In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book
All time are listed in Eastern Time Zone.
Please note that this schedule is subject to change and is currently being updated. Please excuse our appearance as we finalize the schedule. If you have any questions, please contact annualmeeting@aarweb.org.
Monday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Hynes Convention Center, 207 (Second…Session ID: A24-132
How might we make sense of the connection between religion, genocide, and mass atrocities? Why is interrogating this connection through a critical theoretical frame vital for articulating a more capacious analysis of religion and peacebuilding?
A common assumption is that religiously motivated atrocities are self-evident. However, the dynamics and relations between religion and atrocities are complex and require significant analytical parsing. In exploring these connections, this roundtable will examine the relation between religion and genocide and mass atrocities by focusing on the Gaza genocide from a comparative perspective.
What is religious labor? Is it a monk tending to radishes in a temple garden or a Buddhist statue carver at work in his workshop? Labor within religious contexts is intertwined with everyday moral economies and realities molded by local and global capitalistic networks. Religion influences the ways work is organized, valued, and experienced, shaping how people recognize and understand their own and others’ labor. It challenges individuals and communities to envision alternative perspectives on labor processes and practices. By exploring the intersection of Buddhism and labor, this roundtable unravels the logics of what we term “religious labor” to investigate not only how religion shapes labor processes but also how work is a co-constitutive element in the formation of Buddhist worlds. This roundtable explores how religious labor serves as a conduit through which material and immaterial labor become co-constituted and how the interdependent processes of valuation make such transformations intelligible.
This year’s annual meeting in Boston occurs approximately 150 years after theologian and philosopher Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910) returned to the U.S. from his European studies and began his career teaching at Boston University. Through his subsequent work, Bowne became known as the “Father of Boston Personalism.” The papers in this session explore the history and legacy of personalist thought from the 19th century to today, examining underappreciated thinkers, unexplored influences, and the ongoing relevance of personalism in contemporary conversations.
Papers
Joining the Dots: Exploring the connections between Saint John Henry Newman and the Boston Personalists
There are a number of studies exploring the philosophical influences upon the development of personalism. However, while the decisive role of Saint Thomas Aquinas is frequently cited by Catholic writers, the various citations made to Saint John Henry Newman by a number of Boston Personalists has largely gone unnoticed. In a similar vein, while Newman commentators frequently compare his thought with this tradition, little or no attempt has been made to document this connection. This paper explores the references made to Newman by figures such as Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910), Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953), Francis J. McConnell (1871–1953), George Albert Coe (1861–1951), and Ralph T. Flewelling (1871–1960) in order to explore whether or not the themes common to these writers possess a deeper connection.
This presentation will focus on the contributions of Rufus Burrow Jr. as a Boston Personalist. Furthermore, it will show how Burrow’s principles are applicable for addressing the fragmentation, acts of dehumanization, and contentious atmosphere that pervade of societies. This will be especially demonstrated through explication of Burrow’s framing of ethical prophecy.
This paper analyzes the efficacy of Erazim Kohák’s ecological personalism in light of environmental disaster. Kohák’s extension of the category of person to non-human creatures in turn demands an emphasis on free responsibility and the capacity of metaphorical language as the distinguishing attributes of human persons. The event of environmental disaster pushes these two attributes to their limits, as is demonstrated through Kohák’s account of the dangers of historicism and romanticism. In analyzing the relationship between fate and finitude as it relates to human responsibility, I argue that the experience of the natural world as finite and fragile elicits a responsibility that refuses to be deferred. Turning to the work of Annie Dillard, I suggest that post-romantic nature writing concretizes Kohák’s effort to “speak with a tree,” demonstrating an ecopoetics of environmental disaster.
This paper explores the potential for a "postmodern personalism" by reinterpreting Boston Personalism(s) foundational ontological claims. While Boston Personalism typically centers on the ontological primacy of persons and their social relations, a postmodern approach interrogates the social conditions — such as race, gender, and sexuality — that shape these relations and which define personhood itself. Drawing on Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, this framework highlights how the current U.S. political regime enforces hegemonic norms of personhood, making "deviants" hypervisible to enforce the norm. Rather than requiring recourse to universal moral absolutes, a postmodern personalist can utilize alternative interpretations of the existing value systems within which they are located, such as U.S. democracy or their Christian ethics, to reformulate ethical relations. They destabilize the hegemonic conception of personhood without essentializing alternatives, revealing the historical contingency of all concepts. This approach seeks not to discard personalism but to expand its critical relevance.
Monday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Sheraton, Arnold Arboretum (Fifth Floor)Session ID: A24-133
This panel explores the tension between rituals of liberation and ritual suppression by asking how ritual practices offer a sense of freedom, under what circumstances normative regimes ban or belittle ritual practices, and by what means practitioners reinvest their rituals with meaning in the face of a culture that minimizes them. The first paper considers the liberation afforded by decluttering rituals as they both produce and obscure waste. The second paper shows how evangelical women, constrained in their public actions by the norms of Christian femininity, turn their homes into prayer closets that allow them to privately act as “prayer warriors.” The third paper counters a history of misunderstanding and suppression by recovering the rituals and voices of Appalachian snake-handling. The fourth paper reveals investing in Bitcoin as a ritual that seeks to restructure power relations in the global economy and results in a sense of personal dignity and freedom.
Papers
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.
Monday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Hynes Convention Center, 209 (Second…Session ID: A24-110
This session investigates how Christian spirituality is being reshaped through intersections with capitalism, technology, and labor in contemporary American contexts. It explores the ways spiritual practices and identities are formed in response to systems of economic exchange, cultural production, and mediated community. Together, these papers raise critical questions about the moral, theological, and political implications of living out faith in a capitalist society.
Papers
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.
Monday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Sheraton, The Fens (Fifth Floor)Session ID: A24-120
This roundtable session reflects on how the study of law and religion has been changed by the contributions of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, who, close to thirty years ago, co-founded what is now the Law, Religion, and Culture program unit. Throughout her richly collaborative career, she has disrupted the terms we use to talk about these subjects and has helped scholars of law and religion to establish new grammars with which to think about collectivity, subjectivity, and political theology. This roundtable, then, assembles scholars from an array of fields whose collective work spans diverse geographies, methods, and conceptual groundings to acknowledge Sullivan’s work as a colleague, collaborator, and interlocutor, and, with her, to imagine where next the field might go.
This roundtable session reflects on how the study of law and religion has been changed by the contributions of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, who, close to thirty years ago, co-founded what is now the Law, Religion, and Culture program unit. Throughout her richly collaborative career, she has disrupted the terms we use to talk about these subjects and has helped scholars of law and religion to establish new grammars with which to think about collectivity, subjectivity, and political theology. This roundtable, then, assembles scholars from an array of fields whose collective work spans diverse geographies, methods, and conceptual groundings to acknowledge Sullivan’s work as a colleague, collaborator, and interlocutor, and, with her, to imagine where next the field might go.
Followed by the GCPR unit business meeting, the session participants propose new conceptions of "nature" as a key category for philosophy of religion. Classic philosophy of religion often uncritically assumes a bifurcation between nature and humans while proving God's existence or establishing God's attributes (e.g., natural theology). The session deploys "nature" as a category inclusive of humans, non-human beings, and divine entities. Geoff Ashton and Karen O'Brien-Kop both explore how Sāṃkhya thought reframes nature. Agnieszka Rostalska develops a holistic approach using methods of critical inquiry (ānvīkṣikī), where Matthew Robertson draws from the Ayurvedic Carakasaṃhitā to undermine binary arrangements of nature and humanity. Finally, Nural Sophia Liepsner draws upon Sufi sources to theorize space in terms of rahim (the womb) as a space of cosmic unity. There will be time for the audience to engage these participants to draw out consequences for doing philosophy of religion. The final 30 minutes will be reserved for the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion program unit business meeting. Please attend if you wish to directly contribute to the 2026 sessions.
Papers
The classic philosophy of religion is grounded in binary thinking that maintains a hierarchy of “culture” over “nature.” It reconstructs and highlights the relationship between human beings or persons to four elements: earth, air, fire, and/or water (collectively, hierarchically, or by emphasizing one) and nature. This tendency resonates with the culture vs. nature dualism, a by-product of 16th- and 17th-century European thought supported by the reflections of Hobbes and Rousseau during the Enlightenment period. Anglo-European thinkers still conceptualize “nature” as something to be observed, analyzed, and studied—an “other” distinct from us.
In my paper, I emphasize the Indian counter-perspective, which also appeals to the elements yet provides a holistic understanding of the world. A variety of beings - persons, animals, plants, etc. are considered part of a bigger whole and consist of diverse components. For naturalistic orientations, even the selves are constituents of the world inseparable from it.
This paper draws from the Carakasaṃhitā, an early work of Ayurvedic medicine, to explore a vision of the relationship between humanity, nature, and the divine that resists conceptualizations of “nature” as fundamentally set apart from humanity. Through an analysis of Ayurveda’s “person-based world,” I argue that a key aim of early Ayurvedic medicine was to rectify presumptions and practices that treat nature and the divine as “other” than the human. Building on scholarship that illustrates the fluidity of Indic approaches to the categories of “person” and “self,” I also show how Ayurveda understands the conditions of nature and humanity—their health or illness—as direct expressions of divinity. As a totalistic program for understanding interconnections that sustain living systems, Ayurveda compels us to think beyond the anthropocentric logics of “othering” and exploitation, and to embrace philosophical, legal, religious, and ethical frameworks that extend personhood to nonhuman entities.
The philosophy of the Sāṃkhya Kārikā has puzzled scholars largely due to Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions that inform their views of nature, consciousness, and the relation between the two. This paper explores a new reading of Sāṃkhya as a phenomenology of life, where life gets construed in terms of a phenomenology of living nature and a phenomenology of human existence. And yet, while this represents a step forward in our understanding of Sāṃkhyadoctrine, it nevertheless reveals deep-rooted biases that Sāṃkhya scholars have toward nature, the first-person perspective, and the relation between the two. Notably, these biases persist in the Natural Sciences, the Humanities, and Indology, but they are not to be found in the Sāṃkhya Kārikā.
Hindu philosophy of religion provides distinct thinking tools for our human, non-human and natural worlds. The Samkhya school has unique and detailed theories of nature, materiality, and evolution and can contribute to pluriversal ways (Mbembe 2016) to think about culture as a product of nature, rather than a point of contrast. Using Samkhya’s ontology of nature as a meta-category, this paper provides a philosophical reflection on classical texts, lived religion, and scientific theories to consider the significance of Samkhya’s dualist ontology of nature and consciousness in the Anthropocene.
What would it mean to reorient the study of Islam around a conceptualization of the womb as microcosm? In contemporary Muslim theology, women’s growing prominence as religious leaders appears to be related to an increased conceptual awareness around rahma (divine mercy), rahim (the womb), and al-Rahman (the God of Mercy). To explore this development, I discuss how the womb functioned as a cosmological site in traditional Sufi discourse and then trace this connection in the thought of contemporary Muslim theologians and activists. Throughout, I ask how and when this reorientation is leveraged to support feminist modes of religious epistemology and praxis and how it shapes bodies and their ways of inhabiting spaces. I argue that, within the Islamic tradition, seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of the womb work together rather than in opposition—a paradox that holds the potential of disrupting colonial and patriarchal assumptions about Islam.
In this roundtable, scholars across fields within religious studies examine how Kimberley C. Patton’s work has influenced their own scholarship, which all draws from the analytic of divine reflexivity she proposed in 2009. Trained as an historian of ancient Greek religion, Patton has worked across nearly a dozen global religious traditions from Neolithic times to the present. Her commitment to the comparative study of religion has produced major theoretical interventions in religious studies, provoked insightful critique of phenomenological categories of analysis, and illuminated unexplored categories of inquiry. With attention to divine motherhood, sacred oceans, oath-swearing spirits, icons and idols, religious animals, and holy tears, this roundtable assembles scholars across various regional, historical, and temporal contexts to critically reflect on divine reflexivity. As a collective, they consider how thinking with Patton has shaped their own work, and what that thinking means for the general practice of the comparative study of religion.
Open and Relational Theologies deem God to be persuasive, not coercive; a lure, not a puppeteer. But human freedom seems to imply our ability to resist God's love forever. It also seems to imply the potential for evil to triumph in time. If God's love precludes God's control of individual persons and our collective history, how strong is our hope for God’s liberative action in the present and for an eschatology where God will be “all in all”? Panelists will offer: an open theist argument for the doctrine of bodily resurrection as grounds for hope in cosmic redemption; a pneumatological account of freedom as the invitation to participate in God’s hope for the future; an interpretation of apokatastasis consistent with an open future; and a call for an eschatological imagination that balances the freedom of the future with the need to concretize hope against injustice.
Papers
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.
