In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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

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

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

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

Central to Iris Murdoch’s moral-aesthetic philosophy is her conception of prayer, which she derives largely from Simone Weil’s theory of attention, and from Plato’s Eros. In both philosophers she finds a model for moral perfectionism as the turning away from fantasy towards reality and the good. She locates among the most seductive of fantasies the unified image of a personal God, and thus, I argue, seeks to theorize a “demythologized” form of prayer without God, or a practical mysticism of the Good. This position hews close to Weil’s mystical “attention,” but Murdoch trades Weil’s God for Plato’s Good, and diverges from both thinkers in placing greater emphasis on the imaginative practice afforded by art, especially the reading of tragic literature. This paper considers how her practical mysticism poses a modest resolution to “the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” initiated by Plato, who professed a grave mistrust of literature.

Since the 1980’s, Enrique Dussel has been regarded as the most important scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in Latin America. An early contributor to liberation theology, a pioneering leader in the concurrent field of liberation philosophy, all the while being a highly respected historian of the Catholic Church in his own right, Dussel’s work spanned fields, geographies, and world history in an effort to dismantle the Eurocentric and colonialist pretensions of modernity. In this short reflection, I will argue that one of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye towards epistemic decolonization. The relation between history and philosophy and the relation between history and theology are good examples of this interdisciplinarity. 

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted that ethics is not finally a matter for philosophy. For him, the ultimately good or ultimately meaningful cannot be captured by reason. Wittgenstein thus gives us a different route for answering Kant’s famous questions: “What should I do?” and “What can I hope for?” If Wittgenstein’s skepticism about ethical philosophy is correct, we do not need a theory to act or hope. Rather, theories serve to procrastinate action and obscure hope. Wittgenstein’s deflationary approach to philosophy teaches us to abandon the hope for a theory of hope. I will argue that this is not a counsel of despair. Rather, Wittgenstein frees us for authentic hope: hope not underwritten by a philosophical or theological system, but simply ordinary hope for this or for that, hope that relies on nothing but itself. It is this hope, hope freed from philosophical theory building, that liberates us to act. 

This paper foregrounds the theme of maturity as the way of life of human freedom in Weber’s political thought. It does so to explore how Weber’s ethic of responsibility bears the trace of the religious that it disavows. This trace, the paper suggests, can be seen in the influence that the exemplary lives of certain religious virtuosi exert upon Weber’s ethic of responsibility, lives which capture his hopeful imagination, spur his desire, and thus motivate his call for a politics of limits. Making this claim, however, entails setting aside an intellectualist understanding of religion premised on belief in favour of understanding religion as a desire-driven practice. Shifting to such a register brings into relief how Weber’s notion of maturity as the exercise of human freedom remains tied to the religious virtuosi even when Weber insists that religious belief has become incredible.

State-sponsored religious performances in the Inca Empire featured an abundance of sensory stimuli. While scholarly efforts have predominantly focused on studying the role that the senses played within Inca religion through documentary evidence, lesser attention has been paid to Inca religious experiences in place. To spatially contextualize and thus better understand the sensorial dimensions of Inca sacredness, I will examine Inca religious performance as it was embodied in the most significant sacred center in the Andes at the time: the Coricancha. Specifically, I will explore how the center functioned as a site in which participants could engage with the sacred through the interplay of sound, sight, smell, and taste. To do this, I will combine ethnohistoric sources with archaeological materials, architectural evidence, and acoustic analysis. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this paper offers an avenue to address the materiality and intangibility of Indigenous religious experiences in the past.

This paper presents an ethnographic approach to the study of Pentecostal sounds in urban spaces. Drawing from my ongoing project, Mapping Christian Audibilities, I explore sound as a material form that can be explored through fieldwork. Moving beyond traditional church settings, the paper focuses on outdoor Christian sounds—such as those produced by prayer groups, parades, and street preachers—and traces how they interrupt and interact with the sonic environment of Toronto’s Bloor Street (a major, downtown thoroughfare). By combining active listening, sound walking, and sound mapping, I examine how sound creates territoriality in urban contexts. Building on scholarship in religion, sound, and space, I argue that Christian sounds do not simply blend into the urban sonic background but actively interrupt and engage with it, creating "mixed-tapes" that make contemporary Christianity audible—and give it a complex presence—outside church buildings.

The Virgin Mary as ‘Our Lady of Good Health’ or Arogya Madha is a powerful protectress for migrant, working-class, marginalized caste Tamil communities in South India, across confessional identities. This paper suggests that the roots of this pervasive popularity of the Virgin is rooted in her articulation through the lived ritual grammar of Tamil Dalit and Shudra maternal tutelary divinities, known as the ammans. Attending to ethnographic narratives of seeing, feeling and hearing Arogya Madha through visions and divine voices, animal sacrifice and miraculous images, it demonstrates how the ‘White Virgin’ is configured into a ‘Tamil mother’, both an intimate, wholly present partner for place-making and a place in the unknown. As an amman, Mary's engagement by her followers in turn attests for them a sense of rootedness in the midst of the liminal subjectivities of being Tamil and Catholic and structural and personal experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion.

While there is growing interest in the role of senses in the history of Islam (Lange 2022), very little attention has been given to sensory approaches to Shiʿi Islam in South Asia (Wolf 2017; Bard 2015; Hyder 2006), an already “peripheral” area of Islamic Studies (Fuchs 2019). This paper explores the engagement of the senses in Shiʿi rituals in the Indian subcontinent. Examining the Urdu Shiʿi lament genre, I argue that the interconnection of the sensorium with South Asian Shiʿi devotional practices functioned in three important ways to shape Shiʿism in South Asia. I argue that the role of the senses in the use of ‘Indian’ music, poetry, and objects engaged local sensibilities and emotions that shaped important connections between the Indian subcontinent and the Arab Islamic world and helped to firmly establish Shiʿi Islam within the realm of ‘South Asian’ religions.

This paper analyzes the work of Pinky Promise, a nationwide parachurch organization that boasts a membership of approximately sixty thousand women, the majority of whom are Black. Though founder Heather Lindsay describes the organization as broadly “Christian” and “non-denominational,” I observe that Pinky Promise promotes cultural and theological understandings that scholars commonly associate with the term “evangelical.” Furthermore, I posit that we must take seriously the lived religious experiences of communities who affiliate, believe, and behave according to scholarly definitions of “evangelical,” even when those communities do not claim the mantle of “evangelicalism” for themselves. In the case of Pinky Promise, doing so allows for both a fuller understanding of the organization and a critical assessment of American evangelicalism broadly. Situating Pinky Promise within the evangelical imaginary demonstrates how Black women, in particular, produce and participate in a Christian public that often brackets their participation as marginal.

This paper begins by considering contested definitions of “evangelical” in the context of the 2016 US presidential election.  I focus on progressive White evangelical activists who voiced their opposition to vast White evangelical support for the Trump-Pence ticket.  These activists sought to publicly define faithful evangelicalism as a commitment to social justice highly attuned to embodied forms of identity and difference.  I demonstrate this through close readings of popular books by one such activist, Shane Claiborne, arguing that Claiborne constructs an alternative to right-wing White evangelicalism through narrative depictions of racial-ethnic otherness.  He writes his definition of evangelicalism through recurring stories about the embodied experiences of his Black and Brown neighbors.  I contend that Claiborne exercises in this way a definitional freedom and narrative license fraught with contradiction.  His stories criticize a normative White perspective in mainstream US evangelicalism and also narratively reproduce a similar norm.

This paper examines post-evangelical feminist authors and readers who have disidentified with evangelicalism in the twenty-first century to explain their disidentification in historical context. Using published blog posts, social media posts, and Substack newsletters, as well as 75 semi-structured interviews I conducted from 2021-2023, I argue that post-evangelical feminists’ primary reasons for disidentification with evangelicalism are the interconnected issues of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia they consider to be dominant within white evangelicalism. Yet, as a scholar, I assert that post-evangelical feminists continue to embody evangelical tenets including the centrality of scripture, belief in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and the motivation to spread Christian messages. The term “post-evangelical” reflects this tension of continuity and discontinuity, history and present context.

At the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1976, Dr. Ralph Blair launched an organization called Evangelicals Concerned. The mission of this organization was to persuade evangelicals that homosexuality was morally neutral and that churches should affirm (monogamous) same-sex partnerships. Through EC, Blair distributed two quarterly newsletters and a host of booklets, organized regional conferences, and oversaw local chapters across the nation. In the late 1970s especially, Blair was one of several evangelical gay activists who unnerved leaders of evangelicalism. This presentation will analyze EC’s evangelical gay discourse and, in the process, offer several insights about how scholars use the term “evangelical.” Centering historical subjects like Blair—that is, those who have been ostracized by evangelical institutions even as they earnestly identified as evangelical—invites us to conceive of “evangelical” not as a stable, uniform theological construction, but as a dynamic, perennially contested discursive construction.

Chicanas have faced oppression historically through colonization and its rippling effects of machismo and marianismo. Paulo Freire states that the fundamental theme of our epoch is domination. If, by extension, domination is a fundamental theme in Chicana lives, then liberation is an objective to be achieved. In this research, I argue that one way Chicanas have achieved their own liberation is through embodying Our Lady of Guadalupe by reinterpreting the icon to reflect themselves and those within their community. I examine the artwork of Ester Hernandez, Alma López, and Yolanda López. Through the form of embodying Guadalupe, Chicanas experience liberation by engaging in conscientization that is political and spiritual. By becoming Guadalupe, Chicanas are active agents in shaping their history and future, rejecting colonialism, machismo, marianismo, and any social construction of Chicanas that functions to exclude and/or oppress, thereby experiencing a form of self and communal liberation. 

Faith healing has been central to Pentecostalism expansion in Latin America. However, most sociological studies that investigate this practice in the region start from theoretical assumptions that do not reflect the region’s religious reality. Using a lived religion approach, I explore how members of a Brazilian Pentecostal church in greater Boston make sense of this religious institution's healing system to construct their own definitions of illness and health. The research draws from 114 hours of ethnographic observation of the church’s practices and 11 interviews. The results show that the church’s healing system is based on a dualistic and hierarchical perspective on health that promotes the total spiritualization of medicine. However, members exercise their agency by resisting both the spiritualization of medicine and the medicalization of society through the construction of a dualistic and horizontal interpretation of health and illness that is simultaneously based on religious and medical definitions

Although the popularity of the Rāmāyaṇa story beyond India proper, and especially in Southeast Asia, is well known, the popularity of Mahābhārata stories, especially in Pali Buddhist countries, is less so. Indeed, this has even led to the perception that the Rāmāyaṇa has a geographically transcendent quality, while the Mahābhārata was of less universal popularity because it is tied to Bhārat, or India. In this paper, I examine an interesting exception to this perceived tendency, the adoption of the story of Kṛṣṇa’s grandson Aniruddha from the Harivaṃśa into Siamese literature. I show that while it ultimately lost out to the Rāmakian—the Thai version of the Rāmāyaṇa—in popularity, it was at the height of Siamese power and prosperity a coequal partner in the adoption of Hindu mythology into elite Siamese courtly literature.

What is the relationship between vernacular languages and the birth of “Hindutva?” Despite Sanskrit’s notoriety as the language of Brahminical articulation, when Hindutva or Hindu Nationalism broadly as a political movement was born in the late nineteenth century, the vernacular became the language of its political articulation. Here, I probe and problematize a raucous public debate in Bengal in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the heart of it was a polemical exchange between Brahmos and Hindus surrounding the nature of idolatry. As Brahmos chastised Hindus, castigating them of idol worship, those who defended image worship self-essentialized it as a fundamental fulcrum of a Hindu identity. This public articulation in the vernacular (at least in Bengal), discursively produced the category of the “Hindu.”  This controversy, I argue, allows us a glimpse into the connection between religion, language, and a Hindu identity formation in a colonized society.

In the fifteenth century, Śvetāmbara Jain monks produced a voluminous body of literature in Gujarati (Māru-Gūrjara). Didactic story literature comprises the greatest quantity of this emerging vernacular register, far outstripping their output of devotional poems and songs that tend to dominate studies of vernacularization. One such collection, the Śīlopadeśamālā-Bālāvabodha, instructs laywomen to view their pathway to the Jain soteriology of mokṣa as going through the upholding of family honor and prestige, especially by maintaining good wifely comportment and maintaining chastity at all costs. The contents of this story collection and manuscript evidence of its distribution give us new insight into the close connections between Śvetāmbara monastic orders (gaccha) and the caste communities who supported them. Concerns of caste purity that are policed on women’s bodies are here ideologically linked to women’s soteriological potential. Thus, early Jain works in emerging vernaculars forged and maintained ideological links between caste and sect.

In 2009, a woman surnamed Li began distributing a scripture in northeast China, which she claims was revealed to her by Kṛṣṇa. Titled Bojiafan song (Ode of the Bhagavān)—a clear play on Bhagavad-gītā (Ch.: Bojiafan ge)—the work presents itself as Kṛṣṇa’s final word and offers a cosmogony, cosmography, and detailed ontology. It also warns against environmental degradation and prophesizes a magnificent future for China once it adopts Hinduism. The present paper argues the following about this truly unique religious text: (1) that its emergence is in keeping with what historian Vincent Goossaert calls China’s “revelatory ecology,” (2) that it evidences specifically Daoist understandings of scripture, and (3) that its production and circulation appear to mark the start of a largely internal or “one-sided” dialogue between Chinese and Hinduism akin to the one Buddhologist Robert Sharf indicates has been occurring among Chinese and Buddhism now for hundreds of years.