In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Ethics is sometimes thought to be narrowly a concern with our treatment of the Other, a living thing: the neighbor, the loved one, animals, the earth, or God. However Jewish ethics also has a robust understanding of our obligations to the no longer living, to the no-longer-human. Of course Jewish rituals around death and mourning are well known and well studied. What has received less attention is our moral obligations to the dead body itself. By studying the Jewish visual response to death, namely how Jews traditionally (do not) depict and gaze upon the dead, I argue that ultimately it is the ethical agent’s moral responsibility to render the dead invisible. The Jewish corpse, a no-longer-human being who is not quite an object, who can experience shame and contains the image of God, requires that it ultimately be erased from this world, no longer available to living eyes. 

While recent feminist Jewish thought has used critiques of abstraction as a feminist tool to criticize the way that canonical figures in Jewish thought have theorized the “ethical relation," this paper will suggest that abstraction plays a key role in a range of experiences, including experiences of infertility. To do this, the paper will show that, like many other kinds of experiences related to childbearing and childrearing, experiences of infertility are deeply shaped by obligation, but these obligations are directed towards an Other who remains abstract—the hoped-for child. In this way, the paper challenges us to develop new tools for describing the important conceptual contributions that theorizations of parental experience can make to contemporary ethical discourse. 

This paper explores the emerging phenomenon of AI-based simulations of the dead and the ethical issues they raise, particularly in a Jewish context. The capacity of AI to mimic styles from limited data offers potential therapeutic and memorialization benefits, yet also presents serious concerns. Central among these are questions of consent, privacy, the integrity of data-driven identities, and disruptions to the grieving process. Within Jewish tradition, the decentralized nature of authority and the reliance on historical precedent complicate the establishment of new norms. The author proposes two guiding principles—a right to be remembered and a right to be forgotten—and shows that these principles can be grounded in Jewish sources. Drawing on examples from twentieth-century and medieval Jewish history, the paper outlines how entirely new moral norms can be developed in response to unprecedented ethical dilemmas.

Missionary geographic enthusiasm was a vital component of nineteenth-century missionaries’ attempts to inform the American Protestant public about the world, its people, and their supposed need for evangelism. Starting in the late 1820s, missionary leaders of Monthly Prayer Concerts turned to maps and other geographic information as a key part of the “missionary intelligence” they shared with American audiences. Maps served several purposes in missionary intelligence: to educate and entertain, to make the far away and distant feel near, and to help American Protestants take a livelier interest in the world around them. Ministers sought to harness the power of visual aids and compelling narrative to turn public educational lectures into tools for the advance of foreign missions in the world at large. But these efforts to educate Americans about the world brought missionary conceptions of the hierarchies of world religions, cultures, and race into American geographic understandings.

Recent scholarship on maps suggests we must reimagine what we think a map looks like and what a map does. Maps are lively images that can take many visual forms, perform many functions in society, and assert many different claims about the relationships between human beings and their environments. Maps can also make claims about time, articulating relationships between the past, present, and future. This paper invites scholars to rethink the significance of maps in Protestantism by examining two Bible maps from the early twentieth century: a map of “The Holy Land” in the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and a chart made by dispensationalist minister Clarence Larkin in 1920. Examining the materiality of these images and their functions in Protestant communities, this paper argues Bible maps and charts made distinct claims about contemporary politics, the Bible’s relationship to geography in the past and present, and the sacrality of time.

William Dawson was a staunch Presbyterian. He was also a celebrated nineteenth-century geologist, president of Montreal’s Natural History Society, and principal of McGill University. In his view, cataloging scientific specimens bolstered his faith. This paper begins by considering Dawson’s taxonomic work as a form of Protestant mapping. It then jumps to the present when it inspired my experiment organizing a new “Natural History Society” at McGill, which included scholars and artists. We presented artifacts to each other, created our own weird taxonomic maps, and made a digital pedagogy tool. The project was a “serious parody” (Wilcox 2018), a ludic protest that parodies a dominant cultural form, while gaining real insights in the process. Making our own taxonomies was also an experiential form of critique, a way to move “map” closer to “territory” in J.Z. Smith’s terms. Can it help us to reimagine complex relationships with each other and the planet?

This paper thinks diagrammatically about how to visualize Protestant subjects and subjectivities. Thinking about subjects through diagrams allows us to ask: How are subjects made in and through their spatial existence? Rather than starting from the classic trope of Protestant interior individualism, I argue diagramming is a method that can help us shift toward a deeper understanding of Protestant subjects-in-the-world. I especially build on recent scholarship on diagrams as methods of mapping in cultural anthropology, and I extend this into religious studies. When we think about subjects through the lens of space, it becomes clear the Protestant tradition incorporates a multitude of types of cartographic subjectivities. The paper discusses three example diagrams of Protestant subjectivity: the subject as concentric circles; the subject as a relational ensemble; and the subject as a friction-filled coupling.

This paper historicizes how scholars came to frame Protestantism as a disenchanted, modern religion focused on thinking about immaterial beliefs. It demonstrates that this view, although pervasive, is not inherent to Protestantism itself. This view is a modern definition of religion that took hold among freethinkers who practiced the “religion of secularism” from the 1890s onward. In cartoons, freethinkers criticized Protestantism as a material form of religion that focused too much on supernatural objects and beings. Freethinkers offered new interpretations of Enlightenment epistemologies that suggested secularism was a truly enlightened, modern religion because it focused on immaterial beliefs. Ironically, the religion of secularism informed the secular historical method, through which scholars studied Protestantism as a tradition of immaterial beliefs. This paper offers a way of remapping belief in Protestantism according to eighteenth-century Enlightenment epistemologies, which Protestants adapted to practice their enlightened, material form of religion well into the twentieth century. 

This paper examines the emotional life of Confucian sages, drawing upon the Korean Confucian scholar Seongho Yi Ik’s 李瀷 (1681-1763) account of human emotions and the emotions of sages. While much scholarship has explored the cultivation process that leads to the exemplary life of sages, less attention has been given to their inner emotional experiences. To address this gap, I first outline the effortful life of ordinary people, who must remain vigilant in monitoring and regulating their emotions, distinguishing moral emotions from personal emotions and ensuring that the latter are properly guided by the former. I then turn to the effortless life of sages, whose actions are always appropriate and spontaneous. I make two key claims: 1) sages do not experience the Four Beginnings, and 2) sages experience only the Seven Emotions. This analysis reveals an overlooked dimension of Confucian ethics that extends beyond interpersonal relationships. 

Since Mengzi, who argued that the four basic emotions demonstrate the inherent goodness of human nature, Confucianism has emphasized the moral significance of emotions in ethical behavior. However, negative emotions such as jealousy, arrogance, and dissatisfaction disrupt internal harmony and strain relationships, raising questions about their role in moral cultivation.
In Confucian thought, emotions have traditionally been linked to qi (氣) or physical temperament, complicating the concept of emotional autonomy. However, Jeong Yagyong (Dasan), an influential 18th-century Korean philosopher, challenged this view. He rejected the idea that temperament significantly influences morality, diverging from Neo-Confucian interpretations.
This presentation will explore Dasan's perspective on negative emotions, examining how he reframed their ethical significance and offered a more individualized approach to moral self-development. The analysis contributes to broader discussions on the moral role of emotions in Confucian ethics, offering new insights into the intersection of emotion, temperament, and morality in East Asian philosophy.

This paper explores the role of resentment in Joseon women's literary expressions, challenging traditional Confucian views. While resentment is often seen as a sign of weakness, it becomes transformative when combined with moral emotions like filial longing and self-respect.

The study analyzes how these women's writings—poems, letters, and notes—served as a medium for self-empowerment and solidarity. Despite their wishes to have these works destroyed after death, they were preserved and shared across generations.

By revealing vulnerability through writing, Joseon women empowered themselves and created a shared emotional landscape with others facing similar circumstances. This research highlights the interplay between Confucian ethics, gender dynamics, and emotional expression in Joseon society.

This article explores the philosophical implications of “Jeong,” a concept cluster that represents the emotions of Koreans today. “Jeong” originated from the Chinese character 情, but after going through a long and persistent debate on emotions in Joseon Confucianism and riding through the conceptual history of the modern period when Eastern and Western cultures clashed and merged, thereby establishing itself as a core notion representing the basis of Korean minds. 
Since its meaning has evolved between the waves of Eastern and Western cultures, to gauge the context and semantic nuances of “Jeong”, I first examine the philosophical discussed in ancient Greek and Chinese traditions from a comparative philosophical perspective. Then, I will argue that “Jeong” is a philosophical joy that reflects and encompasses other emotional keywords that express emotions in Korean culture and arts, such as the two aesthetic emotions in a dynamic relationship, joy (heung) and sorrow (han).
 

This paper examines the emotional life of Confucian sages, drawing upon the Korean Confucian scholar Seongho Yi Ik’s 李瀷 (1681-1763) account of human emotions and the emotions of sages. While much scholarship has explored the cultivation process that leads to the exemplary life of sages, less attention has been given to their inner emotional experiences. To address this gap, I first outline the effortful life of ordinary people, who must remain vigilant in monitoring and regulating their emotions, distinguishing moral emotions from personal emotions and ensuring that the latter are properly guided by the former. I then turn to the effortless life of sages, whose actions are always appropriate and spontaneous. I make two key claims: 1) sages do not experience the Four Beginnings, and 2) sages experience only the Seven Emotions. This analysis reveals an overlooked dimension of Confucian ethics that extends beyond interpersonal relationships. 

Since Mengzi, who argued that the four basic emotions demonstrate the inherent goodness of human nature, Confucianism has emphasized the moral significance of emotions in ethical behavior. However, negative emotions such as jealousy, arrogance, and dissatisfaction disrupt internal harmony and strain relationships, raising questions about their role in moral cultivation.
In Confucian thought, emotions have traditionally been linked to qi (氣) or physical temperament, complicating the concept of emotional autonomy. However, Jeong Yagyong (Dasan), an influential 18th-century Korean philosopher, challenged this view. He rejected the idea that temperament significantly influences morality, diverging from Neo-Confucian interpretations.
This presentation will explore Dasan's perspective on negative emotions, examining how he reframed their ethical significance and offered a more individualized approach to moral self-development. The analysis contributes to broader discussions on the moral role of emotions in Confucian ethics, offering new insights into the intersection of emotion, temperament, and morality in East Asian philosophy.

This paper explores the role of resentment in Joseon women's literary expressions, challenging traditional Confucian views. While resentment is often seen as a sign of weakness, it becomes transformative when combined with moral emotions like filial longing and self-respect.

The study analyzes how these women's writings—poems, letters, and notes—served as a medium for self-empowerment and solidarity. Despite their wishes to have these works destroyed after death, they were preserved and shared across generations.

By revealing vulnerability through writing, Joseon women empowered themselves and created a shared emotional landscape with others facing similar circumstances. This research highlights the interplay between Confucian ethics, gender dynamics, and emotional expression in Joseon society.

This article explores the philosophical implications of “Jeong,” a concept cluster that represents the emotions of Koreans today. “Jeong” originated from the Chinese character 情, but after going through a long and persistent debate on emotions in Joseon Confucianism and riding through the conceptual history of the modern period when Eastern and Western cultures clashed and merged, thereby establishing itself as a core notion representing the basis of Korean minds. 
Since its meaning has evolved between the waves of Eastern and Western cultures, to gauge the context and semantic nuances of “Jeong”, I first examine the philosophical discussed in ancient Greek and Chinese traditions from a comparative philosophical perspective. Then, I will argue that “Jeong” is a philosophical joy that reflects and encompasses other emotional keywords that express emotions in Korean culture and arts, such as the two aesthetic emotions in a dynamic relationship, joy (heung) and sorrow (han).
 

Thomas Merton was a pioneer in interreligious dialogue and interspirituality, engaging in years of correspondence with practitioners from Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Indigenous and other religious traditions. His extended dialogue with Zen writer D.T. Suzuki was published in Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and many of Merton's final days in Asia were spent with Tibetan monks and other Buddhist practitioners. Yet, Richard King and others have argued that despite Suzuki's warm reception in the West, he occupied a minority viewpoint within Zen which was tailor-made for such export. But this paper argues that Merton is no Orientalist appropriator. He was uniquely qualified to engage in interreligious dialogue, not because he was a scholarly expert, but because he was a mystic. Merton cultivated dialogue for the purposes of deepening his own monastic practice and fostering justice in the world. His pathbreaking interreligious exploration shows how interreligious dialogue can move in decolonizing directions.

“However strange it may appear, I was led to Yoga by William of Saint-Thierry.” This sentence began the preface of Jean-Marie Déchanet’s English translation of his mid-twentieth century book titled La Voie Du Silence later translated as Christian Yoga. In the text, Déchanet argues the aim of both William of Saint-Thierry, a French Benedictine mystic,  and Christian Yoga is the union and balance of anima, animus, and spiritus. For him, Yoga creates an “openness [toward the] mystical life,” “quickens the life of faith, the love of God and our neighbor,” and “sharpens our sense of duty and responsibility as men and, above all, as Christians.” While he argues yoga supports the Christian spiritual life, Déchanet enforces parameters on what type of yoga a Christian should practice. This paper examines Déchanet’s argument for a Christian Yoga through his historical context and scholarship of William of Saint-Thierry. 

By primarily incubating his imagination and that of his audience, both as a writer and preacher, Howard Thurman draws from various resources: spiritual traditions, nature, poetry, and friendships, and invites himself and others to transcend the boundaries of a life contained by a dominant, totalizing narrative. This essay dives into a common theme that unites Thurman’s writings: the stretching of one’s vision and desire for interconnectedness amidst the vicissitudes of life, collective trauma, racial and class discrimination, and other forms of systemic oppression. Multiple religious belonging adds more taste buds to Thurman’s religious sense, metaphorically speaking. Thurman drank from several spiritual wells. Following my examination of Thurman’s spirituality, which finds roots in inter-spiritual experiences, I will reflect on Thurman’s spiritual fluidity and his philosophy of interdependence.

In 1960, the Catholic monk, Thomas Merton (1915-1968), received a copy of the Talks on the Gita. This commentary on the Bhagavad Gita was written by Vinoba Bhave, disciple, confidant, and spiritual successor to Mahatma Gandhi. The book has a marked impact on Merton, providing him with a framework and language to process his vocational crisis in 1960, to bear non-violent witness in 1962, and to critique contemporary spirituality in 1965. In this paper, we explore a transition in Merton’s understanding of the Gita. We argue that, with the Talks on the Gita, Merton comes to understand the Gita as a text of both personal and universal application, and to see Vinoba as an inter-religious sage. Merton envisions Vinoba and his teachings as universally applicable: transcending ideological boundaries and broadening his more global worldview. Merton’s efforts proffer relevant questions about the identification, meaning, and lived experience of “multiple religious belonging.”

In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy established the Church of Christ, Scientist, also known as Christian Science, to promote her teaching that mankind is spiritual and consequently that sin, sickness, and death are unreal. As a result of years of doctrinal and legal battles against mainstream ministers and institutional medicine, a narrative that Christian Science served as an outsider group to American religion dominates the historiography of this Boston-based new religious movement. While acknowledging this narrative of difference, found in the works of Stephen Gottschalk and R. Laurence Moore, this paper decenters the institutional Church of Christ, Scientist to reevaluate how this new religious movement built upon widely accepted trends in practical religion and religious healing. Examining Eddy’s incoming correspondence and publications on Christian Science reveals how mainstream Protestants ultimately sympathized with Eddy’s healing mission and how they navigated Eddy’s more radical metaphysics to find commonalities with this new movement.

Socialization of children in new and minority religions has often been discussed in the context of criticism, often by former members, of religious childrearing practices. This paper discusses the seldom-heard perspectives of second-generation adult children who have elected to remain in their parents’ faith. Two quantitative studies of the Jehovah’s Witness communities, in Japan (JWJ-QS) and Rwanda (JW-RWA), collected data from first- and second-generation Witnesses, providing their perspective of learning, adopting, and remaining in the Witness faith. Additional variables investigated the centrality of religious identity, changes in social relationships, intrinsic-extrinsic religious orientation, and resilience and support in congregation life. The JWJ-QS and JW-RWA studies fill a gap in the literature by contributing insights into the process of religious socialization of children within the Jehovah’s Witness community. The data offer potential for further analysis of factors leading to affiliation, retention, and reaffiliation of second-generation Witnesses.

David Koresh’s visits to Israel were crucial in shaping his theological development, self-conception, and apocalyptic prophecy. With each journey, both Koresh’s sense of purpose and the trust his followers placed in him intensified. His increasingly cohesive apocalyptic vision intertwined spiritual salvation with a radical political agenda. 
Despite the significance of these events, the specifics of what transpired during each visit remain inadequately understood. My research addresses this by both synthesizing the dispersed primary evidence and incorporating previously unutilized sources, including Hebrew-language publications and interviews with individuals who met Koresh during his visits.
In this paper, I will present my preliminary findings to construct a coherent picture of how Koresh’s pilgrimages not only solidified his self-conception as the Messiah but also delineated a striking political dimension in his vision – one that cast the modern State of Israel and the United States as pivotal players in an unfolding cosmic drama.
 

A modest body of research exists on affiliation with and disaffiliation from the religion of Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, no systematic study has yet been done on those who have departed and then reaffiliated with the Witness community. This paper argues that the religious stages of affiliation and disaffiliation cannot be understood in isolation from the larger context of individuals’ spiritual journey. Similarly, the insights of those who have initially identified as Witnesses, interrupted their association, and then chosen to renew their identity as Jehovah’s Witnesses have much offer in understanding specific attractions to the Witness religion, individual and group identity, the social network of Witness congregations, and the effects of separation and return to the faith.

This paper offers a unique rereading of Eve from Genesis in light of Orthodox theology as a form of resistance to the sexism and misogyny in the contemporary Church. It departs from the dominant “Eve-new Eve” interpretation, in which Eve is the quintessential woman who brought sin through disobedience and the Theotokos is “new Eve” who brought the savior through obedience. This paper introduces an alternative interpretation, which it calls “shared theosis.” It argues that Eve, the Theotokos, and Mary Magdalene all seek communion with God at different points along a theotic journey of free will, discernment, and synergy. "Shared theosis" replaces the leitmotif of obedience from "Eve-new Eve" with theosis and characterizes the Eve-Theotokos relationship as continuity rather than contrast. It more fully reflects Orthodox eucharistic cosmology that sees the “world as a church" where the human person acts as a priest, bringing all creation into union with God. 

The work of Orthodox theologian Elisabeth Behr-Sigel was key to the Eastern theological tradition beginning to take seriously the question of the ordination of women. This paper explores her legacy in this area, particularly concerning her call in The Ministry of Women in the Church (St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1991: 174) for deeper theological reflection on the priesthood. By exploring recent discussions of women’s ordination, such as those offered by contributors to the volume Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church (Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya, editors; Cascade Books, 2020), this paper uses Behr-Sigel’s observations to consider how developments in the area of the ordination of women to the diaconate are linked to the presbyteral ordination of women. For Behr-Sigel the women’s diaconate is not an alternative to the ordination of women to the priesthood but both should be part of broader theological deliberations on the practices of the Orthodox Church.

The trend of neo-traditionalism among converts to Eastern Orthodox Churches in the United States is a well-researched phenomenon that can be observed in idiosyncratic expressions of Orthodoxy unique to a North American context. In this paper, I will highlight pedagogical methods used in Orthodox catechesis which may contribute to these behaviors and ideologies. I will characterize these methods–which rely upon power imbalance, identity fragmentation, social isolation, and cultural hegemony–as pedagogically “violent” using Galtung’s theory of violence as consisting of direct, structural, and cultural dimensions. My analysis of the psychological impact of violent pedagogy draws primarily from Victor Turner’s theory of liminality in conversion, aided by the pedagogical insights of Paulo Freire and bell hooks. I will conclude by suggesting principles of non-violent pedagogy for Orthodox catechesis which may serve to create distance between Orthodox tradition and American neo-traditionalism, and to meet the pastoral needs of individuals drawn to neo-traditionalist ideology.

This paper tracks the construction of hegemonic masculinity across temporal disruptions through a phenomenon that I call ‘twins not-twins.’ First, I examine the religiously-racially premodern hegemonic masculinity of monks taught by Maximus the Confessor. Fourteen centuries later in the 2014 Christopher Nolan film _Interstellar_, I analyze the modern hegemonic masculinity of the film’s lead character Matthew McConaughey and himself (trapped in a black hole). Temporally, Maximus’s monks are multiple striving to be one; McConaughey’s character, Cooper, is singular split into two. Each are twins not-twins. I argue that the hegemonic masculinity produced through the monks’ divine pursuit and Cooper’s space pursuit are context-specific hegemonic masculinities that provincialize the idea of a stable touchstone by which other masculinities are theorized. Further, I examine the cross-temporal confluences of these premodern and modern hegemonic masculinities to situate dynamics in both sets of twins not-twins that are occluded by the tendency toward periodization.

This paper argues the trend of delegitimizing religion has a long history in Nigeria. What is different now is that Pentecostalism is, by its nature, a religion of dominionism that hardly brooks criticism. But rapidly expanding uses of Pentecostalism for “content-making" prey on religious resources. By subjecting the things of God to profane acts, they also transform social relationships to the faith. After analyzing a few instances of the ingenuity of Pentecostal critics who remediate their church-performances, I take an in-depth look at what this radicalism portends for the faith. For a society where both the edification and entertainment cultures have always been entangled, what does it mean when religion finds itself on the internet as a source of moral instruction and a disenchanting amusement?

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, this paper examines how the constitutionalization of Zambia’s postcolonial covenatal nationalism functions as a nationalized religious ideology of exclusion, symbolic violence and death. This nationalistic  theology, with its deeply entrenched moralistic stance, targets other religions, women, and sexual minorities, using the ideology of a Christian nation as an ideological state apparatus to regulate national morality, suppress dissenting voices, and covertly police alternative religious practices. Thus, Zambian Pentecostalism plays a significant role in undermining democratic values, decolonial emancipation, peaceful coexistence, and human flourishing in the postcolonial world.

Pentecostalism is an articulation of Black diaspora, because it is an enspiriting or enfleshing – a moment of reimagining and reanimating conjuncture as racialized Black bodies are undone and redone through movement – social, religious and political.  Because Pentecostalism articulates and enunciates this disfiguring configuration of racialized Black bodies, geographies, epistemologies, and ontologies – new potentialities and possibilities emerge for analysis. There is now a critical mass of Black descended scholars who have drawn upon this motion that I poetically describe, but until quite recently, have not been brought into conversation with one another. From Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, to Ogbu Kalu’s Tembisa, to Nimi Wariboko’s charismatic city, to Robert Beckford’s outernational to Keri Day’s Azusa reimagined, Pentecostalism as Blackness narrates the possibilities of a re-ordering of the world, about the aspirations for the already, but not yet postcolony.

The increasing prominence of born-again Christian politicians in several African countries has sparked discussions about the 'Pentecostalization' of African politics and its impact on secular governance and inter-religious harmony. The case of Ethiopia offers a fresh perspective on these questions. When the Pentecostal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assumed power in this predominantly Orthodox Christian and Muslim nation, observers were surprised by his use of religious rhetoric alongside his radical restructuring of Ethiopian politics, which ultimately led to civil war and instability. Ethiopia presents a useful case study to question overgeneralized notions of a postcolonial Pentecostal politics in the post and prompts better analysis rooted in local historiography.

The paper situates the emergence of African Pentecostal women pastors in Catholic Europe as representing a dynamic intersection of faith, gender, and migration, revealing the complexities of identity and embodiment in a multicultural context. These women navigate the spiritual landscape as 'souls in search of bodies,' embodying migrant corporeality that challenges traditional religious structures. Their experiences reflect not only personal spiritual journeys but also broader socio-economic realities, illustrating how faith practices adapt to new environments (Meyer, 2010; Van Klinken, 2015). Through an interdisciplinary approach, combining sociology, theology, and migration studies, we explore how these pastors negotiate their roles within both Pentecostal communities and the broader Catholic milieu, fostering a unique theological perspective that honors their African heritage while engaging with European cultural norms (Butticci, 2016; Burgess, 2018). 

This paper argues the trend of delegitimizing religion has a long history in Nigeria. What is different now is that Pentecostalism is, by its nature, a religion of dominionism that hardly brooks criticism. But rapidly expanding uses of Pentecostalism for “content-making" prey on religious resources. By subjecting the things of God to profane acts, they also transform social relationships to the faith. After analyzing a few instances of the ingenuity of Pentecostal critics who remediate their church-performances, I take an in-depth look at what this radicalism portends for the faith. For a society where both the edification and entertainment cultures have always been entangled, what does it mean when religion finds itself on the internet as a source of moral instruction and a disenchanting amusement?

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, this paper examines how the constitutionalization of Zambia’s postcolonial covenatal nationalism functions as a nationalized religious ideology of exclusion, symbolic violence and death. This nationalistic  theology, with its deeply entrenched moralistic stance, targets other religions, women, and sexual minorities, using the ideology of a Christian nation as an ideological state apparatus to regulate national morality, suppress dissenting voices, and covertly police alternative religious practices. Thus, Zambian Pentecostalism plays a significant role in undermining democratic values, decolonial emancipation, peaceful coexistence, and human flourishing in the postcolonial world.

Pentecostalism is an articulation of Black diaspora, because it is an enspiriting or enfleshing – a moment of reimagining and reanimating conjuncture as racialized Black bodies are undone and redone through movement – social, religious and political.  Because Pentecostalism articulates and enunciates this disfiguring configuration of racialized Black bodies, geographies, epistemologies, and ontologies – new potentialities and possibilities emerge for analysis. There is now a critical mass of Black descended scholars who have drawn upon this motion that I poetically describe, but until quite recently, have not been brought into conversation with one another. From Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, to Ogbu Kalu’s Tembisa, to Nimi Wariboko’s charismatic city, to Robert Beckford’s outernational to Keri Day’s Azusa reimagined, Pentecostalism as Blackness narrates the possibilities of a re-ordering of the world, about the aspirations for the already, but not yet postcolony.

The increasing prominence of born-again Christian politicians in several African countries has sparked discussions about the 'Pentecostalization' of African politics and its impact on secular governance and inter-religious harmony. The case of Ethiopia offers a fresh perspective on these questions. When the Pentecostal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed assumed power in this predominantly Orthodox Christian and Muslim nation, observers were surprised by his use of religious rhetoric alongside his radical restructuring of Ethiopian politics, which ultimately led to civil war and instability. Ethiopia presents a useful case study to question overgeneralized notions of a postcolonial Pentecostal politics in the post and prompts better analysis rooted in local historiography.

The paper situates the emergence of African Pentecostal women pastors in Catholic Europe as representing a dynamic intersection of faith, gender, and migration, revealing the complexities of identity and embodiment in a multicultural context. These women navigate the spiritual landscape as 'souls in search of bodies,' embodying migrant corporeality that challenges traditional religious structures. Their experiences reflect not only personal spiritual journeys but also broader socio-economic realities, illustrating how faith practices adapt to new environments (Meyer, 2010; Van Klinken, 2015). Through an interdisciplinary approach, combining sociology, theology, and migration studies, we explore how these pastors negotiate their roles within both Pentecostal communities and the broader Catholic milieu, fostering a unique theological perspective that honors their African heritage while engaging with European cultural norms (Butticci, 2016; Burgess, 2018). 

One of the most often mentioned groups throughout the fifty-one treatises of the Brethren of Purity is the Sabeans (or Mandaean) of Ḥarrān. They are mentioned about a dozen times throughout the treatises and the Brethren dedicate an entire section of their fifty-first treatise on magic to them. The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) were a ninth-tenth century Shīʾite philosophical movement from Baṣra, Iraq. Little is known about the actual group or its members, and their only remains are fifty-one treatises with two summaries. However, their works played an influential role in various intellectual trajectories throughout Islamic and Jewish philosophical history. This paper argues that the Brethren’s philosophical and religious conception of the Intellect stands in between that of the Sabian-Mandaean, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Shīʾite Islamic thought. 

The temptation to see Damascius’ Ineffable as anticipating skeptical modernity is nearly irresistible. First, he insists that in everything that we say about the “first principle” reflects our own cognitive limitations rather than anything objective. Second, he draws attention to the aporiae of negative theology, “overturning… all discourse.” Third, he radically modifies the schema of procession, in ways that some see as annihilating the Neoplatonic hierarchy. Others have rightly pushed back, insisting that Damascius is no skeptic, modern or postmodern, and that his modifications emerge from problems immanent to his predecessors. But if Damascius is not Kant (much less Derrida), why? This paper suggests that Damascius allows us to see, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, what separates the metaphysics of Neoplatonism (and the Hellenistic world) from that of modernity —precisely by pushing this boundary to its limit. This boundary is the question of philosophy’s presupposed starting point.

This paper examines the distinction between vision and union in later Neoplatonism, particularly in the works of Iamblichus, Hermias, and Proclus. While the vision of the divine is traditionally considered the highest religious experience, later Neoplatonists argued that it remains an intellective act and, as such, is insufficient for true union with the divine. Instead, they proposed that genuine union transcends intellect and is realized through theurgy—a ritual practice that activates a distinct "part" of the soul, the “One of the soul.” By analysing the metaphysical and epistemological framework of later Neoplatonism, this paper challenges the assumption that divine vision represents the ultimate stage of religious ascent. In doing so, it sheds new light on the role of theurgy as a transformative process that not only surpasses intellectual contemplation but also reconfigures the relationship between human and divine activity.