the mechanics of karma, less has been said about how these texts “work” toward their explicit goal of transforming its audiences into devotees. I argue here that by staging melodramatic encounters with sūtras, depicting characters’ experiences of fear, grief, illness and so on being changed into “tears of joy” by the wonderworking of Buddhist sacra, miracle tales understand the transformative power of sacred text to be chiefly affective, and attempt to induce such dispositional transformations in their readers and hearers. No mere lessons in metaphysics, these narratives propagate dharma through hair-raising and tear-jerking; by galvanizing emotional bodies.

How do Buddhist sūtras employ metaphoricity to transcend linguistic limitations and actualize non-conceptual realization? Focusing on the metaphor of water, waves, and ocean (Skt. udadhi, Chi, 大海; Skt. taraṃga, Chi. 波浪) as conceptual mappings for mind, consciousness, and conceptual thoughts, the paper examines the embodied dimension of metaphors in Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra and their role in shaping religious realities. Two key conceptual metaphors—mental activity as fluid movement and psychological peace as physical stillness—illustrate how Buddhist transmission relies on sensory engagement and transformation of experience to mediate teachings. With examinations of Chinese commentaries and associated cultural productions, the study argues that the reception and transformation of water-mind imagery highlights the cognitive and experiential mechanisms of metaphors that actualize Buddhist knowledge transmission, demonstrating how embodied metaphors extend Buddhist soteriological ideals beyond the textual realm into empirical practice. This approach reframes knowledge transfer by emphasizing embodied metaphors as integrative mechanisms bridging literature, philosophy and practice. 

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