In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

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.

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.