In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

In his 1843 "Address to the Slaves of the United States," Henry Highland Garnet declares, “The Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters!” This metaphor captures the tragic circumstances of enslaved individuals caught between oppression and the desire for freedom. This paper explores Garnet’s call for freedom as a moral reorientation. Garnet presents freedom as individual responsibility and collective action that requires moral reform in addition to physical liberation. By analyzing Garnet’s critique of slavery, this paper considers how his prophetic vision offers an ethical framework for reclaiming freedom in the face of oppression. It ultimately asks: How can moral reorientation shape our understanding of freedom in the context of persistent and pervasive injustice?

In exploring the relationship between freedom and responsibility, this paper first briefly diagnoses the outsized attention given to blameworthiness and guilt in the philosophical and Christian ethical literature on moral responsibility. Then, this paper locates the sympathetic response (as a kind of practical wisdom) as a capacity central to the concept of responsibility. The sympathetic response, or acknowledgement of another’s suffering, is an achievement fundamental to being responsive to and responsible for others. Drawing from Stanley Cavell’s distinction between “knowing” and “acknowledging,” this paper dramatizes the claim (that acknowledgment of human suffering is essential to knowledge of it) through insights from the lives and legacies of Mamie Till-Mobley and Frederick Douglass.

Martin Luther King Jr. characterized freedom as a kind of self-determination—the ability to deliberate, decide, and take responsibility for one’s own actions. Poverty and segregation remove one’s ability to be fully free by attacking one’s sense of self-regard. One common expression of this unfreedom is sloth, specifically, apathy toward one’s unjust and unfree circumstances. This paper reconstructs King’s reflections on the vice of sloth and proposed solutions. It proceeds in three parts: first, it reconstructs King’s account of the psychological roots of sloth. Second, the paper examines one of King’s most common political constructions of the apathetic agent—white moderate liberals—and his positive proposal about removing apathy through democratic participation and direct action. The paper concludes by connecting King’s arguments about nonviolent resistance and the dual formation of self and society to contemporary debates about the usefulness of virtue and vices for an ethics of social change.

This paper examines the lived experiences of first-generation Bahá'ís from European Catholic backgrounds, focusing on their religious transitions through the lens of progressive revelation. Drawing on life story interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Ireland and Italy, I analyze how first-generation Bahá'ís navigate their religious identity within personal, familial, and community contexts. The research reveals how the Bahá'í theological framework of progressive revelation facilitates a unique form of religious transition that enables continuity with Catholic heritage while embracing Bahá'í beliefs. The absence of clergy and of ceremonial rupture with previous affiliations in the Bahá'í Faith allows individuals to maintain familial and cultural connections while developing personal relationships with religious figures, particularly Jesus Christ. This study contributes to understanding how Bahá'í approaches to religious plurality shape convert experiences and challenge traditional anthropological models of religious conversion based on rupture.

This paper examines conceptualizations of ‘virtue’ which emerge in literature drawn from positive psychology and the Bahá’í Faith, exploring the relationship between the two approaches. While positive psychology draws upon a range of religious and philosophical approaches to inform its classification of virtues and strengths (known as the ‘Values-In-Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths’), it has not yet drawn upon or been studied in relation to the Bahá’í Faith.

This paper considers how the approaches may complement and inform one another as distinct bodies of knowledge, contrasting the ways in which their respective empirical and theological frameworks shape the concepts of virtue which emerge. It further highlights the syncretic and ‘integrative’ approach of positive psychology (which integrates specific aspects of religion) with the ‘inclusive’ approach of the Bahá’í Faith (based upon the principle of the oneness of religion). In turn, it considers the unique potential for future dialogue between the approaches.

This paper examines the intersection of religious freedom and academic methodology by comparing the treatment of Bahá’ís in Iran and Germany. While Iran, reflecting an exclusivist Islamic theological framework, denies Bahá’ís religious freedom, Germany allows them to practice their faith freely. A key factor in this disparity is the absence of a developed methodology for religious studies in Iran. Unlike Germany, where religious studies evolved alongside or even merged with Christian theology—exemplified by the Religionsschule des Verstehens—Iranian institutions largely follow an exclusivist theological paradigm. Although some Shi‘a scholars advocate for greater tolerance, their influence remains limited. Additionally, a broader challenge to global religious freedom arises when Muslim institutions in the West demand rights that are not granted to minorities, such as the Bahá’ís, in the Islamic world.

The interpretation of dreams is hardly an exact science. When we mine Islamic and Baha’i texts for instruction, we find that much depends on factors like the favor of God and purity of the heart. These textual traditions agree that while techniques may help to induce dreams of significance and familiar symbols may point in consistent directions, only divine guidance ensures that we distinguish between the truth and illusion. If divine guidance is in place, the truths of the dream realm can be closer to ultimate reality than our wakeful experiences. The state of sleep frees the soul to perceive beyond the bodily senses. On the other hand, our baser desires can cloud our dreams and turn them into a meaningless jumble. When read together, texts from Islam and the Baha’i Faith reveal a complex framework in which dreams lead us closer to or pull us farther from divine truth. 

 In this paper, I will summarize Lebens’ approach to apophatic theology (Section 1), and defend it from the main criticisms to which it was subject (Section 2). I will, then, show that Lebens’ approach to apophatic theology faces a dilemma, that is, either many claims about God are false or many claims about God are nonsense (Section 3). I will also argue that, in both cases, Lebens’ account of apophaticism faces some important issues (Section 4 and Section 5). To conclude, I will show that the failure of Lebens’ apophatic theology can show some remarkable feature of grammatical thomism, and its employment of nonsense.  

In this paper, I argue that ‘grammatical Thomism’, based on a Wittgensteinian interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, has a problem at its heart, relating philosophical discourse with theological speech. In surveying the views of Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, Nicholas Lash, and Stephen Mulhall, I explicate how these thinkers come down on different sides of this question, suggesting that their approach to religious language and particular commitment to analysing Christian forms of life lands them in a puzzle that must be solved, rather than dissolved.

This paper compares the dialectical relationship between speech and silence in the writings of three thinkers. The first, Ignace D’hert OP, was a student of Cornelius Ernst OP in the 1970s, himself a student of Wittgenstein. D’hert’s dissertation develops Ernst’s ideas into a Wittgensteinian ontology, concluding that the function of faith-language is the production of pregnant silence. Similarly, Rowan Williams’ Gifford Lectures, inspired by Ernst’s writings, begin with a Cavellian account of language and culminate in a theology of silence. The following year, Stephen Mulhall delivered his Stanton Lectures on ‘Grammatical Thomism’ that develop the thought of Herbert McCabe OP, Ernst’s Dominican contemporary. Also attending to the failures of language, Mulhall presents his own account of the function of theological language, which he compares and contrasts with Williams’ in a subsequent article. Despite significant convergence between these three accounts, it is well worth examining just where and when they diverge. 

From its inception, the underlying realism of David Burrell’s (1933-2023) Aquinas:
God and Action has been doubted. 1 This is witnessed to in both the early reviews
and clearly evidenced in the work itself, especially the chapter ‘Truth in Matters
Religious’ and the broader discontent with any quest for certainty that Burrell
expresses. This doubt around Burrell’s realism has only intensified since the birth of
the moniker ‘grammatical thomism’, which situated Burrell’s reading of Aquinas in a
broader trend in theology and ‘revisited’ the realism. 2
This paper will also revisit Burrell’s realism, but instead of finding Burrell’s realism
wanting, it will argue that Aquinas is purposefully ambiguous as to how we might
narrate the relationship between language and reality.

 In this paper, I will summarize Lebens’ approach to apophatic theology (Section 1), and defend it from the main criticisms to which it was subject (Section 2). I will, then, show that Lebens’ approach to apophatic theology faces a dilemma, that is, either many claims about God are false or many claims about God are nonsense (Section 3). I will also argue that, in both cases, Lebens’ account of apophaticism faces some important issues (Section 4 and Section 5). To conclude, I will show that the failure of Lebens’ apophatic theology can show some remarkable feature of grammatical thomism, and its employment of nonsense.  

In this paper, I argue that ‘grammatical Thomism’, based on a Wittgensteinian interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, has a problem at its heart, relating philosophical discourse with theological speech. In surveying the views of Herbert McCabe, David Burrell, Nicholas Lash, and Stephen Mulhall, I explicate how these thinkers come down on different sides of this question, suggesting that their approach to religious language and particular commitment to analysing Christian forms of life lands them in a puzzle that must be solved, rather than dissolved.

This paper compares the dialectical relationship between speech and silence in the writings of three thinkers. The first, Ignace D’hert OP, was a student of Cornelius Ernst OP in the 1970s, himself a student of Wittgenstein. D’hert’s dissertation develops Ernst’s ideas into a Wittgensteinian ontology, concluding that the function of faith-language is the production of pregnant silence. Similarly, Rowan Williams’ Gifford Lectures, inspired by Ernst’s writings, begin with a Cavellian account of language and culminate in a theology of silence. The following year, Stephen Mulhall delivered his Stanton Lectures on ‘Grammatical Thomism’ that develop the thought of Herbert McCabe OP, Ernst’s Dominican contemporary. Also attending to the failures of language, Mulhall presents his own account of the function of theological language, which he compares and contrasts with Williams’ in a subsequent article. Despite significant convergence between these three accounts, it is well worth examining just where and when they diverge. 

From its inception, the underlying realism of David Burrell’s (1933-2023) Aquinas:
God and Action has been doubted. 1 This is witnessed to in both the early reviews
and clearly evidenced in the work itself, especially the chapter ‘Truth in Matters
Religious’ and the broader discontent with any quest for certainty that Burrell
expresses. This doubt around Burrell’s realism has only intensified since the birth of
the moniker ‘grammatical thomism’, which situated Burrell’s reading of Aquinas in a
broader trend in theology and ‘revisited’ the realism. 2
This paper will also revisit Burrell’s realism, but instead of finding Burrell’s realism
wanting, it will argue that Aquinas is purposefully ambiguous as to how we might
narrate the relationship between language and reality.

This paper argues that the seemingly ambivalent attitude of the early Buddhist tradition toward caste is in fact an artifact of a modern scholarly misunderstanding of the history of the caste system. The prevailing assumption has been that the caste system was of hoary antiquity by the time of the Buddha, and that therefore “the Buddha,” if he spoke about caste at all, must have taken a stand one way or the other about it. I will argue instead that the beginnings of caste ideology were coalescing among reactionary Brahmans at the same time as the early Buddhist texts were being composed. By reading Tipiṭaka texts alongside roughly contemporaneous Brahmanical text, we gain a clearer picture of how Buddhist rhetorical strategies against conservative and reactionary Brahmans contributed to the shape of an emerging caste ideology.

Because smell is often used in a metaphorical sense, one might be inclined to read instances of fragrant virtue as just that—a metaphor. However, olfaction, as it is described within the earliest Buddhist texts to argue for vegetarianism, breaks down our cleanly divided modern categories of literal and metaphorical. Smell is used within these sūtras, and within premodern South Asian texts more generally, as “a way of knowing things about the world. People can use smells in order to tell whether a particular source of smell is pure or impure…low caste or high caste” (McHugh, 2012, 90). In this way, what a smell implies about one’s identity is of paramount importance. This paper explores how smell is used within Mahāyāna sūtras as a marker of caste. In particular, the paper contends that the sociological concept of “odorphobia” can help illustrate how malodor signifies low-caste stature within these Buddhist texts. 

The paper reads B.R. Ambedkar as a philologist through his engagement with Pali and Sanskrit towards the making of Buddhist texts. By tracing a genealogy of key sacred texts, the essay specifically focuses on how liturgical languages engage with caste hierarchy. The object of analysis in the paper is the category of caste and how it continues to function from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. I historicize Ambedkar’s engagement with language (Choudhury, 2018; Bronkhorst, 2019) and read it with other philological interpretations of early Buddhism (Norman, 2006), alongside recent scholarship on Ambedkar (eds. Jondhale and Beltz, 2004; eds. Rathore and Verma, 2011). This long historical thread culminates in a (casteless?) The Buddha and His Dhamma (Ambedkar, 1957) based on which I argue that Ambedkar reformulates the idea of what it means to be sacred through his decades-long engagement with Buddhism. 

Caste figured little in studies of Buddhist traditions across Asia because caste seemingly had little effect on Buddhist communities outside the subcontinent. Yet, as perhaps the identifying, if not defining, feature of South Asian societies, caste proved an inescapable phenomenon for modernist subcontinental Buddhist thinkers such as Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933), Dharmanand Kosambi (1876-1947), and BR Ambedkar (1891-1956). While the semantic ambiguity of jāti allows the linguistic term to become mapped onto various forms of exclusion and difference, we must not forget that caste mattered in the primary social circles of these three thinkers. This paper explores the various ways in which they hoped to build a strong South Asian Buddhist community by positioning the religion around, or beyond, caste discourses. Despite their respective efforts to distance themselves from its practice and its reach, caste remained an integral component in their various social calculations and interactions. 

19th-century US historians have long recognized that both the insane asylum and the home have functioned as sites for disciplining bodies and minds into model citizens. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the asylum and the home and how both used religion to shape their residents into model citizens. This paper examines the synergistic relationship between the Southern home and the asylum and how their reality challenged their idealized archetypes as site of patriarchal authority. It also highlights how religion shaped and was shaped by the ideals of normativity – necessarily gendered/racialized – these sites were built to instill. As the niece of Duncan Cameron, one of the wealthiest slaveowners in North Carolina, Anna Cameron Kirkland’s story is an example of how religious discipline was used in the home and the asylum to discipline upper-class white women. 

Six years after the Missouri Mormon War of 1838, Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were assassinated by a mob on June 27, 1844. Their murders at Carthage Jail, Illinois, were a tragic moment in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and within larger American religious history more broadly. Besieged church members living in Nauvoo and the surrounding environs lost their two most senior leaders to religious and political violence, which demonstrated the limitations of pluralism and tolerance in Jacksonian America. Their deaths also proved the need for greater religious freedom and protections for spiritual beliefs and practices in the United States.

My objective in this paper is to introduce and contextualize the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint prison experience and resulting writings within the larger fields of prison literature and incarceration studies.

In 2023, the Michigan Department of Corrections became the first state agency mandated to recognize the Christian Identity movement as a protected religious group entitled to hold group services within its facilities. The recognition of the controversial white-racial theology animates a number of issues concerning religious sincerity and governance in the prison context. This presentation focuses on the dynamic tensions between external authorities (in the form of the courts and prison officials) and internal authorities (in the form of long-believing inmates and religious leaders) in determining sincere adherence. Pulling from court and church records, as well as extensive interviews with incarcerated adherents, this presentation combines historical analysis and contemporary evidence to argue that while Identity Christians can be sincere believers, their recognition complicates the boundary between racial extremism and religious pluralism in prisons. 

The current political moment, with its renewed debates about school choice and the Department of Education, offers an opportunity for Christian ethicists to contribute to discussions about the purpose and value of public education. Traditionally, discourse about religion and schools revolves around a narrow set of topics, like school prayer or state funding for religious schools. However, religion plays a much broader role, from the moral values expressed implicitly or explicitly in curricula and disciplinary codes to issues of justice raised by vast funding disparities. I argue that Christian ethicists can respond to today’s movement to divest from public education by offering a moral alternative distinct from the neoliberal paradigm that has dominated educational reform efforts. I then briefly make a case for an abolitionist vision of public education grounded in the concept of imago dei and an understanding of collective liberation with deep roots in Christian ethical traditions.

The "Dear Colleague Letter" published by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights sent educational institutions scrambling to remove forward-facing language about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and restructure race-specific programming. Understandably, these institutions--public and private alike--are concerned to protect their students, who depend on the Department for federal financial aid. However, I argue that Catholic institutions should defend their commitment to DEI as grounded in Catholic Social Teaching and as thereby protected by the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause. I offer a reading of the USCCB's 2018 document "Open Wide Our Hearts: A Pastoral Letter Against Racism" which denounces racism as a structural evil that violates the imago dei, and calls on all Catholic educational institutions to actively combat racism. Conservative Catholics have partnered with Republicans for years in successfully claiming religious exemptions from federal laws. This approach could also be useful to defend DEI.

Drawing from four semesters teaching religious studies inside two Florida-state prisons, this paper explores academic freedom within prison and the role that religious studies can play within the carcel system. By investigating the intersection of religion and freedom of thought in such restricted spaces, I ask: can knowledge set us free? Those who teach in (Dubler, 2014; Gellman, 2022) and write about these spaces (Erzan, 2017; Sullivan, 2009; Stoddard, 2021) recognize the challenges of working in a constrained world—one with misconceptions and limited resources for teachers and students. However, when engaged appropriately, knowledge can expose new narratives thereby opening new worlds, possibilities, and opportunities for those who pursue it. Religion, both in a personal sense and as an academic framework, may offer freedom for students behind bars.

This paper argues that, under what I call "obsessive liberalism," religious practices will be protected in proportion to their perceived similarity to those of the mainstream.  Obsessive liberalism, I argue, imagines a universal liberal subject, from whom all rights of the individual and group derive and who ought to hold rights exactly equal to all other liberal subjects.  Under obsessive liberalism, moreover, the solution to liberalism's problems is, always, more liberalism.  Identifying examples of obsessive liberalism in the extant literature, this paper seeks after a framework based in dual values of equity and, in some cases, of rights springing from peoples, not from the individual liberal subjects that make them up.  In either case, such a framework holds the potential to make possible the cognizability of non-protestantized religious practices and beliefs under the law, leaning in particular upon the example of Native peoples living under US settler law.