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An informal breakfast gathering of Alumni, Faculty, and Friends of Regent College. Come connect with old friends, make new connections, and hear about what's happening at Regent College. Hosted by Regent College's Alumni Office.
Join us for breakfast while networking with the Fuller community. Featured speaker Jeff Keuss, Dean, School of Mission and Theology and Professor of Theology & Culture, speaking on "Name Your God(s): Compassion as Activism in 1 Kings 18: 20–40."
Registration required. Register here, http://bit.ly/4nQzZC3
Invitation only editorial board meeting for the journal, Dead Sea Discoveries.
This panel explores how religion shapes both the construction and erasure of aspects of American history and life. One paper examines a paradox at Boston College, where the reuse of spaces connected to clergy sexual abuse has both advanced admirable causes and fostered the forgetting of that abuse. Another paper analyzes the myth of the family farm in rural America, highlighting how religious and political discourses obscure the realities of corporate farming and reinforce evangelical ideals around gender and the natural world. A third paper investigates a 1920 Unitarian commemoration of the Pilgrims and shows how the event transformed the Pilgrims from symbols of Christian nationalism into icons of global religious liberalism. The final paper analyzes the memorialization of the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge gay bar fire (led by MCC minister Rev. Dexter Brecht) and argues that responsible memory requires assessing if some names and stories should not be recalled.
In the early 2000s, Boston College, a Jesuit Catholic university, paid $168 million to the Boston Archdiocese in land purchases. During the same period, the archdiocese paid over $95 million in settlements to 627 victims of Clergy-Perpetrated Sexual Abuse. On the purchased property, the McMullen Art Museum now occupies the estate last inhabited by the infamous Cardinal Law, and the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry is housed in a building to its rear. Grounded in the work of Avery Gordon and using the method of autoethnography, I trace my own theological work in these spaces as an experience of paradoxical haunting – at once called to memory by knowledge of the victims, and tempted into forgetting by the good work now done within these walls. Such re-use of space is an explicit strategy of encouraged forgetting that negates processes for justice and facilitates the intergenerational impacts of abuse.
This paper examines the ways in which the myth of the family farm is constructed and maintained in rural America through memory, religion, and political discourse. Framed around a December 2024 letter from the Republican Governors Association, the paper explores how rural farmers are depicted as defenders of a virtuous agrarian lifestyle in opposition to a dangerous secular world. The family farm narrative functions as an intentional and institutionalized form of forgetting that obscures the realities of corporate-driven agriculture while reinforcing specific social, religious, and gendered ideals. Through this lens, the paper addresses the political and cultural stakes of mythmaking and forgetting in America’s heartland and questions how evangelical ideologies about nature, domination, and family structures shape the midwestern farm.
In October 1920, American Unitarians and their allies gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrim Fathers’ famous Mayflower voyage. While ostensibly following a familiar Christian nationalist narrative of the Pilgrims as the founders of a Christian America, the Unitarians ended up revising the history. The Pilgrims, they claimed, had been champions of “liberal” religious principles such as freedom, tolerance, and harmony, and therefore, their history should be celebrated as a “common past” for religious liberals across nations and traditions in the modern world. To visualize this, the Unitarians invited guests from many European countries and two Asian countries (Japan and India) who represented various Christian sects and even non-Christian faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism. Attempted at this international, interfaith commemoration was a radical transformation of the Pilgrims from a tiny community of seventeenth-century Calvinists to a global icon of modern liberal ecumenism.
In this paper, I develop a conception of queer forgetting, utilizing the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge gay bar fire, its 2003 memorialization, and planned 2025 rededication as case studies. The memory of marginalized groups is frequently fragile, subject to oppressive social and legislative forces, and often necessarily leaves little trace; this is particularly true of queer memory. I argue that in retrieving and reviving lost queer memories, historians must consider queer subjects’ opacity, lest archival violence perpetuate the suppression of contemporary queer voices. Bringing archival theory to bear on memory studies and drawing upon scholars like Charles Long, Edouard Glissant, I assert that those reclaiming the past must responsibly assess if there are names one should not recall, stories one should not tell. Perhaps some names, some stories, should be forgotten.
We are running out of time. Such is the sentiment of so many people around the world today. In the face of a multitude of crises, global politics seems to be driven and defined by an overwhelming sense of anxiety and impending apocalypse. Whether it is climate change, increasing political instability, or rapid technological advancements, humanity seems to be barreling toward an uncertain future at best and catastrophe at worst. This panel brings together four scholars to critically reflect on religious perceptions and philosophies of time to explore where we are, where we are headed, and what we can do. Engaging Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and secularist perspectives, this panel discusses both how dominant theologies of time undergird the present politics, as well as how alternative visions of time can offer individuals and communities a new way of political being and action not dependent on linear, fixed, or progressive time.
If Islamic eschatology invariably predicts the total destruction of the earth, what room does Islamic ethics afford the religious responsibility to presently prevent and mitigate harm? Putting contemporary popular Muslim intellectuals in Egypt with American prison abolitionists, I investigate how non-mainstream eschatological visions of inevitable human-led destruction create communities of ethical practices that shift the focus of political action away from futurity-oriented outcomes to the socio-political demands of the present moment. I consider how the cross-cutting grammar of intention in the work of Egyptian Islamists and US prison abolitionists relocates the temporal struggle against structural evil(s), which decouples the inevitability of finitude from fixed teleologies by accepting the likelihood of the failure, disruption, and incompletion of redress efforts. I consider the potential this move affords for experimentation in democratic, egalitarian, and self-critical ethical communities that do not reproduce the epistemological and political hierarchies of mainstream technological solutions to ecological crises.
Climate change is often identified as an urgent political problem with little done to address it, while other “urgent” problems garner far greater response. What happens when nothing happens in response to urgencies? How can urgency be restored as a motivating political idea—and should it be? This paper interprets Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of the realms of time and space in The Sabbath (1951) to explore the relationship between urgency and climate change. It argues that Heschel’s distinction of time and space can be understood to assert true temporal urgency against what I call material urgencies, the sense of scarcity of finite goods that we often prioritize over and against the possibility of a future together. To recover a politically motivating sense of urgency about climate change, I argue, we must value the scarcity of time more than the scarcity of things and learn to see the difference between them.
The stories we consume about technology and AI have real-world consequences for how we develop and employ this technology. The dominant narratives of our technological predicament––techno-optimism and techno-pessimism––are both manifestations of a primarily Christian worldview that has previously informed American narratives of progress and history. Drawing from different critical theory, this presentation highlights issues at stake in the development of AI, including the stratification of social inequalities and environmental impact. I propose an alternative ethical orientation to technology, one rooted in Buddhist theories of cyclical time, interdependence, and the bodhisattva ethos.
It has become increasingly alluring to refer to the future of unabated climate change as a climate crisis, an apocalypse. In reaction to the rise of 'climate doomerism,' a peculiar faction has emerged within ecological discourse: ecomodernism. Ecomodernists argue that the limitlessness of human potential opens up a new world of possibility, wherein humanity is completely untethered from the material limits of our planet and energy is cheap, clean, and abundant for all. Drawing from queer ecology, decolonial thought, and critical secularism studies, this paper posits that the transcendent view of humanity lauded by ecomodernists represents the dominant secular eschatology of environmental thought. Engaging the work of Delf Rothe, Chris Methmann, and Ben Jones, I outline the secular eschatological views of ecomodernists and analyze the particular role of technology in ecomodernism. For ecomodernists, technology is the medium of salvation and liberation from human material finitude.
We are running out of time. Such is the sentiment of so many people around the world today. In the face of a multitude of crises, global politics seems to be driven and defined by an overwhelming sense of anxiety and impending apocalypse. Whether it is climate change, increasing political instability, or rapid technological advancements, humanity seems to be barreling toward an uncertain future at best and catastrophe at worst. This panel brings together four scholars to critically reflect on religious perceptions and philosophies of time to explore where we are, where we are headed, and what we can do. Engaging Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and secularist perspectives, this panel discusses both how dominant theologies of time undergird the present politics, as well as how alternative visions of time can offer individuals and communities a new way of political being and action not dependent on linear, fixed, or progressive time.
If Islamic eschatology invariably predicts the total destruction of the earth, what room does Islamic ethics afford the religious responsibility to presently prevent and mitigate harm? Putting contemporary popular Muslim intellectuals in Egypt with American prison abolitionists, I investigate how non-mainstream eschatological visions of inevitable human-led destruction create communities of ethical practices that shift the focus of political action away from futurity-oriented outcomes to the socio-political demands of the present moment. I consider how the cross-cutting grammar of intention in the work of Egyptian Islamists and US prison abolitionists relocates the temporal struggle against structural evil(s), which decouples the inevitability of finitude from fixed teleologies by accepting the likelihood of the failure, disruption, and incompletion of redress efforts. I consider the potential this move affords for experimentation in democratic, egalitarian, and self-critical ethical communities that do not reproduce the epistemological and political hierarchies of mainstream technological solutions to ecological crises.
Climate change is often identified as an urgent political problem with little done to address it, while other “urgent” problems garner far greater response. What happens when nothing happens in response to urgencies? How can urgency be restored as a motivating political idea—and should it be? This paper interprets Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of the realms of time and space in The Sabbath (1951) to explore the relationship between urgency and climate change. It argues that Heschel’s distinction of time and space can be understood to assert true temporal urgency against what I call material urgencies, the sense of scarcity of finite goods that we often prioritize over and against the possibility of a future together. To recover a politically motivating sense of urgency about climate change, I argue, we must value the scarcity of time more than the scarcity of things and learn to see the difference between them.
The stories we consume about technology and AI have real-world consequences for how we develop and employ this technology. The dominant narratives of our technological predicament––techno-optimism and techno-pessimism––are both manifestations of a primarily Christian worldview that has previously informed American narratives of progress and history. Drawing from different critical theory, this presentation highlights issues at stake in the development of AI, including the stratification of social inequalities and environmental impact. I propose an alternative ethical orientation to technology, one rooted in Buddhist theories of cyclical time, interdependence, and the bodhisattva ethos.
It has become increasingly alluring to refer to the future of unabated climate change as a climate crisis, an apocalypse. In reaction to the rise of 'climate doomerism,' a peculiar faction has emerged within ecological discourse: ecomodernism. Ecomodernists argue that the limitlessness of human potential opens up a new world of possibility, wherein humanity is completely untethered from the material limits of our planet and energy is cheap, clean, and abundant for all. Drawing from queer ecology, decolonial thought, and critical secularism studies, this paper posits that the transcendent view of humanity lauded by ecomodernists represents the dominant secular eschatology of environmental thought. Engaging the work of Delf Rothe, Chris Methmann, and Ben Jones, I outline the secular eschatological views of ecomodernists and analyze the particular role of technology in ecomodernism. For ecomodernists, technology is the medium of salvation and liberation from human material finitude.
This panel considers the relationship between Black Theology and Womanist Theology on Black sexual theoethics. Panelists will address the role of these theological traditions in deconstructing, expanding, and building new understandings of “the oppressed.”
Using a mix-method approach, I engage Cultural Anthropology, Narrative Theory, and Black Queer Theology within a Black Posthumanist lens to investigate how Black Trans-masculine identities are shaped by and resist traditional hegemonic theological and cultural structures. This unique perspective allows me to both examine and develop contemporary literary works that elevate Black transmasculine identities. I argue that the intersecting identities of the Black Transmasculine experience are liberatory in and of themselves in that they challenge and reshape dominant notions of gender, race, and religion. Through narrative, I seek to illuminate how Transmasculine experiences challenge and reshape traditional theological frameworks, offering new possibilities for religious practice, community building, and freedom.
In his preface to the 1997 edition of God of The Oppressed, James Cone reflects on his 1975 publication, saying: “It still represents my basic theological perspective—that the God of biblical faith and black religion is partial toward the weak” (Cone, 1997). However, he acknowledges in no uncertain terms that the perspectives of "feminist," "gay," "womanist," "Native American," and "South African theologians," in particular, have transformed the content, form, and approach of his work. Specifically highlighting the work of Kelly Brown Douglas in Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective and its implicit and explicit challenges to Black Theology, this paper then refocuses on the significance of Cone’s critical reflection on (and reconsideration of) his own work – with an emphasis on the ways Cone’s perspectives on gender and sexuality evolved. This paper contends that Cone’s way of critically reflecting on his own work models a politically powerful form of humility that remains an effective technology available to those who are oppressed in quests for liberation.
This paper suggests a recalibration of Cone’s Black Christology. Drawing insights from queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam, it rereads Cone’s Black Christology and then argues that the way of the Black Christ is that of disidentification and queer failure. This is to say, that by assuming flesh, the eternal Word not only fully assumes the conditions of the oppressed but also the entirety of the fallen human condition. In his queer way of being in the world, even unto the point of death on the cross and in his exaltation, Christ addresses the powers of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that oppress as well as our complicity with those powers. In this way of disidentification and queer failure, the Black Christ is truly for all Black people. This Black queer engagement thus critically retrieves Cone’s Christological perspective while at the same time pushes his thought in new directions.
This paper explores the role of Black and Womanist theology in unsettling inherited constructions of “the oppressed.” Rooted in African-centered and decolonial traditions, it centers the lived, embodied realities of Black women and gender-diverse persons, whose voices and experiences have frequently been marginalized or distorted within dominant theological discourses. Engaging Black Theology’s liberative vision alongside Womanist thought, the paper challenges patriarchal, heteronormative, and colonial assumptions, while reclaiming spiritual memory, communal dignity, and ethical agency. This inquiry is not abstract; it emerges from the everyday struggles, resistances, and spiritual practices of those confronting erasure and demanding justice. Through a reconfiguration of theological sources and a critical interrogation of power, the paper opens space for ethical and theological imaginaries that affirm life, confront systemic violence, and nurture collective flourishing. In dialogue with the panel’s theme, it offers reflections grounded in praxis, inviting theology to serve as a site of healing, resistance, and radical possibility.
